3.6 The Paradoxes of Culture

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Identify four paradoxes in the concept of culture.
• Define four mechanisms of cultural change.
• Provide a detailed example of the mobility of culture.
• Describe culture as an arena of argument and contest.
• Explain how members of a culture can have different versions of their shared culture.

As European immigrants settled in the western frontier of the United States, they faced the challenge of reinventing the elements of culture familiar to them in very different environmental and social conditions. Used to living in houses made of wooden planks or logs, they found themselves on vast plains with very few trees. A common adaptation to this environmental limitation was to dig into a slope of earth to create a dugout home with turf walls and roof.

While these homes were perfectly functional, many Euro-American settlers considered them dirty and backward. When their farming ventures became prosperous, they often undertook the great expense of importing wood from forested areas to build the kind of house familiar to them from life back east, either on the East Coast of the United States or in the European countries they originally came from.

While conducting fieldwork in Lesotho in the 1980s, cultural anthropologist Jim Ferguson observed that people who became prosperous often replaced their round homes made of mud and stone and thatched roofs with rectangular ones featuring cement floors and galvanized steel roofs. While the round buildings were functionally adapted to local conditions, made of local materials, cool on hot days, and warm in cool nights, the rectangular ones heated up like ovens under the hot sun and were noisy in the rain. The materials were imported and expensive. Talking to one man who was planning to replace his round house with a rectangular one made of cement and steel, Ferguson suggested that local building methods and materials might be superior to foreign ones.

Looking me carefully in the eye, he asked, “What kind of house does your father have, there in America? ... Is it round?” No, I confessed; it was rectangular. “Does it have a grass roof?” No, it did not. “Does it have cattle dung for a floor?” No. And then: “How many rooms does your father’s house have?” ... I mumbled, “About ten, I think.” After pausing to let this sink in, he said only: “That is the direction we would like to move in.” (Ferguson 2006, 18)

In both cases, for Euro-American settlers and Lesotho villagers, the idea of home is not a settled matter but subject to the forces of environmental adaptation, functionality, social status, and ideological debate. Both examples illustrate a set of tensions at the heart of the concept of culture. Originally, anthropologists studied culture as a fairly stable and consensual set of features commonly embraced by the people of a certain geographical area. In the course of the 20th century, however, anthropologists began to realize that this notion of culture was misleading and incomplete. In the early 20th century, American anthropologist Franz Boas argued that the elements of culture are highly mobile, diffusing through the cultural contacts of trade and migration. Since the 1960s, cultural anthropologists have come to emphasize the controversial aspects of culture: how people disagree and argue over the dominant values and practices of their societies. Much of this controversy stems from the unevenness of culture within a society—how people in different social categories and subgroups participate differently in their common culture, with different versions or perspectives on the same cultural norms and practices.

Despite these forces of change and controversy, there is something durable and shared about culture, some set of common elements that distinguishes the whole way of life of each society. Even as cultures change through innovation and contact, they often hold on to some of their distinctive features. In the 1980s, some scholars thought that increases in global trade, migration, and technology were transforming all the diverse societies of the world into one uniform global monoculture. In the 2020s, we see that the opposite has happened. In many parts of the world, we have seen a resurgence of cultural identities and explicit efforts to maintain, rehabilitate, and reinvent forms of cultural heritage.

So riddled with contradictions is the concept of culture that some anthropologists have suggested ditching the whole notion altogether and finding some other concept to bind together the four fields in their pursuit of knowledge about humanity. Perhaps such an integrated understanding of humanity isn’t even possible.

Or maybe the contradictions of culture are the most illuminating aspects of the culture concept. Maybe those contradictions are anthropology’s most important contribution to our understanding of humanity. This textbook takes the latter approach. Culture is the whole way of life of a people subject to a set of contradictory forces. These forces constitute four central paradoxes of culture.