1. Culture is homogenous. This presumes that a (local) culture is free of
internal paradoxes and contradictions such that (a) it provides clear and
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unambiguous
behavioural ‘instructions’ to individuals – a program for
how to act – or (b) once grasped or learned by an outsider, it can be characterized
in relatively straightforward ways (‘the Dobuans are paranoid’).
A homogenous view of culture makes the second inadequate idea easier
to sustain, namely that:
2. Culture is a thing. The reification of culture – regarding culture as a
thing – leads to a notion that ‘it’ is a thing that can act, almost independently
of human actors. There is no hint of individual agency here. … The
term is used as a shorthand way of referring, as we shall see, to bundles
of complicated cognitive and perceptual processes, and it is a series of
short (cognitive) steps from shorthand to metonymy to reification. But we
should be on guard, particularly since by reifying culture it is easy to overlook
intracultural diversity, underwriting the third inadequate idea:
3. Culture is uniformly distributed among members of a group. This idea imputes
cognitive, affective, and behavioural uniformity to all members of the
group. Intracultural variation, whether at the individual or group level, is
ignored or dismissed as ‘deviance’.
Connected to this is the further misconception that:
4. An individual possesses but a single culture. He or she is simply a Somali, a
Mexican, or an American. Culture is thus synonymous with group identity.
The root of this misconception stems from the privileging of what
we can call tribal culture, ethnic culture, or national culture, over cultures
that are connected, as we shall see, to very different sorts of groups, structures,
or institutions. In part this came from the social settings in which
anthropologists first developed the culture idea: small-scale and relatively
socially undifferentiated tribal or ethnic groups. … A person possess and
controls several cultures in the same way, as sociolinguists tell us, that
even a so-called monolingual speaker controls different ‘registers’ of the
same language or dialect.
5. Culture is custom. This idea holds that culture is structurally undifferentiated,
that what you see is what you get. … Culture here is virtually synonymous
with ‘tradition’, or customary ways of behaving. … Culture here
reduces to a sort of surface-level etiquette. Cultural variation is, as Peter
Black once put it, merely a matter of ‘differential etiquette’. Once again,
individual agency is downplayed.
6. Culture is timeless. Closely related to the culture-is-custom view (indeed,
to all of the above views), the idea that culture is timeless imputes a
changeless quality to culture, especially to so-called traditional ones
(Avruch 1998: 14−16).