For well over a hundred years, culture has been a substantive---a noun. It either did things or things happened to it. It existed, but it was inert.
The call has been made by many to examine culture as a process. The call---and little more. The callers don't go on to tell you how to do that.
Culture does not have a useful companionate verb, as life has its cognate, to live. Leslie White tried to supply it, but what he did was turn the noun culture into the verb "to culture." He didn't have any takers. In part, he was ahead of his time. But he had an even greater strike against him: he tried to use the word as a variant of itself.
In the present exercise, culture is a verb more in the conceptual than in the grammatical sense. I have found the word culturize useful in some places in this book, but its meaning is restricted; certainly it does not provide an analogy to the life/live situation.
Two assumptions underlie this exercise:
* there is a time dimension to all culture, and
* one state of culture often leads to another (in ways that do not, as well as ways that do, imply cultural evolution).
I am beginning with something as simple as a flowchart, a process that is today followed by many computer programmers to assist in planning the timing and flow of projects. As far as I am aware, the first flowchart in anthropology was that given by Arnold van Gennep in 1908.) As far as I know, no others were added until 1957, when both Victor Turner and I came up with flowcharts. Michael Thompson introduced some interesting and more complex ones in 1979. I built on it preliminarily in 1984.
There is one additional set of ideas on which I build: that of the cultural trap, which as far as I know was introduced by John Platt. The proposition is this: culture is adaptive---that is, it facilitates human use of and participation in the environment---until the context changes so that it is no longer adaptive. When that happens, culture may become a trap and may even lead to disaster. For example, if agricultural methods that ruin the soil are pursued without change, those agricultural methods become a cultural trap; if they are not altered the whole culture-environment arrangement will break down. Just so, ideas of law or government that work for communities of a few hundred people must be changed when the same communities grow to several hundred thousand and their family and religious pressures no longer assure social equity.
The history of the world can be seen as the study of cultural processes: those that create adjustments to changed environmental conditions on the one hand, and those that lead to cultural traps on the other. Some cultural traps (like power struggles as we hand over offices) have been overcome, at least in some places. Others (like ethnicity) have not. We are surrounded today by culture traps, as every cultural tradition has always been surrounded by such traps. Only if we recognize those traps, which means understanding the way our actions and our beliefs turn into traps, and actively seek exits or solutions or both, can our civilization survive.
Ancient Greek civilization foundered on a social trap. Having invented the city-state, the Greeks stuck to their guns and could not take the next step: agreeing on ways for city-states to cooperate and coexist. Communist civilization ended in a social trap very like it: having invented a new form of planned economy, they were unable to adapt it to changing world conditions, particularly to the information revolution.
But, what about us? Do we know enough about social and cultural process to avoid the traps?
In an important sense, this book is about recognizing and avoiding cultural traps---which, here, include the traps of social organization. We cannot avoid these traps without understanding just how we (like everybody else) walk into them. Anthropology and the other social sciences know enough today so that we should be able to get on with the job. The secret is in simplifying what we know to the point where we can apply our knowledge successfully and people will not confuse our applying it with political manipulation.
Works of social science can be ranked along a scale from simple to obfuscating. Obfuscating is easier. I have tried hard to be simple in this book. Sometimes simple spills over into simplistic or obvious. But restating the obvious in a new context sometimes clears the air.
The gravest need in social science is a good program of synthesis. We know a lot. There is an awful lot of theory out there, some of it even good. There are libraries of good ethnography, many of them all but unread.
But systematic synthesis of what we know is in short supply. Transferring insights from one realm to another so that our whole enterprise can become less fragmented is a worthwhile goal. It can be achieved only by gaining simplicity. We need ways to get our initial premises as clear as our subsequent logic, and to make simple, clear statements about how it all fits together.
And it is only with such synthesis that we can recognize cultural traps and begin to overcome them. In this book, I ask how culture works. It is akin to the medical profession asking how the human body works.
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