The Essential Elements of Culture
Joel Dubois
(c) 2009--for free, fully cited distribution only

Today, English speakers use the word "culture" in a number of different ways. Many think of themselves as preserving their family or ethnic culture in the face of a pervasive diversity that sometimes seems to drown out individual cultures. Other people enjoy attending cultural events and learning how other cultures celebrate and deal with life's challenges. And some feel that they want to be cultured themselves, to cultivate a taste for fine arts, literature, music, and even ideas. Professors and academic writers, for their part, debate what culture really is. Scholars in the humanities and the social sciences often attempt to identify the distinctive features of the cultural products they study. Others, however, argue that culture is just a concept invented by outside observers wanting to study groups of people to which they themselves do not belong.

Without attempting to unify all uses of the word "culture" or to resolve the debates mentioned above, this essay proposes a way to analyze culture into a small number of essential elements. I often refer to these elements as "dimensions" because, like the dimensions of space and time used to analyze movement, they can never be completely separated from one another. I also use the analogy of "layers," because the essential elements of culture depend upon one another, and because some are easier to observe, while others require some digging to uncover. This explanation of the elements of culture is intend to orient readers to the diverse examples of Asian culture sampled throughout the course.

Two Types of Culture

To begin with, consider formal definitions of culture. Observers generally use the word "culture" in two different ways, as reflected dictionary definitions of the term. For example, Webster's Dictionary defines culture as, on the one hand, the "enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training." This definition alludes to the frequent use of "culture" to highlight what is most noteworthy in the art, literature, music and philosophy of a given society, typically by those situated within it. Some refer to this as "high" culture, or "Culture" with a capital "C." Even though religion is often a primary force in shaping "high" culture, especially in Asia, those whose primary interest is a culture's art, literature, music or philosophy are typically less interested in religion in and of itself.

On the other hand, Webster's also points out that the same term may denote "the integrated pattern of knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon...learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations," which may also be described as "the customary beliefs, social forms, and materials traits of a racial, religious or social group." These definitions allude the fact that those studying a particular society, who are often situated outside of it, often view all of that society's products, not simply its most refined, as important for understanding it. Some refer to this as "low" culture--not because it is UNrefined, but because it encompasses the entire foundation of a society's "high" culture. Because religion has been and remains a primary motivator of human activity in most cultures, especially in Asia, understanding religion is key to analyzing the broader elements of a culture.

This course certainly features examples of the "high" culture of late medieval and modern Asia. But in order make sense of such examples, I also place significant emphasis on the broader elements of Asian culture, because most students are largely unfamiliar with them. Interestingly, many students taking the course today do trace their ancestry back to Asia, perhaps even in their parent's generation, and so have been directly exposed to Asian culture. Even those students, however, have typcially grown up studying other cultures through the the public school medium of English. Despite sincere efforts to diversify curriculum, such schooling still focuses primarily on the history and products of European and North American cultures. This course therefore assumes no background in the study of Asian culture, and thus attempts to orient students to its basic elements.

The Dynamic, Unseen Element of Culture: Beliefs, Reflection, Awareness & Trust

When inquiring about other cultures, people today often ask, "what do they believe?" By this people usually mean, "what unseen powers and forces do individuals in those cultures assume are influencing their lives, moment by moment?" For most cultures this includes faith in divine and other spiritual or supernatural powers listening to people's prayers and responding to them; such belief also includes trusting that spiritual forces ensure that certain kinds of actions are rewarded and others punished after death. Yet even apart from religious ideas, people also assume the existence of more abstract entities, such as nature and the many invisible elements of which things and people are composed. They also sense and talk about forces that influence what goes on in nature. These forces include both outer events and the psychological currents that shape personalities. Words like "truth," "fate" and "luck" hint at such forces.

Asking about such beliefs is key to understanding other cultures, and it makes sense to think of belief as the first of three "dimensions," or "layers," of culture. At the same time, such questioning can be misleading if it assumes that beliefs can always be explicitly articulated, and that they are consistently held within a given cultural group. Most people associate the term "belief" with static declarations to which particular groups uniformly adhere, and about which authoritative sources can easily inform us. There are two problems with such a view of belief:

(A) First, if we consider our own beliefs honestly we notice that much of what we believe, we don't really think about explicitly. I believe that the earth existed before I was born, and that when I sit down on my office chair each morning it will support my weight. But I never thought to state those beliefs until I read a philosophical analysis of belief that suggested those examples. When I begin to think about it there are many other beliefs I hold without thinking about them, which I can bring into my awareness during moments of reflection, but which for the most part manifest only in the way that I act.

Such examples may sound trivial; but there are also more significant beliefs that people realize and articulate only if and when when explicitly asked to do so. Many believe that everyone has the right a free trial. Yet most people probably do not think much about that right unless they are asked about it by a judge preparing them to participate in such a trial. Similarly, many throughout the world believe that they will somehow experience the consequences of both good and bad actions sometime in the future. Yet most might forget, or even never realize, that they hold such a belief until someone asks about their religious convictions. Likewise, we will see in this course that even for many religious people, belief in vividly described divine beings such as Jesus, Krishna or Lao Tzu exists unconsciously most of the time, brought to the foreground of awareness only occasionally during communal rituals.

(B) The second problem with assuming that belief can be easily identified is that people tend to develop their most significant beliefs over time; they then continually adjust and revise those beliefs, rather than adhering to them uniformly in a static way. Looking at daily experience makes this clear. Trust in observable things like people, animals, organizations, and even objects develops gradually through a series of interactions that lead us to believe that such people, animals, etc. will behave consistently in a supportive way towards us.

Likewise, people increase their trust in unseen powers and forces over time, after reasoning based on daily experience that such powers and forces are available to them, either offering support or giving rise to adverse affects. Observing and reflecting on her actions through prayer and scriptural reading, a Christian comes to trust that the force of sin influences everyone and that the divine power of Jesus Christ can redeem her from all sin. As we'll see in the first unit of the course, a strikingly similar process takes place among Vaishnavite Hindus who reflect on the teachings of Krishna. In addition, the non-specialist's religious person's understanding of these divine beings might also vary considerable from what experts formally say about them, giving rise to additional variations in the belief of a group.

Even with regards to non-religious viewpoints, belief evolves and fluctuates over time. A person engaged in gardening, for example, develops a sense of trust in the elements of nature, gradually developing and refining a belief in nature's power and a sense of invisible forces of fate and luck; later on in the course we will see that many East Asian artists and writers manifest this kind of belief. While the views of certain authoritative writers may be most visible to those of us who study their writings, the variation in beliefs among non-specialist gardeners is likely to result in a far greater diversity of secular beliefs than may at first appear.

Unfortunately, unexamined use of the term "belief" lulls people's minds into forgetting about the dynamic nature of belief just noted. Therefore, as you study the Asian cultures surveyed in this course, I urge you to draw on the more dynamic substitutes for the word "belief" that I have suggested about--especially "awareness," "reflection" and "trust" (think "ART"!). These words heighten curiosity about the often unconscious and continually fluctuating nature of belief. (Note that I refer to people's "awareness" of divine, supernatural or other spiritua powers and forces without taking any stand on whether such powers and forces are real or not.)

Using such fresh language to describe belief will help you to avoid worn out phrases like "so and so never lost his faith" and "the Chinese exhibit a strong belief in the afterlife." Such superficial stereotypes flatten the dynamic experience of reflection and trust-building suggested the sources we will examine. Drawing on new words will thus sharpen your analyses of sources you view and read.

Describing the Unseen: Powers, Forces & Worlds

Another way to remain curious and open to the dynamic nature of belief is to think more precisely about the nature of the unseen entities that people reflect on, cultivate awareness of, and learn to trust. I have already suggested some ways to do this by using the plural terms "powers" (not simply "higher power" in the singular) and "forces," rather than "god" or "nature." I clarify these and other related terms more fully below, and invite you to use them to whatever extent you feel they help you speak more precisely about the unseen. But I also invite you to come up with your own fresh labels and categories that help you analyze more precisely the way that Asian cultures think about the unseen.

• When I speak of divine or other supernatural/spiritual powers, I mean divine personalities, including the supreme God, who is usually personified, but also lesser spiritual beings, like angels and demons in Western traditions, as well as saints, ghosts, ancestors and other spirits of dead people. People typically regard divine personalities as those inclined towards good; the other category of beings are either included towards evil, or some combination of good and evil. People who trust in the existence of such powers typically feel that they are invisible yet subtly present when called upon. But the notion of an unseen power is also relevant to non-religious worldviews: many people, for example, personify entites such as "mother" nature and "lady" luck.
  
  
• When I speak of forces, I am referring to more abstract,fundamental causes or factors such as "fate," "moral obligation," "sin," which often have a psychological element. People typically think of such forces as affecting everyone in all times and places. And they often think of such forces as giving rise to, and/or influencing, much of what we perceive through our senses, both positive and negative. This notion applies just as well to spiritual forces as to forces that are purely physical, such as gravity and electrical attraction, many of of which are too small, sublte or vast to perceive directly.
  
  
• One might increase the precision of these labels by also describing the worlds inhabited by powers and ruled by forces. Most people think of such worlds as largely invisible to sensory perception. Yet many also consider that unseen worlds intersect dynamically with sensory world. Supernatural powers manifest in human form, such as God the Father incarnating as Jesus and the Hindu supreme God Vishnu taking birth as the human teacher Krishna. Spirits of the dead influence the living, as most vividly dramatized in shamanic rituals, which still strongly influence much of formal religion in East Asia. In many non-religious worldviews, the invisible power of nature manifests in particular dramatic ways, such as mountains and storms. And in both religious and non-religious thinking, abstract invisible forces like "fate" and "karma" manifest in the consequences that people experience as a result of their actions.
  
  
• The fact that powers and forces share common worlds also reflects that the division between them is not hard and fast. Powers often embody universal forces, as in the case of the supreme God's power of judgement over all acts and "mother" nature embodying something more abstract. And abtract forces like death, hunger and passion are sometimes personified as supernatural powers. You may want to consult my handout, "Beyond God(s) and Theism(s)," for a more details analysis of powers and forces in the most widely influetial religious worldviews.
  

Both religious and non-religious worldviews stress that a uniquely endowed few, usually both gifted and trained in discerning hidden truths, are able to directly perceive the kinds of unseen powers and forces described above. Such people are sometimes refered to as "mystics," but the records they leave of their experience are often more precise than the word "mystery" suggests. Most people, however, reflect on, catch glimpses of and gradually come to trust such powers and forces based on depictions provided by the visionary few, whom they may never directly meet. Such depictions of unseen powers and forces may be either (a) verbal, which include poetry, prose, commentary, and conversation, and may be delivered as song, oral recitation, writing, or through informal speech. Often more popular, however, are (b) symbolic depictions of the unseen, which include sculpture, painting, decorative design, architecture. Dramatic enactment and other forms of live storytelling include (c) a mix of verbal and symbolic elements.

Dimensions and Layers: Integrating the Visible Elements of Culture

Reflection about unseen powers and forces is only one dimensions or layers of culture. As hinted earlier in stressing that beliefs form and transform subtly over time, trust in particular depictions of the unseen develops in the context of daily sensory engagement with the visible world. The visible objects, spaces and actions of that world thus play a pivotal role in shaping cultural worldviews, which is why people often think of culture as something displayed in things and events. These visible elements of culture are the foundation of trust in unseen powers and forces. An investigator of culture, then, must pay equally close attention to visible "dimensions" or "layers" of culture.

I suggest that such visible forms may usefully be conceived of as two distinct layers that supplement the belief or reflection dimension discussed in detail so far: practice and community. Listing these three together we have:

1. reflection--thinking about, awareness of and trust regarding unseen powers and forces (vs. simply "belief");
   
   
2. practice--habitual engagement in activities or skills, including especially art forms, rituals and customs, whether formally prescribed in an authoritative source, passed on through observing anothers' behaviors, or simply developed informally by a single individual; and
   
   
3. community--the complex network of relationships between people in consistently defined groups, such as families, ethnic groups, and states, who take on particular roles in such relationships.

Like the above discussion of reflection and the unseen, the following explanation of the visible elements of culture assumes that the three can never be completely separated, as the analogy of "dimensions" and "layers" both suggest. All three are simultaneously experienced by each individual in a culture, somewhat in the same way that time encompasses the three dimensions of space, and that an individual plant simultaneously inhabits distinct layers of soil.

Yet the investigator of culture must distinguish the three, since they are separable to a degree, primarily in situations that many would consider unbalanced or dysfunctional. An individual may very well engage in practice--including reciting words that describe unseen powers and/or forces!-- without engagement or trust in that unseen. The routine of ritual, or the fascination of a particular artistic form, may numb a person's mind to the point where he loses awareness of his unseen goal. Likewise, absorption in community life might lead to a similar kind of forgetfulness. On the other hand, fascination with the unseen may lead some visionaries to leave behind their community and experiment with new kinds of arts & rituals. Also, small differences in the practice of art or religion may cause tension between different communities. The interweaving of reflection, practice, and community in human culture, then, is as complex as the trajectory of a line in a three dimensional graph, or the intermingling of root systems and microorganisms in compacted layers of soil.

Analyzing the Details of Practice & Community

As with the reflection element of culture, observers often oversimplify the more visible elements of practice and community, but for different reasons. Unlike the unseen powers and forces and the dynamic processes of reflection about and trust in such powers and forces, practice and community are visible for all to see. Yet people often think of them in terms of broad concepts rather than looking closely at the particulars.

For example, observers tend to label all religious rituals and ceremonies as "worship" or "prayer," emphasizing the inward attitudes involved. But they often gloss over the very real differences in actions, objects, words and spaces. People sometimes also speak of verbal arts in a similarly broad way, speaking of "literature" without clearly distinguishing between starkly different ways of using and recording words, as hinted in the above list of verbal depictions of the unseen. When observing the community element, observers generally notice the external features of individuals, especially those with formal roles; but they often miss the many informal roles and relationships that make up a community. Outsiders of a particular culture often find it especially difficult to understand practice and community based on written records as well as material artefacts, because such sources often only hint at the details practice and community. The people who created those sources tended to take such details for granted and so focused on depicting or reflecting about unseen powers and forces. Therefore an outide observer relying on written records and material artefacts must make a special effort to investigate practice and community.

As in considering the reflection element of culture, then, an investigator must seek out more precise language to describe practices and communities of a given culture, which will sharpen her analysis. Many of the assignments for this course will ask you to identify precisely the elements of some important practice, prompting you to consider repeatedly the following questions.

• what specific actions, objects, and words are involved in a given art form, ritual or custom?
• by whom and in what settings are those practices performed?
• which practices occur only occasionally--seasonally, at certain life-stages, or generationally?
• which occur regularly and consistently as part of daily, or at least weekly, life?

Often these questions will require you infer information not explicitly detailed in a written sources or material artefact, and sometimes they will be impossible to answer completely--but even that absence of information can be significant. In asking all of these questions, finally, it is important to consider whether a particular practice was actually performed by real people, or whether it is an ideal prescribed by a particular specialist which may not have been widely practiced; both are significant, but distinguishing the two is key. The articulation of rules for practice by specialists usually implies understanding among many practitioners that things should be done in a particular way. Yet in reality a given individual--even one who is aware of and approves of such rules--will likely deviate from the precise rules at least some of the time.

With regards to investigating the community element of culture, an important key is often discerning the processes by which certain people within a culture specialize in particular kinds of activities (i.e., religious ritual, leadership, administration, music, art, literary production). Another key is the relationships of different specialists with each other. One fundamental distinction is that between specialists trained within established institutions (e.g., professors), as opposed to those who gain their authority from some type of charisma (e.g., independent authors and speakers), but the two are not mutually exclusive. Also important, finally, is the relationship of such specialists with people who do not specialize in those activities, who tend to more common work such as managing households, growing food, manufacturing goods, and maintaining societal order.

The following questions summarize the above distinctions. Here even more than with questions about practice, the investigator of culture must often infer details not explicitly stated in written records or foregrounded in material artefacts. Sources describing ritual, for example, usually prescribe action for certain types of people, acting in particular social contexts. Depictions of the unseen often describe specific kinds of people relating to powers, forces, and/or other worlds.

• what different degrees of specialization are available to members of a given community?
• in what ways are different types of specialists trained and recognized
• in what ways do different types of specialists interact with each other?
• in what ways do different types of specialists interact with non-specialists?

As noted above regarding practice, with social roles and relationships too a distinction needs to be made between ideal and actual behaviors. Ideals may occasionally be articulated (either explicitly or implicitly) in written, spoken, or visual sources, but most of the time such ideals lie dormant as the sense of obligation that people feel towards each other to act in certain ways. Actual behavior is easier to observe face to face; but written records and material artefacts rarely record such direct observations, especially when dealing with distant historical periods.

Identifying the community layer of a given culture is especially key overall because it is typically specialists who create or commission the written records and material artefacts that depict unseen power and forces. Understanding these specialists, their audiences, and their motives ensures accurate interpretation of sources, especially those of distant times and places. Some specialists address their own colleagues, while others address other types of specialists. Still others address primarily non-specialists, or some combination of these. The documents of early Christianity found in the New Testament, for example, clearly represent leaders and writers in different communities addressing the very different needs of a variety of members--Jewish & Greek, men & women, etc. The Indian, Chinese and other Asian sources represented in this course reflect a similar diversity of specialists and their audiences.

Conclusion: Starting Your Own Investigation

This overview of the elements of culture is intended as a starting point for your exploration of the primary sources encountered throughout the course, rather than as a definitive statement of truth to be accepted, memorized and repeated. I do urge you to study, remember, and seriously reflect on the points I have made regarding

• the dynamic nature of belief, which may better be spoken of using terms like "awareness," "reflection" and "trust";
• the subtle distinctions between different types of unseen powers and forces; and
• the questions and distinctions I stress as key for investigating the details of practice and community, the visible elements of culture.

But I also hope that you will test these ideas rather than simply accept them, ideally discussing them with peers and weighing the alternatives. I hope you will consider to what extent the examples of Asian culture that you study throughout the semester are adequately explained by the analytical tools presented in this essay, ideally once again in conversation with others, who may hold different views. And I hope that you will come up with your own ideas and perspectives about culture generally, and Asian cultures in particular. In the long run, finally, I hope that you will develop and sharpen investigative skills that will serve you in your life in some important way.

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