It is only Man whose behaviour is largely learnt and, therefore, differs from society to society. He has an enormous capacity to learn, to forget, and to relearn. A child of Indian parentage brought up, say, in an African tribal setting, will acquire the culture of the place of his habitation; similarly, a Nuer or a Bushman Hottentot child nurtured in India will have almost nothing in common save racial features with his or her parental society. It is the culture of India, or of the Nuer or Bushman Hottentots, that defines the society of those geographical locations. Even when the group as a whole, or part of it, changes its locale, it carries with it its own culture, expressed in terms of both visible and invisible traits: the dressing pattern, the food habits, the language, the religion and rituals, etc.
More than that, a human group has a tremendous capacity to adapt to different types of environments and to continually enrich culture through his acts and innovations. A living culture is a constantly changing phenomenon.
Man has been a great inventor. He is not merely a recipient of what nature offers; he transforms the natural gifts to his advantage. In doing so, he also damages the environment. It is Man who is held responsible for the current crisis related to climate change.
We shall attempt to draw the contours of culture.
Let us begin by elaborating the point regarding the biological gifts of Man that made him a culture-building and culture-bearing animal.
Consider the large number of languages that humans have invented: we are told that some 10,000 years ago, when the world was populated by around only five to 10 million people—just about half the population of Delhi/NCR (National Capital Region), there were as many as 15,000 spoken languages,2 one for each indigenous community. It is said that languages changed after a radius of 5 kilometres. The Atlas of the World’s Languages lists 6,796 languages spoken today. With the same vocal chord, Man is capable of speaking any of these languages. In India, most educated people speak two to three languages. True, the number of languages is shrinking because some of them are dying, or are in disuse; their number, though, is still larger than the number of nation-states. In India alone, besides the languages recognized by the Constitution of India, there are several dialects that are still spoken; the 1991 Census of India put the number of languages/dialects spoken in India at 1,576.
Language is but one aspect of culture. The variety of cultural traits and complexes is indeed immense. It is this attribute of Man as a culture-building animal—Man the Toolmaker—that is distinctive, and is the most influential in the life of any individual.
A more concrete example is that of clothes. The types of headgear used by men and women in different cultures, and even in the same culture by people of different statuses, are varied.
Social behaviour in a group is limited, on the one hand, by the biological constraints of individuals, and on the other, by cultural conditioning. At birth, a human child is a biological brute; s/he is transformed into a social animal through socialization and enculturation.3
In social sciences, the nature versus nurture controversy is now almost gone. One cannot say that whatever Man has by way of culture is determined by his natural environment or by his biological make-up; nor can one say that culture has no connections with the biosphere in which man operates. The point is that even within the same environment and the same biological make-up, man has developed different cultural patterns. Take the case of headgear. In the same environment, some people wear a turban while others do not, and even those who wear a turban do not tie it in the same fashion. A Sikh turban is different from a Mewari Pagdi and a Rajasthani Safa.
Headgear of bison horn: Maria Gonds of Bastar
Even people of the same ethnic group or caste, living in the same region may wear the turban differently. One finds a variety of turban styles in Rajasthan; the same is true of different sects of Sikhism—the Namdharis and the Akalis, for example, wear their turbans in specific colours (white and blue respectively) and tie them differently. Similarly, in Mewar, the king used to wear a Sanga-shahi pagdi on festive occasions, which was different from that worn on ordinary days. Even there, one finds variations in the manner in which it is tied by different people, as well as in the colours worn. A white pagdi is worn by a person who has lost his father; a colourful turban, with gold decorations, suggests that the person wearing it is a bridegroom, or one connected to the royal family.
Traditional attire of a Rajasthan village woman: covering the head with sari
Just as people wear different attires in the same environment, they also wear the same attire in different environments. Despite the heat, a regular suit is worn on formal occasions when a simple Kurta and Pyjama4 would be more comfortable. Thus, it is the prevailing cultural norms that dictate behaviour.
A Naga warrior
BIOLOGICAL GIFTS TO MAN
Culture is, thus, exclusively the creation of man, and is not spurred by instincts. However, it must be admitted that there are some biological features in man that have facilitated the creation of cultures. Students of man have listed five biological gifts that have made man a creator and transmitter of culture.
Apatani women
The first of these gifts is Emancipation of Hands from Locomotion. Animals, including primates that are closer kin of man, use their four limbs—we call them legs and hands—for locomotion. Apes alternate between straight walking and walking on all fours. Man alone is able to walk on his two legs and cover long distances.
This emancipation has endowed him with the second gift, namely, Erect Posture. Since legs alone are needed for locomotion, man is able to stand erect, and gain a height. His hands are freed to perform some of the tasks that were earlier done by the long snout, particularly for exploring the surroundings for food and conveying it to the mouth. Since the hands were freed from locomotion, they developed differently than the feet among the humans. The fingers became opposable to the thumb, and thus developed prehensility—the ability to pluck a fruit, hold an item and even fashion a tool.
Mewari Pagdi (turban)
This development is associated with the change in the function of the eye. With a protruding snout, the two eyes were distanced by an intervening broad nose—so useful in lower animals to assist in smelling the food because of highly developed olfactory senses. As the function of food surveillance was taken away by the hands, and as the erect posture made the eyes far removed from the ground, the snout in man shrunk. This made the human nose much smaller (thus, less smell sensitive) and the gap between the two eyes was bridged to facilitate a Stereoscopic Vision.
Sikh turban worn by the Indian Prime Minister
Rather than the two eyes viewing things along the snout, they could see the same item together, thus moving from a myopic vision to a presbyopic vision or farsightedness.5
The area covered by the nose and snout shrinking is thus spared for the enlargement of the head that encases the brain. The bigger size of the brain facilitates ‘reasoning’ and ‘memorizing’. Thus, the fourth gift to Man is his reasoning brain.
The last and final gift from biology to Man is the Faculty of Articulated Speech. Man’s vocal chords are capable of producing an infinite number of sounds. Of this immense capability, any particular individual is able to utilize only a miniscule to be able to speak a few languages. However, if we take humanity as a whole, this capability made it possible to invent so many languages. That is why a child of Chinese parentage, brought up in a tribal society of Africa, learns to speak that society’s language and may not be able to utter any Chinese. People from South India, born and brought up, say, in Delhi, are thus, fluent in Hindi or Punjabi and in English, but might falter in their so-called mother tongue. Language is learnt; it is not hereditarily transmitted via the genes. Aryan and Dravidian are the names of languages and do not connote the race of their respective speakers. In this sense, it is technically wrong to call Aryan and Dravidian as races.6
Safa worn by the Gujar leader
Alongside these exclusive gifts of biology to man is one debility, or yet another hidden gift. The human child is a hopelessly dependent creature. It takes much longer time for a human infant to stand on its own feet compared to other animals. This necessitates child care and longer company of the adults in the family. Tiger cubs, for example, take only a few days when they are on their own, of course, under the tutelage of their mother; children of monkeys and apes take a little longer, but in the case of humans, the period of child care extends to more than 5 years—by this time, a dog might become a grandfather; and in a few more months/years might even leave the world for ever. In contrast, a child of 12 does not even complete his first entrance examination to enter the college!
This gift of dependency is conducive to group life, and the development of emotional bonds. The common living creates a ground for collective action and for sharing information and for making inventions, the elements of culture.
Mother and child from Kerala
Taken together, these gifts make it possible for man to manage his relations with nature, negotiate his interactions with other members of his group and with outsiders, and deal with the realm of the unknown, the supernatural.
It is the manner of handling these three areas of interaction that differ from one society to another. And it is this that is technically called ‘culture’. Thus, culture is the product of man’s interactions with other men, with nature, and with the realm of the unknown—the supernatural. In other words, all three systems of interaction—the society and the polity, the economy, and the religious system—are governed by cultural norms of behaviour that are unique to the society concerned.
Figure 4.1 Human Interactions in Society
As we have said, the ‘seeds of cultural capacity’ are also found in some lower-grade primates, particularly the Great apes—Chimpanzee, Gorilla, and the Orang Utans. It has been shown, through careful investigation of these human cousins, that
[T]hey possess the capacity to perceive the applicability of the observed phenomena to the attainment of desires: invention. They apply sticks as levers and stones as hammers; they fit sticks together to extend their reach; they use them as vaulting poles to extend their jumping capacities—and as jabbing rods to annoy unwary hens about the ape farm …. Such patterns are not inborn. They are not instinctive; they are proto-cultural, the stuff out of which culture develops (Hoebel, 1958: 71).
However, apes could not create culture because they have a short memory and they lack the skills to communicate their experience (lack of language) to the new members of the family. Transmission of culture from one generation to another is thus possible only among human societies.
When humans emerged with progressive evolution, they possessed better biological gifts that those mentioned above. With their erect posture and prehensility of their hands, they had a better capacity to fashion tools; stereoscopic vision helped them focus on the finer points of the artefact; the faculty of articulated speech enabled them to convey their experience to others; and the enlarged brain has the capacity to reason and to remember. Not only can man memorize, he also has the capacity to forget. This latter capacity allows him to learn new things: learning, forgetting, and re-learning are essential processes in the growth and spread of knowledge—the cultural capital. No doubt man is intelligent, but living in isolation, he might remain a stupid animal, an idiot; intelligence develops only in the company of other men. Speech is also a general trait; though highly developed in man, it is also found in rudimentary forms in other animals. Similarly, sociability is a trait that is common among many animals. But it is culture that man alone possesses, and that makes a great difference, placing man at the top of the evolutionary ladder.
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