Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Human Imagination by John Traphagan

Author:John Traphagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

4.1 What Is Culture?

I have used the term culture several times throughout this book without offering a precise definition. Part of my reason for this is simply that although culture is difficult to define, we tend to operate as though we know what it is—I wonder how many readers have at some point in the book asked themselves, “what does this guy mean by culture?” Hopefully, quite a few of you have, but my guess is that most have read the word without giving its definition much thought. We use culture regularly in casual conversation without thinking a great deal about what the “thing” culture actually is. Obviously, this is problematic when we want to think about and observe the influence of culture on issues such as interstellar communication or the nature of extraterrestrial beings from an analytical perspective—keeping in mind Feynman’s concern about not overdoing it, we do need to be able to work towards definitions of concepts like culture if we want precision in analysis of what we encounter or sophistication in speculation about what we may encounter.

In general, the definition of ‘culture’ is assumed rather than explicated, not only in the literature dealing with SETI, but more generally in scholarly and non-scholarly discussions of human social organization and particularly in the area of cross-cultural communication. However, the culture concept is actually quite problematic even if we only think about it as a thing that humans or human societies have. Where is it? How do we identify it? And how is it a thing that all humans seem to have but also seems to be different everywhere we look?

Anthropologists have long recognized the difficulties associated with identifying the characteristics of any particular “culture” and have debated the extent to which one can consider culture a bounded “thing” that can be observed and analyzed, as well as the extent to which it determines behavior. In other words, culture is problematic both in terms of its use as an empirical category and as an analytical category. Debate about how we should use the culture concept has often divided anthropologists about what it actually represents in terms of human social organization and behavior. As Watson (1997) points out, early usage of the term in anthropology centered upon the idea that culture is a shared set of beliefs, customs, and ideas that are learned and unify people into coherent and identifiable groups. In this sense, then, culture represents a form of collective or social memory that links past, present, and future. This formulation takes culture as a relatively deterministic feature of human social organization that shapes behavior within a particular society, the edges of which seem to be clearly identifiable. Historically, these bounded entities often have been associated with the geographical space in which a particular group of people lived. This is what I call the bounded-culture model, in which culture is thought of as a fairly static thing that can be observed and recorded. It is this model that continues to

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