The Study of Us

The most important concept in cultural anthropology is culture. Another important and related term in cultural anthropology is society. The term culture is virtually everywhere, though anthropologists have reserved a special, limited meaning for it. Culture is in daily use; we readily see or hear it on Facebook, Twitter, AI, YouTube, podcasts, cable news, broadcast news, the internet, radio, television, newspapers, movies, magazines, and in conversations that occur in homes, offices, factories, restaurants, coffeehouses, and schools, as well as on the telephone or in text messages among friends. The list goes on and on. It wasn’t always like that. The term shows up in countless languages worldwide, every day, and in the same media. Sometimes it&s;s similar to, cognate with, or borrowed from English, like German Kultur ; Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish cultura ; Finnish kulttuuri . It doesn’t, however, always mean the same thing, in any of these languages or in English. I have been doing research for forty-five years on the culture of the Ka’apor people who live in an Amazonian forest in eastern Brazil. For them—who have a population of only about 2,000 people that rely on the tropical forest and its many plants and animals—the term “ šo-há ” (pronounced like “show-hah”), which literally means “place-making,” is their translation of my English “culture.” It means to them everything they do and have done to transform the environment they live in. I think a lot of Indigenous people think of culture as “place-making” because they are normally attached to lands and living things that define them as a people. Anyway, in this book I have a lot to say about culture, regardless of the language in which it occurs. But to make sure you read and understand this most important term as I and generations of anthropologists before me have intended that it be understood, let me give you a succinct definition now: culture is learned, shared human behavior and ideas, which can and do change with time.