"Customs" by Clyde Kluckhohn
Summary of the Text
"Customs" is an essay written by Clyde kluckhohn an American anthropologist. He is well known for the studies of the Navaho Indians and for his work on personality and culture. Here, he defines cultures and shows cultural differences by using different examples. Kluckhohn says that people are different not by instincts not by god, not by fate, not by weather but by culture. According to anthropologist, culture is the man made part of the environment. It is the total life way of the people. It is the social legacy which the individual acquires forms his group.
A man of culture is a man who is acquainted with history, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts. A person who knows about these things is considered to be a "cultured" person. In fact, we cannot explain acts only in theorems of the biological properties of the people concerned, their individual past experiences, and the immediate situation. Such things are partly responsible for behaviour, but not entirely. Culture plays an important role in almost every event. Each specific culture constitutes a kind of blue print for all of life's activities.
One of the interesting things about human beings is that they try to understand themselves and their own behavior. Humans show an interest in their own behaviour and want to know why people behave as they do, especially when differences are observed. Anthropologists offered the explanation that the existence of different types of "culture" is the reason for the differences in human behaviour. Others explain it with the concept of evolution in biology, gravity in physics and disease in medicine. A good deal of human behavior can be understood and indeed predicted, if we know a people's design for living. It affects daily activities, dress, eating habits, and choice of furniture. We brush our teeth on a rising. We put on pants not a loincloth or a grass skirt. We eat three meals a day - not four or five or two. We sleep in bed not in hammock or on sheep pelt (skin of sheep with wool). If the writer knows a person is American then he can accurately predict many things about that person's daily behaviour.
An American woman can't imagine the practice of plural wives nor would allow other woman to share her husband whereas a Koryak woman of Siberia would treat an American woman selfish and jealous of her own race for not allowing her to share her husband.
A man who was born in America and biologically was native American but brought up in China could not adjust himself in the American society and therefore returned to China.
A trader's wife in Arizona once served her guest with sandwiches filled with the flesh of rattlesnakes. After they had eaten full stomach, she told them about what was there in the sandwiches, they started vomiting as they were not used to eating the flesh of snakes. A biological process is caught in a cultural web.
In Indian culture a boy does not dance with a girl if both belong to the same family or have the same ancestry because bodily contact in American social dancing has a directly sexual connotation. The bodily contact between the members of the same clan in India is considered incest taboos as an American young girl feels about sleeping into the same bed with her brother.
At Yale University, the files of the cross cultural survey are organized according to categories such as "marriage ceremonies", "life crisis rites", "incest taboos". At least seventy-five of these categories are represented in every single one of the hundreds of cultures analyzed. In spite of differences in behaviour that are the result of culture, there are also many similarities. Some similarities shared in common by people are: biological features, marriage taboos, some personal experiences-like illness, helplessness, or old age. The fact that certain stage or event in life are recognized as importance by all societies and are accompanied by rituals e.g. marriage, death. However, there are certain things that are impossible for any human to do.