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The Significance of a Kiss

• What is the difference between kissing a family member, a friend, the ring
of the Pope or that of a Mob Boss?
• When actor Richard Gere appeared on stage in India to help raise
awareness of HIV/AIDS, he kissed a Indian movie star on the cheek.
• In the West, a man kissing a woman on the cheek is not a shocking action.
• It suggests familiarity, and maybe even intimacy of a sort.
• In such societies, kisses upon the cheek are also familial.
• Or even simply friendly
• In other places of the world, for example France or Mexico, a kiss (or two
or three) on the cheek is a socially common act.
• This is true even among strangers meeting for the first time.
• In countries like our own or in India, kissing is a far more intimate act.
• An American actor kissing an Indian film star set off significant protests
across the nation.
• Not everyone agreed, but to some Indians, this was a grossly offensive act.
• How do we explain differences in the behavior of kissing?
• In the United States kissing in public is common, and yet Americans do not
kiss with the same frequency as people in France.
• In the other direction, a public kiss in India was controversial enough to
cause people to protest.
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• What is Culture?
• The term “culture” has many meanings.
• In popular usage, it is often equated with distinctive traditions of different
ethnic groups.
• Examples include Mexican Mariachi music, Chinese food, or British Theater.
• These are certainly representative of cultures, but they are only the tip of
the iceberg.
• Culture is also popularly used to denote so-called refined sensibilities.
• That is to say, one can be called “cultured” for enjoying classical music and
the theater (in contrast to pop music and Hollywood Blockbusters)
• Anthropologists use the term in a different manner.
• For anthropologists, culture is a very broad concept.
• Specifically, it does not involve value judgments (i.e. someone being more
cultured or less).
• Culture, as defined anthropologically, encompasses features that are
sometimes regarded as trivial or unworthy of serious study, such as
“popular” culture. To understand contemporary North American culture,
we must consider social media, cell phones, the Internet, television, fast-
food restaurants, sports, and games.
• Culture as defined by British anthropologist E.B. Tylor in 1871 provided a
very broad definition in his book ‘Primitive culture’.
• Since Tylor’s day, literally hundreds of definitions for culture have been
forwarded.
• Culture can be described as a system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of
behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, and shared by
a group of people
• Culture is learned and taught
• Central to the modern anthropological view of culture is that it is learned.
• A person most be “enculturated.”
• You must learn the culture you live in.
• This is contrary to older notions (often racially motivated notions) that one
is born into a culture.
• If culture is learned, then it must also be taught.
• This is done in many ways, but often a child’s first teachers are its parents.
• We raise our children to emulate what we think is normal.
• We teach them how to talk to adults and how to interact with their peers.
• In short, we teach them when it is appropriate to kiss.
• There are many other cultural teachers in our society.
• Simply taking part in social activities with other people is perhaps the most
basic form of cultural education.
• Children quickly learn what is and is not acceptable in group interaction.
• Stealing toys, for example, quickly results in group sanctions:
• Other children don’t want to play with you
• Schools often form a core function of cultural education.
• Not only do students learn math, history, and science
• They also learn about birthday parties, national holidays, and traditional forms of
celebration.
• As culture continues to change, culture learning and teaching becomes a life-long
activity.
• Think, for example, of emergent Internet technologies.
• With technology, new social norms of interaction are being developed.
• Just as there are cultured patterns to interaction in the real world, there are similar
patterns and challenges in the digital world (How Facebook is used, the problem of
cyberbullying, etc.)

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How much of who you are is determined by biology and how much by
culture?
• When looking at the variations of human behavior around the world, we
must ask where that variation comes from.
• Anthropologists generally hold that the majority, if not all, of the variations,
come from cultural differences.
• Many people over the years have argued that biological differences
between peoples also affect behaviors.
• Biological Needs versus Cultural Patterns
• Human beings across the globe have nearly identical genetic codes.
• Every person on the planet has a genetic code that is 99.99 percent
identical to everyone else.
• This remarkable similarity in genetics necessitates we have the same
biological needs.
• All humans must eat, excrete, and have protection from the elements.
• And yet, even within those basic needs, we see tremendous variation.
• Food and dietary patterns vary across the globe (hence the proliferation of
ethnic restaurants in the United States).
• Often food is not simply a matter of taste or style; rather there are major
distinctions in what people will eat.
• Many cultures around the world hold certain insects as delicacies.
• Many Chinese people dislike cheese in all forms.
• Even patterns of excretion vary.
• Public toilets in China are typically made up of a simple hole in the ground over
which a person squats.
• In India and Pakistan, water is used in place of the Western preferred toilet paper.

Nature versus Nurture

• The degree to which Nature (our biology) versus Nurture (our culture, and the way
we were raised) affects our capabilities has been a long-standing debate.
• Many people, for example, have held that biological differences between men and
women account for their differing success in the same careers.
• Such explanations, however, have often been used to excuse long-standing
patterns of discrimination, concerning the role of women in society, for example.
• Anthropology has shown that behaviors that may seem hardwired can easily be
explained by enculturation.
• We learn a huge variety of behaviors by observing and copying the people that we
see around us.
• Thus, the behaviors that seem so strictly biological can also be explained by simple
copying and repetition by group members.

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• Culture is shared yet contested.
• Culture is inherently a group concept.
• It is a shared experience that derives from living as a member of a group.
• If only one person is involved we are just talking about personality.
• Hence, culture is by definition shared.
• At the same time, you know that nothing in a culture is permanent.
• For example, in the US, Europe or Australia there have been debates on the
topic of homosexual marriage, and public views and legislation is changing
on this topic.
• The central idea here is that culture is contested.
• We have a shared culture that we learn from our fellow group members.
• Once learned, that culture is not static.
• When there are parts of it that people do not like, those parts can be
changed.
• The act of changing a culture, however, is difficult, and can usually only be
seen over long periods of time.
• Culture is symbolic and material
• Culture is structured, or created, through a variety of processes.
• In addition to symbols, culture is also created through norms and values
• Norms are constructed through regular practice.
• That is to say they are created by the most common actions of people
within a group.
• Marriage norms can be a good example:
• In some cultures marrying within the group (endogamy) is common.
• In others marrying outside of the group (exogamy) is instead the norm.
• Take the classic Romeo and Juliet story:
• Romeo and Juliet wished to have an exogamous marriage; they wished to
marry members of two different groups (“families”) who were feuding.
• This act of social rebellion against cultural norms forms the plot point for
Shakespeare’s play.
• Looking at U.S. history, there has long been a cultural norm for marrying
within one’s racial group.
• Some states even criminalized interracial marriage to enforce this norm.
• The strength of this cultural prejudice arose out of decades of racial
segregation in the United States.
• Only finally in 1967 did the U.S. Supreme Court rule that this prejudicial law
was unconstitutional in the case of Loving v. Virginia.
• Most people within a culture follow its norms.
• But culture change often arises from resistance to such norms.
• Hence the United States has seen a long-term movement toward accepting
interracial (i.e. exogamous) marriages.

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• Cultural values develop out of shared history and background.
• The United States is heavily influenced by Puritan colonists that helped to
found many of the continent’s earliest settlements.
• Thus values such as hard work and denial of pleasures (general abstinence)
are often seen as worthy values.
• Even to this day, many companies value workers who do not use their
vacation days, but instead work straight through the year.
• In other cultures, vacation is valued; it is thought that workers who take a
break come back stronger and better able to do their jobs.
• Values have a way of changing over time.
• As cultures change, as economies grow and shrink, as wars come and go
• Life events affect what we as a culture hold most dear.
• In the end, not all values are shared values.
• Like culture norms, there are some values that are common but not
universal to a culture.
During the 1950s, most American women expected to have careers as wives,
mothers, and domestic managers. As millions of women entered the
workforce, attitudes toward work and family changed. Compare the 1950s
mom and kids doing dishes with the contemporary physician entering data on
a laptop computer

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Instrumental needs include basic biological needs for food, drink, shelter,
comfort, and reproduction. People also use culture to fulfill psychological and
emotional needs, such as friendship, companionship, or the need for approval
or companionship.

Many modern cultural patterns have become maladaptive over time.

Examples of maladaptive aspects of culture include policies that encourage
overpopulation, poor food-distribution systems, overconsumption, and
industrial pollution.

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• Among the social universals is life in groups and in some kind of family.
• Generalities occur in certain times and places but not in all cultures. They
may be widespread, but they are not universal. One cultural generality that
is present in many but not all societies is the nuclear family, a kinship group
consisting of parents and children.
• Food based peculiarities
• Cultural borrowing and exchanges have accelerated with globalization.
Traits that are useful, that have the capacity to please large audiences, and
that don’t clash with the cultural values of potential adopters are more
likely to spread than others are.

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