9 Culture as a Tool of Adaptation

Nisha Thapa

Contents:

    Introduction

Culture adaptation

Summary

Learning Objectives:

1.      What is cultural adaptation?

2.      To study the process of cultural adaptation.

3.      To study the array of examples which helps in deeper understanding of the topic.

4.      To study the concept of cultural variation due to different types of adaptation.

Introduction

Man comes into the world as a helpless infant possessing no developed inherited mechanisms for behaviour. He must be taught to eat, speak, walk, and to perform nearly all the overt actions required for living. Even as an infant, he performs certain actions, such as swallowing or elimination, these are often profoundly modified by experience and learning. During his relatively long period of infancy and childhood, man is ceaselessly subjected to a learning process which eventually provides him with certain ways of living appropriate to the society into which he is born and in which he is educated.

Men, like animals, live in more or less organized clusters which we are called societies. Members of human society always share a number of distinctive modes or ways of behaving which; taken as a whole, constitute their culture. Each human society has its own culture; distinct entirely from that of any other society.

The concept of culture, which Kluckhohn has defined as all the “historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational and non-rational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behaviour of men”, helps to understand human behaviour. The diversity of human behaviour is also clarified by this concept when we realize that each human society has a distinctive culture, or to quote Kluckohn again, “a historically derived system of explicit and implicit designs for living, which tend to be shared by all or specifically designated members of a group (that is a society)”. (Kluckohn, 1945).

Fig 1. Culture plays a vital role in adaptation to the environment

It is clear that the anthropological definition of culture is far more comprehensive than that of the word as it is ordinarily employed. Many people hold that culture is synonymous with development or improvement by training and education. A “cultured”, more properly, “cultivated”, individual is one who has acquired a command of certain specialized fields of knowledge, usually art, music and literature, and who has good manners. Persons not so well educated in these fields, or persons whose manners were learned in the streets rather than in polite society, are often called uncultured. (Beals, 2007)

In anthropological usage, however, this distinction is not significant, culture is not restricted to certain special fields of knowledge; it includes ways of behaving derived from the whole range of human activity. The designs for living are evident in the behaviour of Eskimos, the natives of Australia, or the Navajos are as much a part of culture as those of cultivated Europeans and Americans. Culture includes not only the techniques and methods of art, music and literature, but also those used to make pottery, sew clothing, or build houses.

Anthropologist cannot observe culture directly; he can only observe what people do and say and the processes and techniques they employ in the manufacture and use of material artifacts. Baskets, pottery, weapons, paintings, sculptures, and many other items of the same sort are collected and studied because they represent the end products of ways of behaving in a given society. Similarly, many varieties of human actions are studied, not as isolated items of behaviour, but for the light they may throw on the ways in which human beings are taught to behave in the societies in which they live.

Tylor (1870) gave the definition of culture as “the complex whole which includes art, belief, customs, knowledge, laws, norms and any other capabilities and habits acquired by humans as a member of the society.”

Cultures are inherited and as members of a society we all inherit our culture from the society through the medium of family. Culture is what can be said as a society’s shared and socially transmitted ideas, values, and perceptions, which are used to make sense of experience and generate behaviour and are reflected in that behaviour. Culture is socially constructed and learned rather than biologically inherited. Therefore, culture is learned, shared and is dynamic (Havilland 2007)

Likewise, the ability of the living organisms to survive in a particular ecological set up is called adaptation. It is possible for the possession of certain physiological, bio-chemical, genetic and behavioural characteristics since, an ecosystem changes with time and space, and organisms have to adapt themselves with the new environment. Various species of the animal kingdom show the evidences of adaptation. Humans are not the exceptions. According to Darwin, evolution itself is based on adaptive selection. The organisms, which can adapt to their environment in a better way, are permitted by nature to survive. Therefore, the less adapted organisms are eliminated gradually through death, before the attainment of reproductive age. Thus, adaptation is regarded as a process of modification in the structure and function of an organism for which it can survive and reproduce in a changing ecosystem.

For the alteration of natural environment, not only man but all organisms face a crisis and so they undergo certain changes in their characteristics. Adaptation is also a process of adjustment, chiefly biological in nature which takes place under climatic variation. The animals, which fail to adapt, become extinct. Since man is a higher intellectual animal, he is endowed with number of ways to minimize the effect of different environmental conditions. His learned behaviour, i.e., culture helps him cope up any sort of adverse climate at any place in the world. In fact, culture represents an intimate adjustment of people in a given environment. Each human culture is a unique one that shows adaptation of a group of individuals to their local environment. Culture acts as a protective sheath between man and nature; it is a reaction against environment with an inventive brain.(Roy, 2008)

In this purview, one of the best examples is hunting and gathering; as it has been the most and foremost successful and persistent adaptation which human beings have ever sustained since, hunting and gathering is the most important part of human culture at one point of time.

Image 1: hunting

Source: worldciv1team3.weeldy.com

Another example is Bushman of the Kalahari Desert; they have adapted to the environment very well living in a holistic environment, their bodies are lean and thin so as not to allow water loss from the body and through decades of evolution, and their genetic code allows them to go without water as compared to a non-Kalahari resident.

Image 2: Bushmen adaptation to the heat

Source: (https://kiwifootprints.com)

In India, if we see the tribes for instance; Chenchus and Bhils still subsist their living as Hunters and gatherers. They have adapted tools like bows and arrows which helps them to hunt efficiently among the bushes.

Most importantly, if we see adaptation in cold areas; it would be different in comparison to hot environment as the people living in cold environment have different adaptation requirements. The people dwelling in extreme cold regions need more warm cloths, our ancestor covered their bodies with animal skin especially animals like arctic fox and polar bears as those animals skin help prevent heat loss from the body and provided more heat.

Culture adaptation

Man is essentially unique in developing culture as a means of more rapid adaptation to divergent environments. When culture is viewed as a tool of adaptation, a number of analogies to organic evolution appear. Species are divided into populations, each of which are adapted or is adapting to its particular environment. Similarly, each society has its own culture, and this represents one possible adaptation or way of life to permit survival in the particular environment in which the society exists.

Cultural adaptation has played a crucial role in human evolution. Human foragers adapted to a vast range of environments. The archaeological record indicates that Pleistocene foragers occupied virtually all of Africa, Eurasia, and Australia. The data on historically known hunter-gatherers suggests that to exploit this range of habitats, humans used a dizzying diversity of subsistence practices and social systems. Consider just a few examples: the Copper Eskimos lived in the high Arctic, spending summers hunting near the mouth of the Mackenzie River, and the long dark months of the winter living on the sea ice hunting seals. Groups were small and were highly dependent on men’s hunting for survival. The Eskimo culture based on the environment they live in i.e., extreme cold have helped them evolve a culture to adapt to the cold environment. In Kalahari Desert, women have played a great role in collecting of seeds, tubers, and melons which accounted for most of their calories in their diet. Men were involved in hunting impala and gemsbok. They even survived fierce heat and lived without surface water for months together. Both of them lived in small, nomadic bands linked together in large band clusters by patrilineally reckoned kinship. The Chumash lived along the productive California coast situated around present day Santa Barbara, gathering shellfish and seeds and fishing the pacific from great plank boats. They lived in large permanent villages with division of labour and extensive social stratification.

This range of habitats, ecological specializations, and social systems is much greater than any other special species. Big predators like lions and wolves have very large ranges compared to other animals, but lions never extended their range beyond Africa and the temperate region of western Eurasia; wolves were limited to North America and Eurasia. The diet and social systems of such large predators are similar throughout their range. They typically capture a small range of prey species using one of the two methods: they wait in ambush, or combine stealthy approach and fast pursuit. Once the prey is captured, they process it with tooth and claw. The basic simplicity of the lives of large carnivores is captured in a Gary Larson cartoon in which a T.rex contemplates its monthly calendar- every day has the notation “kill something and eat it”. In contrast, human hunters use a vast number of methods to capture and process a huge range of prey species, plant resources, and minerals. Some animals are tracked, a difficult skill that requires a great deal of ecological and environmental knowledge. Others are called by imitating the prey’s mating or distress calls. Still others trapped with snares or traps or smoked out of borrows. Animals are captured and killed by hand, shot with arrows, clubbed, or speared (Kalpan et al 2000).

And this is just the ache; if we included the full range of human being strategies the list would be much longer. The lists of plants and minerals used by human foragers are similarly long and diverse. Making a living in the arctic requires specialized knowledge: how to make weatherproof clothing, how to provide light and heat for cooking, how to build kayaks and umiaks, how to hunt seals through holes in the sea ice. Life in the central Kalahari requires equally specialized, but quite different knowledge: how to find water in the dry season, which of the many kinds of plants can be eaten, which beetles can be used to make arrow poison and the subtle art of tracking game. Survival might have been easier in the balmy California coast, yet specialized social knowledge was needed to succeed in hierarchical Chumash villagers compared to the small egalitarian bands of the Copper Eskimo.

We may say that humans are more variable than lions, but what about other primates? Byrne (1999) questioned: Don’t chimpanzees have culture? Don’t different populations use different tools and foraging techniques? and concluded that there is no doubt that great apes do exhibit a wider range of foraging techniques, more complex processing of food, and more tool use than other mammals . However, this technique plays a much smaller role in great ape economy than they do in the economies of human foragers. Byrne (1999) went on to compare the foraging economies of a number of chimpanzee populations and human foraging group and found thatthey categorize resources according to the difficulty of acquisition: collected foods like ripe fruit and leaves can be simply collected from the environment and eaten. Extracted foods. like fruits in hard shells, tubers or termites that are buried deep underground, honey hidden in hives in high in trees, or plants that contain toxins must be processed before they can be eaten. Hunted foods come from animals, usually vertebrates, which must be caught or trapped. Chimpanzees are overwhelmingly dependent on collected resources, while human foragers get almost all of their calories from extracted or hunted resources.

Humans can live in a wider range of environments than other primates because culture allows the relatively rapid accumulation of better strategies for exploiting local environments compared with genetic inheritance. Consider “learning” in the most general sense, every adaptive system “learns” about its environment by one mechanism or another. Learning involves a trade-off between accuracy and generality. Learning mechanisms generate contingent behaviour based on “observation” of the environment. The machinery that maps observations onto behaviour is the “learning mechanism”. One learning mechanism is more accurate than another in a particular environment if it generates more adaptive behaviour in that environment. A learning mechanism is more general than another if it generates adaptive behaviour in a wider range of environments. Typically, there is a trade-off between accuracy and generality because very learning mechanism requires prior knowledge about which environment cues are good predictors of the actual state of the environment and what behaviours are best in each environment. The more detailed and specific such knowledge is for a particular environment, the more accurate is the learning rule. Thus, for a given amount of stored knowledge, a learning mechanism can either have detailed information about a few environments, or less detailed information about many environments.

In most animals, this knowledge is stored in the genes, including of course the genes that control individual learning. Consider the following thought experiment: pick a wide-ranging primate species, let’s say baboons. Then capture a group of baboons, and move them to another part of the natural range of baboons in which the environment is as different as possible. You might for example, transplant a group from the lush wetlands of the Okavango delta to the harsh desert of western Namibia. Next, compare their behaviour to the behaviour of other baboons living in the same environment. We believe that after a little while the experimental group of baboons would be quite similar to their neighbours. The reason that the local and transplanted baboons would be similar, we think is the same reason that baboons are less variable than humans: they acquire a great deal of information about how to be a baboon genetically- it is hardwired. To be sure, they have to learn where things are, where to sleep, which foods are desirable, and which are not, but they can do this without contact with already knowledgeable baboons because they have the basic knowledge built in. They cannot learn to live in temperate forests or arctic tundra because their learning systems do not include enough innate information to cope with those environments.

Human culture allows learning mechanisms to be both more accurate and more general, because cumulative cultural adaptation provides accurate and more detailed information about the local environment. Evolutionary psychologists argue that our psychology is built of complex, information rich, evolved modules that are adapted for the hunting and gathering life that almost all humans pursue up to a few thousand years ago. Fair enough, but individual humans cannot learn how to live in the arctic, the Kalahari, or anywhere else. The reason is that our information rich, evolved psychology doesn’t contain the necessary information. Think about being plunked down on an Arctic beach with a pile of driftwood and seal skins and trying to make a kayak. Nonetheless, you would almost certainly fail to make a kayak. And supposing you did make a passable kayak, you’d still have a dozen or so similar tools to master before you could make a contribution to the Inuit economy. And then there is the social mores of the Inuit to master. The Inuit could make kayaks, and do all the other things that they needed to do to stay alive, because they could make use of a vast pool of useful information available in the behaviour and teachings of other people in their population. The Inuit of the Arctic have realized effective cultural adaptation to cold stress in terms of clothing and shelter. They were layered clothing, trapping air between layers to act as an insulator. They wear cloths made up of seal skin as to trap body heat. They live in tents made of animal skin and as they travel on their snow sleds drawn by snow dog. They also construct temporary shelters made of snow blocks which are excellent for trapping heat inside because of its shape. They use snow as an excellent insulator; permanent housing uses underground entrances and higher living areas.

The reason the information contained in this pool is adaptive is that a combination of learning and cultural transmission leads to relatively rapid, cumulative adaptation. Populations of people connected over time by social learning can accumulate the solutions to problems that no individual could do on their own. Individuals don’t have to be too smart, because simple heurristics like correlation detection and imitation of the successful can produce clever adaptations when averaged over a population of individuals and over generations of time. Even if most individuals imitate with only the occasional application of some simple heuristic, many individuals will be giving traditions a nudge in an adaptive direction, on average. Cultural transmission preserves the many small nudges, and expresses the modified traditions to another round of nudging. Vary rapidly by the standards of ordinary evolutionary time, and more rapidly than evolution by natural selection alone, weak, decision- making forces generate new adaptations. The complexity of cultural traditions can explode to the limits of our capacity to imitate or be taught, far past our ability to make careful, detailed decisions about them. We let the population level process of cultural evolution do the heavy lifting of our learning for us. (Boyd, 1984)

Gradually, human population in dry, hot environments have realized effective cultural adaptations to heat stress using clothing and shelter designs to reduce heat production, reduce heat gain from radiation and conduction, and increased evaporation. Typical clothing is light and loose. Shelters are frequently built compact, light colours reflect the sun, and doors and windows are kept closed during the day.(Relethford 1991)

Summary

In this module we have studied culture as a tool of adaptation. To pin point, ecology is the study of the interaction between an organism and its environment. Whereas adaptation is the central concept in ecological studies because adaptation is the process whereby beneficial organism and environment relationships are established. For instance; Darwinism fitness is an index of reproductive success that is often used to measure individual or group adaptation.

The way of life of the tribes for instance; Bushman and Inuit: their ways of living provide relevant informations for us how to live in such an extreme environmental conditions.

Environment affects human behaviour and this affects the way one thinks. We can take the example of the Nanook of the North by Robert Flaherty; living in a very cold environment affects their way of thinking thus producing material culture like warm cloths, sleds which make it easier for them to travel in the snow. Harpoons and fishing rods as the area is not appropriate for vegetation so they need to hunt seals and fish. The Inuit of the Arctic have realized effective cultural adaptations to cold stress in terms of clothing and shelter. They wear layered clothing, trapping air between layers to act as an insulator. They also construct temporary shelters and use snow as an excellent insulator; permanent housing uses underground entrances and higher living areas.

Image 3: Eskimo adaptation to the cold environment

Source: (www.firstpeople.us/tipi/eskimos-building-an-igloo-1918.html)

Human populations in dry, hot environments have realized effective cultural adaptations to heat stress using clothing and shelter designs to reduce heat production, reduce heat gain from radiation and conduction, and increased evaporation.

Therefore, one can conclude that culture is a tool of adaptation and it is the environment which sets the culture of a man. Though culture is the product of the environmental conditions one lives in and it helps to cope with different tools like the food habits, the clothing system, the housing patterns, etc. This helps people survive in the given environment and makes life possible on Earth.

References

• Beals Ralph L. and Hoijer Harry(2007) An Introduction to Anthropology. India: Surjeet publications.
• Boyd Robert and Richerson Peter..Culture,adaptation and innateness (1984) [Accessed:14th March 2016.
• Byrne, R.W (1999) Comparative and ecological perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge university press.
• Haviland, William. A. (et all) 2007. The Essence of Anthropology. U.S.A: Thompson Wadsworth. References
• Kaplan, H.K, Lancaster J, and Hurtado (2000) A theory of human life history evolution: Diet, intelligence, and longevity, Evolutionary Anthropology. [Accessed: 14th March 216).
• Kluckhohn Cylde, and Kelly W. (1945) The concept of culture: The science of Man in the world crisis,ed Ralph Linton. New York: Columbia university press.
• Relethford, John. H. 1990. The Human Species: An Introduction to Biological Anthropology. New York: Mayfield Publishing.
• Roy, Indrani Basu (2008) Anthropology: The study of man. New Delhi: S. Chand and company pvt.ltd.

    Suggested Readings

• Bates,M. 1971. Human Ecology. In A.L.Kroeber, ed., Anthropology Today, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 700-13.
• Boas, Franz.(1928) Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: W.W. Norton and co.
• Carrithers, M. (1992) Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity, Oxford: Oxford University Press
• Childe, V. Gordon. (1939)Man makes himself. New York: Oxford university press.
• Colinvaux,P. 1973. Introduction to Ecology. John Wiley & Sons.
• Forde, D. (1934) Habitat, Economy and Society, London: Methuen.
• Harris, M. (1966) ‘The Cultural Ecology of India’s Sacred Cattle’, Current Anthropology 7: 51-62
• Harris, M. (1979) Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, New York: Random House.
• Ingold, T. (1986) Evolution and Social Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Milton, K. (1996) Environmentalism and Cultural Theory, London: Routledge
• Rappaport, R. (1979) Ecology, Meaning and Religion, Richmond,CA: North Atlantic Books
• Steward, J. (1963) Theory of Culture Change, Urbana: University of Illinois Press
• Wagner, R. (1975) The Invention of Culture .Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall