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Alaska Natives at the Time of the Invasions: A Cultural Profile Project Draft 3 Do not quote or copy without permission from Mike Gaffney or from Ray Barnhardt at the Alaska Native Knowledge Network, University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Mike Gaffney suggests that one read the Teacher's Manual Preview first to get a good idea about the purpose and design of this secondary school textbook. Mike Gaffney Chapter 8 Concept of culture. Already the term culture has appeared in our discussion numerous times. Earlier we said its elasticity of meaning can complicate things because what definition culture is given seems to depend on the interests and purposes of the one using the concept at the time. We have even said it is sometimes used to mean essentially the same thing as ethnicity. It is now time to discuss the concept of culture according to the interests and purposes of the Cultural Profile Project. We start with a broad definition of culture as a distinct way of life and way of thinking about life that is closely share by a socially organized group of people over time. Now we expand on this definition by identifying and discussing what we view as the six parts of culture. Culture is distinctive. There is something about a group’s culture — their way of life and how they think about life — that distinguishes them from other groups. Indeed, their cultural identity is directly tied to their feeling that “unlike other people known to us, we believe and practice these things.” In turn, other groups acknowledge such differences from their own cultural perspectives. We have already suggested that a significant aspect of cultural identity is its variability. For example, the more groups like Islamic or Christian fundamentalists fear their values and way of life are threatened, the more passionately they will proclaim how true and good are their religious traditions and cultural values. Indeed, we would have no need for concepts such as culture and cultural identity if all people everywhere looked the same, spoke the same way, organized their societies according to the same cultural rules, and shared the same values, traditions, and history. Culture is shared. A distinct way of life, including ways of thinking about life, is closely shared by all members of the group. The cultural rules, core values, and cherished traditions are learned at an early age and understood by all members. This learned cultural knowledge provides a mental road map for navigating through everyday life. It is a road map we carry in the back of our heads. We do not consciously think about these cultural rules, values, and traditions as we go about our daily lives. We simply do our culture, mostly without giving it a second thought.1 Anton Chekhov, the great Russian playwright, once observed that “Any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day living that wears you out.” Chekhov was talking about daily life within a familiar cultural setting. But what about living and working in very different cultural surroundings where we start out with few clues on how to appropriately act at any given time? Imagine how exhausting life would be if we had to stop and think about every encounter we had with a local person and about each word we uttered during the day. Anyone who has lived for any length of time in a very different cultural setting knows of this experience. Often it is called “culture shock.” We are not talking about the short, protected experience of a tourist. We are talking about, for example, the experience of Peace Corps volunteers who spend two years working in foreign environments, often in remote areas. We are talking about Native people whose whole life has been in the village of their ancestors but who now must go to the city to find work or care for a loved one. And we are talking about the young non-Native teacher who accepts a position teaching in an isolated Alaska Native village after spending his entire life in New York City. Social organization and cultural rules. If a way of life – a culture – is recognized as having distinctive elements closely shared by a group of people, than it must be considered a living reality. Culture is not simply an abstract idea in some outside observer’s mind. It is a real thing having real meaning and consequences for members of the group. And to have such meaning and consequences, the culture must have a social organization– a structure of social institutions – which at least meets the basic physical and material needs of the group. To identify a social institution we ask this question: Is there a clearly defined category of people who repeatedly come together to accomplish certain tasks or to regulate certain activities of their society? In modern American society, for example, we have religious institutions requiring that group activities take place in churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues on a regular basis. Our capitalist economy is largely driven by the institution of the private corporation. And the main institutions of our political system are the legislative, executive, and the judicial branches of government along with all of the well organized special interest groups working to influence government decision-making. In all these institutional settings, there is a clearly defined category of people who repeatedly come together to accomplish a certain task. In traditional Native societies we have such examples as the social institutions of Iñupiaq and Siberian Yupik whaling crews, the social institution of the potlatch among the Tlingit, and the social institution of the men’s house (qasegiq) among the Central Yup’ik. In all these cases the same category of people – a whaling crew, a Tlingit clan or house group, Yup’ik men of the same settlement – come together on a regular basis to perform specific tasks. Perhaps the most obvious social institution in any culture is some form of a family. Within any cultural group we can detect a pattern of how various family members are expected to treat each other as opposed to treating non-family members. This also includes how to treat members of the larger kinship group such as aunts, uncles, and cousins who may live in a different household or even a different village. Which members live with whom and where is also part of the family pattern. When viewed across cultures, moreover, we can see different kinds of relationships between husband and wife, between parents and children, or between grandparents and grandchildren. Sometimes we can even identify special relationships between aunts and their nieces and between uncles and their nephews. In some societies there exist clear cultural expectations of how older daughters shall care for their younger sisters and brothers. Most important, all social institutions are governed by sets of cultural rules. But what exactly do we mean by cultural rules? We mean those commonly understood principles and expectations which guide people’s behavior in everyday life. These rules, moreover, make up a large part of that cultural road map we carry about in the back of our heads as we go about our daily routines. It matters not whether the task is as routine as food preparation for the family or as dramatic as preparing for war. Understanding family roles and relationships within a particular culture, for example, becomes easier once we know the rules for how family members should relate to one another — the son to the father, the granddaughter to the grandmother, the husband to his wife and so on. Of course we can reverse this investigative process. We can try to understand the cultural rules by observing over time the pattern of behavior that takes place among family members By cultural rules we do not mean written law. In fact written law most often reinforces longstanding cultural rules and customs by updating them to meet the demands of contemporary life. Western societies based on the Judeo-Christian tradition, for example, have for two thousand years taken interpretations of the Bible, particularly the Ten Commandments, and expanded them into written law. Likewise, Muslim societies have taken interpretations of their sacred text, the Qur?an, and expanded it into written Islamic law. Culture persists over time. The fourth key idea helping to define our concept of culture is over time. A distinct culture closely shared by an organized group of people most likely arose from adaptations their ancestors made to a particular natural and social environment years ago. This was quite evident when we discussed the differences between northern and southern Alaska Native societies in Chapter Four. As long as a people’s natural and social environment remains reasonably stable down through time, so too should their culture and social institutions remain fairly stable. Such cultural stability was the historical condition of Alaska Native life until the invasions brought sustained contact with powerful, culturally different outsiders. This, however, does not mean that pre-invasion Native life was without events triggering major social change for various Native communities. Indeed, the more we learn about pre-contact Native life, the more action-packed it becomes, filled with tales of hostilities between Native groups that lasted for years and resulted in the death of many and the dislocation of entire communities. Nevertheless, such pre-invasion conflict and change was generally confined to a single region of Alaska, affecting only several Native groups at any one time. Certainly there was death and destruction in traditional times. But it was not the basic social organization and cultural values of one Native group that were under attack by another Native group. Even if beaten in battle or hit by a natural catastrophe such as an earthquake, the customs and values of the surviving people continued much as before. With the Russian and American invasions, however, it was precisely Native social organizations and cultural values that came under direct attack. Speaking of Russians and Americans, we should note the historical difference between the two invasions and their impact on Native life. The Russian presence in Native Alaska lasted 123 years, 1744 to 1867. And the institutions and laws of their colonial system were essentially confined to the Aleutians, Kodiak Island, the Alaska Peninsula, and the immediate region around Sitka. They also had trading and missionary operations in Bristol Bay and the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta. Aside from the short-lived trading post at Nulato, they never penetrated the Athabaskan interior. Nor did they penetrate Iñupiaq country or establish a presence on St Lawrence Island. On average, there were only about 550 Russians in Alaska at any one time over the 123 year period. The Americans, however, established some form of colonial control over almost all of Native Alaska by 1890, only thirty-three years after signing the Treaty of Cession in 1867. And unlike the Russians, they just kept coming in larger and larger numbers on through modern times. A distinct speech community. The key point about this cultural element is that it says speech community, not language community. In modern times, the way people speak a language may be a more significant badge or signal of cultural identity than the actual language itself. One group of people may speak the same language as other groups inhabiting their region. Over time, however, they may come to speak and use it in a way that distinguishes them from these other groups. Although, for example, its basic vocabulary and grammar is commonly shared by other American speech communities, the everyday English spoken by many African Americans can be quite distinctive in its spoken style and vocabulary. In fact, many words and phrases used by many other Americans originated within the “Black English” speech community. Here are just a few examples: cat – originally a jazz musician, now anyone of the male gender; cool – calm, controlled; dig it – to understand, appreciate, pay attention; bad – really good. The Head of the African and African-American Studies Department at Harvard University, Henry Louis Gates Jr., makes this point:
Focusing on speech community rather than on language as a core element of culture requires some explanation. When thinking about something as complex as the relationship between language and culture, it is often helpful to develop a fresh perspective by doing comparative study. So let’s go abroad to Ireland and then come back to Native Alaska. The term Gaelic refers to a group of similar languages traditionally spoken in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Today the Irish simply refer to their form of Gaelic as the “Irish language.” Not surprisingly, eight hundred years of English intervention and colonization of Ireland resulted in English replacing Irish Gaelic as the dominant language. Although English may be the dominant language, Irish resistance to centuries of English oppression included the rise of “Irish-English” as a distinct speech community with accent, dialect, and vocabulary influenced by the traditional Irish language. Now think of language as a secret code you have to know before truly understanding what’s going on in the society around you. Along with many other groups in the world, including different speech communities in the United States, the Irish do what is known as “code switching.” They can easily speak English-English when necessary — for example, on the job or in the classroom. But in situations where it is considered important to highlight one’s Irish cultural identity — for example, running for political office — a quick switch to Irish-English signifies to voters that you share and value their way of life. The Irish indeed know how different their English speech patterns can be from other English-speaking peoples. And they view this difference as a distinguishing marker of their cultural identity. Take, for example, this observation by the Irish writer Roddy Doyle when interviewed by the British newspaper, The Guardian:
Mr. Doyle mentions an “almost Shakespearean quality to some of the [English] language spoken in Ireland.” This brings up another important point about Irish-English. There has developed in the last century and a half an Irish literature written in English known throughout the world for its powerful portrayal of Irish culture and history. Although this literature is written in precise and eloquent English, there is nothing culturally English about its meaning and content. So, you may ask, what does language and cultural identity in Ireland and certain characteristics of the African American speech community have to do with Native Alaska? We have known for many years that Native Alaska has been experiencing a shift from Native languages to English. Those who believe “to lose your language is to lose your culture” see this language shift as spelling doom for Native cultures. This grim view of a Native future seems to forget two things. The first is the distinctiveness of Native village life based on its cultural platform of a subsistence economy regardless of what language is spoken. The second is the development of various forms of “Alaska Native English.” Consider the following question: Like African Americans and the Irish, is there is now emerging in Alaska different Native-English speech communities? Perhaps we are at a point in Native history when, for example, a person from an Athabaskan village can say, “Aha, the way that guy speaks and uses English tells me that he is, like me, a Koyukon Athabaskan!” So why is Speech Community a Cultural Profile element? We have taken time to discuss the idea of speech community because it is a key feature of any culture, whether in modern or traditional times. No concept of culture is complete without some discussion of cultural linguistics. It is true that language shifts and the development of new speech communities were not major issues in traditional Native times. Bear in mind, however, that even back in those days the particular way one spoke Iñupiaq or Tlingit or Koyukon Athabaskan would signal one’s region, maybe even one’s home community, to other speakers of same language. Take a look at the ANLC map. Do you see the dashed lines within most of the Native language areas? These represent important dialect subdivisions – that is, speech communities – within a language area. Such speech differences surely served as one marker of a group’s cultural identity in much the same way as Irish English and Black English in the United States. And consider this famous line attributed to Winston Churchill, the English prime minister during World War II – “Great Britain and the United States are two great democracies divided by a common language.” Said a little differently, Churchill was suggesting that Great Britain and the United States share the same language but are two different speech communities. Worldview – the heart of culture. This sixth element is absolutely central to any description of a cultural group. A people’s worldview is the unique way they think about themselves and make sense of the world they know. It deserves special consideration. This is why Chapter Thirteen is devoted solely to worldview and different ways of thinking about it. For a definition of worldview we go to the work of the Central Yup’ik scholar, Oscar Kawagley. In his book, A Yupiaq Worldview, Dr. Kawagley says:
Oscar continues:
This indeed is at the heart of our concept of culture. Why? Because it is a human group’s worldview that gives everyday meaning and legitimacy to their social institutions and cultural identity. It is their worldview which defines, even celebrates, the group’s best image of itself. It describes and promotes what is regarded as the worthwhile, honorable life in relation to the spiritual world, to the social world of fellow humans, and to the natural world and its living creatures.
As suggested by Oscar, we can develop a good picture of a culture’s worldview by studying what adults insist be taught to the young. Whether modern or traditional, every society down through time has established institutions to educate the young in all aspects of the group’s worldview. The long-term survival of any culture and cultural identity ultimately depends on how effectively a coherent worldview is passed down from generation to generation. This is why Education is included as an element to be researched in the Social Organization section of your Cultural Profile assignment. In modern society, for example, we have schools, youth organizations, and children’s programs like Sesame Street on public television. All of these American institutions teach cultural values as well as skills and knowledge. In one form or another, they all teach hope, faith, and pride in the America historical legacy and in American practices of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In traditional Native societies it was other kinds of institutions which performed vital educational functions. Among the matrilineal societies of southern Alaska, for example, there existed an important family relationship called the avunculate. In matrilineal kinship systems a person traces genealogical descent through the mother’s side. In the matrilineal society of the Tlingit, for example, a person’s most significant kinship ties are with members of the mother’s clan. Personal benefits such as inheritance, property rights, and social status are tied to clan membership. In patrilineal societies, on the other hand, a person’s significant kinship ties and benefits are determined by genealogical descent on the father’s side. European dynasties, for example, traditionally used patrilineal descent to establish who, male or female, ascended to the royal throne. [Genealogy = tracing a family’s history back to their earliest ancestors.] The avunculate found in matrilineal societies refers to the relationship between the mother’s brother and her son. In Western terms, it is the relationship between a nephew and his uncle on the mother’s side. This avuncular relationship is considered an educational institution because it was the uncle’s responsibility to oversee the education and training of his sister’s son who, of course, is his nephew. This was a fundamental cultural rule. It was a major way the group’s values and knowledge were transmitted to the next generation of males. The biological father certainly has parental responsibilities to his son, and the son had a special connection to his father’s clan. But we should not forget that the biological father also had avuncular educational responsibilities within his own clan to his sister’s son. In modern educational terms, the avuncular relationship was like having your own personal instructor in a home schooling situation. The six parts of culture and the Cultural Profile Project. How does our six part concept of culture fit into the Cultural Profile Project? To begin with, it reminds us that Alaska Native groups persisted as culturally organized communities from ancient times. It suggests that this longstanding cultural cohesion could only have happened if the group’s institutions effectively met the basic human needs of its members. This suggests that one way of approaching your research is to ask: What were these social, economic, educational, political, and spiritual institutions and how did they meet human needs? Our concept of culture tells us that social institutions are governed by commonly understood cultural rules. Most important, it tells us that these rules form an almost invisible dimension of culture. They are not written down nor are they regularly discussed. There is no need for people to continually think about these rules as they go about their daily life. In a word, people simply do their culture. Of course the challenge to you is to identify your Native group’s cultural rules as you go about describing the more obvious structural aspects of their social institutions. Indeed, you must first understand the purpose, organization, and activities of these institutions before you can uncover the cultural rules which sustained them down through the ages. And, finally, our concept of culture steers us directly to a peoples’ worldview as the heart of their culture. It urges us to pay special attention to their worldview because it provides everyday meaning and legitimacy to their social institutions and cultural identity. Therefore we devote all of the last chapter to an examination of worldview and how it is connected to other elements of the cultural profile assignment. What we should be thinking about – key study questions.
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