Culture is the cumulative deposit of beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, and concepts of the universe acquired by a human species through social learning. It also includes non-physical ideas and the systems of beliefs and behavior expressed by them, such as morals, rules, and language.
A child enters the world cultureless, but he rapidly acquires a cultural environment, which influences him in all his overt and covert activities. It can hold back his sex urges, for example, and cause him to observe premarital chastity or even voluntary vows of celibacy for life. It can also cause him to suffer from hunger, because certain foods are branded unclean and therefore not worthy of consumption. The human animal is an extraordinarily sensitive cultural creature.
The study of cultural phenomena has a long history, beginning with the classics of ethnography and anthropology. In the 1960s a new approach to cultural analysis arose with two books destined to exert a profound influence, Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson and The Invention of Tradition by Eric Hobsbawm. This approach, now generally known as cultural history, emphasizes the study of beliefs and ideas, which are not restricted to the writings of literate elites. It also includes the notions that are not articulated in the written record, but which can be discerned from patterns of action and from the physical evidence of a culture’s artifacts.
Today, the study of cultural history encompasses a variety of disciplines, including archeology, linguistics, and even the behavioral sciences, such as sociology and psychology. It is a reaction against perceived rigidity in the social histories that have preceded it, and asserts the relevance if not primacy of perspectives, foci, and agency that would have been dismissed as peripheral at best, and ridiculous at worst. It has led to gender studies and more focused race studies, as well as a whole host of smaller but no less important subjects such as travel writing, food history, and environmental history.
Cultural Anthropology, the journal that carries this work forward, publishes ethnographic writing informed by a wide array of theoretical perspectives and innovative in form and content. It also welcomes essays that explore how the discipline can be used to address broader public audiences and interests. This issue features seven original papers that examine various aspects of culture in a range of settings. The topics include a study of chainsaws and a look at acoustic violence, the effect of music on the development of cities, the ebb and flow of fashion trends, and the cultural dimensions of deforestation. A further essay considers how museums can rethink their relationships with source communities to control access to their artefacts and reclaim the history they embody.