Culture

Culture is defined as the strategy by which human beings adapt to the natural environment. Anthropology in all its forms is the study of human beings and their behavior, and culture is a manifestation of that behavior. Culture includes all the techniques, technologies, and artifacts produced by human beings. Culture is clearly a vital element in cultural anthropology, which studies how human beings react to their environment. In two books on different cultures, the authors take different methodological approaches to their studies, but in each case the authors show an understanding of the way the environment and all that it entails--topography, vegetation, climate--shapes the culture that develops in that environment. A comparison of the culture of the Tyrol in The Hidden Frontier by John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf and that of the Guatemalan Indians in Penny capitalism by Sol Tax shows how important environment has been in the way each culture has developed.

The geography of the Tyrol includes the Brenner pass, with the land of the tyrol rising on either side. This pass connects Austria and Italy across a narrow area 1370 meters above sea level. The area has been a unified political entity since the early thirteenth century and was divided by the Treaty of St. Germain of 1919 into the tansalpine Tyrol, one of the provinces of the Federated Austrian republic, and the cisalpine Tyrol, now part of the region of Trento-Alto Adige of the Republic of Italy. The authors note

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miles west of Guatemala City, and this lake is at an altitude of 5,100 feet. Because of the nature of the region, with cliffs rising precipitously from the edge of the water to heights of 1,000 feet or more, certain sites assume greater commercial importance than others. Panajachel is one of the busy ports for water traffic on the lake, for instance, and is the most important because there is a town nearby, because the main highway from the capital to the west passes through it, and because gasoline launches as well as canoes may be accommodated (Tax 1). Panajachel also occupies an important place on the east-west trade axis (Tax 2). The people in the region are then described, and there are only a thousand or so people living in this pueblo. The population can be divided into Ladinos and Indians, the two classes of persons recognized in Guatemala. The difference between them is that a Ladino is generally someone who is not an Indian, and an Indian is defined in terms of cultural and linguistic criteria rather than on physical features. The Indians in Panajachel are distinguished from Ladinos in that their mother tongue is Indian and their command of Spanish is relatively poor. They wear a costume that is different form

Category: Philosophy - C