We construe our cultural realities in terms of the complex, multi-determined boundaries by which we order our experiences and relationships with the world. The notion of culture as a complex, phenomenological boundary demarcating the human experience and defining our common human condition, describes a pathway by which we navigate our realities.

The kind of cultural boundary we seek to maintain unites our experience in history as biographical, connecting our sense of the past with our present predicament and our future promises. It is a complex boundary which functions upon many levels of our integration of experience, and yet which no where remains very clearly defined for very long. It pervades every facet of our experience, and yet the fact of its own boundedness remains commonly invisible and transparent to our view.

We have come, by a rather circuitous route, to reconsider, and possibly rehabilitate, the notion of anthropological "Culture" as a central orienting conception in the anthropological construction of reality, both theoretically and in the "really real" world. Culture has been a rather paradoxical concept, for though it has been a central orienting paradigm for an entire science of humanity it nevertheless is itself without fixed or final definition. It has been many things to different people, and in an ideal sense, can be claimed not to really exist at all except as our own anthropological construction of reality.

The notion of culture as boundary offers us an opportunity to reformulate and reintegrate the rather contradictory foundations of anthropological science. Human boundaries are holistically integrative and thus by definition also entail a relativity--but the fact of such boundary itself may be a human universal, and it is by means of boundaries that we identify differences in the world, and thus boundaries have always implied cultural and anthropological comparisons. Phenomenologically and empirically, boundaries also bring our feet back down to the earth in the sense that they do not imply eidetic, eternal "strukturs" or "Logos" of human reality. They are negotiated, permeable, malleable, diaphanous, alterable, ephemeral, violable--human boundaries, in short, unlike so many boundaries which have kept most other species in their place, are constructed.

How shall we construe the concept of culture as anthropological boundary? It is a boundary that is defined through time as much as its marked across space. It is as much psychologically as socially constructed. It is symbolic as well as materially defined. It is both embodied and disembodied. These dimensions have been reiterated enough. But the conception of Culture as a complex boundary in the anthropological construction of reality has other important implications. First it marks the texture and the manifold contours the fabric of our experience.

We are both united and separated by it, and it is the principle means by which we are known and others are known by us. Without a stable sense of boundary, meaning would not be possible--the anthropological construction of reality would not take place. It is basically a symbolic and therefore paradoxical texture. In one hand we may hold its substance, and in the other it may slip through our fingers no matter tightly we grasp it. Its complexity is integrated in a stochastic way that incorporates randomness.

We usually understand a given cultural orientation by terms of that strange anthropological calculus that interconnects its various traits and aspects, its traditions, style-patterns, values, beliefs, symbolism and collective representations, mythologies, rituals, institutions, technologies, arts and artifacts, we attribute relativity to culture in our understanding that no two cultural orientations are quite alike, though they may share many parallels, and many are radically different. We can travel over a mountain-ridge with expectations of encounter people not unlike the one's we just left behind, only perchance to discover a very different and contradictory orientation. There seems little systematic order in the diffusion and adoption of traits and elements across our boundaries that would allow us to predict with any sufficient accuracy the consequences of contact we establish between our boundaries. And yet when we scratch the surface of their skins we find the same basic humanity as that's within ourselves.

It is in our own nature that we need our boundaries by which to make sense of our realities. The kind of sense we make is cultural knowledge, and the boundaries that we depend upon are our own reciprocal cultural constructions of reality. The sense of boundary which underlies our conception of culture demands also that we conceive of cultural process as a dialectical continuum which incorporates change and stability along a wide range of possibilities, which combines and recombines a broad diversity of elements into stylistically unique patterns.

The boundaries of this cultural continuum are characterized by the dialectics which its many elements are mutually constrained. These dialectics articulate our cultural boundaries. They entail the incorporation of basic tensions and contradictions--the contradictions of cross-purposes and inimical designs. There is no culture that is without its own special set of conflicts and contradictions, and there is no cultural grouping, no matter how enclosed and inbound upon itself in the world, which is complete and completely separate from the larger world. This cultural continuum guarantees that we must locate the position of all cultural orientations within its range, and that the net value of a culture will not be determined in an exclusive, internal sense, but by the critical conjunction between its own corporate design and the larger external processes of the continuum itself, and the world beyond the continuum. We can see human civilization as defining the boundaries of this continuum, and recognize that the continuum itself, though vast, is not unbounded within a larger world.

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We cannot have a worldly conception of culture without at least some kind of implicit comparison between cultural orientations. A culture defines itself and its own identity not only terms of the possibilities of its own development, but in its contradictions and relations with other cultural orientations, which in definition are but realized extensions within the world of alternate possibilities of itself. The study of culture is always comparative, no matter how implicit such comparison may be. It is only by contact with different cultural orientations beyond our own boundaries that we are able to recognize the potential relativity, spuriousness and transparency of our own cultural orientation.

Because we are frequently dealing with holistic constructs which model the complexity of integrated realities, we must often approach the comparative study of culture on the basis of "types" and reified constructions which are but poor substitutes for the reality. We tend to reify culture as something real in and of itself, rather than as just a conceptual construction representing real historical processes and phenomenological experiences. We may devise complex models to schematize our cultural understandings, yet we recognize the lack of a non-relative basis upon which to base such constructions. When we compare cultures, we lack any fixed reference, non-arbitrary reference point to guide our comparisons. We select traits on the basis of what we understand to them to be, often without consulting the people whose traits they really are. We are thus involved in a kind of reference, ascription and attribution of cultural identity that we cannot do without and yet which will never prove to be correct.

We can speak of basic culture as what might be construed semantically as prototypical of categorical human culture. This comprises categories of cultural construction that are similar to basic linguistic/semantic prototypes, and yet they remain basically the substance and design of culture. Such elements and traits of culture tend to be linguistically encoded in very simple, unelaborated terms. The category of "chair" is quite unremarkable--it corresponds to its counterparts of "color" or "tree"--and we recognize a chair as something that is fundamentally cultural, even though not all cultures have had chairs as a common part of their cultural universe. We should note that this "basicness" of culture tends to correspond to what some would refer to as "folk culture" to be distinguished from "high" or haute culture the elements of which tend to be marked in special and elaborate forms.

We have demonstrated a near universal order of acquisition of basic color terms, an order which is largely determined by culture and yet which remains pan-culturally the same in design. We might speculate upon a similar kind of universal order of "basic cultural categories" which are prototypically convergent upon the same range of phenomena. In this regard, we can expect some measure of statistical correlation and corroboration of such convergence. We might eat with fingertips, leaves, chop sticks or forks and spoons, but the bowls and plates we eat from are nearly universal in their basic shape and function. We can also expect that from a point of view of adaptive integration, such basic culture tends to be practically oriented to matters of daily life and living, things that we take for granted in the grand scheme of things. Their practicality may include their expressive and symbolic value, if we think about all the things a simple ring may bind together, or the tones made by a simple horn or flute.

There is no anthropological study of a group of people or a cultural orientation that is not inherently a cross-cultural comparison. It is the intrinsic comparability between cultural studies that constitutes the primary ground for their empirical character. The empirical value of cultural studies is not to be found in the descriptions of material contents or spatial configurations--it is found by the comparison of similar and different traits between cultures, the establishment of common correlates among cultural configurations, or what has been called adhesions and the measurement of their distribution in space and time. Though our comparisons will always fall short of historical determination or scientific causality, and though they may always be plagued by Galton's dilemma, we can nevertheless see clearly the substantive, factive basis that the fact of basic difference and identity establishes in the world. Traits cohere together and make sense only in comparison with other sets and trait complexes.

The science of anthropology, if we are to speak of a genuine and legitimate science, is rooted in its basic comparative research. A study that does not test its conclusions within a cross-cultural context, no matter how implicitly, remains from an anthropological standpoint incomplete and scientifically inadequate.

We have not yet learned how to conduct or manage our comparisons in the most productive manner, though we have made great progress in the accumulation of a broad, cross-cultural data-base. We face the unsolved problems of history, of encoder reliability, and the basic validity of our comparative constructs and categories. Similar to the study of language, we must see the history of cultural change as complex and dynamic, internally driven along pathways of divergence or else independent convergence upon a similar adaptive trait complex. We can also refer to the exogenous forces of differential acculturation and transculturation that interrupt cultural processes and redirect them.

It follows that the very boundaries that make possible and mandatory comparison, also become the principle objects of such comparison. It is through systematic and rigorous comparison that the boundaries and outlines of a basic cultural orientation yield themselves before our observations. By the identification of such boundaries in terms of basic difference and correlation between cultures, we can gradually piece together rudimentary range of our cultural continuum.

All such comparison is itself rooted in a basic presumption of the common ground of humanity--what might be referred to as the anthropological context or the human condition common to all people in the world. In other words, all cultural orientations must satisfy on a daily basis fundamental human needs and aspirations which all people share with one another. All cultural orientations must define and appropriate a similar range of basic resources that are considered vital to its survival, whatever the environment in which it is situated. Cultures must establish and maintain a dynamic equilibrium in the balanced reciprocities and relations between people and between humans and their world. This constitutes a basic paradigm or matrix for the instantiation of the range of variation among different cultural orientations in the world, one that creates a common frame of reference for our cross-cultural comparisons.

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Humankind is characterized by its world openness. Unlike many other kinds of mammals, human beings lack any definite, clear-cut markers by which we can identify the nebulous notion human nature. We lack the clear instinctual patterns found among most other species. Instead we have evolved to a condition of becoming in our growth and development critically dependent upon the acquisition and mediation of culture by which to complete and bring to maturation our character.

Culture becomes by definition those external forces and factors which impinge upon our innermost being from the very beginning, and which become internalized in place of instinct, to the point that they become as if primary nature. We cannot therefore speak of a pure human nature totally unadulterated by the influence of cultural conditioning. We only have to study the few extant cases of feral children and children raised under conditions of severe cultural deprivation to witness the helplessness and lack of order of pristine human nature. But we can speak of humankind having evolved an inherent, naturally based capacity for culture. Indeed a need and even a drive for cultural acquisition, one which makes all children so curious and interesting in the world. We can also speak of human-made, externally based cultural elements becoming internalized as if they are natural, to the point that our language, our appetites and aversions, our sexual preferences and practices, our values, attitudes, beliefs, our feelings and our daily behaviors, take on a force of habit that has almost the strength and the same power of control as if fully developed instinct.

With the possibility of internalization of cultural character as if human nature, comes the reverse possibility of the externalization of bits and pieces of human nature--needs, drives, emotions, behaviors--as if a humanly constructed part of the cultural world. The child not only internalizes the life and life-world of the parents, but in the process extends its own organic being into this effective environment to make it intrinsically an extension of its own being.

The process of internalization is characterized by what has been called subjective inevitability and is part of another process referred to as primary acquisition, primary socialization and primary enculturation and, from a psycho-social standpoint, primary identification. These are different dimensions of the same phenomena. What characterizes all of them, besides the sense of subjective inevitability, is that they involve a process of deep embedding of behavior and thought, to a point beyond the influence of mere habit or acquired patterns of behavior, to the extent that they become a relatively permanent and subsequently unchangeable part of basic human character. Though fixed, they are not so complete as instinct would have it.

We can call this entire phenomena primary process and speak of humans having learned things so well that it becomes more than second nature if something just less that first nature. It is upon the deep-seated level of primary process that we must seek explanations for many social and behavioral phenomena, and solutions to many difficult and intransigent human problems.

The point of primary process is that culturally derived characterized are ingrained to the point of organic being, of even perceptual experience in framing and modify how we relate to the world we inhabit. At this level, people with different backgrounds may indeed experience, even see, the world differently than others.

The principle of primary process explains a cycle of culture and personality development that can be claimed to have largely taken the place of natural evolution for humankind. We are no longer constrained by natural selective forces, but have instead substituted an alternative kind of developmental patterning in which there is a critical feedback between, on one hand, the externalized world of culture and the internalized world of human nature, and, on the other hand, the level of primary process and the subsequent level of secondary social process.

As we internalize into our own character cultural based traits, to the point that these become part of our primary being, we in turn subsequently externalize into our cultural life-worlds that primary being, to the point of critically influencing its direction of development. As our characters become, with increasing age, increasingly fixed upon the level of primary process, secondary process increasingly takes over in subsequent influence upon our character.

The differences between primary and secondary processes are roughly the difference between primary and secondary language acquisition. They do not differ in kind or quality except that the former are characterized by an inherent capacity or facility, almost an imperative, while the latter is notably lacking in such a capacity. The primary level is the level at which things are acquired organically, automatically and reflexively. Secondary level things are acquired by force of habit and conditioning, but the effect is far more ephemeral and far less complete than for primary conditioning. The energy threshold for secondary acquisition is much higher and less surmountable than for primary acquisition.

It can be said that humans are genetically programmed to some as yet unknown extent for primary acquisition during critical stages of early childhood.

Primary acquisition, having been deeply embedded, takes on an unmarked and largely subconscious influence. It comes to constitute the background of culture and personality out of which secondary process later reconfigure human character. Primary acquisition is largely unadulterated and does not compete with previously acquired traits, except perhaps at the level of genetic capacities. Secondary acquisition must largely compete with and take over space of primary acquisition.

The unmarked condition of primary process is important because it goes on at a level that remains largely out of awareness. A large amount of nonverbal communication can be said to occur at the level of primary process, in an unmarked way. Remaining out of awareness, it is largely beyond the normal purview of our conscious control. It remain largely taken for granted, implicit, unquestioned.

Cultural constraint, at the level of primary process, is largely the kind of indirect constraint that constitutes the cumulatively decisive cultural context for the conditioning of human personality and character. Primary process comes to control us. We rarely have the opportunity to control our own innermost character.

It is most likely that subsequent external influence on the level of primary process is likely to have critically disruptive effects, the source of events or episodes or crises upon personality and social identity. Attempts to alter and modify primary process of the adult personality are likely to be met with a great deal of subconscious and indirect resistance, negative reaction, and even failure, and may have expectedly yet largely unpredictable end-results. This is true whether we are a well-intentioned Psychiatrist trying to cure a patient of her/his childhood repression, or a well-meaning Professor attempting to alter the behavior and character of one of her/his prime students in a more professionally suitable manner.

It is at this level that we can experience, and account for culture shock, and the problem of crossing wide gulfs or strong cultural boundaries which separate different peoples in time and space. The resistance and frustration we are likely to feel as an alien in an alien environment, will most importantly be upon the level of primary process.

It is important to also recognize that our crossing of boundaries in life, our passages, must be mediated in one way or another by the critical presence/absence of a significant other. In early stages of development, this is known as bonding. Later we refer to it as identification, reference, friendship, modeling, and mediation or brokerage.

Basic cultural differences are to be found to exist mostly upon the level of primary process. Upon this level different cultures are pervasive and nearly total in the daily lives of its constituency.

It becomes vital that if we are to understand the influence of culture upon character, and the influence of human nature upon culture, then we must seek answers and evidence upon the level of primary process. From a cross-cultural standpoint, we can see the great difference whether we raise, in different cultural milieus, children to be independent or interdependent, sociable or authoritarian, dominant-dependent or nurturant, responsible or sociopathic, passive or aggressive, introverted or extroverted, open or closed-minded, honest or deceitful, orally dependent or phallic, taciturn or talkative, inbound or cosmopolitan, conservative or liberal, tolerant or intolerant, hierarchical or egalitarian, physical, emotional or cerebral, sympathetic or apathetic, violent or peaceful, sexually repressed or sexually liberated, ego-centric or socio-centric.

It is important to recognize the multi-factorial structure of the influences and factors that impinge upon the development of primary process--many of which are beyond human awareness or control. We must critically examine the long-lasting impact that widespread day-care may have in critically altering the cultural character of its youngest generation. We must reexamine the case of single parent households, early childhood separation, foster parentage and adoption, the cases of aberrant or deviant socialization. We must look at the deep intransigence of cultural ingrained patterns to change or influence, as well as the long lasting influence larger historical and social events can have upon subsequent generations of a culture. We must look at the case of cultural inferiority complexes when a minority group is subjugated and repressed by a majority group, and the effect this must have upon the development of subsequent generations at the level of primary process. We must examine the influence which a pervasive and omnipresent electronic media may have at this level, whether intentional or not.

We must see primary process for what it is, as something paradoxically both beyond our control and yet remaining within the purview of our power and our patience. It controls us while we try to change it.

It is by primary process that we can account for a large substantive part of those anthropological relativisms that have plagued the social sciences since their inception. Cultures caught upon different historical trajectories have developed and come to transmit primary process in fundamentally unique ways.

Part of the uniqueness of this primary process is that it is a multi-factorial kind of thing, probably not accounted for by any single or even minimal set of determinative factors. The kinds of historical and social factors which input into it and the resulting character and cultural patternings are not simply predictable or even commensurate.

This leads us to ask a central and important question, of what exactly is primary process, and how does it occur. An important component of this must be the organic program of early child growth and development, and the many environmental factors that either enrich or stifle this growth and development. The young child grows into the mold fashioned by the workings of the cultural environment s/he grows up in. As the child grows into this environment, extending itself in a ever enlarging circle of the larger social self, the child also steadily incorporates much of this environment into itself, such that it forms the basic templates from which all subsequent maps and models will be derived, or compared or contrasted.

This process is stimulated from within with almost no natural or built in resistance. There is a natural drive, a cultural imperative, for acquisition which will prompt a child normally deprived to explore and seek the nourishment it needs to grow with. A child seeks a continuous challenge with life, at all stages and levels of sophistication and difficulty. The challenges that children meet on a daily basis, and which often defeat them, are obstacles that adults take for granted. Adults have successfully met these obstacles and have incorporated them at a level of autonomic reflex that they do not even notice them anymore in the same way that the same things may become the center of the child's complete absorption.

What significance does the notion of primary process hold for evolutionary theory of humankind. First we may say that the primary mechanism driving human evolutionary development must have been the development of this mechanism, and the unique set of circumstances allowing for this development, which made possible to externalization of human nature in the form of culture and which also made possible the internalization of a rudimentary cultural environment.

We cannot ignore the long period of childhood socialization and infant dependency, and the strong bonding between mother and child. It that an extended period that may, in terms of primary process, never really end, and one which renders the human being a socially dependent creature--dependent upon the group for more than just satiation of hunger or sexual drives, but to meet other symbolic, linguistic and affective needs. These social needs have long remained without any necessary organic basis in human survival and yet with many important organic associations and effects. It rendered humankind vulnerable to the condition of the group--subject to its ostracism and control, even to the point of its physiological well being. It rendered humankind continually anxious and capable of being easily subdued and subjugated to the demands of the group. Symbolic forms took on a vital life within the context of the group that had a strong impact upon the being. It meant a permanent loss of innocence, and the beginning of a never ending quest for independence.

It follows that if we are to institute social reforms that will be effective in inducing social responsibility as well as greater social equality. We will have to do so mostly upon the level of primary process, and it will be at this level that our most problematic resistance to reform will be met.

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Our conception of culture must take into account several important facets. First, though cultures are most integrated, they are not without significant contradictions. These contradictions as well as cultural integration, are important to the understanding of the internal dynamics which drive endogenous cultural change.

Cultures are also mostly functional in their integration that is they are organized on the basis of achieving certain strategic purposes in adaptation in the world. This functionality of culture occurs upon all levels of its integration, and drives what may be referred to as exogenous change.

Cultures are also symbolic in their integration, and it is the curious amalgamation of their symbolic functionalism that is most distinctive. Even the most practical and pragmatic tools and devices of a culture have some symbolic value, and all symbolism has some material form in which they are invested. Cultures are as much a worldview as they are a world. They constitute a coherence system that allows people to make sense of and adapt to their world. They provide a template that is superimposed in a representational manner upon experience. The basicness and rootedness of culture and its boundaries in our organic being, in our innate capacity for cultural acquisition, accounts for the great conservative stability of culture.

Nevertheless culture is subject to the forces of change, both internally and externally. Cultures have for the most part been self-organizing entities--they function structurally in an anti-chaotic manner. The superimposition of one cultural orientation upon another, a the diffusion of a culture, or inter-fusion of different cultures, are processes which must be seen as secondary to the actual internal organization of basic culture.

We can specify that cultural boundaries are maintained and changed upon all levels of anthropological process, both from within in terms of their incorporation of difference, and from without in terms of their symbolic and functional value in relation to a larger world. Such internal and external factors create a basic dialectic that fosters the kinds of boundaries in our experience we recognize and refer to as culture. Internal dynamics which result in cultural drift cannot be easily separated from external forces of history which frequently come to play a predominant role in the determination of cultural changes.

A comparative science of culture is not unlike a similar comparative science of linguistics that lies at the core of culture. Certain cultural processes exhibit an internal regularity that may be remarkable. Like languages, all cultures must maintain some sense of internal closure and boundary in the world.

We must also see that in terms of the functional integration of a cultural orientation, is measured in terms of its relative equilibration in the distribution of basic resources to humans and of its human constituency to its basic resources. Many of these basic resources may be culturally defined and determined--their locus within a specific cultural matrix will depend upon a number of factors. But we may derive on the basis of this, a basic functional formula for the relative integration of a given cultural orientation, one that is multi-determined, and which may have differential consequences in terms of the internal dynamics and contradictions and the external, functional strategies and alterations. We can, for any given culture, configure a general functional calculus in which the primary variables are the distributive relations between people and their cultural definition of basic resources.

Blanket Copyright, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.

Last Updated: 09/25/09