In this episode we continue answering the question: What is culture?
We begin with a bold statement: that culture is largely unconscious. Asking people to explain their culture is not a reliable guide to understanding culture. To illustrate this point we setup the following metaphor: Asking a pilot how he feels when he turns the key in the ignition does not tell you anything about how a combustion engine works.
We will cover this more in the season on reason, but the adaptive function of reason is social persuasion, not the pursuit of the truth. Introspection is not a reliable guide to the cause of behavior, as people do not necessarily have conscious action as to why they act the way they do!
We next turn to the work of Alan Fiske, who lambasted the field of anthropology for relying on statements from subjects in the field as actual evidence to the cause of human behavior. He makes the compelling case that most socially learned behaviors are motoric, they lie in our procedural memory. This is the part of our memory which handles muscle movement and task doing. Things like riding a bike or playing an instrument. You do not have conscious access as to your procedural memory. Things you are conscious of live inside your declarative memory, such as specific life events, periods in history, or how to read.
Fiske argues that asking subjects to declaratively explain practices which they acquired procedurally leads to confabulations, because they do not have conscious access as to “why” they are behaving as they are. Instead, the subjects invent responses to please the researchers. It is not the responsibility of the subject to explain why they act the way they do, but of the researcher. The researcher must uncover the unconscious rules which govern the process of social learning.
We close this episode discussing the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of Habitus. Bourdieu views culture as largely unconscious. Habitus is all of our internalized dispositions. Ways of thinking, standing, starting, and valuing that we unconsciously acquire through our social upbringing.
Habitus governs our taste (what’s funny and whats not), and how we enmesh ourselves in social situations. Consider that you “feel” the right way to act in society, and your social circle, you don’t really think about it.
The Alan Fiske paper used as research for this episode:
https://bec.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/108/archive/papers/learning_culture.htm
