Karl Marx wrote in 1852 that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past” (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). The line is one of the most-cited descriptions of human agency in the social sciences — and a useful corrective to the common misconception that cultures are static traditions imprisoning the people who live in them. These are my five things to know about culture, drawing on Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp’s chapter 8 part 2 (200-205) for Intro to Anthropology — particularly their concepts of heterogeneity (191) and adaptive/maladaptive practices (201) — and on Marx, Meredith Small, and others. The page closes with a critique of how cultural terms can end up doing the work that race-talk used to do. For the broader concept canonical on how anthropology deployed culture against racial determinism — Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “culture as anti-concept,” Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Eric Wolf’s billiard-ball critique, Oscar Lewis on the “culture of poverty” — see What Is Culture in Anthropology? For the hub, see Anthropological Foundations.
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1. Cultural Relativism Is a Tool — Not “Anything Goes”
Cultural relativism is the practice of trying to understand other people’s decisions from within their own framework — getting into their worlds and figuring out how they are making the calls they are making. It does not require approving of everything anyone is doing, and other people are not required to approve of everything we are doing. Used well, it lets us be critical of our own society and sometimes critical of others. Used poorly, it collapses into a kind of moral relativism — “anything goes, all cultures are great” — that does not actually help us think. Cultural relativism is also hard. It is something you arrive at by participating in and talking to people, not something you can declare yourself to have.
As soon as Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp introduce cultural relativism, they introduce its limit: cultural practices that are adaptive and maladaptive (201). Things people do may be beneficial within a society, while other practices may be harmful to members of that same society. The terms are tricky — adaptive at what time, for whom, measured by whom — but the underlying point holds. Driving large SUVs around just because we want personal space might be adaptive for the individual driver while being maladaptive for the climate outcomes we all share. (For an extended example of this argument, see Gun Culture.) Cultural relativism is a tool for understanding, not a license for indifference.
2. Cultures Are Heterogeneous, Not Uniform
Every society has different opinions, different practices, different points of view internally — what Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp call heterogeneity (191). MGC suggest some societies are more homogeneous than others. That may be true, but homogeneity is genuinely difficult to measure in any absolute sense. People who look entirely the same from the outside will often claim from the inside that they are so different they should be fighting each other.
Many of the conflicts the world calls “ethnic” happen between peoples who share more cultural markers than almost anyone else in the world. The conflicts between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants would look absurd from the outside if you went by cultural markers alone. People can claim to be different and claim to be the same, and those claims are themselves part of a society. The safer working assumption: every society has different points of view, and people inside it are arguing about what is going on.
3. Cultures Borrow and Interact Across Boundaries
Culture borrows from other cultures, constantly. We interact with visitors. We take terms from neighboring languages and bend them to our own purposes. We may decide to reject the ideas or customs of the people next to us, but we are often appropriating them or using them in new ways at the same moment. Drawing a hard boundary around where one society ends and the next begins is much harder than it looks.
Every time we try to put up borders and walls, people do what they have always done — they migrate, they walk, they trade, they interact across whatever barriers we erect. Societies that have been truly isolated from others tend to wither, because people need to trade and interact with the wider world to thrive. The spread of Homo sapiens through the world was a story of constant interaction, trading, and borrowing.
4. Cultures Are Dynamic: Marx on Making History
Culture is always changing. In each generation, as much as we may try to pass on traditions, people are reworking them, thinking about them, and they should be. Culture is dynamic — it involves people thinking, changing, using symbols to manipulate their world, and coming up with new ideas. This happens in our society and in other societies as well. The mistake is to think other people are imprisoned in static traditions, or that their lives have been “this way forever and ever.” Humans have short memories — it is hard to go back more than three or four generations — but every society’s recent past looked different from its present.
One of the most-cited descriptions of human agency under constraint comes from Karl Marx in 1852: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” People are active makers of their own history and culture — but the circumstances under which they make it are not of their choosing. We did not choose where we were born. We did not choose the inheritances we are working with. And we have to make our history alongside other people who are making theirs at the same moment.
The quote is from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, written after his more famous Communist Manifesto. Marx was trying to reflect on why people had elected Louis Bonaparte (a relation of the original Napoleon) back into office in France, and why they had not followed through on the revolution that had seemed to be happening in 1848. This is Marx in his reflective mode, after the revolution he believed was about to arrive failed to carry through. The line has outlived its immediate political context and become one of the social sciences’ most useful compact formulations of structure and agency together.
5. Power and Inequality Within Culture
Cultural analysis has to include attention to power and access to resources. MGC frame this through adaptive and maladaptive — people have different abilities to shape culture, and some practices within a culture have unequal effects on people inside it. The plainer words for this are sometimes the better ones: power and inequality. Culture should not be an excuse or a justification for why some people cannot fulfill their opportunities or end up in genuinely bad situations.
Meredith Small uses an example from the pediatrician Edward Tronick to illustrate the trap. Tronick reports that medical residents improved their advice to mothers by replacing lectures on “good mothering” with sympathetic comments like “What a gorgeous baby. I can’t imagine how you manage both work and three others at home.” The point is well taken — mothers should not be lectured on parenting practices when alternatives are unavailable. There are cases where cultural ideas about who is allowed to care for kids make a 12-year-old looking after a 7-year-old genuinely fine.
But the mother in the doctor’s office may also be saying, in effect: spare me the cultural-sensitivity lecture. I would love affordable childcare. I cannot afford it. It is not my culture; it is that I have no access. Can you help me with that? The cultural framing can hide the resource question. Recognizing what is genuine cultural variation and what is constrained choice requires not collapsing the second into the first.
When “Culture” Becomes a Stand-In for Race
Here is the closing question the lecture lands on: suppose you describe another group using a term like “culture” or “ethnicity.” Suppose you think of them as basically all the same — homogeneous — and as a bounded group that does not really mix with people from a different group, because they’re in that culture. Suppose you think of their practices as something they cannot really change, do not really reflect on, just the way they are and always will be. And suppose this becomes your justification for not extending healthcare or childcare or whatever else: they’re doing fine, that’s their culture, they probably would not accept it anyway.
What have you done? You may be using the word “culture,” but you are doing the work that race-talk used to do. The word changed; the concept did not. Anthropology launched culture against race — against the idea that biological category determines aptitude, ability, and life chances. If “culture” gets used to mean homogeneous, bounded, deterministic, and unchanging, then we have substituted one term for another without changing the underlying move.
This is the rhetorical capstone of the lecture, and the broader concept canonical does the historical and theoretical heavy lifting: how Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston deployed culture against scientific racism; how Eric Wolf’s “billiard ball” critique called out the bounded-cultures move; how Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty” became one of anthropology’s worst inventions; and how Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “Adieu Culture” reckoned with what the discipline’s signature concept had become. For all of that, see What Is Culture in Anthropology?
FAQ
What are the five things to know about culture in anthropology?
The five points covered here: (1) cultural relativism is a tool for understanding, not moral relativism; (2) cultures are heterogeneous internally, not uniform; (3) cultures borrow and interact across boundaries; (4) cultures are dynamic, with each generation reworking inherited traditions; (5) cultural analysis must include power and inequality. The page closes with a critique of how cultural terms can end up substituting for racial ones.
What do anthropologists mean by adaptive and maladaptive practices?
Muckle, Tubelle de González, and Camp introduce the terms in their discussion of cultural relativism (201): a culturally sanctioned practice may be beneficial within a society (adaptive) or harmful to its members (maladaptive). The terms are slippery — adaptive at what time, for whom, by whose measure — but they mark the limit of cultural relativism. Cultural sanction does not by itself make a practice good for the people subject to it.
What does Karl Marx mean by “men make their own history”?
The line is from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.” Marx is arguing for human agency under constraint. People are creative makers of their own culture and history, but the circumstances they work with come from inheritance and from what others around them are doing at the same time. The line has become one of the social sciences’ most useful compact formulations of structure and agency.
How can cultural terms become substitutes for racial terms?
If a “cultural” term is used to describe another group as homogeneous, bounded, unchanging, and determining people’s lives — and this framing becomes a justification for unequal treatment — then the term is doing the rhetorical work that race-talk used to do. Anthropology developed the culture concept specifically against racial determinism; if “culture” gets used the same way race once was, the word has changed but the concept has not. For the historical depth on this argument, see What Is Culture in Anthropology?
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