More about culture--!Kung

For this week blog post I am writing about a “classic” ethnography in anthropology. This is Nisa by M. Shostak, which describes the life of Nisa, a !Kung woman, through her own words and stories, plus observations by the author's fieldwork.

!Kung is a gathering-hunting society which lives in the area between Botswana and Namibia, southern Africa. As the description goes, !Kung’s life is based on gathering and hunting—that is their way to survive. They spend most of the day gathering food: fruits, nuts, vegetables and whatever other thing they found that is eatable. They also hunt a wide variety of animals, from cows to giraffes. Usually mothers go gather food with their children and father go hunt by themselves. Having this lifestyle—living in the bush and the wild—does not mean !Kung people are less smart or intellectuals than other cultures. As I said in my previous blog post, culture is how people see and understand the world. They live that way because it is how they see the world and how they understand the environment around them, not because they are not intellectual or have lack of reasoning.

!Kung people live in villages and have no boundaries. Each family has a set of huts where they sleep. !Kung people has a lot of customs that I found interesting and that are much different from my culture. One of the aspects of the !Kung people I found more interesting is the relationship they have in each nuclear family. There are things I like about them and that I would even like to apprehend in my life, but there are other things, from my ethnocentric point of view, I found very extremists that I don’t like. One of the things I found interesting is the relationship children have with their parents. Based on Shostak’s observations, children do not view parents as a great figure of authority—the relationship between them is very intimate. !Kung children have a closer relationship (compared to many other cultures, including mine) with the father. Since fathers are not a notable authority figure, !Kung children see them more as friends and peer than a rule figure. The kind of conversations they have one another is different from the ones I would have with my father. In my culture, parents are a very important authority figure. I was raised with the idea of always respecting my father and doing what he tells me to do. The relationship with my father is very close, and we talk about many things, but comparing it to the !Kung, it is much different. This kind of relationship in !Kung life is influenced by their lifestyle. Since they live in small villages and families spend much time together, they develop that kind of relationship.

While I was reading the book, each time I found an aspect of !Kung customs very different from my culture, I tried to think back in my life to see how I see that and how I experienced that, and then tried to compared it to their way of seeing it. I imagined myself being one of them to try to understand why and how they did something in such way and had such understanding of something. Reading this book, I now realize how true are things anthropologist says about how the environment and its elements, shape people’s view toward the world and things around them in order to create what is called culture. Each time I imagine myself as one of them and kind of understood the reason why and how they see things in their own way, made me realize how there are people in the world that think completely different than myself and people around me. With the background of readings I have now through this course I have a wider understanding of world cultures, not only in the new culture I am currently surrounded by, but of gathering-hunting cultures like the !Kung.

My view of Culture

Culture is what all human beings are. Culture is what defines us, shape us, and teach us. Before reading the assigned readings for the week, for me culture was something really simple, no more than only “people’s customs”. However, now I know that is not like that. Culture is not as simple as saying “people’s customs”, it is much more complex and deep than that. Culture is not easy to define and it is a very complex concept. Culture is still a nebulous research topic for anthropologists.

As I have learned through my readings, culture is a set of customs, traditions, beliefs, knowledge, ceremonies, food, cloth, likes, and dislikes of a group of people who little by little creates what is called culture. These things are passed on generation by generation to descendants. As time passes, descendants learn their culture and at the end these become part of their life style. Moreover, that life style is labeled as their culture, and at the same time culture characterizes and differences them from other groups of people, which makes them, in a sense, unique. In addition to all these things, culture also is what tells people what is wrong and what is right. For people, their culture becomes the lens through which they see the world. The way people understand the world and how they react before it depends on their culture. Most people believe (including myself before reading these articles) that folklore artifact, flags, clothing, musical instruments, religious objects, etc. is culture. But, culture really is the meaning behind those objects, which is given by people. Depending on what people believe according to their “culture” they give different meanings to things that could mean completely the opposite to other people. In the world there are many cultures, ones that are not even known by most people. There are isolated cultures, which are very unique in its way to see the world and that has traditions that any other has. Every culture has its own way of seen the world and based on that they give meaning to objects and artifacts.

Now that I have read all these articles and chapters I totally see differently everything around me. I now understand more clearly the concept of culture and how it is created. Since I am an international student studying in the United States, I am constantly experiencing culture issues and shocks. Now that I understand the meaning of culture and everything around it more clearly, I now see myself differently as a person and (most important for my life now), as a foreign student. I now know how to manage my cultural issues and understand more how Americans see me. And at the same I now know how to see other people. When I go back to the Dominican Republic I would now understand how to see foreign people there. It may be that the way I see things now is not completely the correct one, but it has helped me in my personal life. In the last few days, the lens with which I see culture has change. I now have become a more analytical person when it comes to culture matters.