Dwight Read: UCLA Department of Anthropology

A long standing issue in human societies has been the relationship between culture and behavior. One extreme position views culture as arising primarily out of behavior structured by a variety of processes, ranging from external factors such as environmental conditions to internal factors such as behavioral consequences arising directly from interactions of individuals within groups. The other extreme sees behavior as a consequence of the roles and identities that individuals take on. Change in those roles and identities are seen as occurring over relatively long time scales, thereby giving primacy to viewing behavior as arising from the cultural context in which individuals are embedded. The sociologist James March has recently argued that neither position has successfully demonstrated the irrelevancy of the other position, but his argument leaves unanswered how these two positions might be integrated into a more encompassing view of the processes affecting and structuring human behavior, including the capacity of human systems for self-restructuring. I will address these two positions by considering two sharply contrasting hunting and gathering groups, the Netsilik Inuit of Hudson Bay in Canada the Tiwi on Melville and Bathurst Islands off of the NW coast of Australia.
I will use the Netsilik as an example amenable to the first position and argue that the Netsilik cultural framework of infant naming and sealing partners provided a cultural basis for implementing methods of resource procurement that were necessary for survival in their extreme, Arctic region. At the same time I will argue that the cultural framework is more complex than simply reflecting necessary patterns of behavior in that the cultural framework not only provides a cultural basis for implementing the required behaviors, but the cultural framework has its own dynamics and thereby adds another dimension that structured their particular behavioral means for coping with the environmental constraints to which they had to adapt.

The Tiwi, I argue, provide a stark contrast to the Netsilik and exemplify the way in which the cultural framework can have far reaching consequences for social organization and behavior that only makes sense by reference to the cultural system(s) in which the behavior is grounded, rather than by reference to behavior as the means to interact with their environment or as arising from the consequences of individual interaction, per se. In brief, the Tiwi had an extremely complex social system structured by a kinship framework that appears to bear little relevance to what was required to procure resources on Melville and Bathurst Islands.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Read_2-14-05_a.pdf