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CULTURES AND
SOCIETIES IN A
CHANGING WORLD
Fourth Edition
Wendy Griswold
FOURTH EDITION
CULTURES AND
SOCIETIES IN A
CHANGING WORLD
Other titles for your
consideration from the Sociology
for a New Century Series
Global Inequalities, York W. Bradshaw and Michael Wallace

Economy/Society, Bruce Carruthers and Sarah Babb
How Societies Change, Second Edition, Daniel Chirot
Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World, Second
Edition, Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann
The Sociology of Childhood, Second Edition, William A. Corsaro
Crime and Disrepute, John Hagan
Beyond a Border: The Causes and Consequences of Contemporary
Immigration, Peter Kivisto and Thomas Faist
Gods in the Global Village: The World’s Religions in Sociological
Perspective, Third Edition, Lester R. Kurtz
Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change,
John Markoff
Work in the Old and New Economies, Peter Meiksins and
Stephen Sweet
Aging, Social Inequality, and Public Policy, Fred C. Pampel
Women, Politics, and Power, Pamela Paxton and Melanie Hughes
Constructing Social Research, Second Edition, Charles C. Ragin
Theories in Globalization, Second Edition, William Robinson
Women and Men at Work, Second Edition, Barbara Reskin and
Irene Padavic
Cities in a World Economy, Fourth Edition, Saskia Sassen
Gender, Family, and Social Movements, Suzanne Staggenborg
Changing Contours of Work: Jobs and Opportunities in the New Economy,
Second Edition, Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins
FOURTH EDITION
CULTURES AND
SOCIETIES IN A
CHANGING WORLD
WENDY GRISWOLD
Northwestern University
WITH
Christopher Carroll
Gemma Mangione
Michelle Naffziger
Talia Schiff
FOR INFORMATION: Copyright © 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc.
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Cultures and societies in a changing world / Wendy Griswold. —

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Contents
List of Figures ix
Foreword xi
Preface xiii
About the Author xvii
1. Culture and the Cultural Diamond 1

Two Ways of Looking at Culture 3
“The Best That Has Been Thought and Known” 4
“That Complex Whole” 7
Connections: The Links Between Culture and Society 10
The Cultural Object 11
The Cultural Diamond 14
Summary 17
Questions for Study and Discussion 17
Recommended for Further Reading 18
2. Cultural Meaning 19
Why Do We Need Meaning? 21
Culture and Meaning in Reflection Theory 23
Culture as Mirror 23
The Greek Background to Reflection Theory 25
Culture and Meaning in Marxian Sociology 27
“From Earth to Heaven”: The Materialist
Approach to Culture 28
Historical Materialism 29
Research Directions From the Marxian Tradition 30
Culture and Meaning in Functionalist Sociology 32
Culture and Meaning in Weberian Sociology 35
The Anxious Protestants and the World They Built 36
The Cultural Switchman 38
Meaning Systems or a Tool Kit? 39
Meaning, Modernity, and the Clash of Cultures 40
Summary 43
3. Culture as a Social Creation 47

Durkheim and the Social Production of Culture 49
The Problem of Modern Social Life 49
Social Bonds: The Role of Religion 50
Culture as Collective Representation 53
The Collective Production of Culture 55
Symbolic Interactionism 55
Subcultures 59
Cultural Innovation and Social Change 62
Cultural Lags and Leads 63
Cultural Innovations 64
Summary 67
4. The Production, Distribution, and Reception of Culture 71

The Production of Culture 73
The Culture Industry System 73
Cultural Markets 77
The Production of Ideas 81
Reception 83
Audiences and Taste Cultures 84
Horizons of Expectations 87
Freedom of Interpretation: Two Views 89
Seduction by Mass Culture 90
Resistance Through Popular Culture 92
Summary 95
5. Identities, Problems, and Movements 97

Constructing a Collective Identity 99
Constructing a Social Problem 104
Making Trouble 105
From Happening to Event to Social Problem 105
The Career of a Social Problem 108
Constructing a Social Movement 110
Summary 113
6. Organizations in a Multicultural World 117
Organizational Cultures 119
Culture and Motivation 119
Cultures of Solidarity and Ambiguity 124
Organizations in Cultural Contexts 128
Working Across Cultures 133
Summary 137
7. Culture and Connection 141
Media Revolutions and Cultural Communities 142
Oral Cultures 143
Written Cultures 144
Print Cultures 145
ICT Cultures 146
The Cultural Impact of the Internet 149
Old Diamonds, New Media 152
Communities of Meaning in a Global Culture 156
Postmodernity and Community 157
Mediated Transnationals 160
8. Culture and Power 163
Power: What Is It, Who Has It, and
Why Do People Submit to It? 163
Power in Face-to-Face Interactions 166
Identity Politics 168
The Aesthetics of Power 172
Political Acts as Cultural Objects 176
Cultures Without Centers 179
References 181
Index 193
List of Figures
1.1 The Cultural Diamond 15

2.1 Reflection Model of Television and Violence 24
2.2 Plato’s Reflection Theory Set on the Cultural Diamond 27
2.3 Reflection and the Cultural Diamond 44
3.1 Cultural Production in a Little League Baseball Team 61
4.1 The Culture Industry System 74
4.2 Mass Culture and Popular Culture Theories
on the Cultural Diamond 94
5.1 Transforming Happenings Into Cultural Objects 106
6.1 McDonald’s in Israel 119
7.1 Cultural Diamond for New Media 154
ix
Foreword
S ociology for a New Century offers the best of current sociological think-
ing to today’s students. The goal of the series is to prepare students,
and—in the long run—the informed public, for a world that has changed
dramatically in the last three decades and one that continues to astonish.
These goals reflect important changes that have taken place in sociology.
The discipline has become broader in orientation, with an ever-growing
interest in research that is comparative, historical, or transnational in orien-
tation. Sociologists are less focused on “American” society as the pinnacle
of human achievement and more sensitive to global processes and trends.
They also have become less insulated from surrounding social forces. In the
1970s and 1980s sociologists were so obsessed with constructing a science
of society that they saw impenetrability as a sign of success. Today, there is
a greater effort to connect sociology to the ongoing concerns and experi-
ences of the informed public. Each book in this series offers a comparative,
historical, transnational, or global perspective in some way, to help broaden
students’ vision. Students need to be sensitized to diversity in today’s world
and to the sources of diversity. Knowledge of diversity challenges the limita-
tions of conventional ways of thinking about social life. At the same time,
students need to be sensitized to the fact that issues that may seem specifi-
cally “American” (for example, struggles over gender equality, an aging
population bringing a strained social security and health care system, racial
conflict, national chauvinism, the interplay of religion and politics, and so
on) are shared by many other countries. Awareness of commonalities under-
cuts the tendency to view social issues and questions in narrowly American
terms and encourages students to seek out the experiences of others for the
lessons they offer. Finally, students also need to be sensitized to phenomena
that transcend national boundaries—trends and processes that are suprana-
tional (for example, environmental degradation). Recognition of global
processes stimulates student awareness of causal forces that transcend
xi
xii——Cultures and Societies in a Changing World
national boundaries, economies, and politics. Using classical and contempo-

rary sociological theory to analyze both traditional topics—such as culture
and stratification, culture and identity, sociological approaches to arts and
literature—and newer ones including global cultural flows, religious terror-
ism, and the profound impact of the Internet, Cultures and Societies in a
Changing World explores the complex interplay between cultures—idea
systems, artworks, popular culture, religious beliefs, common sense—and
social structures. Within the framework of the “cultural diamond” this book
uses a comparative analysis of cultural objects and practices in Nigeria,
China, the United States, and other locations around the world to demon-
strate how cultural producers and consumers express a changing world
through culture and how culture itself contributes to social changes.
Chapter-long examinations of the culture construction of social problems
and organizational transactions reveal how the application of a culturally
informed approach can illuminate seemingly non-cultural issues ranging
from those involving social justice to those entailed in practical business
operations.
Preface
C ulture fascinates sociologists nowadays, but this was not always the
case. When I began teaching, in the early 1980s, material outcomes and
structural explanations for social phenomena—such things as income, educa-
tion, fertility changes, and economic pressures—were under the sociological
big top; culture and cultural explanations were a sideshow. True, there were
always sociologists who studied religion, values, arts, and the like, and there
were always anthropologists whose study of culture influenced sociological
thinking. But as a whole, sociology did not pay much attention to culture. As
any teacher or student of sociology will know, times have changed. The past
several years have witnessed an explosion of cultural studies in sociology, as
well as in the adjacent social sciences of political science, psychology, and
even economics. This rise of cultural sociology has a number of causes, most
generally the inherent limitations of strictly material factors to explain human
behavior or to capture human experience. Therefore, most sociologists now
view people as meaning makers as well as rational actors, symbol users as
well as class representatives, and storytellers as well as points in a demo-
graphic trend. Moreover, sociology largely has escaped its former either/or
way of thinking. The discipline now seeks to understand how people’s mean-
ing making shapes their rational action, how their class position molds their
stories—in short, how social structure and culture mutually influence one
another. Although all of this is very satisfying to cultural sociologists who no
longer have to think of themselves as laboring in the wilderness, problems
bedevil teachers and students in the classroom. Everyone wants to talk about
symbols, discourse, meaning, and cultural practices, but systematic guides to
such discussions are rare. Needed are concise introductions to cultural sociol-
ogy to help students (1) explore the concept of culture and the nature of its
linkages with the social world, (2) enhance their understanding of seemingly
structural issues such as poverty or ethnicity by applying cultural analysis to
xiii
xiv——Cultures and Societies in a Changing World
these issues, and (3) broaden their cultural and social horizons so that they
may operate effectively in the global economy and international culture of the
twenty-first century. These are the goals of this book.
The Cultural Diamond

Cultures and Societies in a Changing World will enable students taking
broad-ranging courses in sociology or social problems and students taking
specialized courses in cultural sociology to think more clearly about the role
culture plays in shaping our social world. The book introduces the sociology
of culture, the branch of sociology that looks at cultural phenomena—
including stories, beliefs, media, ideas, works of art, religious practices,
fashions, rituals, specialized knowledge, and common sense—from a socio-
logical perspective. At the same time, it suggests how such cultural phenom-
ena operate in more general social processes. Finally, looking at the
culture-society relationship from the other direction, it shows how social
forces influence culture. In the book, I use the device of the “cultural dia-
mond” to investigate the connections among four elements: cultural
objects—symbols, beliefs, values, and practices; cultural creators, including
the organizations and systems that produce and distribute cultural objects;
cultural receivers, the people who experience culture and specific cultural
objects; and the social world, the context in which culture is created and
experienced. We examine these elements and connections in Chapters 1
through 4. Then, in Chapters 5 and 6, we discuss how the cultural diamond
operates in two specific cases: social problems and business transactions. In
Chapter 7, we look at culture and community in the dawning age of global
electronic culture. In Chapter 8, we tackle the ever-more-pressing subject of
power—political, social, domestic—and examine the role culture plays in
exerting or resisting regimes of dominance.
A Global Approach
An international or global outlook is indispensable to any sociological study
in today’s world, and cultural studies are no exception. This study of culture
is global in at least three ways.
Cross-National Cases
First, we consider examples of cultural phenomena and processes from a
wide variety of countries and periods. The world has always contained a
Preface——xv
bewildering assortment of cultures, of course, but lately Americans have

become increasingly concerned with the implications of this fact for their
internal social policies and external economic and political relationships.
Although we examine aspects of the Western cultural tradition in general
and American culture in particular, we draw on materials from different
traditions and cultures as well, including numerous examples from cultures
of special interest to Americans, such as Israel and Japan. Four places—
Nigeria, China, the Middle East, and the United States—serve repeatedly to
demonstrate problems and issues in cultural analysis, because they constitute
dramatically different starting points for societies entering the twenty-first
century. Nigeria contains an extraordinary mixture of languages, ethnicities,
and religions, with no one group in the majority. Under British colonial rule
for more than half of the twentieth century, Nigeria struggles to reconcile
political unity and cultural diversity while achieving greater economic devel-
opment. China has had an advanced culture and centralized political control
for millennia, but revolutionary political change in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury has brought about massive social and cultural dislocations. Now China
has embarked on an experiment with hitherto unheard of dimensions: to see
whether economic freedom can flourish while tight political and cultural
controls remain. The Middle East has dominated the headlines, hopes, and
fears of the twenty-first century as pressures for social and cultural change
collide with authoritarian regimes and strongly held traditions. Finally, the
United States, along with its Western European allies, dominated the bipolar
Cold War era of the mid-twentieth century. It seemed to represent the pin-
nacle of advanced, industrial society, complete with a modern culture,
toward which all societies presumably were converging. Now the fracturing
of former political alliances and the new complexity of international rela-
tions, along with the increasingly undeniable claims made by culturally
diverse groups internally, challenge the validity of a specifically American
culture and the applicability of American values in a troubled and rapidly
changing world. For these reasons, Nigeria, China, and the United States
offer thought-provoking running examples of some of the most perplexing
culture problems facing the new century.
Global Culture
The second way in which this book is global in scope is that we consider
how globalization processes themselves are affecting culture and cultures.
From transnational media to tourist art to the immigration of peoples to
international production of manufactured goods, processes taking place at
the global level have all but obliterated pockets of cultural purity and have
xvi——Cultures and Societies in a Changing World
made parochialism increasingly costly as well as naive. Technological

advances in communications have leaped cultural boundaries, just as global
markets have transcended national differences; indeed, these two factors are
closely related. The Internet seems to be both fostering a world culture with-
out boundaries and encouraging a renewed sense of cultural particularism—
new boundaries, rooted in ethnicity, religion, and geography. The point is
neither to celebrate nor to bemoan these inexorable processes of globaliza-
tion and differentiation but to understand them.
Cultural Conflicts
Third, many of the most intractable conflicts taking place in the post–
Cold War era involve culture. Struggles over ethnic homogeneity and reli-
gious fundamentalism, to take just two examples particularly costly in
human blood, clearly involve meanings and passions that go far beyond the
merely economic or political. Similarly, negotiations between international
business partners or heads of state, and more generally relations among
people from different cultural backgrounds, can be smoother and more pro-
ductive if the parties recognize the influences of different cultures.
Understanding the cultural bases of past and current struggles and misunder-
standings may help avoid repetition of costly mistakes. Such understanding
will equip students to live their professional and personal lives as effective
and wise citizens of a world where both cultures and societies are changing
more quickly than ever before in human history.
About the Author
Wendy Griswold has a background in both social science and the humanities.
She received her doctorate in sociology from Harvard University in 1980 and
has a master’s degree in English from Duke University. She taught at the
University of Chicago from 1981 to 1997. She is the Bergen Evans Professor
in the Humanities and Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University. She
has been associate editor and book review editor of the American Journal of
Sociology and has been on the editorial boards of Contexts, Poetics, and Acta
Sociologica. She is on the Advisory Board for the Centro per lo Studio della
Moda e della Produzione Culturale, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore,
Milan and she is associate editor for Contexts and Poetics. She has received
research support from the National Science Foundation, the National
Endowment for the Humanities, support from the Guggenheim Foundation,
the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies,
the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, and the European
University Institute in Florence. Her research on culture has been interna-
tional in scope. Her most recent book is Regionalism and the Reading Class
(2008); she is currently completing a book on the WPA Federal Writers’
Project and its impact on American culture. Bearing Witness: Readers,
Writers, and the Novel in Nigeria (2000) won the “Best Book” award for the
Sociology of Culture section of the American Sociological Association. Her
first book was on the English theater (Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy
and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre 1576–1980 [1986]). In addi-
tion, she coedited a book on the sociology of literature (Literature and Social
Practice [1989]) and has written on the sociology of religion, specifically on
conflict within churches. Her current research explores cultural regionalism;
she is also studying the relationship between the Internet and reading in
Africa. She has written an influential paper on sociological methods for cul-
tural analysis (“A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture,”
Sociological Methodology 17 [1987]:1–35); much of her methodological
thinking is incorporated in the present book.
xvii
1
Culture and the
Cultural Diamond
C ulture is one of those words that people use all the time but have
trouble defining. Consider the following stories about some of the
wildly different things we envision when we talk about culture.
In September 2010 France’s Senate voted 246 to 1 to ban women from
wearing a full-face veil (niqab or burqa) in public. Many Muslims argue that
veiling, which they regard as defending female modesty from intrusive male
eyes, is intrinsic to their culture. The minister of justice, on the other hand,
says that the ban affirms French cultural values of dignity and equality. Girls
growing up under these two cultures may feel torn by the incompatible rules
for being a good French citizen and a good Muslim.
On a Friday evening in the college dining hall, a half-dozen students dis-
cuss their plans for the weekend. One says she’s going to a basketball game,
another says he’s checking out a hip-hop group playing at a local club, and
a third says she’s staying in to download some music and watch videos. A
fourth mutters, “Study and sleep, just like always, no life,” while a fifth
counters with “Party!” Then the sixth announces, “Well, guys, you may be
wasting the weekend, but I’m going to get some culture. Tonight, I’m meet-
ing friends at an art exhibit opening in a gallery downtown, and my girl-
friend and I have symphony tickets for tomorrow.” His friends start making
cracks about him being a culture vulture, while he jokes back about some
people having more taste than other people.
An American conducting business in Tokyo hopes to land a lucrative
contract for her firm. When her Japanese counterpart presents his card, she
1
2——Cultures and Societies in a Changing World
takes it casually with one hand, glances at it, and sticks it in her pocket.
Subsequent relations with her Japanese prospect prove frosty, and her firm
loses the contract. “Ah,” says an experienced friend, “you lost out because
of a cultural misunderstanding. In Japan, the business card is considered an
extension of the person; one treats the card with great respect, holding it
with two hands and carefully putting it in a safe place. Americans don’t
think of it that way; for them, the card is just a convenience. You insulted
the very person you were trying to court.”
Fitness demands hours in the gym and years of self-denial pursuing the
six-pack abs and lean musculature of the cultural ideal. The fit body carries
a wealth of meanings—sexual attractiveness, discipline, health—but at the
same time advertisers urge consumers to purchase this body, in effect, by
spending both time and money (e.g., gym membership, personal trainers).
One result is that fitness is more available to the affluent than to the poor.
As both cultural ideal and cultural commodity, it helps reproduce class and
gender inequalities (Dworkin and Wachs 2009).
In an urban mixed-race neighborhood, sociologist Elijah Anderson
(1990) observes casual street encounters in which African Americans appear
uncomfortable when they pass Caucasians walking their dogs, despite the
dog walkers’ assurances that their pets are friendly. This results from a cul-
tural difference, he concludes:
In the working-class black subculture, “dogs” does not mean “dogs in the
house,” but usually connotes dogs tied up outside, guarding the backyard, bit-
ing trespassers bent on trouble. Middle-class and white working-class people
may keep dogs in their homes, allowing them the run of the house, but many
black working-class people I interviewed failed to understand such behavior.
When they see a white adult on his knees kissing a dog, the sight may turn their
stomachs—one more piece of evidence attesting to the peculiarities of their
white neighbors. (222)
All five stories involve culture, but each seems to talk about very different
things: national customs (handling business cards), activities considered elit-
ist (attending the symphony), personal practices (going to the gym), and
local variations in symbolic meanings (what dogs or veils represent).
Together they suggest that culture, though rather hard to pin down, is
important to understand. Cultural ignorance or misunderstanding, it seems,
can lead to highly undesirable outcomes: lost business, interethnic tension,
or an inability to participate in either the comic or the transcendent moments
in human experience.
What is this concept called culture that can apply to such a wide variety
of situations? Why do notions of culture inflame such intense passions that
CHAPTER 1:â•‡ Culture and the Cultural Diamond——3
huge numbers of people—from sectarians in Mumbai to gang members in

Chicago—regularly kill and die for their symbols, their beliefs, and their
cultures? Moreover, how can we gain a better understanding of the connec-
tions between the concept of culture and the social world? This chapter
addresses these questions.
Two Ways of Looking at Culture

When sociologists talk about culture, Richard Peterson (1979) observed,
they usually mean one of four things: norms, values, beliefs, or expressive
symbols. Roughly, norms are the way people behave in a given society, val-
ues are what they hold dear, beliefs are how they think the universe operates,
and expressive symbols are representations, often of social norms, values,
and beliefs themselves. In the last decades of the twentieth century, sociolo-
gists added a fifth item to the list: practices. Culture in this recent view
describes people’s behavior patterns, not necessarily connected to any par-
ticular values or beliefs. We discuss these various meanings later, but for now
the point is that even such specialists as cultural sociologists use the word
culture to stand for a whole range of ideas and objects.
The academic perspectives on culture can be sorted into two schools of
thought. It is fair to say that most notions of culture stem from assumptions
rooted in either the humanities or the social sciences, particularly anthropol-
ogy. Although this book presents the social scientific perspective by and
large, the distinctiveness of this stance emerges only in comparison with its
counterpart in the humanities.
Before we begin, however, we must clarify one thing: Neither “culture”
nor “society” exists out there in the real world—only people who work,
joke, raise children, love, think, worship, fight, and behave in a wide variety
of ways. To speak of culture as one thing and society as another is to make
an analytical distinction between two different aspects of human experience.
Think of the distinction as such that culture designates the expressive aspect
of human existence, whereas society designates the relational (and often
practical) aspect. Hugging dogs, paying respect to business cards, working
out—these all describe methods for expressing our lives as social beings. The
same object or behavior may be analyzed as social (a business card commu-
nicates information necessary for economic transactions) or cultural (a busi-
ness card means something different to a Japanese than to an American).
Now, oriented with this rough distinction between the expressive and the
relational and with the recognition that both culture and society are abstrac-
tions, we may explore the two most influential seedbeds for contemporary
thinking about the culture/society relationship.
“The Best That Has Been Thought and Known”

In common usage, the term culture often refers to the fine and performing
arts or to serious literature, as in the facetious statement of the art-gallery-
and symphony-goer, “I’m going to get some culture.” Culture in this sense,
sometimes called “high culture”—as opposed to popular culture, folk cul-
ture, or mass culture—carries implications of high social status. The
unthinking equation of culture with the arts results from a line of thinking,
prominent in those disciplines collectively known as the humanities, whereby
culture signifies a locus of superior and universal worth.
In the nineteenth century, many European intellectuals posited an opposi-
tion between culture and society or, as they often put it, between culture and
civilization. As they used the term, civilization referred to the technological
advances of the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying social upheav-
als. Contrasting culture with civilization was, therefore, a protest against
Enlightenment thinking, against the belief in progress as an invariable ben-
efit, against the ugly aspects of industrialization, and against what Marx
called the “cash nexus” of capitalism whereby everyone and everything
seemed evaluated on an economic basis. If civilization meant filthy tene-
ments, factories spewing smoke into the air, and people treated as nothing
more than so many replaceable parts, many thoughtful men and women
wanted no part of it. They saw culture—entailing the wisest and most beau-
tiful expressions of human effort—as its contrasting pole and the salvation
of over-civilized human beings. This dichotomy set the alienating, dehumaniÂ�
zing effects of industrial civilization against the healing, life-enhancing
capacities of culture. Typical of this polarizing tendency was the English
social philosopher John Stuart Mill’s account, in his autobiography, of how
his highly rationalized training in logic and economics brought him to a
nervous breakdown. Only by reading Wordsworth’s poetry, he testified,
could he restore his sanity.
The automatic question that arises today occurred to nineteenth-century
thinkers as well: How can we believe in culture’s extraordinary, redeeming
value without this belief turning into a narrow ethnocentrism, a hymn of
praise to Western European culture as the summit of human achievement?
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), a British educator and man of letters,
answered this question by formulating a universal theory of cultural value
([1869] 1949). Emphasizing culture’s potential influence in the social
world, he harshly criticized Victorian England for its mindless materialism
and its worship of machines and freedom (in other words, industrialization
and democracy) without considering the ends to which either should be put.
He feared a result of either dull, middle-class Philistinism or social anarchy
produced by rioting workers. The aristocrats, whom Arnold dismissed as

“barbarians” too busy hunting foxes to bother defending culture, would
provide no help. Only culture could save modern society.
What constituted this salvation of humankind? Culture, Arnold asserted,
was “a study of perfection.” Culture could make civilization more human
by restoring “sweetness and light.” Although it is now used pejoratively to
convey superficial amiability, Arnold intended the expression sweetness and
light to refer to beauty and wisdom, respectively. He took the idea of sweet-
ness and light from Jonathan Swift’s parable about the spiders versus the
bees. Everyone thinks spiders are very industrious, Swift observed, but, in
fact, spiders work only for themselves; they spin all those webs just to catch
their own dinners. Bees, on the other hand, more properly admirable, unself-
ishly produce benefits for others: honey and the wax used in making candles
or, in other words, sweetness and light. Arnold appropriated the more
socially productive of Swift’s two creatures in his definition of culture. Like
the honey and candles that come from bees, the beauty and wisdom that
culture provides come from (1) awareness of and sensitivity to “the best that
has been thought and known” in art, literature, history, and philosophy and
(2) “a right reason” (an open-minded, flexible, tolerant intelligence).
How does culture work? Arnold, the educator, saw culture in terms of its
educational potential. He maintained that culture enables people to relate
knowledge, including science and technology, to conduct and beauty.
Civilization potentially relates harmoniously with knowledge, beauty, con-
duct, and social relations—a Greco-Roman view—and culture can bring
about this harmony. Culture is not an end in itself but a means to an end. It
can cure the social ills of unrestrained materialism and self-satisfied
Philistinism by teaching people how to live and conveying moral ideas. In a
sense, Arnold believed, culture can be the humanizing agent that moderates
the more destructive impacts of modernization.
Arnold’s conception of culture holds that it addresses a different set of
issues from those addressed by logic or science. Surprisingly, German soci-
ologist Max Weber (1864–1920), whom we shall encounter often in this
book, took the same view. In his essay “Science as a Vocation,” Weber laid
out the limits of what science cannot do to set up his arguments about what
science can do. The limits are what interest us here. What meaning for our
lives can science offer? Weber suggested none (1946:143, 153):
Tolstoi has given the simplest answer, with the words: “Science is meaningless
because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for
us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’”â•‹.â•‹.â•‹.â•‹Science today is a “voca-
tion” organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and
knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets
dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contem-
plation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe.
To answer Tolstoi’s question and find a meaning for their lives, Weber
asserted, human beings must look to prophets and philosophers, to religion
and ideas. Most generally, they must turn to culture.
Weber was a scientist and Arnold a man of letters, but both emphasized
the separation of culture from everyday life in modern society and its ability
to influence human behavior. This way of looking at culture is traditionally
associated with the humanities (although contemporary humanities disci-
plines are more critical). The traditional humanities viewpoint
•• evaluates some cultures and cultural works as better than others; it believes
culture has to do with perfection. Deriving from a root word meaning “culti-
vation,” as in agriculture, this sense of culture entails the cultivation of the
human mind and sensibility.
•• assumes that culture opposes the prevailing norms of the social order, or
“civilization.” Harmony between culture and society is possible but rarely
achieved.
•• fears that culture is fragile, that it can be “lost” or debilitated or estranged
from socioeconomic life. Culture must be carefully preserved, through educa-
tional institutions, for example, and in cultural archives such as libraries and
museums.
•• invests culture with the aura of the sacred and ineffable, thus removing it from
everyday existence. This separation is often symbolically accentuated: Bronze
lions, for example, guard the entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago (and
many libraries and museums elsewhere). Because of its extraordinary quality,
culture makes no sense if we consider only its economic, political, or social
dimensions.
It is important to recognize this “traditional humanities viewpoint” as an

ideal type, with contradictions and complexities smoothed away for the sake
of comparison. Moreover, it describes a rarified “high culture” definition
that few contemporary humanities departments would endorse. Nevertheless,
this understanding of culture lies deep in most people’s thinking. Consider,
for example, the revulsion much of the world feels over looters ransacking
treasures from the art museums and archeological digs of Iraq. Observers are
horrified that looting, and the illicit market for rarities that supports it,
reduces something precious and sacred to a mere commodity and in so doing
decimates the cultural heritage—“the best that has been thought and
known”—of the Iraqi people. Such a value-laden view of culture can often
be seen as elitist, but at the same time it is widely held.
“That Complex Whole”

During the nineteenth century, the new disciplines of anthropology and
sociology simultaneously advocated a very different way of thinking about
culture than that put forth by Matthew Arnold. An early statement of this
position came from the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder
(1744–1803), who reacted strongly against the smugness of European cul-
ture at the end of the eighteenth century. Fascinated by traditional folk verse
and the poetry of the Old Testament, Herder regarded such oral literature as
spontaneous products of innate human creativity that sharply contrasted
with the more artificial literary output of an educated elite. If all humanity
comprised natural poets, how absurd to think that the European educated
classes had somehow cornered the market on the “best that has been
thought and known.” Or, as Herder put it:
Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have
not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time
your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought
of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature.
(Williams 1976:79)
Herder argued that we must speak of cultures, not simply culture, for the
obvious reason that nations, and communities within or across nations, have
their own, equally meritorious cultures.
This view of culture as a given society’s way of life was introduced to
English anthropology by E. B. Tylor, who dismissed the whole culture-
versus-civilization debate out of hand in his book Primitive Culture ([1871]
1958:1): “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is
that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, cus-
tom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society.” This wide-ranging anthropological definition of culture has domi-
nated the social sciences, including contemporary sociology, ever since.
Sociologist Peter Berger (1969), for example, defines culture as “the totality
of man’s products,” both material and immaterial. Indeed, Berger argued
that even society itself is “nothing but part and parcel of non-material cul-
ture” (6–7). Although social scientists don’t all agree to quite so expansive a
definition, they don’t agree on much else about culture either. Back in the
1950s when two anthropologists counted the different definitions of culture
used in the social sciences, they came up with more than 160 distinct mean-
ings (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952).
Viewing culture as a people’s entire way of life avoids the ethnocentrism
and elitism that the humanities-based definition falls prey to, but such an
all-encompassing definition lacks the precision desired in the social sciences. A

recent trend leans toward cutting the culture concept down to size and char-
acterizing the object of analysis. Wuthnow and Witten (1988), for example,
suggest that sociologists should distinguish between implicit and explicit cul-
ture. Sometimes, we regard culture as a tangible social construction, “a kind
of symbolic good or commodity that is explicitly produced” (50), as in the
case of a fit body or a veil worn by a Muslim woman. At other times, we see
culture more abstractly as an “implicit feature of social lifeâ•‹.â•‹.â•‹.â•‹a prefiguration
or ground of social relations” (50), as in the cultural ground whereby Japanese
and Americans handle business cards in different ways or American blacks
and whites act differently around dogs. This distinction proves useful, not
because either kind of culture is conceptually superior but because it can act
as a preliminary classification in sorting out the many definitions of culture
with which sociologists must deal. Implicit culture is hard to study, of course;
in fact, it’s hard to spot in the first place. We will consider ways for sociologists
to pin down this elusive concept, but, for now, the point is to recognize these
two sorts of culture: explicit, expressive, symbolic forms on the one hand and
implicit grounding for action on the other. (Sometimes, the former is seen as
the domain of “the sociology of culture,” whereas the latter falls under “cul-
tural sociology,” but this terminological distinction is not uniformly adopted.)
Unlike the old-school humanists, social scientists of various schools of
thought tend to see harmony, not opposition, between culture and society.
The two most influential social scientific theories of the twentieth century—
functionalism and Marxism—regard the fit as a close one. Functionalism,
the branch of social theory that assumes a social institution usually serves
some specific function necessary for the well-being of the collectivity, identi-
fies culture with the values that direct the social, political, and economic
levels of a social system. In the functionalist perspective, a fit exists between
culture and society because any misfit would be dysfunctional. Robert
Merton (1938), for example, once suggested that American culture places a
high value on economic success. When people lack the practical means to
attain the goal of success, he said, they experience severe strain, often turn-
ing to criminal behavior as a result. For most people in America and in any
culture that functions smoothly, the goals given by the culture and the means
for attaining these goals work in harmony. Coming from the opposite direc-
tion politically, Marxists also see a close fit between social structure and
culture, but they reverse the direction of influence—from social structure to
culture, not the other way around. In their view, cultural products, implicit
or explicit, rest on an economic foundation. Both functionalism and
Marxism are discussed in Chapter 2; for now, note that they share what we
might call the “close-fit assumption.”
As an example of this assumption, consider Peter Berger’s (1969) analysis

of culture as formed through externalization, objectification, and internal-
ization. Berger suggests that human beings project their own experience onto
the outside world (externalization), then regard these projections as indepen-
dent (objectification), and finally incorporate these projections into their
psychological consciousness (internalization). We can easily think of cases
that seem to illustrate Berger’s model. Let’s take the fact that human repro-
duction involves two sexes. Many religious belief systems might be said to
externalize the dualism of biological reproduction into dual powers, such as
the Manichean worldview of an eternal war between good and evil or the
Chinese dualities of yin and yang. Such dualities, based on direct experience,
become objectified and exist in the culture independent of any human
thinker. Entire cosmologies of contending forces of good and evil thereby
grow around the male/female dichotomy. These cosmologies, in turn,
become internalized, influencing human thought and practice. Thus,
Christians imagine good and evil fighting within the soul—an angel whisper-
ing in one ear, a devil in the other—whereas Chinese medicine centers on the
perceived need for a yin and yang balance in the body itself.
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973:89) defined culture as “an histori-
cally transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of
inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men
communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes
toward life.” Geertz’s influential formulation is more precise than the entire-
way-of-life social science definitions because it focuses on symbols and the
behavior that derives from symbolically expressed ways of thinking and
feeling. This definition captures what most sociologists currently mean when
they use the term culture. To recapitulate, the social science standpoint
•• avoids evaluation in favor of relativism. As two sociologists once put it, “The
scientific rhetoric, tight-lipped and non-normative, brooks no invidious distinc-
tions” (Jaeger and Selznick 1964:654). We may make evaluations in terms of
culture’s impact on the social order but not of the cultural phenomenon itself.
•• assumes a close linkage between culture and society. In some schools of
thought, one tends to determine the other, whereas others stress the mutual
adjustments that take place between culture and social structure.
•• emphasizes the persistence and durability of culture, rather than its fragility.
Culture, seen more as an activity than as something that needs preserving in
an archive, is not what lies in the museum guarded by those bronze lions;
instead, it is the ways museum-goers (and everyone else) live their lives.
•• assumes that culture can be studied empirically like anything else. Social scien-
tists do not regard culture as sacred or fundamentally different from other
human products and activities.
Again, this is a simplification to emphasize the contrast between the two

standpoints. And again, many twenty-first-century social scientists would
reject such aspects of this view as the close-fit assumption (Swidler 2001). If
we go back to the example of looting in the Middle East, the social science
approach would focus less on the “treasures” being destroyed and more on
the practices of the people in the area. It would posit that in a time of
upheaval, people respond in ways consistent with their cultural grounding.
Thus, in Iraq they would point out that (1) virtually all looters are men (in
Middle Eastern cultures, women appear less in public); (2) they wear the
same checked masks as the Palestinian fighters (a style distinctive to this part
of the world); (3) they openly offer the looted objects for sale (practices com-
mon to a trading bazaar culture); and (4) the armed guards stand by (the
demands of locality and possible kinship outweigh those of job description).
In such an analysis, the social scientist takes no moral position on the activ-
ity in question but instead attempts to understand the behavior on its own
cultural terms.
One might well respond to the distinction we have been setting between
the traditional humanities and the social scientific approaches, saying,
“Look, there are advantages to both points of view. In the case of radical
Islam, for instance, to understand why some Muslims are eager to die for
their religion, it helps to see that their adherents regard their religious beliefs
as ‘the best that has been thought and known’ and thus extraordinarily valu-
able. At the same time, an understanding of the political and economic
contexts—the links between religion on the one hand and Middle Eastern
social structure on the other—is necessary to comprehend and explain the
recurring explosions of sectarian violence. So, why not try to understand
culture by approaching it from both directions?”
Why not, indeed? In this book, although our object is a specifically socio-
logical understanding of culture, we try to incorporate the insights of both
traditions. We begin to do so by envisioning the culture/society connection
in terms of “cultural objects” located in a “cultural diamond.”
Connections: The Links Between

Culture and Society
We have been looking at various definitions of culture, from the most restric-
tive (high art; “the best that has been thought and known”) to the most
expansive (the totality of humanity’s material and nonmaterial products). We
have seen that the word and the concept, especially as employed in the social
sciences, take many shapes and that, therefore, any discussion of culture must
begin with a definition. Here, then, is our working definition: Culture refers
to the expressive side of human life—in other words, to behavior, objects, and
ideas that appear to express, or to stand for, something else. This is the case
whether we are talking about explicit or implicit culture. Such a working
definition is not evaluative or focused on “the best”; nor is it the most expan-
sive definition, for it restricts culture to the meaningful.
Geertz, and Weber before him, took culture to involve meaning, and in
this book, we follow their example. Thus, we could talk about a community
in terms of its culture: its jokes and slang; its conventions, stereotypes, typical
practices, and common knowledge; and its symbols that represent and guide
the thinking, feeling, and behavior of its members. Or, we could talk about
that community in terms of social structure: its network of relationships
among members, its institutions, and its economic and political life. The com-
munity’s culture influences its social structure, and vice versa; indeed, the two
are intertwined and have been separated only for purposes of analysis. To
understand the community, the sociologist must understand both.
We need to do more, however, than simply define culture and indicate
how to distinguish it analytically from social structure. We need a way to
conceptualize how culture and the social world come together or, in other
words, how people in social contexts create meaning. To draw on both the
humanities and social science views for our analysis of culture and to exam-
ine cultural phenomena and their relation to social life, we need a conceptual
framework and conceptual tools, such as the cultural object.
The Cultural Object

A cultural object may be defined as shared significance embodied in form
(Griswold 1986). In other words, it is a socially meaningful expression that
is audible, visible, or tangible or that can be articulated. A cultural object,
moreover, tells a story, and that story may be sung, told, set in stone,
enacted, or painted on the body. Examples range widely. A religious doc-
trine, a YouTube video, a belief that women are more sensitive than men, a
Shakespearean sonnet, a hairstyle such as Rastafarian dreadlocks or the
Manchu queue, a habit of saying “God bless you” when somebody sneezes,
or a quilt made by hand or by robots—any and all of these can be cultural
objects. Each tells a story. Notice that the status of the cultural object
results from an analytic decision that we make as observers; it is not built
into the object itself. If we think of the quilt as a product in a department
store’s inventory or something to warm our feet in bed and not in terms of
its meaning, the quilt is not a cultural object. But when we consider it in
terms of its story—how it expresses women collectively piecing together
scraps to produce an object of beauty and utility—the quilt becomes a

meaningful cultural object and may be analyzed as such.
In this book, we talk equally of “cultural objects” and “culture,” so it is
important to keep the terms straight. Specifying a cultural object is a way of
grasping some part of the broader system we refer to as culture and holding
up that part for analysis. One might compare this distinction to how we
would go about studying a marsh. We would need to analyze the soil, the
water, the climate, and the specific forms of animal and plant life found there
(e.g., the leopard frog) in order to understand how the ecosystem works as
a whole. On the other hand, if we were primarily interested in a particular
species of frog, our study would concentrate on it, with the marsh as a bio-
logical context. Analogizing to our terms, the cultural object is the leopard
frog, and the culture is the marsh.
In attempting to understand the connections between a society and its
culture, it seems to make sense to start the analysis with a close examination
of cultural objects, those smaller parts of the interrelated, larger system.
Here, we follow the lead of the humanities: Culture is in a world apart, at
least for analytical purposes. Literary critics, art historians, and others in the
humanities usually focus on a work of art as a self-referential universe pos-
sessing structure and meaning. This practice seems sound for examining
cultural objects in our wider social sciences definition. We start, therefore,
by paying close attention to the cultural object itself. This does not imply an
“art for art’s sake” (or culture for culture’s sake) rejection of the external
world and how it impinges on the cultural object but simply means we first
take the cultural object as evidence about itself. In other words, we start
with the cultural object, though we certainly don’t end there.
Consider the homely case of bread. Plain old bread, traditionally the food
of subsistence for people who can afford nothing better, has lately taken on
a certain élan. Bakers in upscale communities have worked on improving the
quality of American bread by introducing international baking techniques
and new ingredients. Boutique bakeries have become so successful that they
have forced industry giants such as Pepperidge Farm to compete on their
level. Americans raised on plain white bread now munch on Italian focaccia,
seven-grain pita, and sourdough baguettes that would amaze the French.
New types of bread incorporating nine different stone-ground grains or
hand-wrought into breadsticks receive fulsome tribute as being “first rate,
handsomely crisp of crust and, yes, downright sexy” (Fabricant 1992).
Bread, sexy?
Think of bread not simply as food or a commodity but as a cultural
object. Americans and Europeans eat a lot of bread, but they don’t pay a
great deal of attention to it. Bread is basic, fundamental, at the foundation
of the nutrition pyramid (yawn). Practical and boring though it may be,
bread can be expressive as well. The post–World War II baby boom genera-
tion, for example, grew up on soft, spongy white bread like Wonder Bread.
The “wonder” lay in the technology—Wonder Bread was infused with vita-
mins to “grow strong bodies in 12 ways”—and although it didn’t have an
especially memorable flavor, baby boomers who spread it with concoctions
such as peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff thought it tasted just fine. It
seemed to express a child’s view of the good life. Later, in the 1960s and
1970s, that same baby boom generation rejected white bread, just as it
rejected much else from mainstream American culture; defying the conven-
tions they grew up with, these young people turned eating whole-grain bread
into a political statement, one that expressed a repudiation of American
capitalism, technology, and homogeneity.
Not only can bread be expressive; a moment’s reflection reminds us that
it is steeped in tradition. The Bible abounds in references to bread: It is the
staff of life, it is unleavened during Passover, it is miraculously multiplied
along with the fishes, and it should be cast upon the waters. In the Christian
communion, it even embodies the Divine. During the first centuries of Islam,
white bread symbolized a lack of discipline to the Arabs; a manuscript illus-
tration shows a man enjoying a self-indulgent meal of roast kid, wine, and
white bread (Tannahill 1973:173). In the European ethnic heritage that
shaped many American institutions, bread connotes security, love, frugality,
and family—even life itself.
We further recognize that bread, though ubiquitous in American kitchens,
is by no means universal. Human beings eat different grains in different
places: Many Chinese depend on rice, Senegalese on millet, and Mexicans
on corn. In some of these countries, eating bread signifies being Westernized
or modern, and it can become a political issue. In Nigeria, which enjoyed a
period of oil-based wealth during the 1970s, the middle class developed a
taste for bread made from imported flour and a distaste for local starches,
such as yam and cassava. White bread connotes affluence and modernity for
twentieth-century Nigerians just as it did for eighteenth-century Europeans.
In the poorer “oil bust” years beginning in the 1980s, however, taxes on
imports plus government advocacy of using locally produced foods
attempted to shift Nigerian consumer tastes back to West African traditional
starches. The battle has not been altogether successful, however, and the
streets of Lagos teem with young hawkers of high-priced spongy white
bread, something like our old friend Wonder Bread.
So, bread is basic, fundamental, and boring—but it is also biblically sanc-
tioned, expressive, symbolic of European heritage or the good life, and even
sexy. It is as much a part of a cultural system—whether we think of the local
cultural system (the latest gustatory trends) or the global cultural system (the
meaning of white bread in Nigeria)—as the more obviously “cultural” arti-
facts, such as television or ballet. Bread, then, is clearly a cultural object.
Cultural objects compose part of a larger cultural system that we may want to
analyze. How do the myriad components in this system mesh together? To look
at the bigger picture of culture in society, we need one more analytical tool.
The Cultural Diamond

Cultural objects are made by human beings, a fact intrinsic to all of
the various definitions—culture is “the best that has been thought and
known” by human beings (Arnold); culture is the “meanings embodied
in symbols” through which human beings communicate and pass on
knowledge and attitudes (Geertz); culture is the externalization, objecti-
fication, and internalization of human experience (Berger)—and is the
basis for the familiar distinction between culture and nature. Therefore,
we may regard all cultural objects as having creators. These creators may
be the people who first articulate and communicate an idea, the artists
who fashion a form, or the inventors of a new game or new lingo. Any
particular object may have a single creator, such as the author of a novel,
or multiple creators, such as all of the people listed in the credits at the
beginning of a movie.
Other people besides their creators experience cultural objects, of course.
If a poet sings her odes in the wilderness with no one to hear or record, if a
hermit invents a revolutionary new theology but keeps it to himself, if a
radio program is broadcast but a technical malfunction prevents anyone
from hearing it, these present potential but not actual cultural objects. Only
when such objects become public, when they enter the circuit of human
discourse, do they enter the culture and become cultural objects. Therefore,
all cultural objects must have people who receive them, people who hear,
read, understand, think about, enact, participate in, and remember them. We
might call these people the object’s audience, although that term is a bit
misleading; the people who actually experience the object may differ from
the intended or original audience, and far from being a passive audience,
cultural receivers are active meaning makers.
Both cultural objects and the people who create and receive them are not
floating freely but are anchored in a particular context. We can call this
the social world, by which we mean the economic, political, social, and
cultural patterns and exigencies that occur at any particular point in time.
Cultural sociology centers, first and foremost, on the relationship between cul-
tural objects and the social world. This even-handed attention to both the
cultural and the social is one of the things that differentiate cultural sociol-
ogy from cultural studies, which focuses more heavily on the cultural side.
A second difference is methodological: cultural sociology, as a social sci-
ence, depends more heavily on empirical methods and the analysis of evi-
dence, whereas cultural studies is more purely interpretive. That said, there
is considerable overlap between the two fields. (A good discussion of this
distinction is in Inglis, Blaikie, and Wagner-Pacifici (2007).
We have identified four elements: creators, cultural objects, recipients,
and the social world. Let us first arrange these four in the shape of a dia-
mond and then draw a line connecting each element to every other one.
Doing this creates what I call a cultural diamond (a diamond in the two-
dimensional sense of a baseball diamond), which looks like Figure 1.1.
Our cultural diamond features four points and six links. We cannot call
it a theory of culture, because it says nothing about how the points relate.
Nor can we call it a model of culture in the strict sense, because it does
not indicate cause and effect; in the cultural diamond, violence in the
popular culture (e.g., gangsta rap) could be seen as “causing” violence in
the social world, but the reverse could equally be the case. Instead, the
Figure 1.1â•‡â•‡ The Cultural Diamond
Social World
Creator Receiver
Cultural Object
cultural diamond is an accounting device intended to encourage a fuller

understanding of any cultural object’s relationship to the social world. It
does not say what the relationship between any of the points should be,
only that there is a relationship. Moreover, the texture of that relationship
lies as much in the links as in the four points.
Therefore, a complete understanding of a given cultural object requires
understanding all four points and six links. Return to the example of
bread, a cultural object of widespread but not universal meaningfulness.
To understand bread in West Hollywood and Lagos, we would have to
know about the producers (the growers, bakers, importers, trendset-
ting chefs and restaurant owners, and government bureaucrats setting
import controls) and the consumers (the population and its demographic
characteristics—how many children pack lunches, how many working
couples eat out, how an aging and increasingly thrifty population gratifies
its tastes for luxury, and how the African public has come to associate
white bread with prosperity). We would need to understand linkages—the
media connections advertising products to consumers, for example, or the
system of distribution whereby Nigerian teenage boys acquire fresh bread
to hawk on the highways. Only after investigating such points and connec-
tions can we feel confident that we understand the relationship—a specifi-
cally cultural relationship—that exists between bread and the society in
which it is made and eaten. In Carey’s (1989) terms, we end up under-
standing bread not as the transmission of a foodstuff but as a ritual that
can bind or sometimes divide people.
The same proves true for any aspect of culture that we isolate and ana-
lyze as a cultural object: We need to identify the characteristics of the
object and how it is like some other objects in the culture and unlike oth-
ers. We need to consider who created (made, formed, said) it and who
received (heard, saw, believed) it. We need to think about the various link-
ages; for example, on the social world/creator link, how in this society do
some types of people get to create this type of cultural object and others
do not? (For example, think about how women have often been excluded
from creating certain kinds of cultural objects.) On the cultural object/
audience link, how do some cultural objects reach an audience and others
do not? (For example, think about all of the poems that never get pub-
lished or all of the plays that never get produced.) Once we understand the
specific points and links in the diamond, we can say that we have a socio-
logical understanding of that cultural object. Moreover, once we sense how
that cultural object fits into its context, we are on our way to understand-
ing the culture as a whole.
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NATIVE OF BILUCHISTAN.
Although we gather from the records of Western nations these

indications of products coming from the archipelago in the earliest
ages, yet we have no information in regard to the time that the
Hindu traders, who sailed eastward from India and purchased these
valuable articles, succeeded in planting their own religion among
those distant nations. The annals of both the Malay and Javanese
are evidently fanciful, and are generally considered unreliable for any
date previous to the introduction of Mohammedanism. Simple
chronological lists are found in Java, which refer as far back as a. d.
78; but Mr. Crawfurd says that “they are incontestable fabrications,
often differing widely from each other, and containing gaps of whole
centuries.”
The people who came from India on these early voyages were
probably of the same Talagu or Telugu nation as those now called by
the Malays “Klings” or “Kalings,” a word evidently derived from
Kalinga, the Sanscrit name for the northern part of the coast of
Coromandel. They have always continued to trade with the
peninsula, and I met them on the coast of Sumatra. Barbosa, who
saw them at Malacca when the Portuguese first arrived at that city,
thus describes them:[5] “There are many great merchants here,
Moor as well as Gentile strangers, but chiefly of the Chetis, who are
of the Coromandel coast, and have large ships, which they call
giunchi” (junks). Unlike the irregular winds that must have greatly
discouraged the early Greeks and Phœnicians from long voyages
over the Euxine and the Mediterranean, the steady monsoons of the
Bay of Bengal invited those people out to sea, and by their regular
changes promised to bring them within a year safely back to their
homes.
The United States steamship Iroquois was then lying in the roads,
and our consular agent at this port invited Captain Rodgers, our
consul from Batavia, who was there on business, and myself, to take
a ride with him out to a sugar-plantation that was under his care. In
those hot countries it is the custom to start early on pleasure
excursions, in order to avoid the scorching heat of the noonday sun.
We were therefore astir at six. Our friend had obtained a large post-
coach giving ample room for four persons, but, like all such carriages
in Java, it was so heavy and clumsy that both the driver and a
footman, who was perched up in a high box behind, had to
constantly lash our four little ponies to keep them up to even a
moderate rate of speed. Our ride of ten miles was over a well-
graded road, beautifully shaded for most of the way with tamarind-
trees. Parallel with the carriage-roads, in Java, there is always one
for buffaloes and carts, and in this manner the former are almost
always kept in prime order. Such a great double highway begins at
Angir, on the Strait of Sunda, and extends throughout the whole
length of the island to Banyuwangi, on the Strait of Bali. It passes
near Bantam and Batavia, and thence along the low lands near the
north coast to Cheribon and Samarang, thence south of Mount
Japara and so eastward. This, I was informed, was made by Marshal
Daendals, who governed Java under the French rule in 1809. There
is also a military road from Samarang to Surakarta and Jokyokarta,
where the two native princes now reside. Java also enjoys a very
complete system of telegraphic communication. On the 23d of
October, 1856, the first line, between Batavia (Weltevreden) and
Buitenzorg, was finished. Immediately after, it was so rapidly
extended that, in 1859, 1,670 English miles were completed. A
telegraphic cable was also laid in that year from Batavia up the
Straits of Banca and Rhio to Singapore; but, unfortunately, it was
broken in a short time, probably by the anchor of some vessel in
those shallow straits. After it had been repaired it was immediately
broken a second time, and in 1861 the enterprise was given up, but
now they are laying another cable across the Strait of Sunda, from
Angir to the district of Lampong; thence it will extend up the west
coast to Bencoolen and Padang, and, passing across the Padang
plateau, through Fort de Rock and Paya Kombo, come to the Strait
of Malacca, and be laid directly across to Singapore.
These Javanese ponies go well on a level or down-hill, but when
the road becomes steep they frequently stop altogether. In the hilly
parts of Java, therefore, the natives are obliged to fasten their
buffaloes to your carriage, and you must patiently wait for those
sluggish animals to take you up to the crest of the elevation.
Our road that morning led over a low country, which was devoted
wholly to rice and sugar-cane. Some of these rice-fields stretched
away on either hand as far as the eye could see, and appeared as
boundless as the ocean. Numbers of natives were scattered through
these wide fields, selecting out the ripened blades, which their
religion requires them to cut off one by one. It appears an endless
task thus to gather in all the blades over a wide plain. These are
clipped off near the top, and the rice in this state, with the hull still
on, is called “paddy.” The remaining part of the stalks is left in the
fields to enrich the soil. After each crop the ground is spaded or dug
up with a large hoe, or ploughed with a buffalo, and afterward
harrowed with a huge rake; and to aid in breaking up the clods,
water to the depth of four or five inches is let in. This is retained by
dikes which cross the fields at right angles, dividing them up into
little beds from fifty to one hundred feet square. The seed is sown
thickly in small plats at the beginning of the rainy monsoon. When
the plants are four or five inches high they are transferred to the
larger beds, which are still kept overflowed for some time. They
come to maturity about this time (June 14th), the first part of the
eastern monsoon, or dry season. Such low lands that can be thus
flooded are called sawas. Although the Javanese have built
magnificent temples, they have never invented or adopted any
apparatus that has come into common use for raising water for their
rice-fields, not even the simple means employed by the ancient
Egyptians along the hill, and which the slabs from the palaces at
Nineveh show us were also used along the Euphrates.
Only one crop is usually taken from the soil each year, unless the
fields can be readily irrigated. Manure is rarely or never used, and
yet the sawas appear as fertile as ever. The sugar-cane, however,
quickly exhausts the soil. One cause of this probably is that the
whole of every cane is taken from the field except the top and root,
while only the upper part of the rice-stalks are carried away, and the
rest is burned or allowed to decay on the ground. On this account
only one-third of a plantation is devoted to its culture at any one
time, the remaining two-thirds being planted with rice, for the
sustenance of the natives that work on that plantation. These crops
are kept rotating so that the same fields are liable to an extra drain
from sugar-cane only once in three years. On each plantation is a
village of Javanese, and several of these villages are under the
immediate management of a controleur. It is his duty to see that a
certain number of natives are at work every day, that they prepare
the ground, and put in the seed at the proper season, and take due
care of it till harvest-time.[6]
The name of the plantation we were to see was “Seroenie.” As we
neared it, several long, low, white buildings came into view, and two
or three high chimneys, pouring out dense volumes of black smoke.
By the road was a dwelling-house, and the “fabrik” was in the rear.
The canes are cut in the field and bound into bundles, each
containing twenty-five. They are then hauled to the factory in
clumsy, two-wheeled carts called pedatis, with a yoke of sapis. On
this plantation alone there are two hundred such carts. The mode
adopted here of obtaining the sugar from the cane is the same as in
our country. It is partially clarified by pouring over it, while yet in the
earthen pots in which it cools and crystallizes, a quantity of clay,
mixed with water, to the consistency of cream. The water, filtering
through, washes the crystals and makes the sugar, which up to this
time is of a dark brown, almost as white as if it had been refined.
This simple process is said to have been introduced by some one
who noticed that wherever the birds stepped on the brown sugar
with their muddy feet, in those places it became strangely white.
After all the sugar has been obtained that is possible, the cheap and
impure molasses that drains off is fermented with a small quantity of
rice. Palm-wine is then added, and from this mixture is distilled the
liquor known as “arrack,” which consequently differs little from rum.
It is considered, and no doubt rightly, the most destructive stimulant
that can be placed in the human stomach, in these hot regions.
From Java large quantities are shipped to the cold regions of
Sweden and Norway, where, if it is as injurious, its manufacturers
are, at least, not obliged to witness its poisonous effects.
After the sugar has been dried in the sun it is packed in large
cylindrical baskets of bamboo, and is ready to be taken to market
and shipped abroad.[7]
Three species of the sugar-cane are recognized by botanists: the
Saccharum sinensis of China; the Saccharum officinarum of India,
which was introduced by the Arabs into Southern Europe, and
thence transported to our own country[8] and the West Indies; and
the Saccharum violaceum of Tahiti, of which the cane of the Malay
Archipelago is probably only a variety. This view of the last species is
strengthened by the similarity of the names for it in Malaysia and
Polynesia. The Malays call it tabu; the inhabitants of the Philippines,
tubu; the Kayans of Borneo, turo; the natives of Floris, between Java
and Timur, and of Tongatabu, in Polynesia, tau; the people of Tahiti
and the Marquesas, to; and the Sandwich Islanders, ko.
It is either a native of the archipelago or was introduced in the
remotest times. The Malays used to cultivate it then as they do now,
not for the purpose of making sugar, but for its sweet juice, and
great quantities of it are seen at this time of year in all the markets,
usually cut up into short pieces and the outer layers or rind
removed. These people appear also to have been wholly ignorant of
the mode of making sugar from it, and all the sugar, or more
properly molasses, that was used, was obtained then as it is now in
the Eastern islands, namely, by boiling down the sap of the gomuti-
palm (Borassus gomuti).[9]
Sugar from cane was first brought to Europe by the Arabs, who,
as we know from the Chinese annals, frequently visited Canpu, a
port on Hanchow Bay, a short distance south of Shanghai.
Dioscorides, who lived in the early part of the first century, appears
to be the earliest writer in the West who has mentioned it. He calls it
saccharon, and says that “in consistence it was like salt.” Pliny, who
lived a little later in the same century, thus describes the article seen
in the Roman markets in his day: “Saccharon is a honey which forms
on reeds, white like gum, which crumbles under the teeth, and of
which the largest pieces are of the size of a filbert.” (Book xii., chap.
8.)
This is a perfect description of the sugar or rock-candy that I
found the Chinese manufacturing over the southern and central
parts of China during my long journeyings through that empire, and
at the same time it is not in the least applicable to the dark-brown,
crushed sugar made in India.
CHAPTER III.
THE FLORA AND FAUNA OF THE TROPICAL
EAST.
June 15th.—At 8 a. m. we left our anchorage off Surabaya, and

steamed down the Madura Strait for Macassar, the capital of
Celebes. Along the shores of the strait were many villages of
fishermen, and bamboo weirs extending out to a distance of five or
six miles from both the Java and Madura shores, and showing well
how shallow the water must be so far from land. During the
forenoon it was nearly calm, but the motion of the steamer supplied
a pleasant air. In the afternoon the wind rose to a light breeze from
the east. At noon we passed Pulo Kambing (“Goat Island”), a small,
low coral island off the south coast of Madura. Near by was a fleet of
small fishing-boats, each containing two men, who were only
protected from the broiling sun by a hat and a narrow cloth about
the loins. These boats and other larger ones farther out to sea were
extremely narrow, and provided with outriggers.
Madura receives its name from a Hindu legend, which makes it the
abode of the demigod, Baladewa. It has but one mountain-range,
and that crosses it from north to south. It is, therefore, not well
watered, and unsuitable for raising rice; and many of its people have
been obliged to migrate to the adjoining fertile shores of Java. The
coffee-tree is raised on this island, but the land is best adapted for
pasturage of the sapi, which is similar in its habits to our own neat-
cattle, and never wallows in mires and morasses like the buffalo. In
the mountains on the western part of Java, a wild species, the
banteng (Bos sondaicus), is still found. It is not regarded as the
source of the sapi, but a fertile cross is obtained from the two, and
this intermediate breed is said to be the one used on Bali and
Lombok. The sapi is found on all the islands to and including Timur,
on Borneo, Celebes, and the Spice Islands, and has been introduced
into the Philippines since their discovery, and now lives in a wild
state on Luzon, just as the cattle of the pampas in South America,
which have also descended from the domesticated breeds imported
by the Spaniards.
On the eastern end of the island, which is quite low, great
quantities of salt are obtained by evaporating water in “pans,” or
small areas enclosed with low dikes, like rice-fields. It is also
manufactured in a similar manner at several places on the north
coast of Java and on the western shore of Luzon, in the province of
Pangasinan. Generally the coasts of the islands throughout the
archipelago are either too high, or so low as to form merely muddy
morasses, which are mostly covered with a dense growth of
mangroves. In some places on the south coast of Java, sea-water is
sprinkled over sand. When this water has evaporated, the process is
repeated. The sand is then gathered, and water filtered through it
and evaporated by artificial heat. In Borneo, and among some of the
Philippines, marine plants are burned, and the lye made from their
ashes is evaporated for the sake of the salt contained in the
residuum. All through the interior, and among the mountains, houses
are built for storing it, and officials are appointed to dispose of it to
the natives. The quantity yearly manufactured for the government at
all the various places is about 40,000 koyangs, or 80,000 tons; but it
is not allowed to be shipped and used until it is five years old, and a
supply of 200,000 koyangs, or 400,000 tons, is therefore constantly
kept on hand. It is deposited in the government store-houses by
individuals at one-third of a guilder per picul. It is then transported
and sold at a great profit by the government, which monopolizes the
traffic in this necessary condiment, and obtains a large portion of its
revenue in this manner.[10]
In the afternoon we were abreast the high Tenger (i. e., wide or
spacious) mountains. Here is the famous “Sandy Sea,” a strange
thing on an island covered with such luxuriant vegetation as
everywhere appears in Java. To reach it one has to climb an old
volcano to a height of about 7,500 feet above the sea, when he
suddenly finds himself on the rim of an old crater of an irregular
elliptical form, with a minor axis of three and a half and a major axis
of four and a half miles. It is the largest crater in Java, and one of
the largest in the world. Its bottom is a level floor of sand, which in
some places is drifted by the wind like the sea, and is properly
named in Malay the Laut Pasar, or “Sandy Sea.” From this sandy
floor rise four cones, where the eruptive force has successively
found vent for a time, the greatest being evidently the oldest, and
the smallest the present active Bromo, or Brama, from the Sanscrit
Brama, the god of fire. The position and relation of this Bromo, as
compared to the surrounding crater, is entirely analogous to those
that exist between Vesuvius and Monte Somma. The outer walls of
this old mountain are of trachytic lava, and Dr. Junghuhn thinks its
history may be summed up thus: first, a period when the trachyte
was formed; this was followed by a period of trachytic lavas, then of
obsidian; fourth, of obsidian and pumice-stone; fifth, the sand
period, during which an enormous quantity of sand was thrown out,
and the present sandy floor formed with the cones rising from it;
and sixth, the present ash-period, during which only fine ashes are
thrown out from time to time, and steam and sulphurous acid gas
are constantly emitted.
The earliest descriptions of this crater represent it nearly as it is
seen at the present day; but great eruptions, similar to the one
supposed to have occurred, have been witnessed by Europeans
since they first came to Java. In the year 1772 the volcano
Papandayang, which is near the south coast of Java, and about in
Long. 108° E., threw out such an immense quantity of scoriæ and
ashes, that Dr. Junghuhn thinks a layer nearly fifty feet thick was
spread over an area within a radius of seven miles; and yet all this
was thrown out during a single night. Forty native villages were
buried beneath it, and about three thousand souls are supposed to
have perished between this single setting and rising of the sun. Dr.
Horsfield, who drew up an account of this terrible phenomenon from
the stories of the natives, wrongly supposed that “an extent of
ground, of the mountain and its environs, fifteen miles long, and full
six broad, was by this commotion swallowed up within the bowels of
the earth.”
On the 8th of July, 1822, Mount Galunggong, an old volcano, but a
few miles northeast of Papandayang, suffered a far more terrible and
destructive eruption. At noon on that day not a cloud could be seen
in the sky. The wild beasts gladly sought the friendly shades of the
dense forest; the hum of myriads of insects was hushed, and not a
sound was to be heard over the highly-cultivated declivities of this
mountain, or over the rich adjoining plain, but the dull creaking of
some native cart drawn by the sluggish buffalo. The natives, under
shelter of their rude huts, were giving themselves up to indolent
repose, when suddenly a frightful thundering was heard in the earth;
and from the top of this old volcano a dark, dense mass was seen
rising higher and higher into the air, and spreading itself out over the
clear sky with such an appalling rapidity that in a few moments the
whole landscape was shrouded in the darkness of night.
Through this thick darkness flashes of lightning gleamed in a
hundred lines, and many natives were instantly struck down to the
earth by stones falling from the sky. Then a deluge of hot water and
flowing mud rose over the rim of the old crater, and poured down
the mountain-sides, sweeping away trees and beasts and human
bodies in its seething mass. At the same moment, stones and ashes
and sand were projected to an enormous height into the air, and, as
they fell, destroyed nearly every thing within a radius of more than
twenty miles. A few villages, that were situated on high hills on the
lower declivities of the mountain, strangely escaped the surrounding
destruction by being above the streams of hot water and flowing
mud, while most of the stones and ashes and sand that were thrown
out passed completely over them, and destroyed many villages that
were farther removed from the centre of this great eruption.
The thundering was first heard at half-past one o’clock. At four the
extreme violence of the eruption was past; at five the sky began to
grow clear once more, and the same sun that at noon had shed his
life-giving light over this rich landscape, at evening was casting his
rays over the same spot then changed into a scene of utter
desolation. A second eruption followed within five days, and by that
time more than twenty thousand persons had lost their lives.
When the mountain could be ascended, a great valley was found,
which Dr. Junghuhn considers analogous to the “Val del Bove” on the
flanks of Ætna, except that a great depression among these movable
materials could not have such high, precipitous walls as are seen in
that deep gulf. This eruption was quite like that of Papandayang,
except that there was a lake in the bottom of this crater which
supplied the hot water and the mud, while all the materials thrown
out by the former volcano were in a dry state. In a similar way it is
supposed the great crater and the “Sandy Sea” of the Tenger
Mountains were formed in ancient times. On these Tenger Mountains
live a peculiar people, who speak a dialect of the Javanese, and,
despite the zealous efforts of the Mohammedan priests, still retain
their ancient Hindu religion.
In the evening, fires appeared on the hills near the sea. This was
the last we saw of Java, which, though but one-sixth of the area of
Borneo, and one-third that of Sumatra, is by far the most important
island in the archipelago. It is to the East Indies what Cuba is to the
West Indies. In each there is a great central chain of mountains.
Both shores of Cuba are opposite small bodies of water, and are
continuously low and swampy for miles, but in Java only the north
coast borders on a small sea. This shore is low, but the southern
coast, on the margin of the wide Indian Ocean that stretches away
to the Antarctic lands, is high and bold, an exception which is in
accordance with the rule that the higher elevations are opposite the
greater oceans, or, more properly, that they stand along the borders
of the ocean-beds or greatest depressions on the surface of our
globe. In Java, where the coast is rocky, the rocks are hard volcanic
basalts and trachytes, which resist the action of the sea, and the
shore-line is therefore quite regular; but in Cuba there is a fringing
of soft coral rock, which the waves quickly wear away into hundreds
of little projecting headlands and bays, and on the map the island
has a ragged border. In its geological structure, Cuba, with its
central axis of mica slates, granitic rocks, serpentines, and marbles,
has a more perfect analogue in Sumatra; for in Java the mountains,
instead of being formed by elevations of preëxisting strata, are
merely heaps of scoriæ, ashes, sand, and rock, once fluid, which
have all been ejected out of separate and distinct vents. The area of
Java is estimated at 38,250 square geographical miles; that of Cuba
at about 45,000. The length of Java is 575 geographical or 666
statute miles; that of Cuba 750 statute miles. But while the total
population of Cuba is estimated only at a million and a half, the total
population of Java and Madura is now (1865), according to official
statements, 13,917,368.[11] In 1755, after fifteen years of civil war,
the total population of Java and Madura was but 2,001,911. In a
single century, therefore, it has increased more than sixfold. This is
one of the beneficial effects of a government that can put down
rebellions and all internal wars, and encourage industry. In Cuba, of
a total area of thirty million acres, it was estimated, in 1857, that
only 48,572 were under cultivation, or, including pasturage, 218,161
acres. In Java and Madura, last year (1864), the cultivated fields and
the groves of cocoa-nut palms covered an area of 2,437,037 acres.
In Cuba, from 1853 to 1858, the yearly exports were from
27,000,000 to 32,000,000 of dollars, and the imports of about the
same value. In Java, last year, the imports amounted to 66,846,412
guilders (26,738,565 dollars); and the exports to the enormous sum
of 123,094,798 guilders (49,237,919 dollars). During 1864 twenty-
four ships arrived from the United States, of 12,610 tons’ capacity,
and three sailed for our country, of a united capacity of 2,258 tons.
[12]
Both of these great islands abound in forests, that yield large

quantities of valuable timber. Java furnishes the indestructible teak,
from which the Malays and Javanese fitted out a fleet of three
hundred vessels that besieged Malacca, two years after it had fallen
into the hands of the Portuguese. In like manner the Spaniards,
between 1724 and 1796, built with timber from the forests of Cuba
an armada that numbered one hundred and fourteen vessels,
carrying more than four thousand guns. From the Cuban forests
come the indestructible lignum-vitæ, and the beautiful mahogany.
Those jungles shelter no wild animals larger than dogs, but these in
Java are the haunts of wild oxen, tigers, one large and two small
species of leopard, the rhinoceros, two wild species of hog, and five
species of weasel. Two of the latter yield musk; and one, the Viverra
musanga, of the size of a cat, is also found in the Philippines. Six
species of deer are found on this island, and two of them, the
Cervus rufa and Cervus mantjac, are sometimes domesticated.[13]
The elephant is not found in Java, though it lives in Sumatra,
Borneo, and the peninsula. Also the wild horse of Sumatra or
Celebes does not exist in Java.
Among the more noticeable birds of Java is a beautiful species of
peacock, the Pavo spicifer. It was represented to me as quite
abundant in some places along the south coast. The natives make
very beautiful cigar-holders from fine strips of its quills. In Sumatra it
is not found, but is represented by an allied species. Of pigeons,
Java has no less than ten species. The web-footed birds are
remarkably few in species and numbers. A single duck, a teal, and
two pelicans, are said to comprise the whole number. The white
heron has already been noticed, and besides this, ten other species
have been described. One of the smallest birds in Java, and yet,
perhaps, the most important, from its great numbers, is the rice-
eater, Fringilla oryzivora, a kind of sparrow. Great flocks of these
birds are continually annoying the Malays as soon as the rice is
nearly grown. The natives have a very simple and effective mode of
driving them away. In the midst of a field a little bamboo house,
sufficient to shelter its occupant from the rain and scorching
sunshine, is perched high up on poles above the rice-stalks. Around
each field are placed rows of tall, flexible stakes, which are
connected together by a string. Many radiating lines of such stakes
extend from the house to those along the borders, and the child or
old person on watch has simply to pull any set of these lines in order
to frighten away the birds from any part of the field. There are seven
species of owls, and when the hooting of one is heard near any
house, many of the natives believe that sickness or some other
misfortune will certainly come to the inmates of that dwelling. Of
eagles and falcons, or kites, eight species are mentioned. One of the
kites is very abundant at all the anchorages, and so tame as to light
on the rigging of a ship quite near where the sailors are working.
When it has caught any offal in its long talons, it does not fly away
at once to a perch to consume the delicious morsel at its leisure, like
many birds of prey, but is so extremely greedy that it tears off pieces
with its beak and swallows them as it slowly sails along in the air.
When we begin to examine the luxuriant flora of these tropical
islands, almost the first tree that we notice by the shore is the tall,
graceful cocoa-nut palm. Occasionally it is found in small clumps, far
from the abode of man, for instead of being reared by his care, it
often comes to maturity alone, and then invites him to take up his
abode beneath its shade, by offering him at the same time its fruit
for food, and its leaves as ample thatching for the only kind of a hut
which he thinks he needs in an unchanging, tropical climate.
As it stands along the shore, it invariably inclines toward its
parent, the sea, for borne on the waves came the nut from which it
sprang, and now fully grown, it seeks to make a due return to its
ancestor by leaning over the shore and dropping into the ocean’s
bosom rich clusters of its golden fruit. Here, buoyed up by a thick
husk which is covered with a water-tight skin, the living kernel safely
floats over the calm and the stormy sea, until some friendly wave
casts it high up on a distant beach. The hot sun then quickly enables
it to thrust out its rootlets into the genial soil of coral sand and
fragments of shells, and in a few years it too is seen tossing its crest
of plumes high over the white surf, which in these sunny climes
everywhere forms the margin of the deep-blue ocean.
When the nut is young, the shell is soft and not separate from the
husk. In a short time it turns from a pale green to a light yellow. The
shell is now formed, and on its inner side is a thin layer, so soft that
it can be cut with a spoon. The natives now call it klapa muda, or
the young cocoa-nut, and they rarely eat it except in this condition.
As it grows older, the exterior becomes of a wood-color, the husk is
dry, and the shell hard and surrounded on the inside with a thick,
tough, oily, and most indigestible layer, popularly known as “the
meat” of the nut. This is the condition in which it is brought to our
markets, but the Malays seldom or never think of eating it in this
condition, and only value it for its oil. To obtain this the nut is
broken, and the meat scraped out with a knife. This pulp is then
boiled in a large pan, when the oil separates, floats on the top, and
is skimmed off. This oil is almost the only substance used for lighting
in the East, where far more lights are kept burning, in proportion to
the foreign population, than in our own temperate zone,
notwithstanding our long winter evenings, it being the custom there
for each man to light his house and veranda very brilliantly every
evening; and, if it is a festive occasion, rows of lamps must be
placed throughout his grounds.
The natives also are fond of such display. The common lamp
which they have for burning cocoa-nut oil is nothing but a glass
tumbler. This is partly filled with water, a small quantity of oil is then
poured in, and on this float two small splints that support a piece of
pith in a vertical position for a wick. When the oil is first made, it has
a sweet, rich taste, but in such a hot climate it soon becomes
extremely rancid, and that used for cooking should not be more than
two or three days old. The cool, clear water which the young nuts
contain is a most refreshing drink in those hot climates, far
preferable, according to my taste, to the warm, muddy water usually
found in all low lands within the tropics. Especially can one
appreciate it when, exposed to the burning sun on a low coral
island, he longs for a single draught from the cold sparkling streams
among his native New-England hills. He looks around him and
realizes that he is surrounded by the salt waters of the ocean—then
one of his dark attendants, divining his desire, climbs the smooth
trunk of a lofty palm, and brings down, apparently from the sky, a
nectar delicious enough for the gods.
This tree is of such importance to the natives that the Dutch
officials are required to ascertain as nearly as possible the number of
them in their several districts. In 1861 there were in Java and
Madura nearly twenty millions of these trees, or more than three to
every two natives.
Near the cocoa-nut grows the Pandanus, or “screw-pine,” which
may be correctly described as a trunk with branches at both ends.
There are two species of it widely distributed over the archipelago.
The flowers of one, the P. odoratissimus, are very fragrant and
highly prized among the Malays. In some places mats and baskets
are made from its leaves. Its woody fruit is of a spherical form, from
four to six inches in diameter, and its surface is divided with
geometrical precision by projections of a pointed pyramidal or
diamond shape.
On the low lands, back from the shore, where the soil has been
enriched with vegetable mould, the banana thrives. Unlike the
cocoa-nut tree, it is seldom seen where it has not been planted by
the hand of man. The traveller, therefore, who is worn out with his
long wanderings through the thick, almost impassable, jungles,
beholds with delight the long, green, drooping leaves of this tree. He
knows that he is near some native hut where he can find a shelter
from the hot sun, and slake his thirst with the water of the cocoa-
nut, and appease his hunger on bananas and boiled rice, a simple
and literally a frugal meal. Out of the midst of these drooping leaves
hangs down the top of the main stem, with its fruit decreasing in
size to the end. Some near the base are already changing from a
dark green to a bright golden yellow. Those are filled with delicious
juices, and they melt in your mouth like a delicately-flavored cream.
Such bananas as can be purchased in our markets have been so
bruised, and taste so little like this fruit at its home in the tropics, or
at least in the East Indian islands, that they scarcely serve to remind
one of what he has been accustomed to enjoy. The number of the
varieties of bananas and the difference between them is as great as
among apples in our own land.
Botanists call this tree the Musa paradisiaca, for its fruit is so
constantly ripening throughout the year, and is such a common
article of food, that it corresponds well to “the tree that yielded her
fruit every month,” and whose “leaves were for the healing of the
nations.”
Besides these plants, there are also seen on the low lands
Aroideæ, Amaranthaceæ, papilionaceous or leguminous plants, and
poisonous Euphorbiaceæ. The papaw (Carica papaya) thrives
luxuriantly on most soils. The natives are always fond of it, and I
found it a most palatable fruit, but the Europeans in the East
generally consider it a too coarse or common fruit to be placed on
the table. It was evidently introduced by the Portuguese and Spanish
from the West Indies, and the Malay name papaya comes from the
Spanish papayo.
At the height of one thousand feet ferns appear in very
considerable numbers, and here also the useful bamboo grows in
abundance, though it is found all the way down to the level of the
sea. Practically this is a tree, but botanically it is grass, though it
sometimes attains a height of seventy or eighty feet. It is used by
the natives for the walls of their huts. For this purpose it is split open
and pressed out flat, and other perpendicular and horizontal pieces
hold it in place. It is also used for masts, spear-handles, baskets,
vessels of all kinds, and for so many other necessary articles, that it
seems almost indispensable to them. Its outer surface becomes so
hard when partially burned, that it will take a sharp, almost cutting
edge, and the weapons of the natives were probably all made in this
manner previous to the introduction of iron. At the present time
sharpened stakes, ranjaus, of this kind are driven into the ground in
the tall grass surrounding a ladang or garden, so that any native
with naked feet (except the owner) will spear himself in attempting
to approach. I saw one man, on the island of Bum, who had
received a frightful, ragged wound in this way.
Above one thousand feet the palms, bananas, and papilionaceous
plants become fewer, and are replaced by the lofty fig or waringin,
which, with its high top and long branches, rivals the magnificent
palms by the sea-shore. The liquidambar also accompanies the fig.
Orchidaceous plants of the most wonderful forms appear on the
forest-trees, and are fastened to them so closely, that they seem to
be parts of them. Here the ferns also are seen in great variety.
Loranthaceæ and Melanostomaceæ are found in this zone. To this
region belongs the beautiful cotton-wood tree. Its trunk is seldom
more than ten or twelve inches in diameter, and rises up almost
perpendicularly thirty feet. The bark is of a light olive-green, and
remarkably smooth and fair. The limbs shoot out in whorls at right
angles to the trunk, and, as they are separated by a considerable
space, their open foliage is in strong contrast to the dark, dense
jungle out of which they usually rise. They thrive well also along the
banks of rivers. In Java these trees are frequently used as telegraph-
posts—a purpose for which they are admirably adapted on account
of their regularity. Besides, any thing but a living post would quickly
decay in these tropical lands. The fruit is a pod, and the fibrous
substance it yields is quite like cotton. I found it very suitable for
stuffing birds.
Over this region of the fig comes that of oaks and laurels.
Orchidaceous plants and melastomas are more abundant here.
Above five or six thousand feet are Rubiaceæ, heaths, and cone-
bearing trees; and from this region we pass up into one where small
ferns abound, and lichens and mosses cover the rocks and hang
from the trees. The tropical world is now beneath us, and we are in
the temperate zone.
The tops of all those volcanic mountains that are still in a state of
eruption are usually bare; and in others so large a quantity of the
sulphur they produce is washed down their sides by the rains that
the vegetation is frequently destroyed for some distance below their
summits.
One of the great privileges of a residence in the tropics is to enjoy
the delicious fruits of those regions in all their perfection. Of all
those fruits, in my opinion, the mangostin ought unquestionably to
be considered the first. This tree, a Garcinia, is about the size of a
pear-tree. Its Malay name is manggusta, whence our own, but it is
more generally known in the archipelago by the Javanese name
manggis. It flourishes in most of the islands from the south coast of
Java to Mindanao, the southernmost of the Philippines. On the
continent it yields well as far up the Peninsula of Malacca as Bankok,
in Siam, and in the interior to 16° N., but on the coast of the Bay of
Bengal only to 14° N. The attempts to introduce it into India have
failed, but the fruit is sometimes sent from Singapore after it has
been carefully coated with wax to exclude the air. In Ceylon they
have only partially succeeded in cultivating it. All the trials to raise it
in the West Indies have proved unsuccessful, so that this, the best of
all tropical fruits, is never seen on our continent. Its limited
geographical range is the more remarkable, for it is frequently seen
flourishing in the East Indian islands on all kinds of soils, and there is
reason to suppose that it has been introduced into the Philippines
within a comparatively late period, for in 1685 Dampier did not
notice it on Mindanao. The fruit is of a spherical form, and a reddish-
brown color. The outer part is a thick, tough covering containing a
white, opaque centre an inch or more in diameter. This is divided
into four or five parts, each of which usually contains a small seed.
This white part has a slightly-sweet taste, and a rich yet delicate
flavor, which is entirely peculiar to itself. It tastes perhaps more like
the white interior of a checkerberry than any other fruit in our
temperate climate. The thick covering is dried by the natives and
used for an astringent.
FRUIT MARKET.
Several fruits claim the second place in this scale. Some

Europeans would place the rambutan next the mangostin, and
others would prefer the mango or the duku. The rambutan
(Nephelium lappaceum) is nearly as large as an apple-tree. The fruit
is globular in form, and an inch or an inch and a half in diameter.
The outside is a bright-red rind, ornamented with coarse, scattered
bristles. Within is a semi-transparent pulp, of a slightly acid taste,
surrounding the seed. This tree, like the durian and the mangostin,
is wholly confined to the archipelago, and its acid fruit is most
refreshing in those hot lands. At Batavia it is so abundant in
February and March, that great quantities almost line the streets in
the market parts of the city, and small boats are seen filled to
overflowing with this bright, strawberry-colored fruit.
The mango-tree (Mangifera indica) is a large, thickly-branching
tree, with bright-green leaves. Its fruit is of an elliptical form, and
contains a flat stone of the same shape. Before it is ripe it is so
keenly acid, that it needs only to be preserved in salt water to be a
nice pickle for the table, especially with the universal curry. As it
ripens, the interior changes from green to white, and then to a
bright yellow. A tough outer skin being removed, there is seen a
soft, almost pulpy, but somewhat fibrous mass within. Some of these
fruits are extremely rich, and quite aromatic, while others have a
sharp smack of turpentine. They even vary greatly in two localities,
which may be but a few miles apart. Rumphius informs us that it
was introduced into the moluccas by the Dutch in 1655. It has also
been introduced into Zanzibar and Madagascar. When the Spaniards
first visited the Philippines it was not noticed, but now it is very
common in those islands, and considerable quantities of it are
shipped to China, where I was frequently assured it was very
delicious; but those who have tasted this or any other tropical fruit
from only one locality are by no means competent judges. At
Singapore I found some very nice ones that had been brought down
from Siam. It also flourishes in India, and Mr. Crawfurd thinks, from
the fact that the Malay and Javanese names are evidently only
corruptions of the old Sanscrit, that it was originally brought into the
archipelago from the continent, and should not be regarded as
indigenous.
The duku is another highly-esteemed fruit. The tree is tall, and
bears a loose foliage. From its trunk and limbs little branchlets grow
out, bearing in long clusters the fruit, which is about the size of a
robin’s egg. The outer coating of this fruit is thin and leathery, and of
a dull-yellow color. This contains several long seeds, surrounded by a
transparent pulp, which is sweet or pleasantly acid. The seeds
themselves are intensely bitter. The natives, however, invariably
prefer the durian to all other fruits. The Durio zibethinus is a very
large tree. Its fruit is spherical in form, six or eight inches in
diameter, and generally covered with many sharply-pointed
tubercles. This exterior is a hard shell. Within it is divided into
several parts. On breaking the shell, a seed, as large as a chestnut,
is found in each division, surrounded by a pale-yellow substance of
the consistency of thick cream, and having an odor of putrid animal
matter, so strong that a single fruit is enough to infect the air in a
large house. In the season for this fruit the whole atmosphere in the
native villages is filled with this detestable odor. The taste of this
soft, salvy, half-clotted substance is well described by Mr. Crawfurd
as like “fresh cream and filberts.” It seems paradoxical to state that
the same substance may violate a man’s sense of smell, and yet
gratify his sense of taste at the same time, but the natives certainly
are most passionately fond of it, and I once met a foreigner who
assured me that when he had once smelled this fruit he could never
be satisfied till he had eaten some of it. Its simple odor is generally
quite enough for all Europeans. It thrives well in Sumatra, Java, the
Spice Islands, and Celebes, and is found as far north as Mindanao.
On the continent forests of it exist on the Malay Peninsula, and it is
successfully raised as far north in Siam as the thirteenth or
fourteenth parallel. On the coast of the Bay of Bengal it is grown as
far north as Tenasserim, in Lat. 14° N. It flourishes well on all the
kinds of soils in this area, but all attempts have failed to introduce it
into India and also into the West Indies. Its Malay name durian
comes from duri, a thorn, and is thus applied on account of the
sharp, thorny points of the pyramidal tubercles that cover its shell.
The fact, that the Malay name is the one used wherever the fruit is
known, indicates that it originated in a Malay country, and this view
is strengthened by the circumstance that, while I was crossing
Sumatra, I passed through large forests mostly composed of these
trees in the high lands near the sources of the Palembang River.
Another far-famed fruit is the bread-fruit. It grows on a tree, the
Artocarpus incisa, which attains a height of forty or fifty feet. It will
be noticed at once by the stranger, on account of its enormous,
sharply-lobed leaves, which are frequently a foot wide and a foot
and a half long. The fruit has nearly the form of a melon, and is
attached by its stem directly to the trunk or limbs. It is regarded of
little value by the Malays, but farther east, in the Society Islands,
and other parts of the South Sea, it furnishes the natives with their
chief sustenance. Just before it is ripe it is cut into slices and fried,
and eaten with a thick, black molasses, obtained by boiling down the
sap of the gomuti-palm. When prepared in this manner it tastes
somewhat like a potato, except that it is very fibrous. The seeds of
this fruit in the South Sea are said, when roasted, to be as nice as
chestnuts, but I never saw the Malays make any use of them. From
the Pacific Islands it has been introduced into the West Indies and
tropical America. Another species of this genus, the A. integrifolia,
bears the huge “jack-fruit,” which very closely resembles the bread-
fruit. Sometimes it attains a weight of nearly seventy-five pounds, so
that one is a good load for a coolie. The only part which the natives
eat is a sweet, pulpy substance enveloping each seed.
June 16th.—This morning the gigantic mountain on Bali, Gunung
Agung, or “The Great Mountain,” towered up abeam of us against
the southern sky. According to Mr. Crawford it attains an elevation of
twelve thousand three hundred and seventy-nine feet, or four
hundred and thirty-three feet higher than the far-famed Peak of
Teneriffe.
These mountains are only a continuation of the chain which
traverses Java, and Bali may be regarded as almost a part of Java,
as it has quite the same flora and fauna, and is only separated from
that island by a narrow strait. Here the Asiatic fauna of Sumatra,
Borneo, and Java reaches its most eastern boundary. On Lombok,
the next island eastward, a wholly different fauna is seen, having
well-marked affinities with that of Australia. According to the
traditions of the Javanese, Sumatra, Java, Bali, Lombok, and
Sumbawa, were all formerly united, and afterward separated into
nine different parts, and when three thousand rainy reasons shall
have passed away they will be reunited. The dates of these
separations are given as follows:
Palembang (the eastern end of Sumatra) from Java, a. d. 1192.
Bali from Balembangan (the eastern end of Java), a. d. 1282.
Lombok from Sumbawa, a. d. 1350.
All these dates are absurdly recent, and besides, the separations,
in all probability, did not occur in the order given above. When we
compare the fauna of the continent with that of Sumatra, Java, and
Borneo, we find that Sumatra has the greatest number of species
identical with those of the Peninsula of Malacca; that Borneo has a
somewhat less proportion, and that Java has the largest number
peculiar to itself. Thence we conclude that Java was the first of these
islands that was separated from the continent, that Borneo was next
detached, and Sumatra at the latest period. Bali was probably
separated from Java at a yet more recent date.
Mr. Sclater was the first to notice the fact that the dividing line
between the Asiatic fauna and that of Australia must be drawn down
the Strait of Macassar, and this observation has only been confirmed
by all who have collected in those regions since. Mr. A. R. Wallace
further ascertained that this line should be continued southward,
through the Strait of Lombok, between the island of that name and
Bali. He visited the latter island, and thus contrasts its birds with
those of Lombok: “In Bali we have barbets, fruit-thrushes, and
woodpeckers; on passing over to Lombok these are seen no more,
but we have an abundance of cockatoos, honeysuckers, and brush-
turkeys (Megapodiidæ), which are equally unknown in Bali, and
every island farther west. The strait here is but fifteen miles wide, so
that we may pass in two hours from one great division of the earth
to another, differing as essentially in their animal life as Europe does
from America.”
The royal tiger of Sumatra and Java is also found on that part of
Bali nearest Java, but neither this nor any other feline animal exists
on Lombok.
Monkeys, squirrels, civets, and others are seen west of this
dividing line, but not east of it. Wild hogs are distributed over all the
larger islands from Sumatra to New Guinea, and even occur as far
eastward as Ceram. The flora of these islands is not divided in this
manner, but maintains quite the same character from the northern
end of Timur to the eastern end of Java.
In 1845 Mr. Earl pointed out the fact that Java, Sumatra, and
Borneo, all stand on a plateau which is only covered by a shallow
sea. They therefore not only were formerly connected, as the
similarity of their faunæ shows, but are at the present day, and a
line on the map, which indicates where the sea reaches a depth of
one hundred fathoms, shows exactly where the great basins of the
Pacific and Indian Oceans really begin. Northward this line unites the
Philippines to Asia, and also proves that Formosa, the Lew-Chew and
Japanese Islands, and the Kuriles, are all parts of the same great
continent. Judging from what is known of their fauna, Mr. Wallace
thinks the separation of the Philippines from the continent occurred
before that of Java, and since that epoch they have undergone very
considerable changes in their physical geography.
In 1478, when the Hindu religion was driven out of Java, it took
refuge in Bali, where it exists to the present day. The natives here,
as in India, are divided into four castes. The first and highest
includes only the priests; the second, the soldiers; the third, the
merchants; and the fourth, and lowest, comprises the common
laborers. According to Mr. Crawford, who visited the island, the wives
of the soldiers frequently sacrifice themselves by stabbing with the
kris, and the body is afterward burned, and “with the princes, the
sacrifice of one or two women is indispensable.” The high mountains
on Bali contain a number of lakes or tarns, which supply many
streams, and the natives are thus enabled to irrigate their land so
completely, that about twenty thousand tons of rice are annually
exported to other parts of the archipelago, after a population of
nearly three-quarters of a million is supplied. In 1861 Java had only
a population of three hundred and twenty-five to a square mile,
while Bali was supposed to have nearly five hundred, and it is
probably the most densely populated island in these seas at the
present time.
The Hindu religion also prevails over a part of Lombok. On this
island a huge mountain rises up, according to the trigonometrical
measurements of Baron van Carnbée, to a height of twelve thousand
three hundred and sixty English feet, and probably overtops every
other lofty peak in the whole archipelago.
CHAPTER IV.
CELEBES AND TIMUR.
June 18th.—We anchored this evening close in to the coast of

Celebes on a shallow plateau, which is really only a slightly-
submerged part of the island itself. This word Celebes is not of
native origin, and was probably introduced by the Portuguese, who
were the earliest Europeans that visited this island. It first appears in
the historical and descriptive writings of De Barros,[14] who informs
us that it was not discovered until 1525, fourteen years after the
Portuguese first came to the Moluccas; but at that time they were
only anxious to find the regions where the clove and the nutmeg
grew. Afterward they were induced to search for this island from the
rumors that came of the gold found here; and, indeed, to this day,
gold is obtained in the northern and southwestern peninsulas. At
first, Celebes was supposed to consist of many islands, and this
belief appears to have given it a name in a plural form. It consists of
a small, irregular, central area and four long limbs or peninsulas, and
De Cauto[15] very aptly describes it as “resembling in form a huge
grasshopper.” Two of these peninsulas extend to the south, and are
separated from each other by the Gulf of Boni: one takes an easterly
direction, and the other stretches away six degrees to the north and
northeast. In the southwest peninsula, which is the only one that
has been completely explored, two languages are spoken—the
Mangkasara, in the native tongue, or Mangkasa, in the Malay (of
which word, “Macassar,” the name of the Dutch capital, is only a
corruption), and the Wugi or Bugi, which was originally more
particularly limited to the coast of the Gulf of Boni. North of
Macassar, in the most western part of the island, is another people—
the Mandhar—who speak another language. On the island of Buton,
which ought to be considered a part of the peninsula east of the Gulf
of Boni, another language is spoken. The eastern peninsula is
unexplored. The northern contains the people speaking the
Gorontalo and the Menado languages.
The primitive religion of most of these natives is supposed to have
been some form of Hinduism. De Cauto says: “They have no
temples, but pray looking up to the skies with their heads raised,”
which he regards as conclusive evidence that “they had a knowledge
of the true God.” According to the records of the Macassar people,
[16] the Mohammedan religion was first taught them by a native of
Menangkabau, a province on the plateau in the interior of Sumatra,
north of the present city of Padang. This occurred just before the
arrival of the Portuguese in 1525, and the native annals say that the
doctrine of the false Prophet and of Christianity were presented to
the prince of Macassar at the same time, and that his advisers
pressed him to accept Mohammedanism, because “God would not
allow error to arrive before truth.”
In the interior live a people called by the coast tribes Turaju, who
are represented as head-hunters, and even cannibals. Barbosa[17]
makes a similar statement in regard to all the natives of this island in
his time. He says, when they came to the Moluccas to trade, they
were accustomed to ask the king of those islands to kindly deliver up
to them the persons he had condemned to death, that they might
gratify their palates on the bodies of such unfortunates, “as if asking
for a hog.”
As we steamed up the coast to Macassar, the mountains in the
interior came grandly into view. They appear much more connected
into chains than in Java. One of them, Lompo-batung, rises to a
height of eight thousand two hundred feet above the sea, and is
probably the loftiest peak on the whole island.
The harbor of Macassar is formed by a long, curving coral reef,
with its convex side from the shore. At a few places this reef rises
above the surface of the water and forms low islands; but, in the
heavy gales of the western monsoon, the sea frequently breaks over
it into the road with such violence as to drive most of the native
praus on shore. Near it were fleets of fishing-boats, and this was the
first place in these tropical seas where I found a fish that, according
to my taste, was as nice as those which come from the cold waters
that bathe our New-England shores.
In the road were many praus of forty or fifty tons’ burden, and
some even twice as large. In the beginning of the western monsoon
they go in great numbers to the Arru Islands, the principal
rendezvous[18] for the people of Ceram, Goram, the Ki Islands,
Tenimber, Baba, and the adjacent coast of New Guinea. Mr. Wallace,
who was particularly seeking the birds of paradise, went in one of
these rude vessels to the Arrus, a distance of one thousand miles.
When Mr. Jukes was at Port Essington, in January, 1845, two of
these praus were there. One had made the passage from Macassar
in ten, and another in fifteen days. But, on these long voyages,
many never return. In the last of the month a third came into that
port and reported that four others, more than had arrived safely, had
just foundered during a heavy gale, and that the crew of only one
was salved. Many go every year to the islands off the eastern end of
Ceram and to the neighboring coast of Papua, and sometimes along
its northern shores to Geelvink Bay. These long voyages indicate that
the Bugis are now what the Malays were when the Portuguese first
came to the East, namely, the great navigators and traders of the
archipelago. They carry to all these localities English calicoes and
cotton goods of their own manufacture, also Chinese gongs and
large quantities of arrack. They bring in return tortoise-shell,
mother-of-pearl shell, pearls, birds of paradise, and tripang, which
appears to be the common Malay name for all kinds of Holothurians,
or “sea-cucumbers.” These latter animals abound on every coral reef
throughout the archipelago, just above and below low-water level.
As many as twenty different sorts are recognized of perhaps half as
many species. That kind is considered the most valuable which is
found on the banks of coral sand which are bare, or nearly bare, at
low tide, and are covered with a short, green sea-weed. After the
animals are collected, the intestines are removed, and they are
boiled in sea-water, in some places with the leaves of the papaw,
and in others with the bark of a mangrove-tree which gives them a
bright-red color. After they have been boiled, they are buried in the
ground till the next day, when they are spread out to dry in the sun.
Sometimes they are not buried in the ground, but dried at once on a
framework of bamboo-splints over a fire. They are now ready to be
shipped to China, the only market for this disgusting article. There
the Celestials make of them one of their many favorite soups. It is
said that the Chinese cooks boil them some time with pieces of
sugar-cane to partially neutralize their rank flavor. Many are also
gathered in the Gulf of Siam and sent up the China Sea. Mr.
Crawfurd has been unable to discover any mention of tripang by the
Portuguese writers, and this he regards as one proof, among others,
“that the Chinese, who chiefly carry on this trade, had not yet
settled in the archipelago when the Portuguese first appeared in it.”
There are yearly shipped from Macassar some fourteen thousand
piculs of this article, of a value of nearly six hundred thousand
dollars! A few cargoes, chiefly of coffee, from Menado and the
interior, are exported each year directly to Europe, but ships usually
have to go to China for a return-freight. In 1847 Macassar was made
a free port, in imitation of Singapore.
Our steamer came alongside a well-built iron pier, the only one of
any kind I had yet seen in the East. Though the mail then came but
once a month, there seemed to be no great excitement. A small
group of soldiers, with red and yellow epaulets, came down and
looked on in a most unconcerned manner, while a number of coolies
gathered and began carrying the cargo on shore—for trucks and
drays are modern innovations that have not yet appeared in these
distant regions, not even to any considerable degree in Batavia. The
sea-water here is remarkably pure and clear. As we were hauling in
to the pier, several boys kept swimming round and round the ship,
and shouting out, “Képing tuam! képing tuan!” that is, “A small piece
of money, sir! a small piece of money, sir!” and I found that when I
threw a copper coin as large as a cent, so that it would strike the
water edgewise, even at a distance of ten feet from them, some one

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Elementary Science Methods A Constructivist Approach

Drawings and plans of Frank Lloyd Wright the early

Unspeakable Lynn Sacco

Global Inequalities, York W. Bradshaw and Michael Wallace

SAGE Publications, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

Cultures and societies in a changing world / Wendy Griswold. —

ISBN 978-1-4129-9054-7 (pbk.)

1. Culture. 2. Social change. I. Title.

1. Culture and the Cultural Diamond 1

3. Culture as a Social Creation 47

4. The Production, Distribution, and Reception of Culture 71

5. Identities, Problems, and Movements 97

1.1 The Cultural Diamond 15

national boundaries, economies, and politics. Using classical and contempo-

The Cultural Diamond

bewildering assortment of cultures, of course, but lately Americans have

made parochialism increasingly costly as well as naive. Technological

huge numbers of people—from sectarians in Mumbai to gang members in

Two Ways of Looking at Culture

“The Best That Has Been Thought and Known”

produced by rioting workers. The aristocrats, whom Arnold dismissed as

It is important to recognize this “traditional humanities viewpoint” as an

“That Complex Whole”

all-encompassing definition lacks the precision desired in the social sciences. A

As an example of this assumption, consider Peter Berger’s (1969) analysis

Again, this is a simplification to emphasize the contrast between the two

Connections: The Links Between

The Cultural Object

scraps to produce an object of beauty and utility—the quilt becomes a

The Cultural Diamond

Figure 1.1â•‡â•‡ The Cultural Diamond

cultural diamond is an accounting device intended to encourage a fuller

Although we gather from the records of Western nations these

June 15th.—At 8 a. m. we left our anchorage off Surabaya, and

Both of these great islands abound in forests, that yield large

Several fruits claim the second place in this scale. Some

June 18th.—We anchored this evening close in to the coast of

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