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Contents 1 Give a brief example to illustrate what "culture substitutes itself to nature" might mean. 2 Assuming that "race" is a cultural matter, how would some of the authors on culture presented by Duranti develop this assumption? 3 How would a concern with class (inequality, etc.) be handled within a cultural framework? 4 Which of the theories might make it difficult to deal with social stratification?

Give a brief example to illustrate what "culture substitutes itself to nature" might mean.

Lévi-Strauss and Duranti describe the tug-of-war between cultural behavior and biologically prescribed instinct or behavior. In the second paragraph Lévi-Strauss introduces the problem stating that "Man is both a biolgical being and a social individual". Duranti frames the questions in terms of how culture mediates, or to use his illustration, triangulates, biological action in the proceess of socialization which is how "thinking, speaking and acting" are modified in order to be acceptable to the group outside the individuals family (Duranti 26).

Duranti suggests that when people eager to see a movie form a line in order to purchase entrance tickets, there are subsituting a biolgoical urge for entertainment or relaxation for a culturally determined set of rules for fullfilling those needs. In another example, Duranti concludes that the act of knocking on a door is a culturally modified behavior for which biologically would be the urge to knock down the door. Similarily, we can hypothesize on the cultural geneology of the door. Do we have doors to contrain the biolgical urge that someone has to enter without permission, and what would a person today do if there was not a door, knock on the door frame, or ask persmission to enter while walking through?

Assuming that "race" is a cultural matter, how would some of the authors on culture presented by Duranti develop this assumption?

How would a concern with class (inequality, etc.) be handled within a cultural framework?

Which of the theories might make it difficult to deal with social stratification?

I am not entirely satisfied with this answer but it seems to me that all the theories of culture, and the mechanisms whereby culture can be understood and identified, that Duranti surveys could explain social stratification, or at least, why social stratification exits as a culturally defineable fact.

One could cite Propositional knowledge of social stratification as why it [the stratification] occurs and who they are, and what do to about it, whether to avoid, help, blame, or bemoan social stratification. Goodenough's cognitive view could be referenced as a culturally constructed set of ideas that exists due to terminology defining this propositional knowledge and shared through public discourse to a point where a community created idea exists and is shared through participation.

Explaining social stratification under the umbrella of socially distributed knowledge is somewhat more tricky. While this model rebukes the propositional idea that knowledge exists as an idependant entity, it does not to my satisfaction (at this point) reconcile how distributed knowledge exists independant of individual acquistion and in varying degrees among individuals and yet somehow is present in community prescribed meaning containted in symbolic knowledge (communication). Clearly social-stratification means something different between one person and another and yet it has a meaning that is contained within the word that I (or YOU) can use to plant an idea (propositional knowledge) in my head.

Does this mean that distributed knowledge is accurate or is it that, as the theory of culture as communication points out, similar to 'bachelor' and 'lie', which are symbols that represent knowledge based on ones individual experience. This seems to put the argument back closer to the cognitive view. Lastly, it seems that culture as a system of practice is another way to describe an idea similar to "we [culture is] are what we do". Habitus, or embodied experience, history, disposition, and the resulting action could explain why social stratification acquires meaning. For example, as a child listens to and participates in the construction of what social stratification means, he or she might then go out into the community and practice this acquired meaning, what he or she has internalized as social stratification. Could this practice be termed propositional, communicative, and socially distributive culture?

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