When I was a graduate student in anthropology, I had a professor who described culture through a story. He said, there was a woman who, before cooking a roast, would cut the end off the meat. Anthropologist asked her, why do you cut the end off of the meat before you roast it? The woman answered, well I don't know. I learned how to do it that way from my mother. So the anthropologist went to the woman's mother and said, I talked to your daughter and asked why she cut off the end of the meat before roasting it. She said she didn't know. She had learned how to cook the roast from you. So I'm curious. Why do you cut off the end of the roast before you cook it. The mother said, to tell you the truth I really don't know. I learned to cook from my mother, that's the way she did it. So the anthropologist asked about the woman's mother, the original woman's grandmother. She was still alive, though quite aged already. So the anthropologist went to talk to her. He said, talked to your daughter and your grand daughter. They both cut off the end of the meat before they roast it. Your daughter said she had learned the technique from you, and your granddaughter said she had learned it from her mother, your daughter. So, I'm curious. Why is you cut off the end of the meat before roasting it? The old woman said, wait here. And she got up and went to the pantry came back with a roasting pan. She said the the anthropologist see the pan wasn't long enough for the roast. The idea of culture here is that it gets passed down over time. And that is the subject of this final unit of the course. How and why culture gets transmitted over time but also importantly how and why it changes when it does. We need to think of culture as a living dynamic phenomenon. It's not static once and for all. While people sometimes refer to traditions as handed down from quote, time in memorial, unquote, the truth is that culture is always changing. When we're talking about sun teams such as for example, a working group assembled to accomplish a specific with a larger business enterprise. The culture of the team maybe very recently created. The new team culture would be formed initially by cultural boundary crossings such as we discussed in unit 2. So the actual team culture as opposed to the different cultural backgrounds brought to the team by the members may have a very short lifespan. In other cases such as the United States as a team, the culture may have greater time death. The American flag which we discussed in previous lectures as a dominant symbol, and a component of American culture for example, has roots in earlier variance going back to the revolutionary war period. The original American flag pictured here appears to have been a variant of the British flag, and specifically the flag used by the British East India company. In the American case the 1777 resolution of the Second Continental Congress specified and I quote here. That the flag of the 13 United States be 13 stripes, alternate red and white. That the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field representing a new constellation. Before there was even a constitution with it's will of people there was something that resembled the contemporary American flag, that one looked like this. Each time state were added to the union the flag had to be modified. In fact, the most recent modification took place on 1959, when Hawaii became the fiftieth state. I was a child then. In fact when I moved into my current house, I found in the attic an old American flag, has only 48 stars. This is it here. So culture changes. You can see those changes easily during a lifetime. Our central questions for this unit are why and how does culture get transmitted and why and how does it change. Most specifically I will be asking us to examine the forces that are at work on the motion of culture, the next video will focus on language as one example.
