Redfield p 1-24 Reflections

               Near the beginning of the reading, Redfield offers a very simple definition of culture: providing for life’s needs in an orderly way that makes sense to the people living under it. I like this. It sums up culture very well, perhaps because it is so vague. When we had to define culture in class, I tried to list all the elements I could think of that make up a culture; food, language, traditions etc. These are all ways of providing for life’s needs.

               Redfield talks a lot about the class structure of culture. He discusses many models of culture, many ways that a culture can be measured or observed; the most interesting to me was Redfield’s discussion of cultures like the Tiv, a massive society that feels connected to each other as neighbors and friends, as opposed to a stratified culture with distinct class differences. These distinct models of culture call to mind Redfield’s simple definition, that culture is an orderly way of providing for life’s needs. I wonder whether all people in a culture provide for their needs in the same way, but higher classes have better access to recourses that satisfy their needs; or whether rich and poor people within a culture provide for their needs in different ways. Probably a bit of both.

               Class divisions cause many problems in a culture. Could a stratified culture move toward one where members think of each other as part of a whole? I wonder if the Tiv structure could work in a culture like the US, which is racially and economically diverse, or whether it could only work with a people who are fairly homogenous.