Patterns of culture
原文
Lesson 44
Patterns of culture
What influences us from the moment of birth?
Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment.
The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation,
but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at is most commonplace.
As a matter of fact, it is the other way around.
Traditional custom, taken the world over,
is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions,
no matter how aberrant.
Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter.
The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief,
and the very great varieties it may manifest.
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes.
He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.
Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes;
his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs.
John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual,
as against any way in which he can affect traditional custom,
is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue
against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family.
When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously,
the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation.
The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation
to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.
From the moment of his birth,
the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour.
By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture,
and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities,
its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities.
Every child that is born into his group will share them with him,
and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part.
There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom.
Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties,
the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted,
and some of these propositions have been violently opposed.
In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no
preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration.
In all the less controversial fields, like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae,
the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions.
In this way, we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say.
It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences
have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
Anthropology was by definition impossible,
as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive,
ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds.
It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication
where we no longer set our own belief against our neighbour's superstition.
It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural,
must be considered together, our own among the rest.
译文
第44课
文化模式
从我们出生的那一刻起，有哪些因素在影响着我们呢？
“定制”（Custom）通常并不被视为什么值得特别关注或重视的主题（即：它并不常被视作一个值得大肆讨论或重视的议题）。
我们觉得自己大脑的内部运作机制是特别值得研究的对象。
不过，就“定制”而言，我们有一套自己的思维方式；在大多数情况下，这种行为其实只是非常普通、常见的现象罢了。
事实上，情况恰恰相反。
这是一种传统习俗，已经传播到了世界各地。
这种由大量细致行为构成的整体，其复杂程度远远超出了任何一个人通过单独行动所能展现出来的能力。
无论这些行为多么反常（或离谱）。
然而，这其实只是问题中一个相当微不足道的方面罢了。
最重要的一点是：在人们的体验和信念中，个人习惯（即“习俗”或“传统”）起着主导性的作用。
以及它可能展现出的极其多样的形式。
没有人能够以纯粹、未受污染的眼光来看待这个世界；
他所看到的世界总是被特定的习俗、制度以及思维方式所塑造的。
即使在哲学探索中，他也无法超越这些刻板印象；
他对“真实”与“虚假”的概念依然会受到自己所属传统习俗的影响。
约翰·杜威曾严肃地指出：习俗在塑造个人行为方面所起的作用，
与个人试图改变传统习俗的能力相比，
就如同一个人母语的全部词汇量，
与他婴儿时期说过的那些被家庭语言所接纳的词语之间的比例一样微不足道。
当人们认真研究那些有机会自主发展的社会秩序时，
这些现象不过只是客观、事实性的观察结果罢了。
个人的生命历程，归根结底，就是一种适应过程。
遵循他所在社区中传统上流传下来的模式和标准。
从他出生的那一刻起，
他出生所处的风俗习惯塑造了他的经历和行为方式。
等到他能够说话的时候，他就已经完全融入了自己所处文化的圈子中，成为了那个文化环境中的“小成员”了。
等到他长大到可以参与这些活动的时候……
它的习惯就是他的习惯，它的信念就是他的信念，它所认为的不可能之事，也就是他所认为的不可能之事。
每个出生在这个群体中的孩子都会与他分享这些东西。
而任何一个出生在地球另一端的孩子，永远也无法达到那目标的千分之一（即永远无法达到那个目标）。
没有哪个社会问题比“习俗的作用”更值得我们去深入了解的了。
直到我们能够充分理解这些自然规律及其多样性（即各种自然现象的成因与表现形式）为止……
人类生活中那些最复杂、最难以理解的因素，或许永远都无法被我们完全弄清楚。
只有当某些初步的假设或前提被接受之后，对“定制”（customization）的研究才有可能带来利润。
其中一些提议遭到了强烈的反对。
首先，任何科学研究都必须确保不存在（某种干扰或错误因素）。
在它所选中的各项内容中，会对其中某一项给予优先权（即给予更高的权重或更重要的考虑）。
在所有争议较少的领域中，比如对仙人掌、白蚁的研究，或者对星云本质的探索，
必要的学习方法是：将相关的学习材料整理成组，并记录下所有可能存在的变体形式和各种条件。
通过这种方式，我们了解了所有关于天文学定律的知识，或者比如说，关于社会性昆虫习性的知识。
只有在研究人类自身时，那些主要的社会科学（如社会学、心理学等）才能真正发挥其作用（或：只有通过研究人类自身，这些社会科学才能获得深刻的理解和发展的动力）。
他们已经将研究重点从对某一特定地方性文化现象的探讨，转向了对西方文明的研究。
从定义上来说，人类学本身就是不可能存在的（或者说，人类学的研究是不可能完成的）。
只要我们与原始人之间存在这些差异（或：只要我们与原始人之间存在这些区别），
我们（指那些自认为是文明的人）以及那些被视为“野蛮人”或“异教徒”的人，曾经对人们的思想产生了巨大的影响（即控制了人们的观念和信仰）。
首先，必须达到那种高度的成熟度或复杂性才行。
在我们不再将自己的信仰与邻居的迷信对立起来的地方，
我们必须认识到：那些基于相同前提（比如超自然信仰）的制度，
都应该被一并考虑——包括我们自己的信仰在内。