Peter Farb: Culture

Peter Farb was American academic and writer. Explore interesting quotes on culture.
Peter Farb: 184   quotes 0   likes

“The environment does not determine the character of human culture; it merely sets the outer limits.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968), p. 38

“Culture is all the things and ideas ever devised by humans working and living together.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968), p. 19

Idea

“The weakness of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis… the impossibility of generalizing about entire cultures and then attributing these generalizations to the language spoken …is to leave numerous facts about culture unexplained.”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)
Context: The weakness of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis... the impossibility of generalizing about entire cultures and then attributing these generalizations to the language spoken... is to leave numerous facts about culture unexplained. The great religions of the world... have flourished among diverse peoples who speak languages with sharply different grammars.... Cultures as diverse as the Aztec Empire of Mexico and the Ute hunting bands of the Great Basin spoke very closely related tongues.

“No culture can be explained in terms of one or more leaders”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: We are in the habit of thinking in terms of great leaders largely because the leaders themselves want it that way. The pharaohs ordered that a record of their accomplishments be carved on stone; medieval nobles subsidized troubadours to sing their praises; today's world leaders have large staffs of public-relations consultants. No culture can be explained in terms of one or more leaders...<!-- p. 93

“The problem they had to solve was the same as any messianic movement: how to exist with an alien culture yet remain spiritually autonomous.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: The Ghost Dance made its unfulfillable promises at a time when the Indians were ready to rebel. The teachings of the Native American Church spread at a time when the Indians were ready to admit defeat.... The problem they had to solve was the same as any messianic movement: how to exist with an alien culture yet remain spiritually autonomous. The solution had been to borrow freely from White culture while salvaging what is considered important in Indian religious thought.<!-- p. 269

Problem

“Hopi culture… instead thinks… The span of time the growing takes is not the important thing, but rather the way in which the event of growth follows the event of planting. The Hopi is concerned that the sequence of events in the construction of a building be in the correct order, not that it takes a certain amount of time to complete the job.”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)
Context: Whorf asked... Do the Hopi and European cultures... conceptualize reality in different ways? And his answer was that they do. Whereas European cultures are organized in terms of space and time, the Hopi culture, Whorf believed, emphasizes events. To speakers of European languages, time is a commodity that occurs between fixed points and can be measured. Time is said to be wasted or saved... their economic systems emphasize wages paid for the amount of time worked, rent for the time a dwelling is occupied, interest for the time money is loaned. Hopi culture... instead thinks... The span of time the growing takes is not the important thing, but rather the way in which the event of growth follows the event of planting. The Hopi is concerned that the sequence of events in the construction of a building be in the correct order, not that it takes a certain amount of time to complete the job.

Way , Thinking , Time

“At various stages of evolution, the Indian cultures were presented with only a limited number of possibilities. The members of certain kinds of societies”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: At various stages of evolution, the Indian cultures were presented with only a limited number of possibilities. The members of certain kinds of societies—the small band, the large band, the tribe, the chiefdom, the state, and variations of these—tended to make characteristic choices concerning religion, law, government, and art... Such choices were not... consciously made... For a particular society, they either worked or they did not work.<!-- p. 212

“To do nothing now is to let our children lament that they never knew the magnificent diversity of humankind because our generation let disappear those cultures that might have taught it to them.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968), p. 276

Children

“The Indians have not only refused to vanish, but have… managed to salvage a part of their native culture through revitalization and messianic movements.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: The Indians have not only refused to vanish, but have... managed to salvage a part of their native culture through revitalization and messianic movements.... they are of further interest to anthropologists for the light they shed on such movements in general.<!-- p. 271

Parting

“An unusual manifestation of it is when the whole dominant culture takes up the ways of the conquered.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)
Context: Voluntary assimilation, known as Indianization in the Americas, is one response that has occurred at other places and in other times when two cultures collided. An unusual manifestation of it is when the whole dominant culture takes up the ways of the conquered. That does not happen very often, but it did occur when the Hyksos conquered Egypt about 1700 B. C. and when the Romans conquered the Greeks in the second century B. C.

Way

“As this cultural inadequacy becomes apparent even to the most conservative of its members, the culture may deteriorate to such an extent that it literally dies.”

Peter Farb

p, 125
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

“All routinized religions today (including the Native American Church, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) are successful descendents of what originated as messianic movements—that is, the vision of a new way of life for a culture under extreme stress.”

Peter Farb

p, 125
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Life , Religion , Way , Success

“The victory… was complete except for one final indignity. That was to Americanize the Indian… to exterminate the cultures along with the Indians. …Orders went out from Washington that all male Indians must cut their hair short, even though many Indians believed that long hair had supernatural significance. …Army reinforcements were sent to the reservations to carry out the order, and in some cases Indians had to be shackled before they submitted. …attention of the Americanizers was concentrated on the Indian children, who were snatched from their families and shipped to boarding schools far from their homes… usually … for eight years, during which time they were not permitted to see their parents, relatives, or friends. Anything Indian—dress, language, religious practices, even outlook on life… was uncompromisingly prohibited. …They had suffered psychological death at an early age.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Life , Death , Children , Age

“The astonishing cluster of them [geniuses] that appeared in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. …what changed was the culture, which allowed exceptional minds to flourish.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Appearance , Change

“After the Spaniards settled the Southwest, the Navajo began another burst of cultural borrowing—or, more actually, stealing. Spanish ranches and villages were so depleted of horses—not to mention sheep—that by 1775 the Spaniards had to send to Europe for 1,500 additional horses. After the Pueblo Rebellion against the Spaniards was put down in 1692, many Pueblo took refuge with their Navajo neighbors—and taught them how to weave blankets, a skill for which the Navajo are still noted, and to make pottery. During this time the Navajo probably absorbed many Pueblo religious and social ideas and customs as well, such as ceremonial paraphernalia and possibly the Pueblo class system.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Idea , Time , Horse

“If you read Peter Farb's book, Man's Rise of Civilization, he goes through all these different cultures at first contact, and they very often figure out in very different ways, but typically the things that were in common among them, were that the idea of the accumulation of private property beyond your needs was considered a mental illness.”

Peter Farb

Thom Hartmann, in the documentary film "I Am" written, directed, and narrated by Tom Shadyac
Disputed

Books , Way , Idea , Reading

“The Hopewell fused elements of the Adena, the Archaic, and other Woodland patterns of life. Thus, it cannot technically be identified as a culture. …Rather, the Hopewell people were an amalgam of many societies whose customs varied greatly, but who were bound together by… a cult of the dead and a trade bond… a network of trade linked widely separated areas of the continent.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Life , People , Dead

“To say that the invention "was in the air" or "the times were ripe for it" are just other ways of stating that the inventors did not do the inventing, but that the cultures did.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Way , Time

“The culture of the Anasazi is still the best known of all prehistoric southwestern cultures. …Their architecture… is distinctly their own, and unique among all the southwestern cultures.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

“Today's American bemoans the extermination of the passenger pigeon and the threatened extinction of the whooping crane and the ivory billed woodpecker; he contributes to conservation organizations that seek to preserve the Hawaiian goose, the sea otter of the Aleutian Islands, the lizard of the Galapágos Islands… But who ever shed a tear over the loss of the native American cultures?”

Peter Farb

1st edition
Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Tear , Loss , Sea