Culture
Children by age three are at least sometimes permanently expelled from the household and form groups called age-bands consisting of those within the same age group. The 'Junior Group' consists of children from the ages of three to eight and the 'Senior Group' consists of those between eight and thirteen. No adults look after the children, who teach each other the basics of survival. However, it is not certain whether this practice is typical Ik tradition or merely triggered by unusual famine conditions. Tainter proposes this fragmentation to be an artifact of the dire circumstances where each person must depend on their own resources alone to find food and the age peers band together primarily to protect themselves from older stronger children who would take their food. He also argues that the present social fragmentation is the result of extreme deprivation on a more complex and functional culture, an argument also made by Turnbull.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“The first time many women hold their tiny babies, they are apt to feel as clumsy and incompetent as any man. The difference is that our culture tells them they’re not supposed to feel that way. Our culture assumes that they will quickly learn how to be a mother, and that assumption rubs off on most women—so they learn.”
—Pamela Patrick Novotny (20th century)