1. 3. According to the Spradley article, define and give an example of "tacit" and "explicit" culture.
How can anthropologists discover these two kinds of culture? (Use examples from textbook
chapter or film.)
Culture is the learned, symbolic, at least partially adaptive and ever changing patterns of
behavior and meaning shared by members of a group (Nanda 24). Spradley's article has
discussed about the elaborated meaning of the above definition.
According to the article, Spradley has explained that the cultural knowledge exists in two
levels of consciousness. The first level of consciousness being Explicit Culture incorporates that
part of our life in which we know about the phenomenon of things going on around us and we
can communicate about this to others with relative ease (Spradley 13). Spradley gives a
convincing example of George Hicks in Little Laurel Valley. There are so many other examples
of Explicit culture around us because the "Explicit Culture" is the governing ground for the
people as seen from the third observer. As seen in the video, the anthropologist is particularly
interested in how the lives of the Oaxaca women changed from the rural farming women to the
urban women who go to school (Video 3:29). The trend of women going to school in Oaxaca
was an evolving culture which was visible to the anthropologist who were at Oaxaca for
fieldwork and those women actually wanted to tell Howell what it was to be a literate Oaxaca
women which has great difference than being not able to read and write. Explicit culture has the
concrete presence so discovery of this level of cultural consciousness should be easy for
anthropologist because they can find about Explicit Culture when they go for a fieldwork at a
particular place.
The second level of consciousness as Spradley explains in his article is Tacit Culture.
Subconscious and unconscious aspect of one's culture is said to be a part of a tacit culture. For
example, when we stand at the checkout in the store, if there are people already in the counter
before us we just go behind and stand in a queue. There is no actual conscious identification of
why we do that because we don't have particular direction that we cannot go up to the counter
until the cashier is done with the previous customer and also there are no protocols governing
what is the distance between two people in the line. But still we are able to this because the
knowledge of being in queue and waiting for our turn lies in the subconscious state of our mind.
Anthropologist can discover Tacit culture by sound observation of the weird pattern in the
peoples activities which they do without even knowing what they are doing. Another example
we can see from the video is that women have been doing the work of the household because
there is some prevalent culture in Oaxaca that has particularly stated women are supposed to the
work of household. But, how do they learn to make tortillas? They acquire this knowledge from
the day to day observation but it in their subconscious as "Tacit Culture" which is not really
noticeable.