Cultural Anthropology: A Toolkit for a Global Age - Chapter 2: Culture - PDF

# Chapter 2 Culture ## Introduction - Students in Las Vegas, Nevada demand tougher gun laws after the fatal 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. - How do we understand gun culture in the United States? ## The Parkland Shooting - On February 14, 2018, a nineteen-year-old former student w...

# Chapter 2 Culture ## Introduction - Students in Las Vegas, Nevada demand tougher gun laws after the fatal 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida. - How do we understand gun culture in the United States? ## The Parkland Shooting - On February 14, 2018, a nineteen-year-old former student walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and began shooting. - He fired continuously for six minutes. - Seventeen students and staff were killed: - Alyssa Alhadeff, age 14 - Scott Beigel, 35 - Martin Duque, 14 - Nicholas Dworet, 17 - Aaron Feis, 37 - Jaime Guttenberg, 14 - Chris Hixon, 49 - Luke Hoyer, 15 - Cara Loughran, 14 - Gina Montalto, 14 - Joaquin Oliver, 17 - Alaina Petty, 14 - Meadow Pollack, 18 - Helena Ramsay, 17 - Alex Schachter, 14 - Carmen Schentrup, 16 - Peter Wang, 15 - Seventeen more were injured. ## Gun Culture in the United States - The young gunman set down his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle made by Smith and Wesson Corporation, along with multiple ammunition clips, and blended in with the hundreds of students fleeing the campus. - This was the twenty-fifth fatal school shooting in the 20 years since the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado gripped the nation in 1999. - One Parkland student stated: "For our generation, it’s not a question of if there will be a shooting, but when." ## American Ownership of Firearms - Americans own an estimated 400 million firearms for a population of 320 million people, more than double the ratio per capita of any country in the world. - Forty percent of households and thirty percent of individuals own guns. - In 2017, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported 39,773 deaths by firearms, including 23,854 suicides and nearly 14,542 homicides. - Since 1968, the year statistics began to be recorded, there have been 1,516,863 gun-related deaths in U.S. territory, more than in all the wars in U.S. history. ## Understanding Gun Culture - How do we understand the roots of American gun culture? - A device designed to penetrate and rip apart flesh at a distance has become more than its component parts. - Owners say they buy guns for protection, hunting, and sports. - For some men, hunting together is an outdoor tradition, an expression of their masculinity, and a kind of social glue connecting generations of men and families and communities. - However, the victims of gun violence are disproportionately young people, poor people, and people of color. ## The #NeverAgain Movement - In the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, survivors and students began to organize. - While many politicians offered their thoughts and prayers and the National Rifle Association mobilized to defend gun rights, MSD students demanded legislative action on gun safety measures. - They marched, organized, lobbied, and generated a mass movement on social media, #NeverAgain. - Never Again MSD pushed the Florida legislature to raise the minimum age to purchase a gun from eighteen to twenty-one, impose a waiting period, and require a background check. - Students across the country walked out of classes, demanding action. - On March 24, 2018, in March For Our Lives rallies across the country, student leaders pleaded for common sense gun control and to protect their lives. ## Anthropology and Culture - Anthropologists work to understand complex and diverse human experiences. - We conduct reasoned, careful research into people's cultures, their norms, values, symbols, and ways of seeing the world. - We consider the cultural organizations people create to promote and sustain certain cultural norms and values. - We consider the strategies people use to challenge and renegotiate those norms. - By the end of this chapter you will gain a new set of tools, both research strategies and analytical perspectives, to make sense of "senseless" gun violence in American culture. ## Key Concepts to Consider * What is culture? * How has the culture concept developed in anthropology? * How are culture and power related? * How much of who you are is shaped by biology, and how much by culture? * How is culture created? * How is globalization transforming culture? ## What is Culture? - Culture is a system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, shared, and contested by a group of people. - Culture is our guide for understanding and interacting with the people and the world around us. - It includes shared norms, values, symbols, mental maps of reality, and material objects, as well as structures of power, including the media, education, religion, and politics. - A cultural group may be large or small, and it may have within it significant diversity of region, religion, race, gender, sexuality, class, generation, and ethnic identity. - Ultimately, the culture that we learn has the potential to shape our ideas of what is normal and natural, what we can say and do, and even what we can think. ## Culture is Learned and Taught - Humans do not genetically inherit culture. - We learn culture throughout our lives from the people and organizations that surround us. - Anthropologists call the process of learning culture enculturation. - Some aspects of culture are learned through formal instruction: English classes in school, religious instruction, visits to the doctor, history lessons, dance classes. - Other processes of enculturation are informal and even unconscious as we absorb culture from family, friends, and the media. - All humans are capable of learning any culture they are exposed to. - While the process of social learning and passing information across generations is not unique to humans, humans have developed a unique capacity for culture. ## Culture is Shared Yet Contested - No individual has his or her own culture. - Culture is a shared experience developed as a result of living as a member of a group. - Through enculturation, humans learn how to communicate and establish patterns of behavior that allow us to live in community. - Cultures are shared by groups, large and small. - There may be smaller cultures within larger cultures. - While culture is shared by members of groups, it is also constantly changing. - Cultural institutions serve as structures for promoting enculturation, but they also serve as arenas for debating and challenging core cultural beliefs and behaviors. - Intense debates erupt over school curriculums, medical practices, media content, religious practices, and government policies as members of a culture engage in sometimes dramatic confrontations about their collective purpose and direction. ## Culture is Symbolic and Material - Through enculturation, the members of a culture develop a shared body of cultural knowledge and patterns of behavior. - The elements of a culture powerfully frame what its participants say, what they do, and even what they think is possible and impossible, real or unreal. - While anthropologists no longer think of culture as a completely separate, unique possession of a specific group of people, many argue that a common cultural core exists. - Norms, values, symbols, and mental maps of reality are four elements that an anthropologist may consider in attempting to understand the complex workings of a culture. ### Norms - Norms are ideas or rules about how people should behave in particular situations or toward certain other people. - Norms may include what to wear on certain occasions, what you can say in polite company, how younger people should treat older people, and whom you can date. - Many norms are not written down. - We learn them consciously and unconsciously and incorporate them into our patterns of daily living. - Other norms are formalized in writing and made publicly available, such as a country's laws, a system of medical or business ethics, or the code of academic integrity in your college or university. - Norms may vary for segments of the population, imposing different expectations on men and women, for instance, or children and adults. - Cultural norms may be widely accepted, but they also may be debated, challenged, and changed, particularly when norms enforced by a dominant group disadvantage or oppress a minority within the population. ### Values - Values are fundamental beliefs about what is important, what makes a good life, and what is true, right, and beautiful. - Values reflect shared ultimate standards that should guide people's behavior, as well as goals that people feel are important for themselves, their families, and their community. - Cultural values are not fixed. - They can be debated and contested. - They may have varying degrees of influence. - Ultimately, values are not simply platitudes about people's ideals about the good life. - Values are powerful cultural tools for clarifying cultural goals and motivating people to action. - When enshrined in law, values can become powerful political and economic tools. - Values can be so potent that some people are willing to kill or die for them. ### Symbols - Cultures include complex systems of symbols and symbolic actions in realms such as language, art, religion, politics, and economics. - Symbols convey meaning to other participants. - We are immersed in worlds of symbols that we create. - A symbol is something that stands for something else. - Language enables humans to communicate abstract ideas through the symbols of written and spoken words, as well as unspoken sounds and gestures. ## Mental Maps of Reality - Mental maps of reality are "maps" that humans construct of what kinds of people and what kinds of things exist. - Because the world presents overwhelming quantities of data to our senses, our brains create shortcuts—maps—to navigate our experience and organize all the data that come our way. - Mental maps organize the world into categories that help us sort out our experiences and what they mean. - From our general mental maps we can then dig deeper as required. - Mental maps are shaped through enculturation, but they are not fixed. - Globalization continues to put pressure on mental maps of reality as people on the planet are drawn into closer contact with the world's diversity. ### Two Important Functions 1. **Classifying Reality**: Mental maps classify reality. - Starting in the eighteenth century, European naturalists such as Carolus Linnaeus began creating systems of classification for the natural world. - Our cultures' mental maps seek to classify reality—everything from units of time to what is considered food to who is considered a relative—though often a culture's mental maps are drawn from the distinct vantage point of those in power. 2. **Assigning Meaning**: Mental maps assign meaning to what has been classified. - For example, we divide the life span into categories—infants, children, adolescents, teenagers, young adults, adults, and seniors—but then we give different values to different ages. - In the United States, these categories determine at what age you can marry, have sex, drink alcohol, drive, vote, go to war, stand trial, retire, or collect Social Security and Medicare benefits. - By assuming our mental maps of reality are natural, fixed, and universal, we risk misunderstanding and disregarding others' cultural values. ## Ethnocentrism, Cultural Relativism, and Human Rights - Anthropology challenges the strong human tendency toward ethnocentrism, the belief that one's own culture or way of life is normal, natural, or even superior. - Ethnocentrism involves the tendency to use one's own culture to evaluate and judge the cultural ideas and practices of others. - With intensifying globalization, the world's people are increasingly confronting the diversity of global cultures. - Anthropology seeks to broaden our worldview, to enable people to see their own culture as one expression within the context of global cultural diversity, and to recognize that what may seem unusual or unnatural from one cultural perspective may be normal and commonplace from another. ### Cultural Relativism - For generations, anthropologists have adopted an approach to cross-cultural research known as cultural relativism to counteract the effects of ethnocentrism on our work. - Cultural relativism calls for the suspension of judgment while attempting to understand a group's beliefs and practices within their own cultural context. - Anthropologists begin with the assumption that shared norms, values, beliefs, and practices make sense to the participants in a culture. - The anthropologist’s task is first to understand a culture’s internal logic and system of meaning. - Anthropologists seek to objectively, accurately, and sensitively represent the diversity of human life and culture. ### Human Rights - Although anthropologists may struggle with situations in which the cultural practices they are studying do not match their own ideas of fairness and justice, the commitment to a research strategy of cultural relativism does not require anthropologists to ignore their own sense of right and wrong, disregard international standards of human rights, or defend the cultural practices of a particular group. - Anthropologists frequently raise challenging questions on matters of human rights, including the following: - Are there international human rights standards that should be available to all humans regardless of their particular culture or religion? - What is a particular culture’s ability to meet the basic human needs of its people, or of certain segments of a population that may be marginalized—needs for food, shelter, health, education, safety, and equal treatment under the law? - The American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights draws heavily on international principles as articulated in three United Nations documents: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights. - The AAA’s statement also warns against an overreliance on the abstract legal uniformity of Western traditions. - Each anthropologist must choose how to apply international standards of human rights to cultural practices considered in his or her research. ## How is Culture Created? - Culture does not emerge out of the blue. - It is learned and taught through the process of enculturation. - It is created over time, shaped by people and the institutions they establish in relationship to the environment around them. - Culture is not fixed. - It is invented, changed, contested, and negotiated. - It is not bounded. - It moves and flows across regions and between people.. - We can analyze the processes through which culture is created. - Let's consider the consumer culture that has become so central to contemporary life. ## Creating Consumer Culture - In many parts of the world, consumerism has become more than an economic activity. - It is a way of life, a way of looking at the world—a culture. - The culture of consumerism includes norms, values, beliefs, practices, and institutions that have become commonplace and accepted as normal and that cultivate the desire to acquire consumer goods to enhance one's lifestyle. ### The Protestant Ethic - The German political philosopher Max Weber linked the origins of capitalism in Europe directly to the cultural values of Protestant Christianity that developed in the seventeenth century. - Weber considered the “Protestant ethic” to be central to the accumulation of capital. ### The Culture of Consumption - Advertising, marketing, and financial services industries work to transform the cultural values of frugality, modesty, and self-denial of the old Protestant ethic into patterns of spending and consumption associated with acquiring the material goods of a middle-class lifestyle. - Many key cultural rituals now focus on consumption. - The culture of consumerism has become so powerful that it successfully promotes spending and consumption even when people don't have money. <start_of_image> Cities, Towns, and Consumer Culture - College students are not immune to efforts to create a consumer culture. - They are deeply immersed in it. - Ask yourself what you need to have in order to feel like an average college student and then think about all of the things that you own. - Consider whether you want these things or whether you need these things. - Analyze the ways in which the desire to acquire these things—to consume them — was aroused and cultivated. - Today, through global marketing and media advertising campaigns, increased trade, and rising migration, the desire for this lifestyle is being promoted around the world. ## How Is Globalization Transforming Culture? - Cultures have never been made up of completely isolated or bounded groups of people located in a particular place. - Today's flows of globalization are intensifying the exchange and diffusion of people, ideas, and goods, creating more interaction and engagement among cultures. - Let's consider three key interrelated effects of globalization on local cultures: homogenization, the global flows of culture through migration, and increased cosmopolitanism. ## The Global and Local in Tension: Homogenizing or Diversifying - The expansion of global corporations, products, and markets has led some anthropologists and cultural activists to warn of a homogenized, global culture dominated by McDonald's, Levi's, Coca-Cola, CNN, Hollywood, and U.S. cultural values. - Will the spread of this culture-fueled by goods, images, and ideas from Western cultures—create a homogenizing process that will diminish the diversity of the world's cultures as foreign influences inundate local practices, products, and ways of thinking? - Instead of homogenization, the result of globalization is often hybridization, a mixing or incorporation and reworking of the influences of other cultures into a community's beliefs and practices. - Global encounters may even transform global practices and commodities to reflect more local cultural character. ### Examples of Globalization and Local Culture - **McDonald’s**: Launched in the 1940s in San Bernardino, California, McDonald’s operates in 119 countries. - Today, as the company has expanded it has adapted its menu in response to local tastes and culinary traditions, local laws, and religious beliefs. - **Blue Jeans**: Americans love their blue jeans. - They are comfortable yet tough, intimate yet anonymous. - They shape to fit the contours of our bodies. - You can dress them up or dress them down. - Blue jeans are also a global fashion phenomenon. - On average, people worldwide own 2.6 pairs and wear them 3.5 days a week. - On any given day, the majority of people in the world may be wearing blue jeans. - This is a simple pair of jeans that passes through many hands in a global production process. - Designed and commissioned by global corporations, jeans are made in sixty to seventy countries by 30-40 million workers, primarily young women laboring in sweatshop conditions in developing countries. - They are advertised by global corporations that project desired values of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and individualism onto a simple pair of pants. - They can reveal local expressions of identity, as in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil or in Germany. ## Migration and the Global Flows of Culture - The movement of people in large numbers within and across national boundaries associated with contemporary globalization reveals that cultures are not necessarily bound to a particular geographic location. People migrate with their cultural beliefs and practices. - People incorporate the cultural practices of their homelands into their new communities. - They build links to their homelands through which culture continues to be exchanged. ### Examples of Migration and Culture Change - **Mexican New York**: Robert Smith's book Mexican New York reveals one example of the deep transnational connections—links across national borders—that have become increasingly common in today's globalizing world. - **Religious Practices**: A charismatic speaker from Brazil can lead thousands of Brazilians gathered in a Boston auditorium in worship by satellite hookup. ## Increasing Cosmopolitanism - A third significant effect of globalization on culture is that the increasing flow of people, ideas, and products has allowed worldwide access to cultural patterns that are new, innovative, and stimulating. - Local cultures are exposed to a greater range of cultural ideas and products. - Globalization means that communities in the most remote parts of the world increasingly participate in experiences that bridge and link cultural practices, norms, and values across great distances, leading to what some scholars have called a new cosmopolitanism. ### Cosmopolitanism - Cosmopolitanism is a very broad, sometimes global, outlook, rather than a limited, local one. - Abu-Lughod’s ethnography of television pushes us to move beyond notions of single cultures sharing a set of ideas and meanings distinct from other cultures in an era of mass media, migration, and globalization. ## Toolkit: Thinking Like an Anthropologist - Every day, culture is all around us. - It informs our thoughts and actions, guides us through complex interactions in our families, schools, jobs, and other personal relationships, and even shapes the way we perceive reality. - Thinking like an anthropologist can help you to better understand yourself and those around you, and to analyze your own culture and other cultures you encounter in this globalizing world. - Consider the following questions: * What is culture? * How has the culture concept developed in anthropology? * How are culture and power related? * How much of who you are is shaped by biology, and how much by culture? * How is culture created? * How is globalization transforming culture? ## How Are Culture and Power Related? - For many years, anthropologists focused primarily on culture as a system of ideas. - More recent scholarship has pushed anthropology to consider the deep interconnections between culture and power in more sophisticated ways. - Power is often described as the ability or potential to bring about change through action or influence, either one's own or that of a group or institution. - It may include the ability to influence through force or the threat of force. - Power is embedded in many kinds of social relations, from interpersonal relations, to institutions, to structural frameworks of whole societies. ### Power and Relationships - Anthropologist Eric Wolf urged anthropologists to see power as an aspect of all human relationships. - Power dynamics exist in teacher/student, parent/child, employer/employee, landlord/tenant, lender/borrower, boyfriend/girlfriend relationships. ### Power, Stratification, and Hegemony - Power in a culture reflects stratification—uneven distribution of resources and privileges—among participants that often persists over generations. - Some people are drawn into the center of the culture; others are ignored, marginalized, or even annihilated. - Power may be stratified along lines of gender, racial or ethnic group, class, age, family, religion, sexuality, or legal status. - These structures of power organize relationships among people and create a framework through which access to cultural resources is distributed. - As a result, some people are able to participate more fully in the culture than others. - This balance of power is not fixed; it fluctuates. - We can begin to use culture as a conceptual guide to power and its workings. ## Power and Cultural Institutions - Cultural institutions include: * Schools * Religious Institutions * The Media * The Family * Medicine * Government * Courts * Police * The Military - These cultural institutions are also locations where people can debate and contest cultural norms and values. ### Hegemony - The Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci described two aspects of power: material power and hegemony. - Material power involves political, economic, or military power. - Hegemony involves the ability to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force. - Gramsci recognized the tremendous power of culture-particularly the cultural institutions of media, schools, and religion—to shape what people think is normal, natural, and possible, and thereby directly influence the scope of human action and interaction. - He also noted the ability of a dominant group in a culture to make people discipline their own behavior so that they believe and act in certain “normal” ways—often against their own interests, even without a tangible threat of punishment for misbehavior. ## Human Agency - Although hegemony can be very powerful, it does not completely dominate people's thinking. - Individuals and groups have the power to contest cultural norms, values, mental maps of reality, symbols, institutions, and structures of power. - This is known as agency. - Cultural beliefs and practices are not timeless; they change and can be changed. - Cultures are not biologically determined; they are created over time by particular groups of people. - Human agency serves as a realm in which battles over power take place—where people debate, negotiate, contest, and enforce what is considered normal, what people can say, do, and even think. ### Resistance - Although a dominant group may have greater access to power, resources, rights, or privileges, the systems of power they create are never absolute, and their dominance is never complete. - Individuals and groups with less power or no power may contest the dominant power relationships and structures, whether through political, economic, religious, or military means. - At times, resistance is visible, public, and well organized; at other times, the resistance may be more subtle, discreet, and diffuse. ### Examples of Resistance - James Scott's book *Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance* identifies strategies that people in very weak positions use to express their agency and to resist the dominant group. - Scott focuses on a village in northwestern Malaysia that underwent rapid economic transformation as a result of technological changes in the local rice-growing process. - The introduction of large-scale irrigation, double cropping, and harvesting machines made harvests more plentiful but threw many landless farmers out of work. - The changes benefited the village elite and hurt the poor. - Scott asks why poor farmers who are the majority do not revolt and overturn the social and economic order that has made them poor and kept them poor. - He suggests that the poor farmers understand the potential risks of resistance and the dangerous consequences for themselves and their families that could result from a conflict with the rich and powerful minority. - They often avoid obvious, public displays of resistance and choose subtler, nonconfrontational forms of resistance, including foot-dragging, slowdowns, theft, sabotage, trickery, arson, and false compliance with regulations. ## How Much of Who You Are Is Shaped by Biology, and How Much by Culture? - Biology is important. - We live in our bodies. - We feel, smell, taste, hear, and see the world around us through our bodies. - We communicate with and through our bodies. - All humans must eat, drink, and sleep. - Current research in physical and cultural anthropology shows that no matter how strong our biological needs or our hormones, odors, and appetites might be, culture and the environment in which we live exert powerful influences on what we think, on how we behave, on the shape and functions of our individual bodies, and even on how humans have evolved over time. ### Nature vs Nurture - Popular American discourse often assigns biology—and usually genes-the primary role in determining who we are. - Anthropological research consistently reveals the powerful role culture and environment play in shaping our lives and bodies. - Human genetic codes are 99.9 percent identical, so if behavior were entirely driven by our genes, we should expect to find very similar—even universal—behavioral responses to biological influences. - Instead, we find remarkable physical and behavioral variety across cultures. - Even the most basic human activities, such as eating, drinking, and sleeping, are carried out in remarkably distinct ways. - Shared biological needs do not ensure shared cultural patterns. ### Epigenetics and the Human Microbiome - Contemporary anthropological research calls for a much more complex view of human evolution and individual development over a lifetime that incorporates multiple architects of the human physical form and behavior. - Genes are part of a developmental history in which biology and culture are deeply intertwined and entangled in a dynamic and ongoing biocultural process of change. - The emerging field of *epigenetics* explores ways in which the environment into which one is born can directly affect the expression of genes during one's lifetime. - Epigenetics examines variations caused not by changes in the actual DNA sequence but by environmental factors that switch genes on and off and affect how cells read genes. - These epigenetic marks may change in response to many of the processes anthropologists frequently study -nutrition, stress, disease, social inequality, and migration. - Our bodies do not function in isolation as discrete biological units. - The human body contains approximately 100 trillion cells. - About 90 percent are independent microorganisms that live within our bodies and form what has come to be known as the human *microbiome*. - The human microbiome plays a key role in many bodily functions, including human digestion, vitamin production, drug metabolism, and immunity. - We should think of ourselves not as human beings—shaped long ago by a completed evolutionary process—but as human becomings who are continually evolving and adapting, both on the species level and within the individual lifespan. ## Connecting Culture and Behavior - While direct links between specific genes and behavior have proven difficult to identify, we have much clearer indications of the ways cultural patterns and beliefs shape human behavior. - Culture is learned from the people around us. - It is not written into our DNA. - We are born with the ability to learn any culture that we might be born into or move into. - We have the ability to learn any language and master any set of beliefs, practices, norms, or values. - Such cultural practices are not universal to all humans. - They are uniquely created in each culture. - We should question common assumptions of the biological basis for most, if not all, of human behavior, and instead to consider how learned patterns of belief and practice have been created and how they might be changed. ## Glossary * **Culture** - A system of knowledge, beliefs, patterns of behavior, artifacts, and institutions that are created, learned, shared, and contested by a group of people. * **Enculturation** - The process of learning culture. * **Norms** - Ideas or rules about how people should behave in particular situations or toward certain other people. * **Values** - Fundamental beliefs about what is important, what makes a good life, and what is true, right, and beautiful. * **Symbol** - Anything that represents something else. * **Mental Maps of Reality** - Cultural classifications of what kinds of people and things exist, and the assignment of meaning to those classifications. * **Cultural Relativism** - Understanding a group’s beliefs and practices within their own cultural context, without making judgments. * **Unilineal Cultural Evolution** - The theory proposed by nineteenth-century anthropologists that all cultures naturally evolve through the same sequence of stages from simple to complex. * **Historical Particularism** - The idea, attributed to Franz Boas, that cultures develop in specific ways because of their unique histories. * **Society** - The focus of early British anthropological research whose structure and function could be isolated and studied scientifically. * **Structural Functionalism** - A conceptual framework positing that each element of society serves a particular function to keep the entire system in equilibrium. * **Interpretivist Approach** - A conceptual framework that sees culture primarily as a symbolic system of deep meaning. * **Thick Description** - A research strategy that combines detailed description of cultural activity with an analysis of the layers of deep cultural meaning in which those activities are embedded. * **Power** - The ability or potential to bring about change through action or influence * **Stratification** - The uneven distribution of resources and privileges among participants in a group or culture. * **Hegemony** - The ability of a dominant group to create consent and agreement within a population without the use or threat of force. * **Agency** - The potential power of individuals and groups to contest cultural norms, values, mental maps of reality, symbols, institutions, and structures of power. * **Epigenetics** - An area of study in the field of genetics exploring how environmental factors directly affect the expression of genes in ways that may be inherited between generations. * **Human Microbiome** - The complete collection of microorganisms in the human body’s ecosystem.