“What’s Your Favorite Color?”

…and other leading questions we ask our children.

After having spent my past several articles laying out some basic conceptual groundwork on the topics of anthropology and culture, I would now like to plunge into the realm I plan to spend most of the rest of my articles in this blog exploring—namely, the way that the influence of culture crops up in the most unexpected aspects of our everyday lives, and how the concept of culture can help us to gain a better understanding of what exactly is going on underneath these seemingly straightforward situations.

The first example I’m going to take a look at is a question most of my readers have probably heard asked at some point in their lives—in fact, they have almost certainly answered it at least once, and may even have asked it themselves. It is the (seemingly) age-old question, “What is your favorite color?” This apparently harmless question provides me with the opportunity to revisit both of my previously discussed definitions of culture (as imitation and as imposition), hopefully clarifying anything that was left ambiguous by my more theoretical treatments.

First of all, the very idea of “color” illustrates what I mean by cultural imposition on the world around us. Yes, color names refer to an undeniable physical property of the world around us—the wavelength of light than an object reflects to our eyes. However, the way we break up what is, in the physical world, a continuous spectrum into distinct color categories (red, orange, yellow, etc.) is just as undeniably something we have invented and imposed. Different societies have broken up the color spectrum in different ways,* and I’m sure enough of us have gotten into dispute about whether a certain shirt is actually a bluish green or a greenish blue to recognize that even different individuals within the same society might have different places where they draw those distinctions.

But the “what’s your favorite color?” question also demonstrates my points about cultural imitation. In addition to the fact that color distinction is one of the things we spend a great deal of conscious effort teaching our children from a very young age** (“What color is your shoe, Ctaci? That’s right, it’s brown.” “Abel, can you bring me the pink elephant?”), the very form of this seemingly simple inquiry implicitly reinforces a whole host of cultural lessons you probably never expected.

First of all, asking someone (and I would wager most people who are asked this question are first asked it at a relatively young age) what their favorite color is takes for granted the notion that that person has a favorite color. It thus implies that a favorite color is something every self-respecting person should have, and encourages the individual, if s/he does not yet happen to have a “favorite color” picked out, to select one on the double.

This, in turn, reinforces a variety of even deeper notions. Some of these are connected to favoritism, competition, and superiority. The very form of the question sets up the idea that in any field of multiple options, it is possible (and advisable) to judge one to be universally “best” (rather than simply acknowledging that different options might be preferable for different purposes or under different circumstances). Other implications relate to the concept of identity—posing such a query serves to instill the belief that people can and should be individualized by certain types of traits, that one has preferences which both persist over time and connect intimately to one’s sense of self, and that others can and should keep track of these traits in order to better understand or distinguish between their fellows.

These might seem like subtle or stretched messages for a question frequently posed to five-year-olds and requiring nothing more than a one-word response, but that is precisely my point. The external simplicity of this inquiry masks the vast array of cultural lessons it conveys to its often highly impressionable recipients. Overt discussions of cultural values (“You see, Daphne, this is why we think it’s important to share”) are actually much easier to question and resist than are these sneaky verbal Trojan Horses, especially because the person presenting them may not even realize the underlying messages they have thereby introduced. This goes to demonstrate just how widespread and invisible the little elements of culture we have spent our lives thus far learning to imitate can be.

And don’t even get me started on the whole color/gender connection.


* Interestingly, some research has indicated that there are universal cross-cultural similarities in the places where people break up the color spectrum (though distinct differences in the extent to which they do so). This makes some sense, as there are physiological similarities across cultures in terms of the ways that humans perceive color. Even if color distinctions are entirely physiologically based, they are still impositions, since these distinctions derive from the structure of eyes and brains rather than the outside world. The really interesting question is whether having a physiological basis disqualifies something as "cultural." I'm sure some would support this criterion, but to do so demands that one provide non-physiological explanations for any tendencies one wants to deem cultural, which I am not convinced is possible. Though I certainly welcome attempts!

** This raises the question of why color identification (along with shape recognition, size and orientation terms, barnyard animal noise pairing, and other such often-emphasized subjects of baby books and enthusiastic parental coaching) are of sufficient importance to merit the energy we devote to imparting them to our children—a topic for a future article, I suppose.

Culture as Imitation

Think back for a moment on all the things you have done in the course of your lifetime. How many of them did you come up with on your own, and how many of them did you learn to do through imitating others? Initially, I would guess that you're inclined to put the majority of your past activities in the former category of the self-invented, with only a few simple behaviors defined as imitations. But I'd like to encourage you to rethink that assumption, and to recognize the overwhelming role that imitation actually plays in shaping the way you—and all other humans—behave.

First of all, consider language. Admittedly it's true that as we emerge from infancy our specific utterances cease to be mere copycat repetitions of whatever we're hearing (say "ma-ma") and become (for the most part) novel constructions uniquely appropriate to our immediate circumstances (whether those involve writing a blog post, proposing marriage, or begging our mom for another cookie). But the words from which we compose these constructions (in addition to the grammatical rules which structure their composition, and indeed the very notion of using speech—rather than gesture, drawing, or other means—to communicate) were learned through imitation of others, who in turn learned these things through imitating others who came before them. In addition, our speech is littered with pre-fabricated phrases we have collected through observation and repetition, which range from common figures of speech ("it's just a hop, skip, and a jump away") to the formulaic terms of transition with which even this paragraph itself teems (like "first of all" and "in addition," neither of which, I hate to break it to you (and there's another!) I came up with on the spot).

But the list of imitated activities extends far beyond our use of language. Take a moment to ask yourself why you wear the clothes you do and not garments in any number of alternate forms of equal (or even greater) comfort and functionality—or, for that matter, why you wear clothes at all. Did you wake up one morning, naked and slightly chilly, and decide, "Hm, I think I'll go weave myself some fabric and sew it into a sweatshirt"? My guess is that the answer is no. Rather, people began dressing you before you had any say in the matter, and then as you grew up you noted that people around you generally wore clothes of a particular sort, and you chose particular models of clothing-wearing to imitate.

Using these two examples, reconsider your previous assessment of the proportion of self-invented to imitated behaviors within your own personal repertoire. In fact, try to think of even one thing you have done which was entirely initiated by you, and in no way based on anything you have observed or heard of someone else doing. If you can come up with something, please leave it as a comment—it will be my anthropological challenge to find an element of imitation hidden within whatever you propose.

Note that when I talk about imitation, I am including not only things you learned to do by watching others unconscientiously perform these activities in your presence, but also things that you were actively taught—teaching being, in my opinion, merely a mechanism humans have developed in order to facilitate improved imitation. Any scenario in which the idea to do something comes, not from your own independent and spontaneous invention, but from some recreation or recombination of behavioral elements you have become acquainted with through the activities of others, falls under "the imitated" in my current definition.

I am not arguing that humans are not creative, nor that there is not something impressive, exciting, and meaningful in the ways that humans recombine what they have observed in others into constructions novel in content if not in concept. All I am pointing out is that the majority of what we do, as humans, comes from copying (and then building upon) what others before us have already done. This is not a weakness or failure of humanity. Rather, I consider it one of our species' greatest strengths. (And in saying that I am not denying that other species possess such imitative abilities, though some would like to call that claim into question. I am merely noting that human behavior happens to be strongly characterized by the impulse to imitate.)

This ubiquitous inclination to imitate serves as the first of the two definitions of "culture" which I will employ in my discussions of the anthropology of the everyday. Anything humans do because some other human showed them how is a "cultural" activity. Given your newfound awareness of just how many of the things we do involve some element of imitation, you may at this point be objecting, "But that means that almost everything anybody does is cultural!" That is precisely my point, and the reason that I find the anthropology of the everyday to be such a fascinating subject of study.

For those wondering about the purpose of creating a definition broad enough to encompass practically every aspect of human behavior, my justification involves two claims, which I will merely state at the moment, but hope to more concretely illustrate as I make use of the definition in subsequent articles. Claim 1: Even if this definition applies to almost everything we do, it highlights an aspect of those activities which is often hidden. And claim 2: The fact that much of what we do is learned or imitated from others has important implications and ramifications, which it will benefit us to recognize more overtly.