“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 Imposition

In my previous article, I proposed one possible way of defining culture—as that which we learn from others rather than figure out on our own (which I called “culture as imitation”). In this article, I will propose another possible definition—namely, as that which is enacted upon the outside world rather than being inherently present within it (I will call this “culture as imposition”). These two definitions overlap in a number of ways, and I will explore the interactions between them, and their respective benefits as ways of thinking about culture, in future articles. But first I would like to delve a little more deeply into this idea of “imposition”—to explain what exactly I mean when I use the term, and to give some examples of how it operates in our everyday lives.

I have stolen (or imitated) the term “imposition” from Ralph Holloway, who (as I mentioned in this blog’s first article) defines culture as “the imposition of arbitrary form on the environment.” I find this to be a particularly insightful turn of phrase, because it covers a number of different phenomena. Most obviously, it refers to the tangible, material activities of building, shaping, marking, and the like, whereby we transform our surroundings into easier and more comfortable places to live. From the first time someone picked up a rock and hit it with another rock in order to better shape it for some purpose, humanity has been imposing arbitrary form upon the environment in this way.

But the imposition of arbitrary form on the environment also happens at a much more abstract, conceptual level—and I, personally, find this level to be the far more interesting one. Because this process of imposition occurs, not just in our physical interactions with the world, but in our psychological interactions with it as well.

What do I mean by that? I mean that whenever we think about the world, we impose all sorts of psychological forms and concepts on it that don’t actually exist out there in the world itself. For example, if you stop reading for a moment and take a look around you, you will probably see a number of different objects—chairs, tables, windows, people, clouds, trees, etc.

But all of those “things,” which you perceive as distinct, bounded entities, are actually just amorphous sections of one giant, interconnected blob that is the universe. They aren’t surrounded by neat outlines and they don’t bounce around in bubbles (as would be especially clear if you took increasingly powerful microscopes and tried to find the exact place where any one supposed “object” stopped and another one started).

Even more arbitrary than the idea of distinct, bounded objects is the idea of categories into which we place them. So when you look at a chair, you not only think that is a thing which is both unified into a whole and distinct from all the other “things” around it, but you also believe it bears some inherent property of chair-ness, which it shares with everything else you would designate as a chair, but not with anything you would designate as a table, a turtle, or a tree. But I would argue that the category of “chair-ness” resides, not in the chair itself, but in your brain—from whence you impose it upon whatever environment you happen to encounter.

You can get some idea of what Holloway and I mean when we say that these imposed forms are “arbitrary” when you think about all the items you would call a “chair” if you happened upon them, and the wide variety of shapes, sizes, materials, and uses these items might have. You can get an even better idea if you imagine trying to teach an alien from outer space how to identify something as a chair if she happens upon it. You can also imagine that alien just as avidly attempting to convince you that a certain lamp, your pet gerbil, and your pinky fingernail are all “quigleys.”

Another way to think about it is to look up at the stars and to realize how many different ways people have clustered those stars into constellations over the years. Is Orion a hunter? No, it’s a scattering of light points with a variety of brightnesses and a specific distribution. Maybe to you it looks more like an hourglass. In fact, “it” is not even an “it” at all, because you could just as easily imagine connecting some of the stars in Orion to some of the stars in Canis Major, and some others to some of the stars in Taurus, to create two different constellations. What I’m trying to say is that calling something “a chair” is like naming a constellation in the night sky. You’re arbitrarily imposing unity on a collection of particles that could just as easily be conceptually grouped in any number of alternative ways.

This arbitrariness is even more apparent when it comes, not to tangible objects, but to more theoretical categories—for instance, when we identify a certain occurrence as a “tragedy,” or a certain person as a “troublemaker,” or a certain group of words as a “joke.” These designations do not identify some sort of innate property of the circumstance, individual, or statement. Rather, they dwell in our minds, and are part of the form that we are arbitrarily imposing upon that segment of our environment.

Do you see now why I think conceptual imposition is so much more interesting than mere tangible imposition? It’s really hard to fully wrap your brain around, because, well, these concepts are inside our brains to begin with. Which means they typically seem to be totally natural and self-evident. When you call something a chair you never stop to think that that title is actually something you are imposing upon that bunch of particles. You think you are describing the state of reality. But if you take a step back and think harder, you might realize that somebody else (aliens are always handy for this type of thought experiment) might look at the same thing and perceive it in a completely different way.

I have to warn you, before you finish reading this article and go back to your everyday life, that this way of thinking, once you let it into your brain, has a tendency to crawl around in there and explode at the most unexpected moments. You might be doing a perfectly ordinary thing—taking a walk, going shopping, mowing the lawn—when all of a sudden you’ll realize, “Hey, wait a second, what am I actually doing here, and why am I calling it what I’m calling it, and just how arbitrary are all the structures I’m using to understand it all, and how might somebody else with a different set of conceptual forms bouncing around in their head see all this in a completely different way?”

And that’s when you’ll know—your inner anthropologist has been awakened.