ture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts
of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!
Second, since culture is a similarity between people's ideas, it is
very confusing to say things like "American culture places great
emphasis on individual achievement" or "Chinese culture is more
concerned with harmony within a group." Saying this, we conclude
that, for instance, "Many Americans would like to relax but their cul-
ture tells them to be competitive" or "Many Chinese people would
enjoy competition but their culture incites them to be more group-
oriented." So we describe culture as some kind of external force that
[36] pushes people one way or another. But this is rather mysterious. How
could a similarity causeanything? There is no external force here. If
people feel a conflict between their inclinations and a norm that is fol-
lowed by everybody else, it is a conflict within their heads. If an Ameri-
can child has a hard time coping with the requirement that "an Amer-
ican child should be competitive," it is because the requirement has
been implanted in the child's mind, maybe to his chagrin. But all this is
happening inside a mind.
Third, knowing that culture is a similarity between people is help-
ful because it forces you to remember that two objects are similar only
from a certain point of view. My blue eyes may make me similar to some
other people, but then my shortsightedness makes me similar to oth-
ers. Apply this to culture. We routinely talk about whole cultures as
distinct units, as in "Chinese culture," "Yoruba culture," "British cul-
ture" and so forth. What is wrong here? The term culturallabels a cer-
tain similarity between the representations we find in members of a
group. So, it would seem, we can do anthropological fieldwork and
surveys among different human groups, say the Americans and the
Yoruba, and then describe representations that we find in only one of
them as being the American and Yoruba cultures respectively. But why
do we assume that "the Americans" or "the Yoruba" constitute a
group? Compare this with natural species. We feel justified, to some
extent, in comparing the eggplant with the zucchini or the donkey
with the zebra. These labels correspond to natural groupings of plants
and animals. Now the problem is that there are no natural groupings for
human beings. We may think that it makes sense to compare the Amer-
icans and the Yoruba because there is a Yoruba polity and an American
(U.S.) nation. But note that these are historical, purposeful construc-
tions. They are not the effect of some natural similarity. Indeed, if we
look at people's actual behavior and representations in either group,
RELIGION EXPLAINED