Culture as a Verb

I think it is very beneficial to take a page from Brian Street and Shirley Brice Heath, as scholars, and approach socio-cultural issues as dynamic processes of evolution. Cultural concepts vary from one social group to the next and from one subgroup to the next. Of particular interest were their view of meta-narratives:

". . . groups that see themselves as vastly different from their neighboring groups actually share many habits and patterns of behavior. Yet the meta-narratives or stories they tell in order to give reasons for their particular history or cultural patterns may differ greatly. Meta-narratives answer questions that ask 'why do we do this and not that?' " (Street and Heath, 2008, p. 8)

Stories shape culture. But traveling back in human history, we see oral cultures that told stories of their "history." The epic poem Beowulf, for example, was told orally for generations. The poem, as we understand it today, is simply a snapshot of what the poem was at a specific junction of time, the time that it was recorded into a written form. Prior to this, however, there is no way of truly knowing how that story had been changed in the oral culture and, in many ways, the poem was altered a great deal by committing it to a written form.

While some would consider culture to be specific characteristics (dance, language, etc.), Street's position is that we must begin to view culture not as those nouns, but understanding the function of those things. For instance, the performative function of a specific dance might tell a story (be it historical or mythical). As ethnographers we must begin to understand not what we observe, but the function of what we observe, why are these significant to the particular focus group.

In many ways, Erikson observes many of these things that Street and Heath do. However, he seems to imply that culture can be both static and dynamic at the same time. That is, while some aspects of culture surely evolve, some of the traditions or motives for certain behaviors remain consistent. How then is this possible? If one aspect of culture changes, doesn't it, to some extent, impact other cultural components (indirectly in the very least)?