Anthropologists have long debated whether the customs of a culture invariably function to preserve it. According to o...

shunhe on June 17, 2020

Hi @kenken,

Thanks for the question! So let’s take a look at what’s going on in this complicated argument. We’re told that anthropologists debate about whether the customs of a culture invariably function to preserve that culture. There’s this one definition that says that a culture is just a totality of customs, or all the customs of a group of people taken together. Then, the argument concludes, if this definition is correct, then its customs have to preserve it. Why? Because abandoning any custom would, by definition, constitute destruction of the culture.

This is pretty messy, but luckily, we’re just asked to find the role played by the phrase that talks about how abandoning a custom is destroying a culture. Notice how the word “because” precedes that, which means it’s offered as evidence for something. Evidence for what? Well, the conclusion in the end, “if this definition is correct, then the customs…” and notice how this conclusion is phrased in if-then language, which makes it a conditional conclusion (conditional just meaning that it has if-then language). So this is what (C) tells us, this sentence supports a conditional conclusion drawn in the argument.

(D), on the other hand, is incorrect because although the sentence is a claim, it’s not used to support the view that a culture “should” be understood as a totality of customs. It’s just saying that IF it is understood this way, then XYZ must follow. So (D) messes up the conclusion, and so isn’t right.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions that you might have.