20 Toward a More Scientific Anthropological Paradigm

The nature-nurture controversy of the 1920s has now receded into history. In the light of current scientific knowledge the exclusion of either biological or cultural variables from the etiology of adolescent or any other basic form of human behavior is unwarranted; both nature and nurture are always involved. Indeed, as Conway Zirkle has remarked, any attempt to make one more crucial than the other is „as silly as trying to determine which is the more important in deriving a product, the multiplicand or the multiplier.“ Yet, the significance of biology in human behavior has still to be recognized by many anthropologists. As we have seen, Mead's Samoan researches gave apparently decisive support to the movement that (in George Stocking's words) sought „an explanation of human behavior in purely cultural terms,“ and so sustained the antibiological orientation of the Boasian paradigm.¹

As I have documented in Chapter 3, the theories of the doctrine of cultural determinism were (in Melford Spiro's words) „developed in the first instance as alternatives to and refutations of biological determinism.“ Thus the Boasians had an antipathy to biology, and to genetics and evolutionary biology in particular.! Boas, for example, was opposed to research in human genetics and thought, even as late as 1939, that in respect of the human body, „a search for genes would not be advisable,“ there being some danger that the number of genes would „depend rather upon the number of investigators than upon their actual existence.“ Again, he actively disregarded the Darwinian theory of evolution, being, as Stocking has recorded, „quite skeptical of natural selection^' J Alfred Kroeber, the most eminent of Boas' students, was if anything even more antipathetic to evolutionary biology; in his view there was „no specific connection“ between Darwinism and anthropological thought. These were the attitudes that the young Margaret Mead came to adopt, and which led her, when embarking on her inquiries in Manu'a, to assume that human nature, being „the rawest, most undifferentiated … raw material,“ could be shaped by culture into any form.²

During the fifty years since Mead first avowed absolute cultural determinism, with its assumption of human nature as a tabula rasa, biology has made unprecedented advances, so that it is now known that what cultures have to mold is, in Vernon Reynolds' words, „an exceedingly complex arrangement of biochemical machinery, each piece containing certain instructions of a highly specific kind about its own development.“ Again, after a period of apparent eclipse in the early 1920s, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, far from sinking into oblivion, has reemerged as the unifying paradigm of all the biological sciences, from biochemistry to ethology. Indeed, with the discovery of the way in which genetic information is stored in nucleic acid, the molecular basis of the evolutionary process has been revealed, and it has become apparent that the specificity and subtlety shown by any particular enzyme is as much the result of evolution by natural selection as the clinging behavior of a newborn langur monkey or the capacity of a human infant to learn one of the modes of symbolic communication characteristic of his species. There is, then, in the ninth decade of the twentieth century a decisive summation of scientific evidence to sustain Mulleins generalization that „the criterion for any material's having life is whether or not it has the potentiality … of evolution by Darwinian natural selection.“ It is thus evident that Homo sapiens, as a primate, is, like all other living things, a product of evolution by means of natural selection, and, further, that the coded information stored in the genes of any human individual, as also its decoding in ontogenetic development, is crucially important for the understanding of human behavior, just as is the exogenetic information that comes to be stored in an individual's memory in the course of postnatal experience and enculturation.³

So, as J. Z. Young states, each individual mammalian life is dependent on genetically inherited information „written in the triplets of bases of the DNA code,“ which produces a program embodied in the structure of the brain, the units of which are „groups of nerve cells, so organized as to produce… various actions at the right times.“ Added to this, in the case of humans, is the language and the cultural program that the growing individual learns. However, although from its earliest days the child begins to learn in a way it could not do in the womb, it is able to do this, as Young notes, „only by virtue of the neural equipment with which it is provided by heredity.“ This neural equipment is very far from being undifferentiated. For example, in their researches on the visual cortex of infant macaques, Hubel and Wiesal have demonstrated the presence of individual cells with highly specific characteristics, responding to features in the external environment such as orientated contours. Such specialized cells also certainly exist in the visual cortex of the human neonate. This and much other research has established that, as Young has put it, the human brain, „rather than being a general purpose computer into whose memory any information can be placed,“ is „more like one that already has a system of programs within it.“ Again, the researches of Prechtl, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, and others have shown that the human neonate is equipped at birth with a range of movement patterns essential for survival, as also with other behaviors and emotions—phylogenetically given in their basic structure—which unfold in the course of ontogeny in interaction with their environment.⁴

In 1965, in looking back on the history of cultural anthropology, Kroeber observed that the period when human nature was canceled out as a constant was drawing to a close, as it had become clear that cultural anthropologists could not permanently ignore the „basic genetic part“ of human psychology. This was an accurate prognostication. Research since the 1950s, particularly in the field of human ethology, has shown that in significant ways human behavior is, in the words of Eibl-Eibesfeldt, „preprogrammed by phylogenetic adaptations.“ In this respect then there has been a quite major change since the 1920b when J. B. Watson was pontificating on there being „no such thing as any inheritance of capacity, talent, temperament, mental constitution and characteristics,“ and Mead and other cultural anthropologists were basing their theories about human behavior on the assumption that human nature was „the rawest, most undifferentiated … raw material“ Indeed, so decisive has been this advance in knowledge that, as Ashley Montagu indicated in 1979, there is no longer any rational justification for belief in „the tabula rasa myth.“ We have thus reached a point at which the discipline of anthropology, if it is not to become isolated in a conceptual cul de sac, must abandon the paradigm fashioned by Kroeber and other of Boas' students, and must give full cognizance to biology, as well as to culture, in the explanation of human behavior and institutions.⁵

Since the 1920s, largely because of the writings of the Boas-ians, which have had the highly salutary effect of directing widespread attention to the nature of cultural phenomena, there has been a growing recognition among biologists of the significance of culture in human evolution. C. H. Waddington, for example, emphasized in 1961 that among humans there is „a second evolutionary system superimposed on top of the biological one … functioning by means of a different system of information transmission.“ Again, P. B. Medawar has referred to this method of information transmission „by the entire apparatus of culture“ as exogenetic (the same term Boas used in 1924) and has noted that „the evolution of this learning process and the system of heredity that goes with it represents a fundamentally new biological stratagem—more important than any that preceded it—and totally unlike any other transaction of the organism with its environment.'

Another major development since the heyday of the Boasian paradigm has been the disproof of the assumption that „nothing homologous to the rudest culture“ exists among even „the highest animals“—the assumption on which Kroeber based his doctrine that culture was peculiarly human, so positing a fundamental disjunction between man and all other animals. The evidence for the existence of rudimentary cultural, or exogenetic, adaptations in species other than man has now been cogently stated by J. T. Bonner in The Evolution of Culture in Animals (1980), in which the origins of the human cultural capacity are traced back into early biological evolution, and the error of Kroeber's doctrine that culture is without antecedents in nonhuman species clearly revealed. There is thus beginning to emerge a paradigm in which it becomes possible to view culture in an evolutionary setting and to take account of both the genetic and the exogenetic in a way that gives due regard to the crucial importance of each of these fundamental aspects of human behavior and evolution.⁷

Cultural adaptations are made possible by the evolutionary emergence of what Ernst Mayr has termed open programs of behavior, resulting from a gradual opening up of a genetic program to permit „the incorporation of personally acquired information to an ever-greater extent.“ In Mayr's view there are certain prerequisites if this gradual opening up of a genetic program is to occur. Thus, because personally acquired information necessitates „a far greater storage capacity than is needed for the carefully selected information of a closed genetic program,“ a large central nervous system is required. An open program of behavior is dependent on the brain-mediated storage and transmission of exogenetic information, and further, does not prescribe all of the steps in a behavioral sequence, but, in Karl Popper's words, „leaves open certain alternatives, certain choices, even though it may perhaps determine the probability or propensity of choosing one way or the other.“ Thus, as Bonner states in discussing „primitive behavioral flexibility“ in nonhuman species, the distinction between „a reflex action and a brain-mediated decision is that the former has one response only, while the latter has two or more.“ Within an open program of behavior, then, a choice is made by the brain or in other parts of the nervous system between two or more responses to produce what Bonner calls „multiple choice behavior.“ The appearance of culture is thus to be viewed as „a new niche that arose from the experimentation of animals with multiple choice behavior,“ and it is to this evolutionary innovation that the rise of cultural adaptations in the human species is to be traced. From this kind of beginning the brain of the early hominids evolved to a point that made rudimentary traditions possible, such as have been shown to exist in populations of the Japanese macaque and the chimpanzee. There was then present a selection pressure which caused a further gradual enlargement of the cerebral hemispheres, and, in the genus Homo, the emergence of a dual track of inheritance characterized by the interaction of its genetic and cultural components. Further, in evolutionary perspective there is seen to be a long-existent and deep symbiosis between the genetic and the cultural, with the capacity to produce the exogenetic having arisen, by natural selection, because of its advantage to the species.⁸

We have before us then, a view of human evolution in which the genetic and exogenetic are distinct but interacting parts of a single system. If the working of this system is to be comprehended it is imperative, as Bonner points out, that a clear distinction be made between the genetical and the cultural, for only in this way is it possible to understand „the causes and mechanisms of change in any organism capable of both cultural and genetical change.“ This requirement, furthermore, holds not only for the study of the remote evolutionary history of the human species, but equally for the analysis and interpretation of cultural behavior in recent historical settings. In other words, specific cultural behaviors, to be understood adequately, need to be related to the phylogenetically given impulses in reference to which they have been evolved, and in apposition to which they survive as shared modes of socially inherited adaptation.⁹ An example of such an apposition is to be found in the respect language of the Samoans, to which brief reference has been made in Chapter 8. Of all the cultural conventions of the Samoans, none is more central to their society, with its complex rank hierarchies, than this highly developed language with its elaborate vocabulary of deferential terms for referring to the bodily parts, possessions, attributes, and actions of both titular and talking chiefs and the members of their families. Further, these terms are especially used in chiefly assemblies, which are based on rank, a form of social dominance, and within which there are always long-standing rivalries and tensions. When studying Samoan chieftainship during the years 1966 and 1967, I spent some hundreds of hours sitting cross-legged in chiefly assemblies observing in minute detail, with the gaze of a student of both culture and ethology, the behavior of the other individuals present. On some occasions the chiefs I was observing would, when contending over some burning issue, become annoyed and then angry with one another. By intently observing their physiological states, and especially their redirection and displacement activities, I was able, as their anger mounted, to monitor the behavior of these chiefs in relation to their use of respect language. From repeated observations it became evident that as chiefs became angry they tended to become more and more polite, with ever-increasing use of deferential words and phrases. Thus, by resort to cultural convention they could usually avoid potentially damaging situations. Occasionally, however, the conventions of culture would fail completely, and incensed chiefs, having attained to pinnacles of elaborately patterned politeness, would suddenly lapse into violent aggression, as in the attack on the titular chief Taeao that I have described in Chapter 9. In such cases there was an extremely rapid regression from conventional to impulsive behavior. For our present purpose the significance of such incidents is that when the cultural conventions that ordinarily operate within chiefly assemblies fail, activity does not suddenly come to an end, but rather the conventional behavior is replaced, in an instant, by highly emotional and impulsive behavior that is animal-like in its ferocity. It is thus evident that if we are to understand the Samoan respect language, which is central to their culture, we must relate it to the disruptive emotions generated by the tensions of social dominance and rank, with which this special language has been developed to deal. In this case, as in other domains of their society, impulses and emotions underlie cultural convention to make up the dual inheritance that is to be found among the Sa-moans, as in all human populations. It is evident, therefore, that the cultural cannot be adequately comprehended except in relation to the much older phylogenetically given structures in relation to which it has been formed by nongenetic processes. Further, it is plain that the attempt to explain human behavior in purely cultural terms, is, by the anthropological nature of things, irremediably deficient.

In retrospect, then, it is clear that the fundamental deficiency of Mead's Samoan researches was conceptual and methodological. She went to Samoa, she tells us, convinced by the doctrine of W. F. Ogburn (who made no distinction between the biological and the psychological) that one should never look for psychological explanations of social phenomena until attempts at explanation in cultural terms have been exhausted.] Mead's zealous adherence to this procedural rule in her inquiries in Manu'a led her to concentrate exclusively on the domain of the cultural, and so to neglect much more deeply motivated aspects of Samoan behavior. It was also this adherence to the methods of cultural determinism that caused Mead, with Benedict's active encouragement, to depict the Samoans in Apollonian terms as the devotees of „all the decreed amenities“ and of a social pattern that emphasizes „social blessedness“ within an „elaborate, impersonal structure.“ This depiction Mead had derived directly from Benedict, who, conceiving of culture as „personality writ large,“ had taken from Nietzsche the designation „Apollonian“ to refer to those who live by the law of measure and abjure all „disruptive psychological states.“ We are here dealing with a cultural ideal, and it was the beguiling conceit of the early cultural determinists that the behavior of an entire people could be adequately categorized in such unitary terms. Benedict and Mead failed to appreciate that in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche arrived at the quite explicit conclusion that the Dionysian, which symbolizes the elemental in human nature, was quite as fundamental as the Apollonian, and that Apollo had found it impossible to live without Dionysus. And so it was that Dionysus and Apollo—those archaic personifications of the two most fundamental aspects of human nature—-jointly occupied the temple at Delphi, indubitably disparate, but in life inseparable, as are, as evolutionary anthropology instructs us, biology and culture.¹⁰

As described in Chapter 1-3, the doctrine of cultural determinism was formulated in the second decade of the twentieth century in deliberate reaction to the equally unscientific doctrine of extreme biological determinism.¹¹ We may thus identify biological determinism as the thesis to which cultural determinism was the antithesis. The time is now conspicuously due, in both anthropology and biology, for a synthesis in which there will be, in the study of human behavior, recognition of the radical importance of both the genetic and the exogenetic and their interaction, both in the past history of the human species and in our problematic future.

Počet shlédnutí: 52