Human Universals

by Donald E Brown

  Finally, as Freeman cogently argues, Mead went to Samoa hoping to show that culture was more important than nature, and wrote up her research under continuing intellectual pressure to maintain this position. While she did not intentionally distort, her biases quite clearly shaped her interpretations.

  Mead never returned to Samoa to double-check her findings, even though it was not many years before dissent was voiced. Eventually Mead (1969) admitted that perhaps she had visited Samoa during a period when by good fortune its usual strict patterns had been relaxed—she knew by then that her account was not corroborated by other sources or authorities. But the myth that Samoan conditions offer proof that adolescent behavior is essentially conditioned by culture, and behind it the larger myth that culture does, but biology does not, shape human behavior, retained a vigor that is readily gauged by the vociferous dismissal of Freeman’s book when it received the public notice deserved by a work designed to demolish one of anthropology’s hoariest myths.3

  I hasten to add that Freeman did not say we should affirm the position of the extreme naturists of the 1920s whom Boas, Mead, and others sought to refute (see chapter 3). But he did say that human behavior is the product both of human biology and human culture and that to continue to argue that for all practical purposes the former may be ignored is a position that will retard the understanding of culture as well as human nature.

  Freeman’s restudy does not show that adolescent stress is a universal, or that sexual jealousy is. But it seriously questions Mead’s contention that Samoan data prove that neither of these is a universal. Other lines of evidence suggest that both are universals, and we have some good ideas as to why they should be.

  Male and Female Among the Tchambuli

  The Chambri, better known as the Tchambuli, the name Margaret Mead used for them in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), live on an island in a lake near the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. They are famous in anthropology for purportedly showing the flexibility of male and female temperaments. In Sex and Temperament Mead described three societies representing three different patterns of male and female temperament. In one case, both the sexes conformed to our ideal of a man; in another, both sexes conformed to our ideal of a woman. In the third society, the Chambri, Mead found something no less strange, “a genuine reversal of the sex-attitudes of our culture, with the woman the dominant, impersonal, managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person” (1935:279). Mead concluded from her study that the sex-linked characteristics of behavior and psyche that we think are “normal” are in fact arbitrary: “We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions” (1935:280). The Chambri case did not present the neat pattern that this last sentence suggests, however, for there was a “contradiction at the root of Tchambuli society” (Mead 1935:263).

  Kinship was patrilineal, polygyny was normal, wives were bought by men, men were stronger than women and could beat them, and men were considered by right to be in charge. These ideals flew in the face of a very different reality: “it is the women in Tchambuli who have the real position of power in society” and “the actual dominance of women is far more real than the structural position of the men” (Mead 1935:253, 271).

  The roots of female dominance were threefold. First, the women were the economically productive element among the Chambri. Women did nearly all the fishing, and they traded fish with bush peoples in the hills for sago and other foodstuffs. Women also wove mosquito nets, which were important items of trade. Female productivity provided the Chambri with the exchange valuables needed for ceremonies, wife purchases, and other transactions. Women went about their business in a self-assured, matter-of-fact, and competent way. Second, women exhibited considerable solidarity. Third, women seemed relatively untroubled emotionally.

  In contrast, men were de facto dependents, forced to wheedle foodstuffs and money from women. While Chambri men were supposed to be headhunters, they in fact bought their victims. Men spent almost all their time in artistic activities: painting, dancing, and the like. Pleasant though men’s activities might be, they were games, insubstantial or a sham. Men constantly bickered in a petty and peevish fashion with one another; they preened in a way that can only be called prissy. They made “catty” remarks to one another (Mead 1935:252). Indulged by their women, men went on shopping trips like women in the West. Finally, men were prone to psychological problems. The “unadjusted” among them might even try to act aggressively toward women (1935:271–272).

  Mead attributed many of the Chambri male’s characteristics to child rearing. While boys and girls were raised alike up to the age of six, at that point little boys entered a difficult period. While their sisters were inducted quickly and easily into the women’s world and activities, for three to four years the boys were left at loose ends: they weren’t welcome in the older boys’ and men’s world, nor could they remain at home in the female world. At this point boys also began to ponder the discrepancy between Chambri ideals and the sad truth that females were in fact in charge. Men had to purchase wives, or have them purchased for them, but only if women gave them the purchase price. Men could have more than one wife, but this was because more than one woman might choose some man as husband.

  In many ways Mead’s study of the Chambri and the two societies she compared them with was even more startling in its results than Coming of Age in Samoa. It is no surprise that Chambri women were to become an “icon” of women’s studies (Gewertz 1981:94). But the implications of the Chambri case were toned down in anthropology at least in part because Mead later, in the 1962 introduction to Male and Female, took more of a universalist approach to male and female temperaments. However, Mead’s description of Chambri temperaments, along with the conclusions she drew from studying them, are summarized with few reservations in various recent anthropological textbooks (Aceves and King 1978; Benderly, Gallagher, and Young 1977; Harris 1980; Selby and Garretson 1981).

  Gewertz restudied the Chambri in 1974–75. She was primarily interested in trade and exchange but noted that the picture of male and female given by Mead was no longer applicable, if it ever had been. Gewertz reconstructs the Chambri and Margaret Mead’s view of them as follows: In traditional Chambri conceptions, men are aggressive and women submissive. In their interactions with each other they generally conform to this conception and have apparently done so for as long as there is evidence (i.e., back to about 1850). True, Chambri women were the breadwinners, but they “have never controlled the relations of production, for they have had little access to the political arena in which more significant transactional decisions are made” (Gewertz 1981:99–100). Although Chambri women were the productive element in their society, their husbands and fathers controlled the fruits of female productivity, and used them to enhance their (the men’s) status. Gewertz saw no reason to think the matter had been different when Mead studied the Chambri. Although Mead (1935:254) explicitly states that it is a woman’s choice to hand over the proceeds of her activities, she gives no example of a woman asserting herself by withholding valuables or even of allocating them as she chose. Gewertz says flatly that Chambri women “have never been free to determine to whom or in what circumstances their produce will be given” (1981:100). Rather, women were under the pressure of conflicting demands from the different men in their lives—husbands and fathers—each of whom might use force on his wife or daughter. If Chambri women were dominant, they did not dominate Chambri men. They might challenge men, but such were “the challenges of subversives who have no direct access to political decision making” (Gewertz 1981:100).

  There was, however, a context in which Chambri women were dominant: it was vis-à-vis other women, the women who traded sago to Chambri women for their fish. The sago suppliers were bush people who lived in scattered small communities throughout nearby hills. They were considered inferior by the Cham
bri and, in various senses, were to Chambri as Chambri women are to Chambri men: the Chambri were dependent on the bush people for sago (the bush people could have got fish on their own), the bush people were submissive in the face of Chambri dominance, the bush people were politically vulnerable. Thus there were contexts in which Chambri women acted like men—Mead’s observations were to a degree accurate—but the contexts did not include Chambri women dominating Chambri men.

  Another way in which context was critical to Mead’s observations was the temporal context. As Mead noted, the Chambri had only recently returned to their island after a lengthy exile resulting from defeat by neighbors. Mead failed to see the impact this unusual situation had on the Chambri. In their period of exile the Chambri had taken up residence among their inferiors, the bush-dwelling sago suppliers. Some Chambri men had even married women from these groups. In the Chambri scheme of things, wife-giving groups are superior to wife-takers—so that Chambri men by marrying bush women had in effect nullified Chambri dominance. On returning to their island it was up to Chambri women to reassert their old pattern of superiority over bush women, so that the barter of fish for sago could resume its traditional pattern. Without access to sago, Chambri men would not be able to compete successfully with the men they considered their equals—the other fisherfolk of the region (among whom were the enemies who had once expelled them). The “strain” and “watchfulness” that Mead had reported in Chambri men were quite explicable in this circumstance: they were not yet certain that they would succeed in reestablishing the old pattern (and may perhaps have wondered if the white man’s protection would be adequate).

  Chambri men’s artistic activities had a temporal explanation too. When driven from their islands the Chambri’s physical structures and all their ritual paraphernalia had been burnt. Chambri men were still busy in the 1930s rebuilding all that had been lost.

  Thus Mead saw a temporary condition in which normal male activities, male-male competition especially, were muted. She credited Chambri women with an aggressiveness and dominance that they did have in some spheres but not over and against their men.

  We might note in closing this section that the myth of the onetime existence of a society in which females dominated men in the public arena is ethnographically widespread. In recent years there has been a diligent search for such societies, or the reliable record of them, but none has been found (Bamberger 1974). It seems fair to say that Mead’s Sex and Temperament contributed substantially to the myth.

  Facial Expressions

  Facial expressions have rarely been examined anthropologically, and yet I think a great many anthropologists would consider them to be culturally determined. To support their opinions they could cite La Barre (1947) and Birdwhistell (1963, 1970).

  La Barre writes about both facial expressions and gestures and does not clearly distinguish between them. As an anthropologist he is “wary” of any claims that they may be instinctive, and his discussion is almost entirely confined to cultural differences. Although he notes that “the physiologically conditioned response and the purely cultural one” are typically mixed in the language of gesture throughout the world (1947:57), the cultural component is sufficient to ensure that “there is no ‘natural’ language of emotional gesture” (1947:55).

  When Birdwhistell began, in 1945, to plan his research into what he calls “kinesics,” i.e., “patterned and learned aspects of body motion which can be demonstrated to have communicational value” (1963:125), he assumed that there were universal expressions of “primary emotional states” (1963:126). But his research led him to the opposite conclusion: the emotional states that he had considered natural are in fact culturally defined, and “there are probably no universal symbols of emotional state or tone” (1963:126).

  Birdwhistell partially refined his views later, noting that no ethnographer had reported a people among whom the smile does not occur as an indicator of a situation that is “pleasurable, friendly, benevolent, positive, and so on” (1970:33). And the word he underlines in the following also suggests caution: “there are no universal…facial expressions…which provoke identical responses the world over” (1970:34). Nonetheless, he rejected the propositions that there are any facial expressions that are “closer to the biological base than others” and that any expressions “in isolation” transculturally indicate particular emotional states (1970:38). It follows that facial expressions are as essentially arbitrary as indicators of emotions as are the various linguistic labels given them in one language or another.

  On the other hand, there were psychologists who, in agreement with Darwin (1872), found certain facial expressions of emotion to be universal. Until the 1970s the debate was inconclusive, and the “predominant view within psychology” was “against universals” (Ekman 1972:210). But by the early 1970s two independent lines of research, both by psychologists—Carroll E. Izard (1971) and Paul Ekman and his associates (see especially Ekman et al. 1969; Ekman 1972, 1973)—had provided persuasive evidence that the facial expression of emotions was both culturally relative and universal.

  The main element in these research programs consisted of “judgment” studies: experiments in which persons from different cultures are shown photographs of persons with particular expressions on their faces (happy smiles, frowns of sadness, etc.) and asked to judge what emotion is being shown. Generally the respondents are asked to choose from a list of emotion words in their own language. In some cases the respondents were asked to link little stories with the facial expressions they would produce. Alternatively, persons in one culture were photographed when they were asked to show the expression that particular events would produce, and then respondents from another culture were asked to link the photographs with the hypothetical events. With few exceptions (the exceptions attributed to faulty research design, particularly language problems), raters from all cultures were substantially in agreement on which emotions were indicated by various expressions.

  One study, designed to elicit facial expressions more naturally, is particularly striking (Ekman 1972:239–260; 1973:214–218). Japanese and American subjects—the former chosen because of their alleged tendency to mask facial expression of emotions—were asked to watch two types of films under two experimental conditions. One type is stressful (showing, for example, a bloody eye operation), one is not. In one experimental condition the subject was alone in a room, in the other condition there was another person present asking questions. In each condition the subject was misled as to the precise nature of the research, and in each condition the subject’s face was actually being filmed.

  Once the films were obtained, the ones taken with the subjects alone in the room were shown to Japanese and American subjects who were asked to judge when the persons being filmed were watching the stressful film and when not. Japanese and Americans did not differ in their ability to link persons of their own or the other culture to the films they responded to. Moreover, when the films were examined frame by frame by trained raters, employing a method for analyzing the component parts of the face into its various elemental expressive configurations (the “components” as opposed to “judgment” method), they found no significant difference between the kinds of expressions made by Japanese and Americans to the two films (the components method is described in Goleman 1981).

  However, there was one significant difference between the Japanese and Americans. Upon examining the films taken when another person accompanied the subject as he or she watched the stressful films, it was found that the Japanese smiled more frequently than the Americans. In short, when on stage, so to say, the Japanese masked expressions or substituted one for another. But when offstage, the Japanese and Americans responded alike.

  To understand what these experiments show, Ekman posits two general determinants of facial expression. One is a “facial affect program” that is a part of every individual’s nervous system and that links emotional states with particular movements of facial muscles to produce u
niversal expressions of certain basic emotions. The other determinant consists of “display rules,” culture-specific standards about the display of emotions. He links the two into a “neuro-cultural” theory of facial expressions. To fully understand or interpret facial expression, we must posit both universals and cultural variants.

  In spite of the experiments just described, there remained a substantial objection to claims for universality of facial expression: all the subjects were in direct or indirect visual contact with each other. Was it not possible, therefore, that they had learned—via motion pictures, television, and more direct observation—to interpret each other’s expressions, even though the expressions were different? Or was it not possible that all the subjects had acquired familiarity with an essentially arbitrary and cultural, but increasingly international language of facial expression? Even though uniformly recognized from culture to culture, might this language not have been acquired through John Wayne movies rather than facial affect programs? In order to eliminate these possibilities it was necessary to conduct research among preliterate peoples who had experienced as little contact as possible with those outside influences that might promote a culturally imperialistic set of facial expressions.

  Accordingly, two such societies were studied: the Fore of Papua New Guinea and the Grand Valley Dani of West Irian, which is in the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea (Ekman 1972:269–276; 1973:210–214). In the former case, Ekman’s research team conducted the study; in the latter case it was done by two anthropologists (Karl and Eleanor Heider), who are reported initially to have been skeptical of claims for universal emotional expressions. Each of the peoples studied had only recent contact with Euro-American culture, and from among them, subjects were chosen who had never seen motion pictures, visited westernized communities, worked for Europeans, etc. The results—which were based on the natives’ judgments of photos of Euro-Americans and then the latters’ judgments of photos of the natives—were essentially the same as when all the subjects were from literate cultures. The conclusion seems inescapable: there are universal emotional expressions.