Human Universals

by Donald E Brown

  Footnotes

  1. Deaf sign languages—which are languages, which do possess syntax and morphemes, and which are found in every community of deaf people—do not possess phonemes; however, they do possess structural units below the morphemic level and analogous to phonemes (Sandra Thompson, personal communication).

  2. As will be seen below, more sophisticated definitions are employed by linguists. Note also that linguistic universals are often omitted from anthropological discussions of universals.

  3. A linguist, Comrie (1981:19), makes a parallel distinction between “absolute” universals and tendencies. His tendencies include both near universals and the statistical universals discussed below.

  4. What is sometimes called an “etic grid,” the collection of etic distinctions found to lie behind some universal or cross-culturally valid domain, is a universal pool. The semantic components that Kroeber (1909) found in the domain of kin terms are an example.

  3

  The Historical Context of the Study of Universals

  Some anthropologists write about universals with little or no sense that they are controversial, but other anthropologists—some very prominent (e.g., Geertz 1965)—maintain that universals have little significance if they exist at all. The roots of this anthropological ambivalence toward universals have to be sought in the wider history of anthropological thought, where the scientific concerns of discovery, method, and theory interact with the ideology and politics of anthropologists and others. In important respects, the history of the study of universals is more an indirect reflection of wider anthropological concerns than of the direct concerns of those who might wish to understand universals.

  Although the attention they have received has been far from constant, universals have long been a part of the conceptual framework of anthropology.1 Consider the views of E. B. Tylor, who is generally regarded as the founder of academic anthropology in the English-speaking world. He developed a distinctively cultural anthropology, as opposed to an anthropology that would explain the differences between peoples in racial terms. To support the doctrine of the psychic unity of humanity he noted the detailed similarity of “gesture-language” in all parts of the world and the uniformity in stages of cultural development (1870:370). In his Primitive Culture (1891) Tylor stated that human culture is pervaded by “uniformity,” due to the “uniform action of uniform causes,” the “general likeness of human nature,” and “general likeness in the circumstances of life.” Tylor considered his pages to be so “crowded with evidence of…correspondence among mankind” that he did not dwell on the details in any one place. As a specific example he noted the universality of language and its fundamental similarity among all peoples (1891:1, 6, 7, 161).

  But Tylor’s conception of culture did not fully liberate it from racist ideas. He saw culture in the singular, something that people had more or less of. Degree of intelligence was an important determinant of where a people fell on the hierarchy of the more and less cultured.

  In a process that was largely complete early in this century, Franz Boas, the single most important figure in American anthropology, transformed the concept of culture (Stocking 1968) in ways that were to have important implications for the study of universals. For Boas, cultures were plural; each culture had its own genius and should be judged in its own terms. The notion that other peoples were more primitive and less intelligent was to some degree an artifact of judgment from our own ethnocentric perspective. The differences between peoples did not result from their differing intelligence but from their different culture histories (particularly the accidents of the diffusion of cultural traits).

  It is extremely important to notice Boas’s concern with racism. In the early decades of this century the eugenics movements and other trends had succeeded in, among other things, incorporating racist criteria into U.S. immigration laws. Boas and many other anthropologists took vigorous steps to employ anthropology to combat racism. Margaret Mead’s master’s thesis, for example, examined the environmental influences on the I.Q. test scores of Italian immigrants (Kevles 1985:134–138). This mixture of antiracist morality with cultural relativism—the view that each culture must be judged in its own terms—remains a potent force to the present.

  Another aspect of the Boasian program was to shift anthropological attention away from generalizations—particularly about origins or evolutionary sequences—toward detailed studies of particular cultures. This did not, however, lead Boas to dismiss universals. He utilized the conception of the psychic unity of humanity both to dispel racism and to assert that this unity produced universals. In a section entitled “Traits common to all cultures” in his The Mind of Primitive Man (1963, but first published in 1911), he concurred with the German ethnologist Adolph Bastian in the “appalling monotony of the fundamental ideas2 of mankind all over the globe.”

  We find not only emotion, intellect and will power of man alike everywhere, but also similarities in thought and action among the most diverse peoples. These similarities are…detailed,…far reaching,…vast,…and related to many subjects. (1963:154)

  Boas at times lumped universals with near-universals, but he noted some of the absolute universals.

  Boas pointed out that some universals were the result of their great antiquity. Yet he disagreed with Bastian’s opinion that “elementary ideas” could not be explained, because, Boas said, “the dynamic forces that mould social life” are the same now as they were in the ancient past (1963:178).

  In ways that had no direct connection with elementary ideas or universals, the Boasian concept of culture came to imply an autonomy that was made explicit by one of Boas’s earliest students, A. L. Kroeber, who is generally credited with perfecting the argument that culture is a level of phenomena—the “superorganic”—that cannot be explained by reducing it to lower levels (1917; see also 1915). In particular, the argument goes, one cannot explain culture traits in psychological or biological terms. This brought to a culmination the trend initiated with Tylor’s attempt to explain differences between human groups in cultural terms.

  Kroeber’s views warrant an extended digression and will serve to illustrate developments among Boas’s successors in American anthropology. His 1915 paper, “Eighteen Professions,” drew a sharp boundary between biological science and cultural anthropology: their “differences in aim and method,” he said, were “irreconcilable” (1915:283). Cultural anthropology was a part of history, not science, and “the material studied by history is not man, but his works” (1915:283). Kroeber’s 1917 paper, “The Superorganic,” seemed to be “an antireductionist proclamation of independence from the dominance of the biological explanation of sociocultural phenomena,” as Kroeber himself noted many years later (1952:22). Ideas expressed in Kroeber’s papers, but elsewhere too, were all too successful, and a radical opposition between biology and culture, nature and nurture, became one of the most entrenched tenets of anthropological thought. As Kroeber put it, the contentions of his 1917 paper “passed into…[anthropology’s] common body of assumptions” (1952:22).

  When one stops to think about the implications of Kroeber’s statement that the subject matter of history, including cultural anthropology, is not humanity—it was an astonishing statement. Since cultural anthropology has long been by far the greater part of all anthropology, Kroeber was saying that anthropology—the study of humanity—was largely unconcerned with humanity itself. Like some sort of intellectual neutron bomb, this formulation left human artifacts intact while humans were obliterated from anthropological purview. Trying to understand human culture and society divorced from the problem of trying to understand flesh-and-blood people could only produce a blinkered, one-armed kind of anthropology, still able to function but at a considerable handicap.3

  Although Kroeber’s antireductionist ideas are among his best known contributions, he was not in fact such an extremist. In “Eighteen Professions,” the very paper that drew a sharp boundary between nature and nurture, Kr
oeber said that the “relation of biological and social factors” was a “special province” of anthropological study that would one day “be surveyed, fenced, and improved” (1915:283). It was not his aim at the time, however, to enter that “no-man’s land,” but to delimit “the scope of history from that of science” (1915:283). Several years later, in a textbook on anthropology, Kroeber (1923:3) saw “the interpretation of those phenomena into which both organic and social causes enter” as “a specific task and place in the sun for anthropology.” He still expressed this view in the postwar revision of the textbook (1948:3).

  As he later wrote, “The Superorganic” was not intended to be a declaration of independence, because Kroeber saw no signs of “oppression or threatened annexation by biologists” (1952:22). Instead, the paper was intended to point out the error of explaining sociocultural developments in racial terms. In his later commentary on the paper, Kroeber also retracted some of the reificatory language he had used in describing the superorganic nature of culture (1952:23). His later papers were decidedly reductionist, repeatedly stressing that there is no alternative to considering flesh-and-blood human beings as the efficient causes of culture (1949), while concluding that culture had only a “degree of autonomy” from the organic realm on which it rested and that history should be included in science (1960:3, 12).

  There is good reason to think that Kroeber was actually some sort of psychological reductionist throughout his life. In one of his earliest papers, based on his doctoral dissertation, Kroeber spoke of the “tendencies” that “are at the root of all anthropological phenomena” (1952 [1901]:18). Some are purely “physiological” and can be studied in any individual; others, which were his main concern, are also present in the individual, but they reflect the particular society or culture of the individual. “These several tendencies” are “inherent in the mind” (1952 [1901]:18). Because these tendencies “do not exist separately” from “ethnic phenomena” (i.e., society and culture), “the whole of life…is the only profitable subject of study for anthropology” (1952 [1901]:19). In other words, anthropological study—if it is to be worthwhile—must include tendencies “inherent in the mind.”

  In 1935 Kroeber stated his views more clearly. He agreed with Tylor in positing the psychic unity of humanity, but said that contemporary anthropologists disagreed with Tylor by being more cautious in drawing “specific inferences from this postulate” (1935:565). As he saw it, current methods involved putting the “protean X of the mind to the rear,” but this did “not abolish the X.” Indeed, “The X, or its relation to the Y of culture, does remain our ultimate problem. This fact…we tend to forget; and, probably more than we know, we are bringing up our students and successors in an ultra-behavioristic attitude.…If there is a human mind, it has a structure and constitution, and these must enter into its phenomenal products.…[I]t is well to remember that we are making a deliberate omission for practical purposes for the time being; and above all we have not yet proved that X equals 0” (1935:565–566).

  If Kroeber failed to explore “the interrelation of the organic and the cultural…the reasons were the obvious one of difficulty and the present slender promise of productive results” (1928:325). But throughout his life Kroeber emphasized cultural studies, and it is fair to say that he is much less remembered for his reductionist and interactionist views than for his view of the autonomy of culture. I think it is also fair to say that for many anthropologists a very long period of stressing cultural determinants in practice has made them think that biological determinants are out of the question in principle. They may think that Kroeber was one of those who established the principle, but this is not so.

  Neither Boas nor other anthropologists at the time seem to have noticed any conflict between the view of culture as an autonomous entity and the existence of universals, which they took as fact (Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man was often reprinted, and the section on universals was retained when Boas revised the book in 1938). But as the Boasian view was worked out more clearly, universals were to become more problematical than they had seemed to Tylor or Boas.

  In the meantime, however, Clark Wissler published an influential chapter entitled “The Universal Pattern” in his Man and Culture (1923). The universal pattern contained the following “cultural scheme”:

  Speech

  Languages, writings systems, etc.

  Material Traits Food habits

  Shelter

  Transportation and travel

  Dress

  Utensils, tools, etc.

  Weapons

  Occupations and industries

  Art. Carving, painting, drawing, music, etc.

  Mythology and Scientific Knowledge

  Religious Practices Ritualistic forms

  Treatment of the sick

  Treatment of dead

  Family and Social Systems The forms of marriage

  Methods of reckoning relationship

  Inheritance

  Social control

  Sports and games

  Property Real and personal

  Standards of value and exchange

  Trade

  Government Political forms

  Judicial and legal procedures

  War

  This outline provided a framework for the collection and presentation of ethnographic reports because it would suit any and all societies. It was equivalent to the chapter headings and subdivisions of a standard ethnography and was therefore more a matter, he said, of “classification” than of “concrete trait-complexes.” But Wissler went on to note that some universals, such as the drill, string, and certain beliefs, are quite specific, so that it is not merely the “pattern” that is the same but the “materials,” too. In this context, I believe, “pattern” means “classification” or “class,” and “material” means “content,” so that Wissler was asserting not only the universality of abstract or broad classes of phenomena, such as government and religion, but also of some specific elements within the classes: universals of classification and of content. The distinction between these two conceptions of universals became orthodox. No less persistently orthodox was Wissler’s opinion that human universals were rooted in a common human biology (1923:73–98; Sahlins 1976:8). (Even Boas was to take this position: universals that were “not carried by early man all over the world…may be interpreted as determined by human nature” [1930:109]).

  Although Wissler attempted to sharpen the perspective on universals, the attempt was called into question by a much stronger trend. Perhaps the most visible marker of this trend in anthropology was the success of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which was examined in chapter 1. Mead’s research was part of a series of investigations of the relationship between race and culture that were conducted under Boas’s direction. Mead’s report, and similar ones that both preceded and followed it, made culture look more autonomous than had hitherto been thought and made ever weaker the notion that race—or biology in general—could explain important ranges of human behavior.

  In addition to the Boasian concept of culture, there were other important complements to the empirical reports of which Mead’s was a striking example: the sociological dictum that social facts should be explained by social facts, the phenomenal rise of behaviorist psychology with its view of the human mind as a virtually blank slate, and theoretical turmoil within the biological sciences. In The Rules of the Sociological Method, first published in 1895, Émile Durkheim defined social facts as those “ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him” (1962:3). Social facts were not to be confused with or reduced to biological or psychological phenomena; the “substratum” of social facts, in Durkheim’s view, is society or various groups within it (1962:3). Durkheim supported his position by what seemed to him to be two clear lines of evidence. One was that sociocultural differe
nces could not be explained in racial terms. The other was that the alleged innate tendencies of humans—a “religious sentiment,…sexual jealousy, filial piety, paternal love, etc.”—“are often,” he thought, “totally lacking” (Durkheim 1962:107). It thus seemed clear to Durkheim that psychology could not explain social facts. This view remains very influential in sociology (and anthropology) and is reinforced by Marxist thought in the social sciences. Although it does not go uncontested in Marxist writings, nor even in Marx’s writings, the “official” Marxist position is that there is no universal human nature, only the various human natures determined by specific historical-material conditions (Marković 1983; see also Fromm 1961).

  According to behaviorism, the human mind acquires virtually all its content by means of general learning processes mediated by rewards and punishments. Possessing at birth only the elementary instinctual reactions of love, fear, and rage (Birnbaum 1955:17), humans are fundamentally products of their environments. As John B. Watson, the founder of behaviorism, put it:

  Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. (Watson 1925:82)

  In hindsight it is clear that this famous statement about the influence of the environment on individual differences is entirely compatible with the most extreme of the “faculty” or “modular” views of the human mind—in which it comprises numerous innate and highly specific mechanisms (see, e.g., Fodor 1983). But sociologists and anthropologists of the time seem to have detected no flaw in Watson’s reasoning, and they drew conclusions compatible with his: people are products of their societies or cultures; change society or culture and you change people; discover the dynamics of society or culture and human affairs are brought under control. Intelligent, scientific socialization can make us whatever we want to be. These views were not merely congenial to large numbers of social scientists, they embodied an optimistic faith in egalitarianism and science that appealed to wide segments of the American public. Watson was hailed as a prophet, and his ideas promised to solve problems in the family, the work force, industry, and society at large (Birnbaum 1955; Ross 1979; Samelson 1981).