Human Universals

by Donald E Brown

  But although Watson “presented a beautiful example of an idea” (Samelson 1981:416), the experimental evidence that he provided to support his ideas was all but nil. The success of Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, which was no less a beautiful example of an idea, needs to be seen in this context: it seemed strikingly to validate the claims of behaviorism (Freeman 1983:99).

  Mead was not alone in validating the behaviorist view of the mind. Those neurologists who favored a “holistic” view of the brain (i.e., one in which specific mental functions are not localized) found support for their views in the findings of Karl Lashley (1929), a behavioral psychologist who concluded from his experiments with animals that behaviors were impaired not by the location of brain damage but simply by the amount of damage. With this support, the holists dismissed decades of neurological research and virtually halted further study of the specific functions of specific anatomical regions of the brain (Gardner 1974:25–26, 122–123).4

  The acceptance of Mead’s views, where they were long to remain entrenched in social science textbooks (Minderhout 1986), reflected the apt way in which they illustrated what were becoming the predominant views in anthropology and wider circles. The equation of an arch environmentalism (including cultural relativism) with optimism about the practical application of social science to the problems of society remains a force to the present.

  Surely it is no coincidence that these developments took place at a time when the biological sciences provided relatively little clear guidance for the social sciences. Darwinian thought had been tainted by its association with social Darwinism in general and the eugenics movement in particular (Freeman 1983; Kevles 1985). Furthermore, positive developments in evolutionary theory awaited a synthesis of the contributions of Darwin and Mendel. By the time this synthesis did occur, conventionally dated to R. A. Fisher’s The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930), few social scientists were paying much attention to theoretical developments in biology.

  As a consequence of the sweeping success of cultural relativism by the 1930s, anthropology in the United States was locked into a dilemma: universals existed and were likely to rest upon psychobiological factors; yet human behavior was fundamentally shaped by culture, and culture was an autonomous phenomenal realm that was not determined by psychobiological factors. From this time onward, as Hatch (1973a:236) says, “Explanations of cultural universals in terms of inborn psychological principles led almost inevitably to dead ends in American anthropology” because they “ran directly counter…to a view that the Boasians had struggled to foster within the social sciences since almost the turn of the century.” This was the view that the human psyche is “almost infinitely malleable,” is “largely the product of cultural conditioning,” and so “cannot provide the basis for a comparative science” (Hatch 1973a:236).

  George Peter Murdock’s “The Science of Culture” (1932) well illustrates the difficulties that anthropological conceptions presented. On the one hand, Murdock says that culture is “independent of the laws of biology and psychology” (1932:200) and that “cultural phenomena…are in no respect hereditary but are characteristically and without exception acquired” (1932:202). Except for those who disagree—the “racists, eugenists, and instinctivists”—these points, he said, are a matter of “universal agreement” (1932:200).

  On the other hand, heredity “underlies culture,” equips humans with “a vast number of unorganized responses,” and furnishes “the mechanism—sensory, nervous, and motor apparatus—through which all behavior, acquired as well as instinctive,…finds expression” (1932:202). Hereditary “impulses” “direct human activities into certain main channels” and “lie at the root” of the “marriage relation,…language, economic organization, religion, etc.” (1932:203). In human behavior “heredity furnishes the warp and [cultural] habits form the woof, the warp remain[ing] everywhere much the same” (1932:203).

  Cultural “habits…overlie the hereditary warp so thickly that it is extremely difficult to perceive the latter at all” (1932:204). Yet, as we have just seen, hereditary impulses direct human action into such highly visible institutions as marriage and the economy.

  While “all analogies” between human and animal societies “are never more than superficial” (1932:208), both animals and humans have society—they differ only “by degree” in intelligence, and animals can form habits too (1932:211–212). The apes even have “fads,” which fail to be cultural only because of their briefer duration (1932:213–214).

  Murdock, and many of his colleagues, were sure that culture was (1) a distinct phenomenal realm that (2) could not be explained in terms of biology/psychology: “the principles of psychology are as incapable of accounting for the phenomena of culture as is gravitation to account for architectural styles” (1932:207, quoting Robert Lowie 1966 [1917]:25–26). Since many anthropologists still agree with these propositions, it is important to see precisely where they err.

  There is no insurmountable problem with (1), particularly if “phenomenal” is not taken literally, so that we think of culture as an analytically distinguishable realm, a logical construct that we fashion from patterns of thought, feeling, action, and artifact. And if some word such as “entirely” or “satisfactorily” were inserted before “explained” in (2), many problems could have been (and now could be) avoided. But without such an insertion, (2) is false or misleading. All architectural styles result from an interaction between cultural patterns and the potentialities and limits set by gravity and other aspects of nature5; there is no reason to think that an interactionist framework would not have eliminated the contradictions in Murdock’s essay. However, Murdock and others wanted, on the one hand, to deny any significant biopsychological determination of culture, while, on the other hand, they could not deny the obvious.6

  Another problem with the culture concept is that if culture is genuinely autonomous, cultural universals are highly improbable: unless they occurred by sheer coincidence they could only result from having existed in the very infancy of humanity and thus having descended by uninterrupted cultural transmission to all its branches (see, e.g., the discussion of universals as “cradle” traits in Benedict [1934:19]). Any other explanation would involve something other than culture causing culture and hence would deny its autonomy. In a later essay Kroeber (1949) confronted this problem by dispensing with universals in two different ways. First, he claimed that they were mere artifacts of our Western mode of classification, not of ethnographic reality (the argument was foreshadowed in Kroeber 1935). “Religion,” for example, is our way of classifying certain ranges of information; the term conveys little if anything of the complex ethnographic reality it allegedly designates. Second, he argued that if a trait or complex were biologically determined, it was by definition not a cultural universal; consequently, such universals had no relevance to cultural anthropology. After the elimination of illusory and biologically founded universals, there would be few to perplex most of anthropology, which was—as it remains—mostly cultural anthropology. Kroeber did not explain how a trait or complex was to be identified as cultural or noncultural other than by its universality or nonuniversality. Murdock (1932) had faced the same problem and offered no guidelines either: while insisting that a scientific anthropology must focus on behavior, which might, he said, be either instinctive or cultural, he was silent on how to tell them apart.

  These silences and contradictions can be partly explained, I think, in a fashion similar to Mary Douglas’s (1966) explanation of taboos. According to Douglas, things that violate the boundaries of deeply held systems of classification are often tabooed. In terms of the folk conceptions of the anthropology of the time (and of many anthropologists today), a cultural universal confounds the traits of the cultural and the biological: it is neither fish nor fowl. This by itself may explain some of the ambivalence anthropologists have exhibited toward the study of universals. Transcending the boundaries of nature and culture, universals were difficult to eve
n think about.7 Lying in an anthropological limbo—Kroeber’s (1915) “no-man’s land”—universals were not literally or consciously tabooed, but they weren’t embraced with much enthusiasm either.

  The flip side of the anthropological preconceptions that effectively tabooed universals was an unwarranted willingness to accept ethnographic reports and analyses that purported to show that culture was autonomous and was the supreme determinant of human behavior. The continued willingness to accept those reports—however limited the evidence upon which they were based—leads in our time to the charges cited in chapter 1 that they had become anthropological myths.8

  But to return to the chronological order of events, another of the most important and popular of all texts in cultural relativism, first published in 1934, was Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture. Like Kroeber, Benedict had been one of Boas’s earliest students, and she was a major influence on Margaret Mead from the beginning of the latter’s graduate training. Resulting in the two best-selling books in the history of anthropology, the “intellectual collaboration” of Mead and Benedict “was to have momentous consequences for the development of cultural anthropology” (Freeman 1983:58).

  In Patterns of Culture Benedict presented colorful and sharply contrasting descriptions of the Zuni, “a ceremonious people…who value sobriety and inoffensiveness above all other virtues” (1934:59); the Dobuans, among whom life “fosters extreme forms of animosity and malignancy” (1934:172); and the Kwakiutl, whose behavior “was dominated at every point by the need to demonstrate the greatness of the individual and the inferiority of his rivals” (1934:214–215). Her aim was to illustrate the enormous and apparently arbitrary variability of cultural orientations, while arguing for a tolerance that would lead to each culture being judged in its own terms.

  But as Williams (1947) pointed out when Benedict’s book was published in a 25-cent version for the masses, there were two serious problems with her argument. For one, a plea for tolerance for all cultural orientations could make little sense to those who had just fought against or suffered at the hands of Nazi Germany. Second, it was clear in numerous passages of her book that Benedict routinely judged the cultures she described, leaving little doubt that, for example, she condemned violence, authority, and, interestingly, “asocial” usages that ran “counter to biological drives” (1934:32). Although Williams had no problems with these pragmatic judgments, he condemned Benedict’s book for its untenable advocacy of a principled relativistic tolerance that would deny the validity of such judgments. This advocacy of tolerance, he said, was at “anthropology’s root and core” (1947:85), and Benedict’s preaching it, while practicing something quite different, was a measure of “the compulsiveness of theoretical postulates” (1947:87 note 4).

  I think, however, that the tolerance Benedict advocated was not based on theoretical propositions. Insofar as theory accounts for the peculiarities of Patterns of Culture, it was the theory that culture is autonomous and therefore essentially arbitrary, in combination with the further theory that human nature is little more than what culture determines it to be. Benedict’s book expresses these theoretical conceptions very clearly, and they involved her in contradictions similar to those discussed earlier with reference to a paper by Murdock.

  Consider Benedict’s views on temperament. In an essay published in the same year as Patterns of Culture, Benedict suggested that human “temperamental types are very likely of universal occurrence” (1959 [1934]:278). Which type will be normal or idealized in a particular culture—and which types will then be culturally identified as abnormal—varies from one society to another. That is what Patterns of Culture illustrated. Individuals are readily socialized to manifest the ideal type because, “happily, the majority of mankind quite readily take any shape that is presented them” (1959 [1934]:278). This alleged malleability of human temperament, and the culturally arbitrary labeling of normal and abnormal, is much of what Patterns of Culture is remembered for. How one would reconcile these views with the commonsense judgments Benedict rendered about “biological drives” and their relationship to cultural practices was not explained. Benedict’s book registered a high-water mark in the notion of the extreme variability of cultures. It may, by its very extremity, have led some anthropologists to rethink the direction of American anthropology.9

  Not all anthropologists were swept along with the general trends in American anthropology. In an article first published in 1935 the British anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown expounded a science of society in which the concept of culture had very little part to play. He developed a framework that rested on the study of phenomena universally present. Thus

  Any social system, to survive, must conform to certain conditions. If we can define adequately one of these universal conditions, i.e., one to which all human societies must conform, we have a sociological law. (Radcliffe-Brown 1952:43)

  Radcliffe-Brown was one of the two principal founders of what came to be known as British social anthropology—a school that, like its pre-war American counterpart, shunned interest in origins or evolution. The other founder was Bronislaw Malinowski, who formulated a framework for analyzing culture that used as its fixed points of reference certain universal givens of human life.

  Malinowski’s posthumously published A Scientific Theory of Culture (1960 [1944]) presented a “List of Universal Institutional Types,” in which seven “principles of integration” informed various institutional responses (see similar conceptions in Warden 1936). The principles were reproduction, territoriality, physiology, voluntary association, occupation and profession, rank and status, and “comprehensive” (integration of the community). The institutions informed by reproduction, for example, included the family, courtship, marriage, and extended kinship groups. Malinowski implied that each of the principles is itself a universal—each, at any rate, poses a universal problem. Furthermore, each of the kinds of groupings that the principles give rise to have the same general features, consisting of a charter, personnel, norms, material apparatus, activities, and function.

  Malinowski also thought that “any theory of culture has to start with the organic needs of man” (1960 [1944]:72). These needs—in combination with the further “imperative needs” called spiritual, economic, or social—provided the framework for a scientific theory of culture. The following “basic” needs give rise to the following cultural responses:

  Basic Needs Cultural Responses

  metabolism commissariat

  reproduction kinship

  bodily comforts shelter

  safety protection

  movement activities

  growth training

  health hygiene

  To take the first need as an example, in every society there must be arrangements for the supply of the physical material each person must ingest in order to live, must be allowance for the digestive processes to occur, and must be arrangements for the sanitary disposal of the end products of digestion. These necessities are met by the institutional arrangements of each society.

  In addition to basic needs, which are essential elements in the definition of human nature, Malinowski also posited the above-mentioned “imperative needs” or “derived needs.” They included production and reproduction of the means of production (economics); the codification and regulation of human behavior (social control); renewal of the human material of each institution (education); and an organization of authority and power (political organization). The analysis of culture consisted of showing the way the institutions peculiar to each society discharged the function of meeting each of the basic and derived needs. From Malinowski we get not so much a list of universals as a list of universal conditions for the existence of society and culture.

  As a further aspect of his universalism, Malinowski’s works are permeated with the idea that human impulses are everywhere much the same and that culture is rooted in “innate or natural tendencies of the hum
an mind” (Hatch 1973b:283). But this aspect of Malinowski’s thought was not followed up; it, too, “led to a dead-end in anthropology” (Hatch 1973b:289).

  Back in the United States, dissatisfaction with some aspects of Boasian anthropology surfaced just before World War II. As a consequence of this dissatisfaction, a series of materialistic determinants of culture—economic, subsistence, and ecological—were soon to be studied with renewed vigor, and have become orthodox limitations on the idea of the autonomy of culture. According to Hatch (1973a), these kinds of determinants were acceptable because there were precedents for them in Boasian thought. But psychobiological determinants were something else. Thus Herskovits’s (1940) suggestion that Thorstein Veblen’s concept of “conspicuous consumption” might be applicable in any society was ignored because it “ran counter to some fundamental assumptions behind the Boasian…tradition” (Hatch 1973a:237). The one idea that few anthropologists could live with was the idea that there are fixed and specific features of human nature.