Human Universals
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17. The reluctance of anthropologists and other social scientists to embrace the biological in human affairs may have folk cultural roots. Both Bidney (1947) and Kroeber (1949) trace the nature-culture dichotomy at least in part to the dichotomy of flesh and spirit. The ancient and profound exultation of the latter and denigration of the former shapes Western thought to our day.
4
Explaining Universals
Unlike most anthropologists, the late Joseph Shepher (1983) said it was particularly the universal that interested him. I find that some students, and others, agree—for various reasons. One reason is a curious reversal of the reason that the astonishingly relative is interesting: once one has absorbed the lesson of cultural relativity, what was initially astonishing becomes mundane or fully expectable. It poses no great problem for explanation. Indeed, any outrageously different custom or belief can get the same explanation: it’s because of their culture. But when the kaleidoscope of world cultures becomes normal, then the fixed points, the universals, stand out as curiosities. And the explanation that it is because of their culture becomes meaningless. A new question emerges: given the inherent tendency for disparate peoples to develop disparate cultures, how on earth can some things be the same everywhere?
This chapter presents a number of ways in which universals have been or could be explained. These kinds, ways, or strategies of explanation are neither all of equal importance nor all mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they are often complementary and must be used in combination in order to explain any particular universal.
One of the points that emerges from an analysis of explanation is that a great many universals do require explanation, at least in part, in biological terms. Many seem to require explanation in “interactionist” frameworks—i.e., in terms of a combination of biological and cultural factors. If we want to understand universals in the context of particular societies, the necessity of an interactionist framework is all the greater. “Interaction” is a vague word (Scarr and McCartney 1983), as are “cultural” and “biological,” and it is clear that anthropology does not yet have suitable concepts for combining (or replacing) the biological and cultural frameworks of analysis, which for too long have been kept separate.
The various modes of explaining universals will be presented and illustrated under the following headings: (1) explaining a universal with a universal; (2) cultural reflection or recognition of biological fact; (3) logical extension from (usually biological) givens; (4) diffusionist explanations that rest upon the great age of the trait and, usually, its great utility; (5) archoses; (6) conservation of energy; (7) the nature of the human organism, with emphasis on the brain; (8) evolutionary theory; (9) interspecific comparison; (10) ontogeny; and (11) partial explanations. There is no particular order to this list, and cross-references between them will be frequent. I will illustrate the explanatory modes with discussions of particular universals.
Explaining a Universal with a Universal
The method of concomitant variation is a quintessential anthropological method. By this method two traits that are thought to be linked to each other are examined cross-culturally to see if they covary. For example, one could test hypotheses that link matrilineal descent with unstable marriages by seeing if high rates of divorce are nonrandomly associated with societies that have matrilineal descent. Even though covariation does not demonstrate any particular causal connection, a study that shows distinct traits systematically covarying with each other carries considerable weight because it suggests that some sort of causation is at work. The closer the correlation, the weightier the suggestion. In a discipline riven by fundamental disagreements over what causes what (e.g., whether matrilineal descent generates high rates of divorce, or whether the latter leads to the former), covariation comes close to being a common currency of discourse.
But universals pose a real problem for the use of the method of concomitant variation: every universal is equally a correlate of every other, so the degree of correlation between any of them ceases to be a criterion for judging arguments that posit connections between them. Consequently, the actual causal argument is particularly critical in attempts to explain a universal with a universal. Right-handedness and male dominance will provide illustrations of this first form of explanation.
All peoples are predominantly right-handed, and among almost all peoples the right hand is symbolic of good, the left is not. Because modern students of hand symbolism speak of “near-universality,” I presume that in some societies there is no cultural elaboration of handedness: their members are mostly right-handed but do not associate right (or left) with positive values. The positive evaluation of the right is thus a near-universal and an implicational universal: where symbolic value is attached to the hands as a societywide norm, the right hand is always positively evaluated.1
There has long been evidence that handedness is linked to cerebral specialization: we are predominantly “left-brained” (control of our left and right limbs are lodged in opposite sides of the brain). Consequently, explanations of these three interconnected phenomena—handedness, brain asymmetry, and symbolic preference for the right—have often been given in terms of each other, with the direction of the causal chain being the main bone of contention. If we are predominantly right-handed because we are left-brained, then presumably the causal chain traces back to our genes; but if we are predominantly left-brained because we are right-handed, then the causal chain might go back to the symbolic preference for the right—it is the latter possibility that most concerns us here.
The classic anthropological work is Robert Hertz’s “The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity” (1960 [1909]). Hertz thought that brain asymmetry had a genetic basis and at least partially determined handedness, but he thought that brain asymmetry was too weak a determinant to result in the universal or near-universal cultural evaluation of handedness. He thought, on the contrary, that the socially determined emphasis on the right hand might be responsible for the degree of dominance of the left cerebral hemisphere (because the socially determined preference for the right hand gave the left brain more exercise).2
The main ingredient in Hertz’s explanation was yet another universal: dualistic thought (good/evil, light/dark, high/low, right/left, etc.). Given the human propensity to think dualistically and to attach moral, religious, or ritual significance to dualisms, it was possible that the slight propensity for the hands to differ in skill and strength was magnified socially into yet another profound dualism. Why human thought is fundamentally dualistic and why the human body should so universally be caught up in dualistic thinking were large questions yet to be answered. Whatever the answer, it lay in the “collective conscious,” and Hertz thought it likely that we were on the threshold of organizing societies within which we would arrive at a more “harmonious development of the organism” because we would not rank the hands (and cerebral hemispheres).
In some ways Hertz’s prophecy was correct: right-handedness is less enforced in modern Western societies, and children are now taught in school to exercise their right brains. But the notion that handedness is fundamentally or even largely a cultural phenomenon has not fared well. Although there is no full consensus on any one genetic model for the transmission of handedness, and some sort of environmental influences appear to be involved in left-handedness, these influences appear to be prenatal (Annett 1985; Boklage 1984). In populations where children are pressured to use the right hand for writing, the proportion of right-handed writers can be increased, but the same population will show the normal proportions of left-handed individuals for other activities, such as throwing balls or striking matches. Most children who are left-handed were raised by parents both of whom are right-handed; couples in which both are left-handed will raise children who are mostly right-handed (Annett 1985; see also Levy 1976).
But the genetic factors that explain handedness do not explain why the hands serve symbolic functions. No student of brain
asymmetry and its evolution advances the argument that we have a specific innate propensity to feel emotionally positive about the right, negative about the left. How to explain this positive evaluation of the right will be discussed further below.
An attempt to explain the universality of male dominance provides a more recent but quite similar attempt to explain one universal in terms of others. Having concluded that, in spite of diligent searches for contrary cases, women prove everywhere to be second-class citizens in the public-political domain, Sherry Ortner (1974; see also Bamberger 1974) offers an explanation of this in terms of a universal opposition between nature and culture, a universal devaluation of nature in comparison to culture, and a universal assumption that women are closer to nature than men are.3 Because humans everywhere use culture to overcome nature, culture everywhere is superior. Because more of a woman’s body and time are devoted to reproduction, she is seen as closer to nature. Because she is closer to nature, woman is culturally conceived as inferior to man.
The evidence that women everywhere are seen as closer to nature is not entirely compelling: in the United States today, men are often derogatorily described as “like animals,” and a prominent element in conservative thought is that women civilize men (hence the importance of maintaining “family values,” etc.). But whatever the empirical issues, the logic of Ortner’s explanation is clear, and she explicitly states (1974:71) that she will try to explain one universal in terms of one or more other universals.
Cultural Reflection or Recognition of Physical Fact
This aspect of explanation is present in both Hertz’s (1960) and Ortner’s (1974) explanations for universals but is deemphasized. In Hertz’s argument, dualistic thought—which he saw as an essentially social phenomenon (a matter of the collective conscious)—magnifies a trivial biological tendency. Ortner’s position is similar: the physically differing reproductive roles of male and female figure in Ortner’s explanation, but the real emphasis is on the ideological dualism of nature-culture. This dualism is not clearly a biological given (at least it isn’t for Ortner), nor is the higher evaluation of culture, nor is the association of men with culture and women with nature. So the biological facts are presented as only minor elements in a culturally complex phenomenon. After reviewing explanations for universals of knowledge and for the universality of kinship terminologies, I will say more about the recognition of biological facts in explaining handedness.
Maurice Bloch (1977) presents an explanation of universals in which the reflection of physical fact is a key element. He argues that human cognition comprises two distinct elements: knowledge and ideology. Knowledge results from interaction with nature (i.e., from practical activities such as production and reproduction). The function of knowledge is utilitarian. Ideology results from social structure—especially “institutionalized hierarchy.” Bloch’s notion of institutionalized hierarchy should probably be understood to mean hereditary hierarchy (all the examples he gives are hereditary). The function of ideology is to rationalize or justify instituted inequality, a task that does not require universal validity.
Knowledge, says Bloch, contains universally valid concepts, such as the durational conception of time that ethnosemanticists have found in language after language, and which is virtually essential to the conduct of practical affairs. Knowledge reflects the world as it is. Ideology by contrast is relative, tending to be minimal where instituted hierarchy is minimal, and to be rich where instituted hierarchy is great—as in Hindu, caste-organized India. Ideology does not need to reflect the world as it is, and often obscures its realities.
Bloch’s views require some qualification. For example, knowledge does not always flow automatically from practical activities. To the contrary, knowledge often accumulates gradually, with many false starts along the way. Similarly, instituted hierarchy is not the only source of ideology. But as an attempt to explain major parts of the broad contrast between the universal and universally valid on the one hand, and the culturally specific on the other, Bloch’s argument is both sweeping and testable. My own research (1988) on the conditions that produce history (knowledge) as opposed to myth (ideology) among literate peoples provides strong support for Bloch’s argument.
Knowledge is generally thought to be cultural (and it may be that Bloch sees it this way). But there are two ways in which considerations of human biology impinge on Bloch’s argument. The specific universal that Bloch dwells on is durational time (as opposed to “non-durational” cyclic or static conceptions of time). Since humans, along with myriad other species, have built-in biological clocks of various sorts, it is not at all clear that the conception of time is ever fundamentally cultural—in spite of variations in the marking of time or of the cultural elaboration of time (Young 1988). Moreover, the “production” and “reproduction” of Bloch’s larger framework are intrinsically linked to noncultural aspects of human life: it is only by reference to human biology—e.g., our dietary needs—that activities can be described as practical. Thus Bloch’s argument essentially says that some universals reflect biological facts, even though these universals themselves are cultural.
The universality of kinship terminologies provides a further case of cultural reflection or recognition of physical fact. A kinship terminology is that linguistic domain (discrete set of terms) found among every people, in which domain most or all terms are translatable by the terms required for sexual reproduction, or combinations of them: father, mother, son, daughter (Gellner 1957; Schneider 1972). Among many peoples the combination terms are very complex, and extrakinship factors are reflected in the kinship terminologies, too. (Marriage—which is distinct from procreation per se—so regularly impinges on kinship terminologies that it is usually counted as one of the two fundamental building blocks of kinship. Accordingly, the father and mother of an individual are normally husband and wife.)
The reasons why the relationships involved in procreation are singled out for universal recognition will have to be pursued later. For the time being it is important to note that this sort of interaction in which the human construction of cultural categories overwhelmingly or unanimously recognizes, accepts, and builds upon certain brute features of nature must certainly be included among the means of explaining universals. It is a process well attested in statistical universals too (Brown and Witkowski 1981). Consequently, we must explain an astonishingly uniform and essentially cultural phenomenon—the labeling of kin—in terms of the cognizance of brute facts of human biology.
I suggest the following. Humans everywhere have innate abilities and propensities to see the world the way it is (in addition to Bloch [1977], Sperber [1985] expresses a similar idea). This is not, of course, to say that humans see anything and everything the way it is. Brute, ubiquitous (or universal), and important features of the world are especially likely to be incorporated in language and, moreover, to serve symbolic functions, or to serve as metaphors for, and measures of, other features of the world or of imagination. In this light, consider right-handedness again. From the time of our remote ancestors to the present, our dependence on tool making and tool using must again and again have presented to the human mind the remarkable difference between the skill and strength of the two hands, and the right handers have always greatly outvoted the lefties. What metaphor for all that is wondrous and good, then, is more at hand than the right hand itself? If I read Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) correctly, this is not mere speculation: metaphors with similar bases are indeed the widespread ones. So the nearly universal cultural priority of the right, as well as the universality of kinship terminologies and aspects of knowledge such as the durational conception of time, are all in one form or another reflections of human biology in human culture. The universal classification of people by sex and age are further examples (Brown 1982).
Logical Extension from (Usually Biological) Givens
This is yet another variant of explaining a universal with a universal and is closely relat
ed to cultural reflection. It usually consists of arguing that any particular universal is more or less entailed by one or another of the gross and unquestioned characteristics of the species, i.e., that humans are large-brained, slow-maturing, sexually reproducing, group-living, terrestrial, omnivorous, and often quarrelsome mammals with moderate sexual dimorphism and no estrus. This kind of an explanation is thought to be self-evident, so the logic is not closely examined, the causal chain is not traced in detail, and the conclusions are not subjected to empirical test against alternatives. (To the extent that logic and causation are examined more closely, and are tested, different modes of explanation are involved.)
Malinowski’s (1960 [1944]) framework for the analysis of culture, as described in chapter 3, is fundamentally of this type. His list of human “needs” and “derived needs” are the givens that account for cultural institutions to be found in any society.
Diffusionist Explanations that Rest Upon the Great Age of the Universal and, Usually, Its Great Utility
The use of fire and cooking are universal, and both are of great antiquity and utility. Fire-making is about 40,000 to 100,000 years old, while evidence for the opportunistic use of fire goes back 1,500,000 years (Clark 1986). One or two peoples known to ethnography did not know how to make fire, but all peoples used it. Its advantages include temperature control, illumination, protection from animals, purification, and aid in shaping tools.