Human Universals

by Donald E Brown

  To give but a single example, it is certainly my hope that the list of universals given in the previous chapter may inspire brain scientists to watch for signs of specific mechanisms that may underpin some of them. As I read through The Shattered Mind (Gardner 1974) and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Sacks 1985), I could not help but wonder if brain-damaged individuals might exhibit specific deficits that are directly related to universals—failing, for example, to grasp the notion of reciprocity while other mental functions are unimpaired. But unless one is specifically looking for such deficits, they might not be noticed.

  Be that as it may, it remains true that relatively few anthropologists are at present well prepared to undertake the task of explaining universals. But many more anthropologists, and within the limits of the training they presently get, can, as they long have, contribute to the task of tracing the manifold consequences of universals and human nature throughout human cultures, languages, and societies. The scope of this task ranges from the numerous anthropological studies of such general topics as kinship, gender, and age, through the somewhat more specific studies of reciprocity, binary discriminations, and metaphor, and then beyond anthropology to studies of the relationship between poetic line length and brain information processing (Turner and Pöppel 1983; cf. Chafe 1987) or of the relationship between the universal mental capacity for “conjectural” reasoning that evolved with hunting and such modern preoccupations as detective work, art identification, medicine, and science (Ginzburg 1980). And this is only with reference to unrestricted universals.

  The vast field of implicational and statistical universals is already extensively explored by anthropologists and others—but usually without the recognition of what this says about human nature and of what an extensive role human nature therefore plays in human society, culture, and affairs. Let me give an example from my own experience.

  In the course of my study of the Brunei Malays I was struck by the paucity and impersonal nature of their (reliable) historical materials. As an early attempt to explain this, and bearing in mind the extreme rank-consciousness of the Bruneis that I mentioned in the introduction, I suggested that the exalted status of Malay sultans inhibited candid remarks about them, and thus prevented would-be historians from saying much about the very persons who were the principal actors in Malay history (Brown 1971). Although I did not think through the implications at the time, my suggestion could only make sense in terms of some universalist assumptions (as Hempel 1942 has shown). Some of the assumptions involved human nature.

  For example, I was apparently assuming that people in general don’t like to be reminded of their faults (and maybe the faults of persons near to them), that people in power have a special reason to worry about this (it could result in their loss of legitimacy, office, or life), that people in power—in places like old Brunei—can punish those who remind them of their faults, but that people in power probably like flattery. On the other hand, I assumed that would-be historians—for whatever reasons might motivate them to even think about writing history—would bear in mind these traits of persons in power and thus would not devote much effort to the kind of personalized, praise-and-blame history that is largely taken for granted in the West.

  Although I started with an assumption of cultural difference—the great concern for rank in Brunei—it is clear that the rest of the assumptions are about human psychology: what people in general are prone to do (enjoy praise, dislike blame), and what people under specified conditions do. Respectively, I had assumed unrestricted and implicational universals. I didn’t examine these assumptions carefully for the same reason Geertz didn’t examine the behaviors he described in order to explain how he obtained rapport with Balinese villagers (see introduction): because I had no realization of anything that needed explanation. That this said something about the scope and content of human nature—and about the limits of cultural relativity—never crossed my mind, as perhaps it rarely crosses any anthropologist’s mind.

  But I was not entirely satisfied with my first attempt to explain the relative ahistoricity of Brunei Malays, and I did think that an explanation that worked for them ought to have a general applicability. So I conducted a general, comparative study of historical-mindedness (1988). In order to make sense of why certain literate civilizations, such as China’s, were fanatically historically minded while others, such as Hindu India’s, were equally prone to presenting their past in a flagrantly mythological manner, I hypothesized a contingent relationship between rank and historical mindedness. When social rank is idealized as hereditary, myth will be the predominant mode of presenting the past; when social rank is idealized as achievable, history will be the predominant mode. This formulation in turn rested on certain assumptions about human nature, one of which is that hereditary rulers have a strong preference that their ancestors be flattered rather than criticized (another is that practically no one has ancestors for whom only praise is due). Cross-cultural evidence supported the hypothesis.

  Moreover, I found that the same set of ideas is hit upon everywhere to “explain” or justify hereditary stratification: most notably, the notion that humanity is not a single species, because the rulers (at least) are superhuman, quasidivine, or divine entities with inherently different character from lower humans. Accordingly, hereditary rulers are visually depicted with special attention to the regalia that sets them off (rather than to the actual appearances that could only reveal their humanity), and accounts of their lives are hagiographies rather than biographies. The opposed notion, that all people (barring sex and age differences) are basically the same but responsive to their environments, regularly accompanies conditions in which individuals are expected to rise and fall in the social hierarchy in accordance with their individual merits. And with the notion that people are basically all the same, biography and realistic portraiture tend to develop—motivated apparently by a desire to understand the fate of the individual when birth does not determine it.

  Thus, just as hereditary rulers (or those who wrote on their behalf) were greatly concerned with rank (in order to explain why the rulers ranked above others), the historians of societies in which rank was achievable seem never to tire of the subject either. But for the latter it is rises and falls, and it is the patterns of social mobility that catch their attention—almost certainly because this is a subject that repays the careful attention given to it. In short, I found an apparently universal concern with rank or inequality, taking different forms in different conditions.

  At the same time that I had to posit features of human nature to make sense of differences between cultural traditions, I also noted the different ways human nature was envisaged in those traditions. For the caste-organized societies, human nature was multiple in forms, there was no psychic unity of humanity (the result is a kind of racism or pseudospeciation). In the societies with open stratification, by contrast, the notion of the psychic unity of humanity was regularly hit upon. This complex interplay between, on the one hand, the way the world is (the human psyche is basically the same everywhere) and our ability to perceive it as such, in contrast to, on the other hand, the ways in which the world can be misconstrued (e.g., by positing racial conceptions of human nature) and why humans may misconstrue it, raises important questions about the relationships between culture, universals, and human nature. As discussed in earlier chapters, Bloch (1977) answered some of the questions with his formulation of the differing determinants of ideology and knowledge: hereditary stratification is particularly productive of ideology—of which, mythology (as opposed to history), hagiography (as opposed to biography), iconography (as opposed to realistic portraiture), and racist conceptions of human differences are all manifestations.

  In sum, my attempt to explain variations in historical mindedness led to an exploration of the interplay between universals, human nature, the perception of human nature, and many facets of society and expressive culture.4 That experience is also part of what motivated this book. />
  To show that I am not alone in seeing important connections between universals, human nature, and the subject matter of the humanities, let me quote the poet and English professor Frederick Turner’s comments on Murdock’s list of human universals (to which Turner added a few items himself):

  [I]t would be tempting to propose that a work of literary art can be fairly accurately gauged for greatness of quality by the number of these items it contains, embodies, and thematizes. They are all in the Iliad, The Divine Comedy, King Lear, and War and Peace; and most of them can be found in relatively short works of major literature, such as Wordsworth’s Intimations ode, or Milton’s Nativity ode, or even—very compressed—in Yeats’ Among School Children. These topics virtually exhaust the content of the oral tradition; taken together they constitute a sort of deep syntax and deep lexicon of human culture. (1985:26)

  Turner may have overstated the case—and as the list of universals grows this may be even more true—but the point is clear. Technical or arcane as it may be to explain universals, their intrusion into human affairs is too pervasive for the true humanist to ignore.

  To conclude, I will turn to a question of professional responsibility that stems from the special role of anthropology. To anthropologists almost exclusively has been given the task of going into the far corners of the world to examine the way humans are in the wide range of conditions in which they live and have lived. Anthropologists have claimed and received this task because they have shown that representatives of the modern world do not and cannot tell the whole story about humanity. If we want to know what even we are really like, we must compare ourselves with others—and all those others with each other. It is a difficult job, and one with very special rewards and responsibilities. For it is not merely funding agencies who rely on what anthropologists have to say, nor even the public at large, nor Western civilization. Anthropological ideas are relevant to the whole of humanity: not merely in the sense that they refer to the whole of humanity but in the sense that they may well affect the whole of humanity. Because they have a near-monopoly on studying humanity as a whole, anthropologists serve—more than anyone else—as intellectual brokers between all its peoples. What anthropologists have to say about humanity has incalculable consequences for the peoples they study and for the public they report to. As Goldschmidt (1966:ix) puts it, the influence of anthropology “on the moral philosophy of our time [has been] out of all proportion to the numerical and fiscal strength of the discipline.” Consequently, innumerable aspects of public policy are shaped by the view of humanity that anthropology helps to create.

  Discharging their task, anthropologists have enriched humanity’s understanding of itself and so have probably repaid Western civilization, the public, and the agencies that fund anthropologists. But has anthropology done as much as it could have? The answer is no.

  Although they were sent into the field with the charge of getting the whole picture, so that they could come back relieved of parochial views and thus tell the world what people are really like, anthropologists have failed to give a true report of their findings. They have dwelt on the differences between peoples while saying too little about the similarities (similarities that they rely upon at every turn in order to do their work). At the same time, anthropologists have exaggerated the importance of social and cultural conditioning, and have, in effect, projected an image of humanity marked by little more than empty but programmable minds. These are distortions that not only affect the way we look at and treat the rest of the world’s peoples but also profoundly affect our thoughts about ourselves and the conduct of our own affairs. These distortions pervade the “whole secular social ideology” (Fox 1990:24) of our era.

  Anthropologists are not entirely responsible for the distortions I have described—particularly for the tabula rasa conception of the mind—but their professional motives for exaggerating sociocultural differences and determination are not easily dismissed. The more those differences can be shown to exist, and the more they can be thought to reflect purely social and cultural dynamics, the more sociocultural anthropologists (or sociologists) can justify their role in the world of intellect and practical human affairs and thus get their salaries paid, their lectures attended, their research funded, and their essays read. Part of the responsibility does fall directly on the shoulder of anthropologists: they are the ones who reported stress-free adolescence among Samoans, sex-role reversals among the Chambri, and timelessness among Hopi—or who accepted these reports and wove them into a mythology of boundless human plasticity. This more than anything else lent the weight of empirical science to those extreme forms of relativism that hold or lead to the position that there are virtually no pancultural regularities or objective standards.

  Some anthropologists have fretted for a long time about their colleagues’ penchant for the exotic, their tendency to overstate sociocultural determinism, their denials that there is any human nature beyond what society and culture dictate—and in time the fretting has given way to soul-searching, anguish, and even alarm. Chapter 1 expressed some of the complaints; Kluckhohn, Kroeber, Bidney, Mead, Murdock, Hallowell, Goldschmidt, and others registered further complaints that were noted in chapter 3; Victor Turner’s anguish was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Kroeber also grumbled about the “cleverness in novelty” that anthropologists valued at the expense of wider generalization (1960:14). Bloch accuses anthropologists, “fascinated as usual by the exotic,” of paying more attention to those systems of thought designed to obscure the world (as in ritual) than to those systems of thought by which people know the world (1977:290). Fox (1973:13) worries that we could not plead against inhuman tyrannies if we didn’t know what it is to be human,5 and Bagish elaborates this theme in his Confessions of a Former Cultural Relativist (1981). Spiro (1986), Spaulding (1988), and O’Meara (1989) register their dismay with the recent mushrooming of approaches to anthropology so relativistic and impressionistic that they would seem to deny the possibility of a science of humanity (or any science at all). Keesing (1989:459–460) charges anthropologists with “misreading” other cultures due to a “quest for the exotic” that is rooted in the “reward structures, criteria of publishability, and theoretical premises of [the] discipline.” Outside of anthropology, the psychologists Daly and Wilson (1988:154) identify “biophobia” as a malady that infects the social sciences in general, and the philosopher Allen Bloom (1988) criticizes the inroads that an unchecked relativism has made in wider circles.

  These complaints have not stemmed the strong currents in the mainstream of anthropology, where business is conducted as usual and where signs of even stronger relativism are, as I said, mushrooming. America’s most prominent anthropologist dismisses the kinds of concerns listed above with an exhortation to anthropologists to continue to be “merchants of astonishment” who “hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange” (Geertz 1984:275).

  Geertz’s reasoning is that if we want to know what is generically human, there is no reason to go into the field: “if we wanted only home truths, we should have stayed at home” (1984:276). But this presumes that universals, or features of human nature, are right on the surface of behavior, so readily perceived in New York City, say, that it would be foolish to go abroad to seek or study them. Sometimes that may be true, but we can only be sure by going abroad. At other times we only discover the universal when comparison of variations reveals underlying universal mechanisms or processes.

  It is wrong to think that there is some sort of zero-sum game—or even worse, a winner-takes-all game—between universals and the culturally particular or between biological and sociocultural approaches to anthropological problems. The notion that it is such a game has been a major contributor to producing a blinkered and shackled anthropology, an anthropology unable or unwilling to see the relevance of human nature, and thus severely handicapped in solving anthropological problems. The time is upon anthropologists to take off those blinkers; to rise above the self-serving motiv
es and honest mistakes that put the blinkers on in the first place; to search for, see, study, and analyze what is universal as well as what is unique; to think long and hard about how universals and particulars relate to each other; to convert the psychic unity of humanity from a doctrine that eliminates research on the human psyche to one that stimulates it; to put the special skills and indispensable knowledge of anthropology to work in understanding the human psyche; to look again at problems that were dismissed more than half a century ago; to rewrite our textbooks; and to balance the image of humanity that we present, the latter not because symmetry has some aesthetic value but because humanity really is marked by similarities as well as differences. The point is neither trivial nor relevant to anthropologists alone. The questions that universals raise, above all the question of human nature, will find their answers and their implications in thought and study that cross the boundaries of biology, the social sciences, and the humanities. Seeking answers to these questions will lead to a truer account of what humanity is and who we are. It will be irresponsible to continue shunting these questions to the side, fraud to deny that they exist.

  Footnotes

  1. This is not to deny that some aspects of anthropological method—such as the holistic approach, participant-observation, or the analysis of symbols—might legitimately be applied in our own society with only implicit comparison at best.

  2. Things are a bit different in psychology where behavior genetics employs statistical analytic comparisons of such populations as fraternal and identical twins to partition genetic from environmental influences that underlie individual differences in behavior. However, behavior genetic methods have two important limitations. First, genes that do not normally vary from individual to individual—and presumably the genes that produce all traits that are stable adaptations are of this sort (Tooby and Cosmides 1989b)—are not detected by these methods. Second, the use of these methods cross-culturally—or even between subcultures—can pose serious problems (Gould 1981).