A historical incident—the famous Treaty of Medicine Lodge, signed in 1867 between the Arapaho, Kiowa, and Comanche peoples and the US Government at the Medicine Lodge River of Kansas—frames the first part of our discussion here. This treaty is worth examining not for what it contained, but for the readings it was given based on the dark matters of the opposing sides signing the treaty. After discussing various levels of implicit knowledge and perspectives on each side and the breakdown in communication that thereby resulted, we are prepared to review several influential definitions of culture entertained by anthropologists down through the years. We then take up the desiderata for a definition of culture and offer a novel proposal based primarily on knowledge structures, ranked values, and social roles. Again, culture is not a synonym for dark matter. But living culturally—in a community with shared culture in my definition—forms a good deal of every individual’s dark matter.
From the discussion of culture, we explore various applications of this theory and how it elucidates and harmonizes concepts that some have taken to be orthogonal or contradictory to one another. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the applications of the theory of culture to modern business as one example.
Key to the entire theory is the linguistic anthropological concept of emicization (Pike 1967), which describes the trajectory and point of all linguistic and cultural learning—the achievement of the perspective of the insider. Because dark matter is constructed by actions, observations, conversations, and the other components of a life history in a particular society, to understand it we must understand what this abstract notion of culture is that plays such a significant role in its emergence.
For more than a century, anthropologists have bickered about the definition of culture (Kuper 2000). Some have even argued that it should be replaced with a less global, less monolithic notion. But no anthropologist has seriously entertained the idea that it can be tossed out and replaced by nothing. The reason for this is that the members of a given family, community, society, nation and so on, clearly share some knowledge, some values, and relationships between their different sorts of knowledge and the rankings of their various values over time. They clearly talk alike. They clearly act in similar ways. They show disgust at similar things. And so on. In what follows I want to examine the evidence for culture and how it contributes to the dark matter of the mind, and then to consider one influential critic’s arguments against it.
Let’s say that you want to convince someone else that culture exists. What facts might you appeal to in order to support the existence of an entity called culture? Well, you might suggest social roles, or values, or knowledge transmission and learning, or skills and ways of being. Anything that can be explained by other means loses its force as an argument for culture.
I am a father, a teacher, an administrator, a husband, a shopper, a patient, and a counselor. Each one of these roles is arguably formed by the cultures to which I belong. Culture distinguishes and shapes social roles—even when they may seem universal, and thus might appear to be culture-independent. For example, though it is true that there are Italian fathers and American fathers, the concept of “father” should not be conflated across cultures. It seems likely that between any two cultures, fathers will have overlapping but never identical roles. There are crucial differences between fathers of different cultures. Even American fathers or any fathers of ostensibly the same culture vary in the nature of their roles at different times.
For example, some societies may believe that (more accurately, “value the idea that”) fathers should support their families. In such a society, it may be assumed that fathers have a responsibility to provide food, clothing, and shelter for their children. And—in Western societies, at least—both the society and many fathers themselves believe that it is good for fathers to help their children with schoolwork, heavy lifting, and tasks in general too difficult for children to do alone. Fathers of other generations may share exactly these beliefs and values. But these values are not identical across different cultures. For example, a Pirahã father will not pick up a child to comfort it if the child has injured itself, except in rare circumstances. He will expect the child to work hard and not complain on long treks through the jungle and will not offer assistance in many cases that the American father would. And his individual values emerge partly from the values of other members of his society.
But even in different generations within otherwise the same society, fathers may differ profoundly. For example, values shared by many of my father’s generation included corporeal punishment, the expectation that women did the bulk or all of the housework, the belief that their wishes and orders would be carried out without question, and the attitude that their children were not deserving of respect or of a voice in family affairs. These fathers might regularly side with teachers against their own children in disputes. They considered the child and all its resources as mere extensions of themselves or their possessions. The fathers of the generation of my children, on the other hand, usually avoid corporeal punishment, see their family as a unit of equals, know they ought not to believe that their desires should be the only (or even the main) one heard, often help clean the house, would likely take their children’s side in a school dispute, and so on. Being a father in the 1950s was therefore considerably different than being a father in the twenty-first century (“considerably” does not mean “entirely,” of course). This is because the cultural role is constrained and defined by shifting cultural values.
If such an explanation is on the right track—if definable group values and role-expectations exist—then there is evidence that values are shared across individuals and therefore may partially define a group. This is in turn (part of) what it means for a group to be a culture: shared values. All cultural roles show similar diachronic, geographic, economic, and other shifts across time or across space or across populations. If we move from roles to beliefs or from beliefs to shared concepts, to shared phenotypes, shared food, shared music, and so on, we can find many examples of shared tacit knowledge that produce overlapping cultural groupings.
In part these shared mental items emerge because over the course of one’s life, each of us accumulates experiences, lessons (both formal and informal), and relationships all being assimilated into our bodies and minds, partially via apperception. People who grow up in the same community (a relative term that in my usage can refer to family, village, nation, etc.) have similar experiences—climate, television, food, laws, and values (e.g., fat is wrong, honest is right, hardwork is godly). Their experiences are subjected to apperception and memory, both muscle and mental memory. Episodic and muscle memories hold our various experiences together as culture-guided apperception makes them our own. Arguably our “self”—or at least, our “sense of self”—is no more than this accumulation of memories and apperceptions.
This is then in broad brush how dark matter of the mind is formed. We want to go deeper, however, by exploring the roles of attachment and emicization in the emergence of dark matter and how this dark matter forms the bedrock of culture and individual psychology.
THE VERY IDEA OF CULTURE
There have been many definitions of culture offered in the anthropological literature over the years.2 While we discuss several of these in what follows, I want to begin with my own definition:
Culture is an abstract network shaping and connecting social roles, hierarchically structured knowledge domains, and ranked values. Culture is dynamic, shifting, reinterpreted moment by moment. Culture is found only in the bodies (the brain is part of the body) and behaviors of its members. Culture permeates the individual, the community, behaviors, and thinking.
From this definition, it follows that people may share cultural components without being part of an independently defined social group.
Although this definition emerges from a theory of culture, it also interrogates the construction of such a theory. What should, for example, a “theory of culture” do, exa
ctly? Well, it should enable us to understand. It should remove or radically lessen our surprises regarding human social behavior and indexical values. It should predict or at least explain individuals’ behaviors in specific cultural contexts. It should offer an understanding of the major institutions of a society. It should provide a guide and methodology for investigating specific cultures. To see what I mean, let’s return to the example introduced earlier of the Medicine Lodge treaty.
In October 1867 a meeting took place at Medicine Lodge Creek, near present-day Wichita, Kansas, that led to one of the many treaties between the US government and the aboriginal peoples of North America. On the one side were representatives of the US’s Indian Peace Commission. On the other there assembled members of the Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Apache peoples. There were displays and speeches from both sides of the conference. The American military made a showy display with of colorful uniforms, howitzers, and other weaponry. The Indians gave a lesson in horsemanship that no US mounted soldier could match. Chief Ten Bears of the Yamparika Comanches made an impassioned speech. The treaty was signed. All agreed to it.
But the treaty was ineffective from the beginning. For once, at least, an official treaty with the Indians was invalidated not because of dishonesty on the part of the US government but because the signatories failed to realize that language—whether spoken or written in treaties—is merely the visible portion of an invisible universe of understanding that derives from the values, knowledge, and experiences—the cultures—of individual communities. Though people might read the same words in a treaty, as in all communication, our interpretations are slaves to our assumptions, based on background beliefs and knowledge that the literal meaning of the words rarely conveys.
In this case, the treaty called for the US government to provide food to the Indians so that they could feed their families through the winter months. The US Indian Agency was responsible for providing the food. The US Congress was responsible for ratifying the treaty that was signed. Each in turn depended on other cultural institutions, all with their own deadlines and priorities. The Indians could not have cared less about ratification and the like. But they should have, because when they arrived to collect their provisions, prior to ratification of the treaty, the pantry was bare. The Indians felt betrayed.
On the other side, the US government expected that the Indians, when they agreed to live in the reservations, would consider themselves bound to stay there in perpetuity and to forever abide by the “law.” Perpetual obligations to anyone other than their own families were foreign to the Indians’ values and understanding of the way the world worked. They could never have legitimately made the commitment expected of them. It made no sense. Although US officials could not have cared less about Indian interpretations rooted in their very different cultures, they should have. The Comanche chief Quanah Parker, present at this ill-fated gathering, at least learned from the experience. In his future dealings with whites, he learned to respect the importance of the dark matter of the unsaid. He subsequently inquired about every potential assumption that he thought whites might be making before signing future treaties (though no one outside a culture can ask all the right questions).
Treaties illustrate natural consequences of dark matter. But we need not look so high in the cultural hierarchy to find the effects of dark matter. There are plenty of examples in everyday, mundane transactions. For example, when you tell your friend, “Well, we’re going to eat now,” depending on your relationship, but only a little on your words, this could mean “It is time for you to go home therefore” or “It is time for you to wash up and sit with us.” The guest’s interpretation will be based on their relationship, their knowledge of their host’s culture and personal expectations, their monitoring of the looks of other family members, and so on. It will not be based merely or even mainly on the words that a potential host speaks.
The point is that human language is not just a computer code. Fortran is not a language. Languages and human cognitive abilities draw on and emerge from cultures. Nothing in human language or human societies can be understood without getting at the dark matter of the background. This is what makes the study of human behavior more difficult than the so-called hard sciences—the variables of human interactions are not only nearly infinite, but the majority are hidden from direct observation. Understanding the nature and role of this dark matter in human behavior, language, and thinking is essential for comprehending, coexisting, and working together with fellow humans.
In spite of such obvious (though still superficial) evidence for culture, there are culture deniers. For example, in an essay addressing a question posed on the website Edge.org—“What scientific idea is ready for retirement?”—John Tooby (2014), a founder of so-called evolutionary psychology, argued that culture is a term that has not been found useful and should be abandoned. He argues that “‘culture’ and the related term ‘learning’ are . . . a pair of deeply-established, infectiously misleading, yet (seemingly) self-evidently true theories.” He claims that “all ‘culture’ means is that some information states in one person’s brain somehow cause, by mechanisms unexplained, ‘similar’ information states to be reconstructed in another’s brain.”
Tooby’s concern is, frankly, hard to take seriously. For example, according to his caricaturization, screaming “Fire!” in a crowded theater would be an example of culture. Moreover, by his description, language would just be culture, equating two important, distinct concepts, since language is the primary means for getting ideas from one mind to another. Yet it presupposes ideas shared in both individuals for it to work at all. The contents of a movie would just be “culture” according to Tooby, because everyone watching the movie would share information if they understood the movie, regardless of when or where they watched it or what society they belonged to.3 A poster of an equation becomes “culture” just in case the equation is solved or even understood roughly by a driver passing by, at any time, in any place, from any language.
Tooby further claims that a “science” of culture is no less gibberish than a science of how one building affects its neighbor building through architecture or power lines. He argues that instead of culture, specific phenomena—such as “ritual” or conversations—should be isolated and broken it into their specific components for study. Analysis of material into its constituent parts is of course often a worthwhile endeavor for scientists, depending on the level of analytic detail needed to answer their questions. But to claim that we can dispense with an overarching concept of culture in favor of its constituents is to repeat the errors of the Chomskyan paradigm in linguistics that ignores conversation, discourses, and texts in favor of the exclusive study of sentences—studying constituents apart from their distribution in larger units. Tooby claims that culture is no more helpful a concept than “protoplasm” (though comparing it to the “ether” would have been more powerful and humorous). “Culture and learning are black boxes, imputed with impossible properties, and masquerading as explanations . . . They are the La Brea tarpits of the social and behavioral sciences.” And yet Tooby’s remarks seem merely confused. The history of science shows us that failure to consider phenomena in the proper scale leads to misunderstanding.
If a famous scientist like the founder of evolutionary psychology is unconvinced of the usefulness of the term culture, then either it is indeed useless, he has read insufficiently, he has a vested interest in opposing the concept, or there is a need for a clearer understanding/definition of culture—or all of the above. I believe that there is indeed a need for a clearer or more accurate definition of culture. Yet even the inadequate definition that Tooby seems to use would not justify discarding the concept as useless, as Tooby urges upon us.
Some of the reasons for Tooby’s apparent bemusement with the concept of culture are the following. First, he is understandably committed to his own theoretical model (which we consider in more detail in chap. 9). Evolutionary psychology (EP) rejects
the idea that there is a force—culture—in which the mind is shaped and through which it learns things, for if this were true, it would render unnecessary EP’s nativist theory of how cognition works, focused as it is on the mind instead of the individual, and on “what’s in the mind,” rather than “what’s the mind in.” Second, Tooby’s bemusement arises from a disregard of more than a century of anthropological studies concluding that culture is a powerful explanan for human cognition, behavior, and social relationships, among many other things. Tooby’s comments fail to refer to this literature. That is not the problem at all, in fact, especially not in a piece designed to be a short, pithy popular essay of the Edge type. More significant is that the remarks show ignorance and disdain for this literature, describing a concept that has not ever been more than a small aspect of culture (modes and types of information transfer). Nevertheless, Tooby can support his remarks with the accurate claim that there is no universally embraced definition of culture among anthropologists.
Culture indeed is appealed to as a way of making sense of many apparently unrelated phenomena. While some use culture to explain something as small as a conversation or even a word, it is also appropriately burdened to account for much larger entities. It has been appealed to in order to understand commonality within groups, even for entire nation states. For example, in The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Schama 1997), Schama discusses the Dutch motto, Luctor et emergo, “I struggle and emerge,” and its role in both capturing and creating the Dutch people’s sense of struggle to hold back and reclaim land from the sea—to build a nation where once there was only water and to provide a national rallying cry, a summary (to some) of the Dutch people’s most salient cultural values.
Dark Matter of the Mind Page 10