Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  Examined in this light, what are we to make of this phrase? Superficially, there is nothing profound about a state motto. Legislators have the authority declare any phrase they choose the state motto, any flower the state flower, any song the state song. This does not mean that such choice always reflects cultural values. Nor does legislative action automatically endow itself with a purpose or purchase in the society. On the other hand, Schama makes the case that not only does Luctor et emergo capture a fact about Dutch history and the personalities of some Dutch aristocrats, but that such phrases, once created, can in turn engender the very cultural value they name. The question Schama’s book and many others raise is what the significance might be of intentionally shared ideas and values—through such means as advertising, public proclamations, slogans, aphorisms, flags, and so on—for effecting change within groups. When the group proclamation becomes a value of individuals, the social and the individual are shared or causally linked; this linkage leads to shared actions, and thus ultimately to shared values, getting us partway to what we mean when we claim that a people forms a specific culture (or that they “live culturally”).

  Thus while Tooby may be absolutely right that to have meaning, “culture” must be implemented in individual minds, this is no indictment of the concept. In fact, this requirement has long been insisted on by careful students of culture, such as Sapir. Yet unlike, say, Sapir, Tooby has no account of how individual minds—like ants in a colony or neurons in a brain or cells in a body—can form a larger entity emerging from multi-individual sets of knowledge, values, and roles. His own nativist views offer little insight into the unique “unconscious patterning of society” (to paraphrase Sapir) that establishes the “social set” to which individuals belong.

  The idea of culture, after all, is just that certain patterns of being—eating, sleeping, thinking, posture, and so forth—have been cultivated and that minds arising from one such “field” will not be like minds cultivated in another “field.” The Dutch individual will be unlike the Belgian, the British, the Japanese, or the Navajo, because of the way that his or her mind has been cultivated—because of the roles he or she plays in a particular value grouping, because of the ranking of values that her or she has come to share, and so on.

  We must be clear, of course, that the idea of “cultivation” we are speaking of here is not merely of minds, but of entire individuals—their minds a way of talking about their bodies. From the earliest work on ethnography in the US, for example, Boas showed how cultures affect even body shape. And body shape is a good indication that it is not merely cognition that is effected and affected by culture. The uses, experiences, emotions, senses, and social engagements of our bodies forget the patterns of thought we call mind.

  In this sense, denying the importance—or even the very existence—of culture as an object of study in favor of its constituents (knowledge, behaviors, beliefs, roles, etc.) would be like a linguist studying only phonemes rather than words, words rather than sentences, sentences rather than stories, or stories rather than conversations. Looking only at the parts and never at the whole leads to a defective understanding of all in this case. Saying that culture is just one person’s mind affecting the mind of another person is like saying that language is just one person’s voice affecting another person’s ear, or that somehow the acoustics of speech transmission are the only proper object of study for linguistics. We should not forget that language is no less difficult to accurately define than culture. Yet we cannot do without the term language. People share a language, even though we know that no two people speak exactly alike. On the one hand, language is an abstraction, just as culture is. Moreover, language, like culture, is a property of individual speakers, not the group as a whole. Yet this does not make language, or culture, one whit less real as a shared possession of multiple people simultaneously. Anthropologists may have an even less sanguine view of culture as existing in the minds of individuals, but here exactly is the place where I believe linguistics offers a better model.

  BUILDING CULTURES

  Exploring this idea that understanding language can help us understand culture, consider how linguists account for the rise of languages, dialects, and all other local variants of speech. Part of their account is captured in linguistic truism that “you talk like who you talk with.” And, I argue, this principle actually impinges upon all human behavior. We not only talk like who we talk with, but we also eat like who we eat with, think like those we think with, and so on. We take on a wide range of shared attributes; our associations shape how we live and behave and appear—our phenotype. Culture can affect our gestures and many other aspects of our talk. Boas (1912a, 1912b) takes up the issue of environment, culture, and bodily form. He provides extensive evidence that human body phenotypes are highly plastic and subject to nongenetic local environmental forces (whether dietary, climatological, or social). Had Boas lived later, he might have studied a very clear and dramatic case; namely, the body height of Dutch citizens before and after World War II. This example is worth a close look because it shows that bodies—like behaviors and beliefs—are cultural products and shapers simultaneously.

  The curious case of the Netherlanders fascinates me. The Dutch went from among the shortest peoples of Europe to the tallest in the world in just over one century. One account simplistically links the growth in Dutch height with the change in political system (Olson 2014): “The Dutch growth spurt of the mid-19th century coincided with the establishment of the first liberal democracy. Before this time, the Netherlands had grown rich off its colonies but the wealth had stayed in the hands of the elite. After this time, the wealth began to trickle down to all levels of society, the average income went up and so did the height.” Tempting as this single account may be, there were undoubtedly other factors involved, including gene flow and sexual selection between Dutch and other (mainly European) populations, that contribute to explain European body shape relative to the Dutch. But democracy, a new political change from strengthened and enforced cultural values, is a crucial component of the change in the average height of the Dutch, even though the Dutch genotype has not changed significantly in the past two hundred years. For example, consider figures 2.1 and 2.2. In 1825, US male median height was roughly ten centimeters (roughly four inches) taller than the average Dutch. In the 1850s, the median heights of most males in Europe and the USA were lowered. But then around 1900, they begin to rise again. Dutch male median height lagged behind that of most of the world until the late ’50s and early ’60s, when it began to rise at a faster rate than all other nations represented in the chart. By 1975 the Dutch were taller than Americans. Today, the median Dutch male height (183 cm, or roughly just above six feet) is approximately three inches more than the median American male height (177 cm, or roughly five ten). Thus an apparent biological change turns out to be largely a cultural phenomenon.

  Figure 2.1

  To see this culture-body connection even more clearly, consider figure 2.2. In this chart, the correlation between wealth and height emerges clearly (not forgetting that the primary determiner of height is the genome). As wealth grew, so did men (and women). This wasn’t matched in the US, however, even though wealth also grew in the US (precise figures are unnecessary). What emerges from this is that Dutch genes are implicated in the Dutch height transformation, from below average to the tallest people in the world. And yet the genes had to await the right cultural conditions before they could be so dramatically expressed. Other cultural differences that contribute to height increases are: (i) economic (e.g., “white collar”) background; (ii) size of family (more children, shorter children); (iii) literacy of the child’s mother (literate mothers provide better diets); (iv) place of residence (residents of agricultural areas tend to be taller than those in industrial environments—better and more plentiful food); and so on (Khazan 2014). Obviously, these factors all have to do with food access. But looked at from a broader angle, food access is clearly a function of va
lues, knowledge, and social roles—that is, culture.

  Figure 2.2

  Just as with the Dutch, less-industrialized cultures show culture-body connections. For example, Pirahã phenotype is also subject to change. Facial features among the Pirahãs range impressionistically from slightly Negroid to East Asian to American Indian (to use terms from physical anthropology). Phenotypical differences between villages or families seem to have a biological basis (though no genetic tests have been conducted). This would be due in part to the fact Pirahã women have trysts with various non-Pirahã visitors (mainly river traders and their crews, but also government workers and contract employees on health assistance assignments, demarcating the Pirahã reservation, etc.). The genetic differences are also partly historical. One sizeable group of Pirahãs (perhaps thirty to forty)—usually found occupying a single village—are descendants of the Torá, a Chapakuran-speaking group that emigrated to the Maici-Marmelos rivers as long as two hundred years ago. Even today Brazilians refer to this group as Torá, though the Pirahãs refer to them as Pirahãs. They are culturally and linguistically fully integrated into the Pirahãs. Their facial features are somewhat different—broader noses; some with epicanthic folds; large foreheads—giving an overall impression of similarity to Cambodian features. This and other evidence show us that the Pirahã gene pool is not closed.4 Yet body dimensions across all Pirahãs are constant. Men’s waists are or were uniformly 83 centimeters (about 32.5 inches), their average height 157.5 centimeters (five two), and their average weight 55 kilos (about 121 pounds).

  I learned about the uniformity in these measurements over the past several decades as I have taken Pirahã men, women, and children to stores in nearby towns to purchase Western clothes, when they came out of their villages for medical help. (The Pirahãs always asked that I purchase Brazilian clothes for them so that they would not attract unnecessary stares and comments.) Thus I learned that the measurements for men were nearly identical. Biology alone cannot account for this homogeneity of body form; culture is implicated as well. For example, Pirahãs raised since infancy outside the village are somewhat taller and much heavier than Pirahãs raised in their culture and communities. Even the body does not escape our earlier observation that studies of culture and human social behavior can be summed up in the slogan that “you talk like who you talk with” or “grow like who you grow with.”

  We unconsciously (sporadically—we may be conscious of this initially) learn the pronunciation, grammatical patterns, lexicon, and conversational styles of those we talk with the most. If you live in Southern California, for example, you are likely to say, “My car needs washing” or “My car needs to be washed.” But in Pittsburgh, you are more likely to say, “My car needs washed” or “My car needs to be washed.” There is a grammatical contrast between the two dialects in that one (Southern Californian) requires the present-participle form of the verb for the adjectival construction, whereas the Pittsburghese dialect requires the past-tense form of the participle. Both cultures converge in the to be construction. As another example, if you talk to people of my generation, you will likely say, “He bought it for you and me,” whereas if you talked mainly with members of a more recent generation, you might say “He bought it for you and I.”

  The question is whether there is any more to the idea of culture than this sociolinguistic principle of “local mimicry.” If not, we do not need a theory of culture per se, but only a theory of the role of mimicry in culture. And were this the case, Tooby’s criticism might well be correct. Yet though there are good theories of mimicry (Boyd and Richerson 1988, 2005; Richerson and Boyd 2005; Arbib 2012; among others), culture is far more than mimicry.

  Although imitation (joint influence to be more precise) may indeed be an entry point into culture—along with emotions, and basic survival needs of our species—the structures and values constitutive of culture take time to evolve. These structures and values emerge partially through conversational interactions, which are form-meaning exchanges, including the content of speech, perspectives on right and wrong actions or thoughts, acceptable levels of novelty of information or form of presentation, and levels and markers of conformity. This happens as people talk like who they talk with.

  In other words, people grow to be alike. Raise two children together and they will be more alike than had they been raised apart. They will share values that children raised apart do not share, and they will (at least, early on) share knowledge structures that are more similar than had they been raised apart. The more people talk together, the more they talk alike. The more they eat together, the more they eat the same foods in the same way—the more they eat alike. The more they think together, the more they think alike. And so on.

  CULTURE AS ROLES, VALUES, AND KNOWLEDGE

  Culture has meant many things to different people over the years. This is telling. The diversity of views indicates that culture is not an easy concept to define—not a run-of-the-mill concrete noun like book, relative, taco, or tomato. Rather, it is an abstract noun like love, ambition, or edification. There is no (near-)universal consensus on what culture is. In fact, this lack of consensus has led some, as we have been discussing, to go so far as to declare the notion of culture dead and of no use to either science or simply a broader understanding of Homo sapiens. My own view is that culture has been hard to define not only because it is an abstraction, but also because it is a cover term for “sets of sets” of things united within a community. To better understand the definition of culture that was proposed earlier, it is helpful to first survey some of the better-known definitions from the anthropological literature. The question to keep in mind in light of our discussion to this point is whether such definitions can be improved.

  Perhaps the best known of all definitions of culture is that offered by Edward Tylor ([1871] 1920, 1): “Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

  Although Tylor’s definition of culture is well known and still used by some, it is far from adequate. It isn’t a bad point of departure to begin a discussion on the nature of culture, but it falls considerably short of a full definition. On the one hand, it is too coarse-grained. It doesn’t allude to, for example, the relationships between kinds and structuring of knowledge that—almost as much as the knowledge itself—shapes a culture. It omits reference to roles that people play in their cultures and to the variety of relationships in which different roles may emerge. These are important research topics in contemporary anthropologically oriented research, so a definition of culture should make the concepts accessible/expected. Yet the most critical shortcoming of Tylor’s definition is its lack of reference to either meaning, knowledge hierarchies, or values. Culture is how we structure our knowledge, how we impute meaning to the world, how we value things and people in our environment, among other things. It is more than the epistemological union of multiple individuals.

  So perhaps we need to consider another classic definition of culture. Talcott Parsons (1970, 8) offers an alternative: “Culture consists in those patterns relative to behavior and the products of human action which may be inherited, that is, passed on from generation to generation independently of the biological genes.” Well, of course culture must be heritable. But this is far from all it is. For example, a Filipino-American boy could acquire some patterns from his American father and pass these down to his children, but continue to mainly interact with Filipinos. By Parsons’s definition, the boy would be culturally American and Filipino, yet the set of things inherited by the boy from his father too small a set for anyone to treat him like or mistake him for an American. There has to be more than merely inherited knowledge. So, like Tylor’s definition, Parsons’s is not incorrect, but neither is it necessary or sufficient. We have just seen that it is insufficient. But it is also not necessary that information be inherited. Fo
r example, one people could view another people as “the enemy” during wartime and share this attitude and knowledge of the other people. But the attitude might not (hopefully would not) be passed down to a subsequent generation after the particular war. The knowledge was cultural knowledge, but it was not necessary that it be inherited to count as such.

  Another leading anthropologist to offer a definition of culture is Ward Goodenough (1981, 167): “A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members.” Again, one can say, “Yes, of course,” but still be unsatisfied with this definition for the same reasons as previous definitions—its lack of reference to structure, roles, hierarchy of knowledge, and so on.

  Like Goldilocks, we can try other definitions. One is from Claude Levi-Strauss, who offered the following: “Man is a biological being as well as a social individual. Among the responses which he gives to external stimuli, some are the full product of his nature, and others of his condition . . . But it is not always easy to distinguish between the two . . . Culture is neither simply juxtaposed to nor simply superposed over life. In a way, culture substitutes itself to life, in another way culture uses and transforms life to realise a synthesis of a higher order” ([1949] 1969, 4). In Levi-Strauss’s definition, “nature” and “condition” refer to biology and culture or genotype vs. phenotype, respectively. Culture, as Levi-Strauss puts it “substitutes” for life—that is, it buffers us from our biology as it offers us a way to live that is not merely biological (see also Descola 2013). It changes our lives from those of mere animals living in proximity, to a society, with values and the other components of mental and social life. Lovely as the sentiments are, and however true, Levi-Strauss here merely describes aspects of culture; he does not provide a definition. At the same time, he offers insights that should be captured by a successful theory of culture.