Human Universals Read online

  Steadman had to learn the Hewa language in the field, but long before he was conversant in it he discovered—somewhat to his surprise, because it didn’t jibe with his assumptions about the influence of differing world views—that he and the Hewa “could understand each other well enough to live together” (1971:26–27). As time went by, and he learned more about the ways in which the world is put together differently in Hewa than in English, he was led to observe that the differences were largely superficial: “This fact of experiencing the world in a similar way,” in spite of its being carved up differently in different languages, “became increasingly obvious as I acquired greater proficiency in the language” (1971:27). At the deeper level of why language might be used in the first place, at the level of motives, the similarities were just as evident: “Living, travelling, working and hunting with the Hewa, made it clear to me that their basic concerns, the concerns motivating their behaviour, were similar to my own” (1971:26). I think that anyone who watches the film “First Contact” and is keeping an open mind about similarities will see that New Guineans who were first contacted by Australian prospectors in the 1930s showed many generic human traits. The differences between the natives and the prospectors are numerous, but the similarities are there too.

  Lest anyone think that an anthropologist who takes cultural differences seriously would not make the kinds of assumptions that Steadman and I would, let me give a final illustration from one of the most famous essays by Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist who makes no secret of his emphasis on cultural differences. His essay, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (1971), begins with a description of how he and his wife achieved rapport with the Balinese villagers they were to study. Although the Geertzes had gained official entrée into a village, the villagers were treating them pretty much as though they didn’t exist: “everyone ignored us in a way only a Balinese can do” (1971:1). On the next page we are also told that a Balinese is an “always precisely controlled person.”

  One page later, however, the Geertzes and the villagers, all attending an illegal cockfight at which armed police made a sudden and unexpected appearance, engage in somewhat less controlled behavior: “People raced down the road, disappeared head first over walls, scrambled under platforms, folded themselves behind wicker screens, scuttled up coconut trees.… Everything was dust and panic.” The village chief ran to a river where he pretended to be innocently bathing; the Geertzes followed a villager into his yard, where all pretended, when a policeman arrived, to have been sipping tea and engaging in legitimate ethnographic discourse.

  After this event, the Geertzes were “in” with the villagers, who never tired of gently mimicking the panicked flight of the Geertzes or of wondering why they had not just stood their ground on the basis that they were foreigners who had been mere bystanders. Geertz comments that this event gave him “the kind of immediate, inside-view grasp of an aspect of ‘peasant mentality’ that anthropologists not fortunate enough to flee headlong with their subjects from armed authorities normally do not get” (1971:4).

  But how important is the “peasant mentality,” or even Balinese culture, for understanding this story? Not very. After the scene is set with some explanatory local details (which are not remarkable), the rest of the episode requires and receives no interpretation whatsoever because it is completely intelligible to a nonpeasant, non-Balinese reader. It is, for the most part, simply human: panicked flight from armed outsiders (nearly all police on Bali at that time were Javanese), attempts to deceive authorities or deny wrongdoing, mimicking and teasing, rehashing an exciting and amusing event, trying to make sense of people’s behavior, asking questions, laughing, etc.1 Even the most Balinese element—the initial apparent indifference of the villagers to the Geertzes—was only a surface difference. Beneath the surface, the villagers were—as one would expect—paying a great deal of attention to the strangers in their midst: they were “watching every move we [the Geertzes] made” (1971:1). Thus, 5 minutes after the Geertzes followed the man, whom they had never met before, into his yard, he was explaining to the police who the Geertzes were in a manner so “detailed and so accurate” that Geertz was “astonished” (1971:3).

  I could go on with the similarities between the Balinese and everybody else (and will in chapter 6), but let me instead express a suspicion that nowhere in the ethnographic literature is there any description of what real people really did that is not shot through with the signs of a universal human nature. By virtue of this fact, anthropologists and the people they study—and then the readers of ethnography—share a vast reservoir of interpretive principles. As Sperber (1982:179–180) notes, anthropologists routinely conduct research that can only be done because in crucial ways the differences between us and the peoples we study are not in fact very great; yet because everybody likes to hear that “they” are different from “us,” anthropologists dwell on the differences. Quite a number of anthropologists have registered similar complaints. That humans share so many similarities, and that many if not most anthropologists have left them in the background—or even denied them—points to some anthropological issues that need to be discussed.

  If they hold not merely for Bruneis, Balinese, New Guineans, and Americans but for all peoples, similarities of the sort referred to above are called human universals. They are not confined to the more or less psychological phenomena that I have so far described but include the use of fire and tools, a division of labor by sex, and much more. This book explores a series of general questions about human universals. How many are there? What are the different kinds of universals? What is their importance? How can we be sure that something is a universal? How does one explain universals? What part do they play in the anthropological enterprise, or in understanding human affairs?

  Although I address an anthropological audience, what I have to say is relevant in wider circles. This is so because the task of anthropology is too large for professional anthropologists alone to deal with, so that a series of disciplines—notably sociology, psychology, linguistics, history, economics, political science, geography, biology, and philosophy—are important players in the anthropological enterprise. Besides, anthropology is by definition focused on humans in general, so humans in general may have some interest in its results.

  There are five central theses to this book. The first is that universals not only exist but are important to any broad conception of the task of anthropology. Among those anthropologists who have overcome their skepticism about the very existence of universals, some have argued that such universals as exist are not important. Insofar as their argument is not merely the expression of a value judgment, it is wrong.

  Second, universals form a heterogeneous set. A great many, for example, seem to be inherent in human nature. Some are cultural conventions that have come to have universal distribution. Others fall under different headings.

  Third, the study of universals has been effectively tabooed as an unintended consequence of assumptions that have predominated in anthropology (and other social sciences) throughout much of this century. From 1915 to 1934 American anthropologists established three fundamental principles about the nature of culture: that culture is a distinct kind of phenomenon that cannot be reduced to others (in particular, not to biology or psychology), that culture (rather than our physical nature) is the fundamental determinant of human behavior, and that culture is largely arbitrary. This combination of assumptions made universals anomalous and very likely to be rare; to admit or dwell upon their existence raised troubling questions about anthropology’s fundamental assumptions. These assumptions also led many anthropologists to conclude or argue that anthropology should be narrowed from the study of humanity to the study of culture.

  Fourth, human biology is a key to understanding many human universals. It has long been assumed that insofar as universals exist it makes sense to think that they must in some rather direct fashion reflect human biology rather than human culture. Conflict as it
may with the assumptions of the preceding paragraph, this assumption is correct, and its consequences must be incorporated into any currently acceptable understanding of the anthropological enterprise.

  Fifth, evolutionary psychology is a key to understanding many of the universals that are of greatest interest to anthropology. The feature of human biology most of interest to anthropology is the human mind. A theoretical understanding of the process that shaped the human mind, Darwinian selection, provides the most inclusive theoretical framework for the illumination of the human condition.

  To answer the questions raised above and to defend my main theses, the materials are presented as follows. Chapter 1 summarizes several studies that raise serious questions about anthropology’s skepticism toward universals—and about anthropology’s faith in cultural relativism. Some of these studies have been seen as revolutionary; collectively they are even more so. If they do not definitively settle the issues of universality that they address, they nonetheless indicate that some anthropological rethinking of universals is in order and is underway.

  Chapter 2 explores the ways in which universals are conceptualized, defined, and demonstrated; chapter 3 presents a history of the study of universals; and chapter 4 examines the means of explaining universals. By summarizing recent attempts to explain incest avoidance, chapter 5 looks in greater detail at the means of explaining universals. Chapter 5 also suggests that ways of doing anthropology that were abandoned early in this century deserve a reexamination. Chapter 6 presents a series of universals in the form of statements true of all societies.

  The last chapter examines the relationships that link the nexus of universals, human nature, and the human mind on the one hand with the structure of anthropological thought on the other. Finally, an annotated bibliography presents a large sample of writings that deal in one way or another with universals.

  Footnotes

  1. Again, compare the New Guineans in the movie “First Contact.” Their behavior, captured on film both in the 1930s and many years thereafter when they reminisce about the events of the 1930s, also shows fear of armed outsiders, attempts to deceive them, mimicking and teasing of each other and themselves, relished rehashing of the past, attempts to make sense of others’ behavior, asking questions, laughter, etc. These similarities to us, and the Balinese, neither require nor receive explanation in the film.

  1

  Rethinking Universality:

  Six Cases

  In 1983 the anthropological community was convulsed by reactions to Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of a Myth. Remarkably, two books with a very similar message but by different authors attacking different myths were published within a year of Freeman’s. One was Melford Spiro’s Oedipus in the Trobriands (1982); the other was Ekkehart Malotki’s Hopi Time (1983). Each of these books refutes or questions one of the centerpieces of anthropological relativism.

  In Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) Margaret Mead argued that adolescence among Samoans was not the time of storm and stress that it is in the West and, hence, that the Western conception of adolescence is strictly cultural—something that we could change. Freeman shows that adolescence was just as stressful in Samoa as in the West and that in other ways Samoa was not so different from Western societies as Mead had led us to believe.

  No less influential than Mead’s classic on Samoa was Bronislaw Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), in which he argued that the Oedipus complex was peculiar to what he called “patriarchal” societies. Among the matrilineal Trobriand Islanders, he purported to show, a different complex emerged—one in which a boy felt hostility not to his father but rather to his mother’s brother (who in matrilineal societies occupies a position in various ways analogous to a father in a patrilineal, or patriarchal, society). This was a weaker form of relativism, but again it showed, or seemed to show, that what some Westerners considered natural or universal wasn’t. Yet Spiro (1982)—by reanalyzing Malinowski’s own data, which are renowned for their volume and accuracy—now argues persuasively that the Trobrianders did have an Oedipus complex and that the “family complex,” as Malinowski preferred to call it, is not as variable as Malinowski’s analysis seemed to show.

  A decade after Malinowski wrote Sex and Repression, Benjamin Lee Whorf, a gifted and largely self-taught amateur anthropological linguist, formulated his argument either that the Hopi had no sense of time or that their sense of time was very different from ours. The problem of Hopi time is intimately linked to what came to be called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Edward Sapir was an anthropological linguist who had been Whorf’s mentor. Their hypothesis is that the categories of language shape perceptions of the world. As Sapir (1929:209) put it, “the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits” of a society, and insofar as each society has its own language the “worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds.” In other words, if the speakers of a given language have no terms for something, it is not a part of their thought or worldview and in some sense is scarcely perceived. Since the Hopi language, Whorf said, has no conceptions of time built into it—or embodies very different conceptions of time—the Hopi therefore perceive the world in a radically different way than we do. This was an extreme conceptualization of cultural relativism. But it now appears, insofar as it rests upon the Hopi case, to be quite wrong. Malotki (1983) amply documents the richness of Hopi conceptions of time and their essential similarities to ours.

  Although Freeman’s, Spiro’s, and Malotki’s works are remarkable for their temporal contiguity, they do not stand alone. A few years earlier another refutation of one of Mead’s arguments was published by Deborah Gewertz (1981), almost fifteen years earlier the universality of certain facial expressions was demonstrated (Ekman et al. 1969; Izard 1971), and at the same time another outstanding refutation of cultural relativism was presented in Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969).

  In another of Mead’s classics, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), she attempted to show that the Tchambuli, a New Guinean people, had male and female temperaments that were the reverse of what we consider normal. In the 1970s Gewertz restudied the Tchambuli, whom she calls the Chambri, and found that Mead had misinterpreted the situation among them. Thus Gewertz effectively smashes another of the icons of relativism.

  Psychologists had long debated whether the facial expressions of emotions were universal or culturally relative. The one anthropologist to participate in the debate, Weston La Barre (1947), favored relativism. But by the early 1970s two independent lines of psychological research, culminating in studies conducted among preliterate peoples of New Guinea, had shown that there are universal facial expressions of emotions.

  Berlin and Kay’s (1969) attack on relativism was the first to be published. This work does not overthrow any particular famous anthropological study, but it certainly overthrows an entrenched prejudice. I, and no doubt most anthropologists over a number of decades, had been taught and saw no reason to doubt that color classification was largely arbitrary. The spectrum of color from red through violet is a range of continuous variation with no natural divisions from the standpoint of the physics of light. Therefore, the number of terms for colors, and the boundaries between them, were considered arbitrary—no two peoples’ color terms would necessarily be the same. Berlin and Kay show that although color classification does vary, it also shows remarkable uniformities: particularly in the sequence in which basic color terms are added to the lexicon. The revolutionary nature of their findings has not escaped notice. Let us look at each of these cases in more detail, beginning with the two that are best known in anthropology.

  Color Classification

  Anthropologists and linguists had long known that the way colors are classified varies from language to language. Careful studies conducted by anthropologists after World War II, such as Harold Conklin’s (1955) s
tudy of Hanunóo color words, made the point very clearly. Many anthropologists, in accordance with the “prevailing doctrine” of “extreme linguistic relativity,” interpreted these findings as showing that there were no semantic universals in the domain of color terms, that the lexical coding of color was arbitrary (Berlin and Kay 1969:1–2). Berlin and Kay (1969:159–160) quote a number of sources to illustrate their point. I will quote from the same sources. This is from a prominent textbook (and one that I used as a student):

  Language…is the mold into which perception must be fitted if it is to be communicated. Any single language imprints its own ‘genius’ on the message.… Probably the most popular, because it is the most vivid, example for describing cultural categories that the necessity to communicate creates in human perception is to compare the ways in which different peoples cut up color into communicable units. The spectrum is a continuum of light waves, with frequencies that…increase at a continuous rate.… But the way different cultures organize these sensations for communication show some strange differences. (Bohannan 1963:34–35)

  The following is a stronger statement by an anthropologist, though not in a textbook:

  [T]here is no such thing as a natural division of the spectrum. Each culture has taken the spectral continuum and has divided it upon a basis which is quite arbitrary. (Ray 1952)

  The views of many linguists were the same. A very influential linguistics textbook (again, one that I was taught from) puts the matter this way:

  There is a continuous gradation of color from one end of the spectrum to the other. Yet an American describing it will list the hues as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, or something of the kind. There is nothing inherent either in the spectrum or the human perception of it which would compel its division in this way. (Gleason 1961:4)