Human Universals
Donald E. Brown
Professor Emeritus
Department of Anthropology
University of California—Santa Barbara
Copyright © 1991, 2017 by Donald E. Brown. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author or publisher.
For Carrie, Barry, and Rosminah
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Rethinking Universality: Six Cases
Color Classification
Samoan Adolescence
Male and Female among the Tchambuli
Facial Expressions
Hopi Time
The Oedipus Complex
Conclusion
CHAPTER 2
Conceptualizing, Defining, and Demonstrating Universals
CHAPTER 3
The Historical Context of the Study of Universals
CHAPTER 4
Explaining Universals
Explaining a Universal with a Universal
Cultural Reflection or Recognition of Physical Fact
Logical Extension from (Usually Biological) Givens
Diffusionist Explanations that Rest upon the Great Age of the Universal and, Usually, Its Great Utility
Archoses
Conservation of Energy
The Nature of the Human Organism, with Emphasis on the Brain
Evolutionary Theory
Interspecific Comparison
Ontogeny
Partial Explanations
CHAPTER 5
Incest Avoidance
CHAPTER 6
The Universal People
CHAPTER 7
Universals, Human Nature, and Anthropology
Bibliography
Index
Appendix
Preface
This book is a reflection on human universals and what they imply. Some of the implications are far reaching. I conclude, for example, that what we know about universals places clear limits on the cultural relativism that anthropologists have developed and disseminated widely. Furthermore, what we know about universals suggests the need to revise a conception of human nature that anthropologists have helped to shape and that has spread so far beyond the social sciences that it is now embedded in what Robin Fox (1989:24) calls “the whole secular social ideology” of our time. Because these conclusions are far from trivial, it may be worth recounting the experiences that initially stimulated my interest in universals and led, ultimately, to this book. Since this book is only an imperfect step along the way toward the fuller assessment that human universals deserve, I will also point to its shortcomings.
In 1974 Donald Symons and I co-taught a seminar on primate and human sexuality. Symons presented an early draft of his book The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979), in which he argued that there are certain pan-human sex differences. On the occasion that he discussed a list of these differences—it then contained, if I recall correctly, some five to seven items (such as the quicker and more visually-cued sexual arousal of males)—I bet him that I could find a society in which each of the alleged sex differences was reversed. As a typical sociocultural anthropologist trained in the 1960s, I had absorbed the lesson of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) and many other anthropological classics and textbooks that stressed the inherent variability and autonomy of culture. I was willing to accept the idea of certain kinds of widespread regularities or tendencies, but I thought it highly unlikely that sex differences in temperament or behavior would show any complex similarities in all societies. The latter smacked of rigid biological determinism. But I did not win the bet—and I began to think more carefully about human universals, cultural relativism, and, especially, about the role that human biology plays in human affairs.
Sometime thereafter I glanced through E. O. Wilson’s On Human Nature (1978). My views were still so conditioned by the sociocultural perspectives in which I was trained that I was not inspired to read the book, but I noticed that Wilson quoted a list of human universals that had been compiled by the anthropologist George P. Murdock. The “sociobiology” controversy, galvanized by Wilson’s book of that title, was very much in the air at the time, and it struck me that sociobiologists might be more convincing if they confined their explanations to universals rather than attempting to show that virtually everything that humans do somehow maximizes their reproductive success. While I no longer accept a simplistic formulation in which human invariants may plausibly be explained in biological terms, while the variables demand cultural explanations, that formulation did keep me thinking about universals.
A few years later, the books by Freeman, Malotki, and Spiro that are described in Chapter 1 were published. These books convinced me that the issues surrounding universals, especially the questions they raise about cultural relativism, needed more attention than they were receiving. I considered the prospect of writing this book, and I began to offer seminars and ultimately a lecture course on human universals.
When I began to write, I had in mind something relatively uncomplicated that might stand in opposition to Benedict’s Patterns of Culture and draw attention to the existence and seemingly obvious implications of invariants in human affairs. But the issues turned out to be more complicated than I had realized, and the resulting book is a compromise between a popular essay and a more scholarly work. Moreover, once I felt that the main points had been articulated, I stopped searching for and digesting further materials on universals. I am confident that this book is the most exhaustive study of human universals to date, but I know that I have not covered the entire literature. (Although I have ceased to look for them, some 50 or so references on universals have piled up on my desk in the last year.) In spite of the compromises I have made, I am sure that many readers will find consolation in one reviewer’s observation that this book is only half as long as it could be.
There are some parts of the book that almost certainly will benefit from a more thorough thinking through than I now provide. Consider, for example, the definitions of universals: while I employ only a few of them, I cite a number of others that probably can be reduced to a shorter and more orderly list. And although I put considerable thought and effort into the explanation of universals, the issues sometimes require expertise that I do not possess. Finally, I should note the obvious: no anthropologist can be an authority on more than a handful of universals. The reader who wants to know whether a particular feature that I have accepted as being a universal really is so will have to go beyond this book. Although the future may allow me to correct some of the flaws, I must express the hope now that the persons I will thank below for their many thoughtful comments on this book will be credited for some of its strengths—to which they surely contributed—but not blamed for its shortcomings—for which I just as surely am responsible.
Acknowledgments
The entire manuscript or very substantial portions of it were read by my departmental colleagues Napoleon A. Chagnon, Elvin Hatch, A. F. Robertson, and Donald Symons; by the other anthropologists George N. Appell, Robin Fox, Derek Freeman, Barry Hewlett, Allen R. Maxwell, Raymond Scupin, M. G. Smith, and John Tooby; by the linguists R. McMillan Thompson and Sandra A. Thompson; by the psychologists Leda Cosmides, Martin Daly, and Margo Wilson; by the sociologists Suzanne Retzinger, Thomas J. Scheff, and Pierre van den Berghe; and by a dozen or more students, of whom I would particularly like to thank Helen (Yonie) Harris, Walter Lehmann, Reed Wadley, and Tracy Wise. I received very helpful comments on specific aspects of the book from Ralph Bolton, Richard
Chacon, Matthea Cremers, Alan J. Fridlund, Ward H. Goodenough, Thomas Harding, Douglas Hayward, Hsiu-Zu Ho, Brijitte Jordan, Gwendolyn Lauterbach, Jack N. Loomis, Paul Mattson, Susan Mies, Mattison Mines, Douglas Mitchell, J. Tim O’Meara, Craig Palmer, Douglas Raybeck, Melford Spiro, Lawrence Sugiyama, and Janice Timbrook. Jean-Claude Muller, Robert Netting, and Ronald P. Rohner very kindly supplied me with materials too ample or too late to be properly incorporated in the book. At a very late stage I received encouragement and advice from the historian Carl Degler. I expect that his forthcoming book, In Search of Human Nature, which is a history of Darwinian thought in the social sciences, will expand and deepen the analysis presented in my chapter on history. In addition to the departmental colleagues already mentioned, I should also note the unfailing encouragement from other colleagues, particularly Manuel L. Carlos, William Madsen, and Phillip L. Walker, whose comments passed on in the hallways are much appreciated. To the scholars and students whose suggestions I have used but whose names now escape me, and to those whose advice I failed to take, I offer apologies.
Although I have mentioned my colleague Donald Symons twice already, it would be remiss not to note that he did more than start me thinking about universals and more than merely read my manuscript. He read several versions of it and many sections over and over, patiently providing detailed written comments each time. Just as patiently, he explained evolutionary theory and provided numerous references. His writings on evolutionary psychology have been a considerable influence on me and this book and will, I think, have a considerable influence on the study of human nature well into the future.
David Hume characterized the study of human nature as a subject of “unspeakable importance.” Evolutionary psychology, informed by the comparative study of the constant as well as the variable in human affairs, is one of the most important theoretical frameworks currently available to advance the study of human nature. I have no doubt about the importance of human nature, nor about the relevance of universals in illuminating it; I can only hope that this book will convince others that the study of human universals should loom larger in the attempt to understand humanity and human affairs.
Donald E. Brown
Preface to the 2017 Edition
The first edition of this book responded to a surge of evidence that anthropological skepticism about the very existence of human universals was mistaken. That they might be both numerous and significant ran against a strong current of thought in anthropology, where the concept of cultural relativism had long been pushed beyond its limits. Key works that had begun resistance to that current of thought inspired, and are summarized in, Chapter 1. Since the print edition appeared, in 1991, there has been a continuing stream of publications offering to identify and document the existence of further human universals. Very often—though not always—these have been features of human nature. In all cases they are part of the human condition. There is no sign that this trend is abating—and no good reason why this book should have gone out of print!
Beyond the general literature on human universals, at least one robust and specialized academic field has emerged to pursue a particular sub-field: Literary Universals (see for example the Literary Universals Project at Connecticut University. A “Whence and Wither” paper that I wrote about this book for that project is appended to this edition. The paper cites others in which I expand in different ways on the subject of human universals.
With minor corrections and additions, the text and index of this edition are as in the original.
Donald E. Brown
December, 2017
Introduction
Many anthropologists, probably most of them, are skeptical of statements that generalize about what all peoples do. But are there not generalizations of that sort that really do hold for the wide array of human populations? There are—and not enough has been said about them. This skepticism and neglect of human universals is the entrenched legacy of an “era of particularism” in which the observation that something doesn’t occur among the Bongo Bongo counted as a major contribution to anthropology (Erasmus 1961:387). The truth of the matter is, however, that anthropologists probably always take for granted an indefinite collection of traits that add up to a very complex view of human nature. Let me give some examples.
In a course that I teach on the peoples and cultures of Southeast Asia I have often illustrated the cultural elaboration of rank that is found in many Southeast Asian societies—and certainly among the Brunei Malays with whom I did my doctoral research—with the following anecdote. In the course of my research I was once seated with two young men on a wooden bench at the front of the house that my wife and I rented in a ward of the Brunei capital. A third young man was seated just a few feet away on the rung of a ladder but at the same height as the rest of us. There was no one else around. Tiring of sitting on the bench, I slipped down from it to sit on the walkway. I was followed almost instantly by all three of the young men. Just as quickly I realized that they had done it not because they too were uncomfortable on the bench (I had been there longer than they) but because in the Brunei scheme of things it is not polite to sit higher than another person, unless you considerably outrank that other person. So I protested, urging them to please remain seated on the bench. They said it wouldn’t look nice. I said there was no one but us around to notice. One of them closed the matter by noting that people across the river—to which he gestured (it was about a quarter mile away)—just might see what was going on. The clear implication was that he and his fellows weren’t about to let anyone see them apparently breaking one of the important rules in the etiquette of rank, even though they knew they wouldn’t be offending me.
I always told this story to illustrate difference, to show the extremity to which Bruneis concerned themselves with rank, and it always seemed to be a very effective message. As a teacher of anthropology I know very well that cultural differences elicit some sort of inherent interest. Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) is an all-time anthropological best-seller, and its essential message is the astonishing variability of human customs. No one teaching anthropology can ignore the way students react to revelations about the amazing ways other peoples act and think. And no one teaching anthropology can fail to sense the wheels turning in students’ minds when they use these revelations to rethink the ways people act and think in their own society. Teachers of anthropology not only see this in students, they cultivate it. But are the differences all that should be of concern to anthropology? Does an emphasis on differences present a true image of humanity?
I now realize that the story I have told my students is pervaded with evidence of similarities: above all, the young men were concerned with what other people would think about them; they were also concerned with politeness in particular, rules in general; even their concern with rank was only a matter of difference in degree. I could go on, mentioning their use of language and gestures; the smooth conversational turn taking; the concepts of question, answer, explanation; the use of highness/lowness to symbolize rank; and much more.
At a more subtle level, I believe, some amazing things were happening that I took no note of. Without my explaining things in detail, in my broken Malay, the young men had instantly grasped my point: the setting was informal and I wanted them to treat me as they would treat each other (they would not have moved down or up in unison for each other in those circumstances); furthermore, it was “not my custom” to be offended by people sitting higher than me. I think that my companions sized up these aspects of the immediate situation just as I had.
But they also saw a wider context in which their behavior could be misinterpreted by others, and with what seemed like a few words and a gesture, they explained their position to me and closed the matter. There were more than a few words and gestures: there were tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, and an enormously complex context of past, present, and future. And there were four human minds, each observing, computing, and reacting to the �
��implicature” (Scheff 1986:74) of the bare words so silently and automatically as to occasion no notice. All this—from the conscious concern with what others would think to the unconscious assessments of implications—formed a plainly human background, from which I in my lectures had pulled out a quantitative difference as the focus of attention.
I use the word “quantitative” because, although it may not be my custom to think that the height of one’s seat should match one’s rank, the idea is not foreign to western culture. There are some wonderful examples of the equation between seating height and rank, or dominance, in Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Great Dictator.” What distinguishes the Bruneis from us is the greater frequency of day-to-day contexts in which the equation is observed among Bruneis.
Now it might be objected that the Brunei Malays are so westernized that of course they are similar to us in many ways; one needs a pristine, uncontacted people to see the real exceptions. This is an assumption that I would have taken quite seriously at one time, and that was acted upon by my university schoolmate Lyle Steadman (1971). Like me, he received his anthropological training in the 1960s and was steeped in cultural determinism. In order to fully explore the consequences of having a nonwestern worldview, he did his work among a New Guinean people, the Hewa, who had had no more than the most fleeting and widely spaced contacts with European patrols. At the time Steadman studied the Hewa they lived in one of the last “restricted” areas of New Guinea. This meant that the area was “uncontrolled,” and Europeans, including missionaries, were forbidden to enter it. One of the reasons the Hewa were essentially uncontacted was that they lived so sparsely on the land that from one family’s household to another was typically a grueling two-hour walk over a rugged terrain covered by dense rain forest.
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