However, there were ways in which some kinds of explicit universalism then reemerged in anthropology. At the 1939 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Alexander Lesser and Leslie White read papers defending the study of sociocultural evolution (Belmonte 1985; Lesser 1952). Lesser’s paper discussed a series of implicational universals, referred to moral universals, and described the prevailing attitude toward the study of sociocultural evolution as a “taboo.” White’s paper was more explicitly anti-Boasian, and defended a more rigidly universalistic view of evolution. Only a year later, A. V. Kidder (1940:534–535) summarized evolutionary parallels in the Old and New Worlds:
In both hemispheres man started…as a nomadic hunter, a user of stone tools, a Palaeolithic savage. In both he spread over great continents and shaped his life to cope with every sort of environment. Then, in both hemispheres, wild plants were brought under cultivation; population increased; concentrations of people brought elaboration of social groupings and rapid progress in the arts. Pottery came into use, fibers and wools were woven into cloth, animals were domesticated, metal working began—first in gold and copper, then in the harder alloy, bronze. Systems of writing were evolved.
Not only in material things do the parallels hold. In the New World as well as the Old, priesthoods grew and, allying themselves with temporal powers, or becoming rulers in their own right, reared to their gods vast temples adorned with painting and sculpture. The priests and chiefs provided for themselves elaborate tombs richly stocked for the future life. In political history it is the same. In both hemispheres group joined group to form tribes; coalitions and conquests brought pre-eminence; empires grew and assumed the paraphernalia of glory.
These are astounding similarities. And if we believe, as most modern students do, that the Indians’ achievement was made independently, and their progress was not stimulated from overseas, then we reach a very significant conclusion. We…must consider that civilization is an inevitable response to laws governing the growth of culture and controlling the man-culture relationship.
Kidder posited some sort of “innate urge” to develop civilization. We needn’t accept the existence of this urge—nor each detail of his summary—in order to grasp the significance of the complex parallels in Old and New World cultural developments, parallels that suggest some sort of universal evolutionary pattern.
Events leading to World War II, and the war itself, probably stimulated many anthropologists to rethink extreme forms of cultural relativism—much as Williams (1947) was led to rethink the relativism espoused in Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934). Carried to its logical conclusions, relativism implied a tolerance for cultural otherness that few anthropologists were anxious to apply to Nazism (Hatch 1983:103–104).
In 1945 Murdock published “The Common Denominator of Cultures.” It was a comprehensive essay on universals that brought them back into the mainstream of American anthropology. It also provided a “partial list” of universals:
age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative labor, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labor, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing, family, feasting, fire making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin-groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, modesty concerning natural functions, mourning, music, mythology, numerals, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool making, trade, visiting, weaning, and weather control. (1945:124)
When the various items on the list were broken down to further uniformities, “cross-cultural similarities” were even “more far-reaching.” Murdock gave the example of funeral rites, which he thought were not only universals themselves but which in turn contained further universals: expressions of grief, means of disposing of the body, and magical protection for the participants.
Murdock agreed with the opinion that the universals were of classification, not of content. He thought it “highly doubtful” that “any specific element of behavior” was a true universal. But he rejected Kroeber’s (1935) argument that the classifications were “a mere artifact of classificatory ingenuity.” Competent authorities of diverse theoretical viewpoints all agreed upon the classifications, which meant that the universal pattern could only find its basis in “the fundamental biological and psychological nature of man and in the universal conditions of human existence” (1945:125; this already marked a considerable revision of the views presented in his 1932 paper). Universals, thus, had an objective reality. Murdock went on to discuss humanity’s common “impulses” and “drives” as ingredients—but not the sole ingredients—in the production of universals.
Long before his paper on universals was published, Murdock had been at work on a vast scheme to codify the findings of world ethnography. This resulted in the Human Relations Area Files, in which a large number of ethnographies from all major areas of the world, and representing varying levels of cultural complexity, are presented in a manner that allows one to look up information on each of them in terms of standard categories (Murdock 1971). These categories are not necessarily universals—not every society would, for example, have a “navy,” which is a subheading under “armed forces,” itself not likely to be a universal—but the categories are intended to cover all known major topics (a grand sort of universal pool), and some are ordinary universals.
In a 1947 paper entitled “Human Nature and the Cultural Process” the philosopher-anthropologist David Bidney reiterated his charge (1944) that it is a fallacy to reify culture as an autonomous phenomenon. He saw “superorganicism” as just the extreme opposite of the reductionist “organicism” that racism entails, and he argued that culture should best be understood “as the dynamic process and product of the self-cultivation of human nature” (1947:383, 387). It is true, he said, that “the variety of human cultures [can]not be deduced from the so-called instinctive endowment of individuals or racial groups, and…cultural development is not bound up with improvement in mental capacity,” but it does not follow from this that “culture is a process sui generis…which…precedes the individual and determines the type of human nature he is to acquire” (1947:389–391). On the contrary, “Omnis cultura ex natura,” for “cultural phenomena are not intelligible apart from the structure and functions of human nature” (1947:390, 391). Bidney thus agrees with Wissler, Malinowski, and Murdock in rooting universal human institutions in a universal human nature and its needs (1947:391).
Given the contingent effects of time and place in cultural development, Bidney doubted that there could ever be a predictive science of culture. But he thought that human nature was a proper subject for natural science, so that “adequate self-knowledge requires a comprehension of both nature and history” (1947:396). Bidney described his views as “humanistic,” and in the sense that they restored what Kroeber’s superorganicism obliterated—the human being—the term is apt. Although Bidney’s critique of the reification of culture was definitive, his views did not receive much attention from anthropologists at large.
Melville Herskovits’s Man and His Works, first published in 1947, contained a chapter entitled “The Universals of Civilization.” Herskovits stressed the classificatory function of universals, pointing out that the categories Murdock provided in his Outline of Cultural Materials (1971, but prepared in draft in the 1930s) were in many respects simply an expanded and refined version of Wissler’s “cultural scheme.” Herskovits proposed his own short list and used it to order ethnographic materials. He summarized Malinowski’s scheme for a
nalyzing cultures in terms of human needs, but pointed to the scheme’s difficulties—particularly the one of trying to explain religion and aesthetic elements of culture in any framework based on Malinowski’s conception of biological needs. Herskovits did not propose a solution to this problem, but he added that the alternative to explanations in terms of basic needs is in terms of “historic phenomena”: an origin so early that the universals in question became so by spreading with humanity to all parts of the world. Herskovits concluded his book with an unusual reconciliation of cultural relativism with universals: the former, in opposition to “ethnocentric absolutism,” stresses universals, because tolerance rests on the recognition that justice and beauty are known in all cultures, even though their manifestations differ from one culture to another (1952:76–77, 229–240, 347–348, 575, 655). Cultural relativism is often conceived of as the opposite of universalism, but there is this sense in which they can be harmonized.
In 1948 Carleton Coon published a reader in anthropology with an appendix that gave an overview of anthropology. In the course of developing a universalistic model for the analysis of society and culture, the appendix presents a fairly extensive discussion of the physical nature of humans, along with frequent mention of specific universals (1948:563–614).
In the same year Leslie White, who, as noted earlier, had already begun to question certain aspects of the cultural relativity of American anthropology, attempted to explain the universality of the incest taboo. He defended E. B. Tylor’s argument that those who failed to marry out died out. Marrying out promoted the cooperation that set human culture above animal existence. Focused attempts to explain particular universals were, however, to remain somewhat rare for another decade or so.10
Outside the United States there were continued signs of interest in universals—if not in their study, at least in their use. For example, in 1949 Lévi-Strauss published his Les Structures Élémentaires de la Parenté, in which he posited innate “mental structures” to explain certain features of kinship. Lévi-Strauss was very attuned to American anthropological thought, and he was aware that he was breaking a sort of taboo (see footnote 7, above). Lévi-Strauss’s views have been particularly influential in turning at least some anthropologists’ thoughts toward the human mind and its relationship to human cultures.
Although I mentioned it above, it was in this period that Kroeber (1949)—somewhat out of step with the times—argued against universals on the grounds that they were either vague and ethnocentric labels or were not within the purview of cultural anthropology anyway.
Clyde Kluckhohn’s “Universal Categories of Culture” (1953) considerably advanced the discussion of universals. He expressed dissatisfaction with “the tautology that culture alone begets or determines culture.” He quoted A. V. Kidder’s (1940) summary of the impressive similarity of developments in the Old and New Worlds as evidence for uniform forces at work in isolated locations, and from a variety of sources he pulled together materials that rested on the assumption of universals or demonstrated their reality. He found explanations for universals in human biology and psychology, and in uniformities of human social interactions and environmental situations. Recent studies of the neuroanatomy of primates and humans led him to express the opinion that some of our behaviors depended “less on sociocultural factors than had previously been thought” and to wonder if there might not be “specific biological bases for certain of our social habits” (1953:514).
Kluckhohn took issue with Kroeber’s reduction of universals to noncultural status: however much they may reflect human biology, they are still “socially transmitted” (without using the term, he apparently was expressing what is now called an interactionist position). And universals provide fixed points for cross-cultural comparisons that “are not ethnocentric.” He retained the point of view that universals are of classification, not content: “likenesses, not identities” (quoting A. V. Kidder).
Murdock’s and Kluckhohn’s works have clearly ranked among the most influential statements on universals from the time they were written until now. They contain much, perhaps most, of the reasoning behind the study of universals that is generally familiar to anthropologists.
The following decade or so did not show a continuing rise in the number of general and explicit discussions of universals in mainstream anthropology, and in much of anthropology there was a significant retreat. In addition to the ambivalence that many anthropologists still felt toward universals, there were two other possible reasons why the immediate post-war enthusiasm for them slackened. Insofar as interest in them was stimulated by the desire to have some fixed basis for dealing with the major crisis of the late thirties and forties—the rise of Nazism—it might follow that when this crisis faded so did interest in universals. Indeed, the subsequent major world crisis—the threat of World War III—led many academics to call for a renewed espousal of tolerance and the cultural relativism that supports it. Second, insofar as anthropologists were willing to accept universals, it was not very clear how they were to be explained or, perhaps more importantly, how an interest in them could be turned into research programs. Psychology was still very much oriented toward behaviorism and so could offer little guidance. Few anthropologists had any sense of what was happening in evolutionary biology or whether it could be of help—in spite of the anthropological interest in cultural evolution.11
An important exception was A. Irving Hallowell, whose paper “Personality, Culture, and Society in Behavioral Evolution” (1963) argued that universals necessarily raise questions about human psychology and the evolution of the human mind. He criticized anthropology for paying no more than lip service to a vague concept of the psychic unity of humanity, and he criticized both anthropology and psychology for assuming that humanity is a product of evolution and yet failing to explore humanity’s psychobiological nature in an evolutionary perspective. Hallowell argued that anthropologists tended to emphasize the unique aspects of humans, thereby sidestepping important evolutionary questions, and he advocated a program of comparative psychology that would link human and animal studies.
Two years later the mainstream anthropological unease about universals found expression when Clifford Geertz (1965) took a critical look at the concept of cultural universals, particularly at the idea that only universals are of primary importance in defining human nature. He argues that this is a prejudice that was carried over from the Enlightenment and given a concrete research strategy by anthropology in the middle decades of this century. In accordance with the social scientific conceptions of the time—i.e., that the biological, the psychological, the social, and the cultural are all distinct and autonomous levels of analysis—the research strategy consisted of finding cultural universals and then associating them in an intuitive manner with constancies from the biological, psychological, or social levels.
Geertz finds a number of problems with this strategy. Like Kroeber before him, Geertz sees no constant content to such universals as religion, marriage, or property, and so he finds them “fake” (1965:101). Furthermore, the alleged linkages of cultural universals with their subcultural underpinnings are, he says, either vague or improbable. Consequently, Geertz sees no good reason to seek the definition of human nature in cultural universals. On the contrary, he sees good reason to seek the essence of humanity in its variousness. To incorporate this variousness in the concept of human nature, he argues for a new research strategy that accommodates itself to a new framework for understanding humanity that had only become clear a decade or so before he wrote.
The key ingredient in this new framework involves replacing the conception of autonomous levels of analysis with one that allows theoretical analysis in terms of interaction between biology, psychology, social organization, and culture. This interactionist framework is required because we now have every reason to think not that our bodies evolved first, then our brains, and then our societies and cultures—a sequence implied by the autonomous-levels-of-analysis framew
ork—but that they all coevolved. As a consequence of this coevolution, humans are dependent on culture—our brain and body presume culture. No humans exist without culture, and in all cases, Geertz notes, they have particular cultures, not generic culture. Humans have evolved such dependence on cultural “control mechanisms—plans, recipes, rules, instructions”—that humans are now “incomplete” without them (1965:107, 109).
Thus, at the same time that our nervous system evolved ever greater complexity, we also abandoned “the regularity and precision of detailed genetic control over our conduct for the flexibility and adaptability of a more generalized, though of course no less real, genetic control over it” (Geertz 1965:112). Our nervous system itself, according to Geertz, is now a product of culture. Without the particularities of culture, human behavior would be “a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions” and our experience would be “virtually shapeless” (1965:108).
Surely Geertz is correct in pointing to the difficulty of drawing a boundary between the innate and the cultural and in noting that most complex behaviors must be some sort of “vector outcome” of the two (1965:113). Geertz is likewise correct in his assertions that we need to chart human variability if we seek a true understanding of human nature, that science finds its generalities in particulars, and that a true science of humanity may well find the “generically human” in such “cultural particularities” as Himalayan polyandry (1965:105). As Symons (1979:225–226) argues, for example, the very rarity of polyandry and the conditions that bring it about are telling evidence for innate panhuman sex differences. But to imply that only the variables reveal the generically human is surely wrong, and the assertion that humans “are, above all other things, various” (Geertz 1965:115) is at best a judgment call with numerous arguments against it.
Geertz probably overstates the importance of culture in other ways, too: to say that humans are dependent upon some aspects of culture—tools notably (Mann 1972)—is quite different from saying that humans are dependent in general on “the guidance provided by systems of significant symbols” (1965:112). It also remains to be seen that all emotions, say, are as chaotic as Geertz says—even though they may always be given a culturally variable gloss.
Human Universals Page 11
