In the long run it may be that the Westermarck hypothesis will not stand up; certainly it is only a partial explanation that does not preclude other, complementary explanations. But the mode of explaining—involving ethological and evolutionary perspectives, a detailed specification of mechanisms and of individual motivation, a diligent search for natural experiments, and quantitative tests when possible—deserves emulation with other universals.
Footnotes
1. Following up the leads suggested by folk classifications might lead to an analysis of incest along with bestiality, irreverence, and sundry other topics. Whether to follow the leads suggested by folk classifications is a complication I will not treat here. But I should note that some anthropologists have recently explored incest from the viewpoint of child abuse, the category under which some forms of incest are classified in the West today (see especially Willner [1983] but also La Fontaine [1988]).
2. Marriages of royal brothers and sisters are well attested in the historical record, but evidence that this led to actual incest (i.e., reproduction) is extremely limited (Bixler 1982a, 1982b). Arens (1986:116) suggests that the motive of royal brother-sister marriages was not reproductive at all: such marriages merely took royal sisters out of the marriage market and thereby prevented them from bearing offspring who might rival the king. With their sisters safely married to themselves, nothing compelled kings to actually mate with them.
3. Arens (1986:17–23; see also May 1979) summarizes the same or similar materials, with similar results (but cf. Bittles 1983). Arens wonders how, if the consequences of inbreeding are “not controversial or debatable,” it is then possible for some anthropologists to consider inbreeding costs irrelevant to understanding incest avoidance (1986:21). The answers are that by taking populations (not individuals) as units of analysis, some anthropologists have (1) noted that populations would not necessarily suffer from inbreeding, while others (2) observe that sustained inbreeding would, over the generations, actually eliminate harmful genes from the gene pool. Each of these lines of thought ignores “the immediate disadvantages for those most immediately involved” (Arens 1986:23).
4. Isis was the most extensively worshiped Egyptian deity and, perhaps ironically, was particularly associated with fertility.
6
The Universal People
What do all people, all societies, all cultures, and all languages have in common? In the following pages I attempt to provide answers, in the form of a description of what I will call the Universal People (UP). Theirs is a description of every people or of people in general. Bear in mind the tentative nature of this chapter: as surely as it leaves out some universals it includes some that will prove in the long run not to be universal, and even more surely it divides up traits and complexes in ways that in time will give way to more accurate or meaningful divisions. At the end of the chapter I will discuss how it was put together and the ways in which it will change in the future.
Although humans are not unique in their possession of culture—patterns of doing and thinking that are passed on within and between generations by learning—they certainly are unique in the extent to which their thought and action are shaped by such patterns. The UP are aware of this uniqueness and posit a difference between their way—culture—and the way of nature.
A very significant portion of UP culture is embodied in their language, a system of communication without which their culture would necessarily be very much simpler. With language the UP think about and discuss both their internal states and the world external to each individual (this is not to deny that they also think without language—surely they do). With language, the UP organize, respond to, and manipulate the behavior of their fellows. UP language is of strategic importance for those who wish to study the UP. This is so because their language is, if not precisely a mirror of, then at least a window into, their culture and into their minds and actions. Their language is not a perfect mirror or window, for there are often discrepancies between what the UP say, think, and do. But we would be very hard pressed to understand many aspects of the UP without access to their thinking through their language. Because their language is not a simple reflex of the way the world is, we need to distinguish their (emic) conceptualization of it from objective (etic) conceptualizations of the world.
The UP’s language allows them to think and speak in abstractions, and about things or processes not physically present. If one of them is proficient in the use of language—particularly if it is a male—it gains him prestige, in part because good speech allows him to more effectively manipulate, for better or worse, the behavior of his fellows. An important means of verbal manipulation among the UP is gossip.
In their conversations the UP manage in many ways to express more than their mere words indicate. For example, shifts in tone, timing, and other features of speech indicate that one person is or is not ready for another to take a turn at speaking. UP speech is used to misinform as well as inform. Even if an individual among the UP does not tell lies, he understands the concept and watches for it in others. For some UP do lie, and they dissimulate and mislead in other ways too. UP use of language includes ways to be funny and ways to insult.
UP speech is highly symbolic. Let me explain how this is different from animal communication. Many bird species vocalize a danger warning. The vocalization is substantially the same for the species from one location to another. Indeed, it is somewhat similar from one species to another. Humans have cries of fright and warning that are in some ways analogous to these bird calls, but between many, many members of our species our routine vocalizations are meaningless. This is so because speech sounds and the things they signify have very little intrinsic connection. Sound and sense, as a rule, are only arbitrarily associated. Equally arbitrary is the way units of speech that are equivalent to our words get strung together to make sentences. But in spite of this arbitrariness there are features of language at all basic levels—phonemic, grammatical, and semantic—that are found in all languages.
Thus UP phonemes—their basic speech sounds—include a contrast between vocalics (sounds produced in or channeled through the oral cavity) and nonvocalics (e.g., nasals). UP language has contrasts between vowels and contrasts between stops and nonstops (a stop, e.g., English p or b, stops the flow of air during speech). The phonemes of UP speech form a system of contrasts, and the number of their phonemes goes neither above 70 nor below 10.
In time, their language undergoes change. So it follows that the UP do not speak the language of their more remote ancestors, though it may be quite similar.
However much grammar varies from language to language, some things are always present. For example, UP language includes a series of contrasting terms that theoretically could be phrased in three different ways, but that are only phrased two ways. To illustrate, they could talk about the “good” and the “bad” (two contrasting terms, neither with a marker added to express negation); or they could talk about the “good” and the “not good” (i.e., not having the word “bad” at all but expressing its meaning with a marked version of its opposite, the marking in this case to negate), or they could talk about the “bad” and the “not bad” (i.e., not having the word “good,” etc.). Logically, these alternatives are identical: each arrangement conveys the same information. Similar possibilities exist for “deep” and “shallow,” “wide” and “narrow,” etc. But in each case the third possibility never occurs as the obligatory or common way of talking. So the UP are never forced to express, for lack of an alternative, the ideas of “good,” “wide,” “deep,” and so on as negated versions of their opposites.
By virtue of its grammar UP language conveys some information redundantly. In English, for example, both subject and verb indicate number, while in Spanish both noun and adjective indicate gender.
Two final points about UP grammar are that it contains nouns and verbs, and the possessive. The latter is used both for what have been called the “intimate” or “inal
ienable” possessions, i.e., to talk about their fingers, your hands, and her thoughts, and for “loose” or “alienable” possessions too, e.g., my axe.
The UP have special forms of speech for special occasions. Thus they have poetic or rhetorical standards deemed appropriate to speech in particular settings. They use narrative to explain how things came to be and to tell stories. Their language includes figurative speech: metaphor is particularly prominent, and metonymy (the use of a word for that with which it is associated, e.g., crown for king) is always included too. The UP can speak onomatopoeically (using words that imitate sound, like “bowwow”), and from time to time they do. They have poetry in which lines, demarcated by pauses, are about 3 seconds in duration. The poetic lines are characterized by the repetition of some structural, semantic, or auditory elements but by free variation too.
Most of the specific elementary units of meaning in UP language—units that are sometimes but not always equivalent to words—are not found in all the rest of the languages of the world. This does not prevent us from translating much of the UP speech into our own or any other particular language: centimeters and inches are not the same entities, but we can translate one to another quite precisely; people who lack a word for “chin” and thus call it the “end of the jaw” still make sense.
A few words or meanings cut across all cultural boundaries and hence form a part of UP language. I am not saying, of course, that the UP make the same speech sounds as we English speakers do for these words, but rather that the meanings for these terms are expressed by the UP in their terms. For example, the UP have terms for black and white (equivalent to dark and light when no other basic colors are encoded) and for face, hand, and so on.
Certain semantic components are found in UP language, even if the terms in which they are employed are not. For example, UP kin terminology includes terms that distinguish male from female (and thus indicate the semantic component of sex) and some generations from others. If not explicit, durational time is semantically implicit in their language, and they have units of time—such as days, months, seasons, and years. In various ways there is a temporal cyclicity or rhythmicity to UP lives. The UP can distinguish past, present, and future.
UP language also classifies parts of the body, inner states (such as emotions, sensations, or thoughts), behavioral propensities, flora, fauna, weather conditions, tools, space (by which they give directions), and many other definite topics, though each of them does not necessarily constitute an emically distinct lexical domain. The UP language refers to such semantic categories as motion, speed, location, dimension, and other physical properties; to giving (including analogous actions, such as lending); and to affecting things or people.
As is implied in their use of metaphor and metonymy, UP words (or word equivalents) are sometimes polysemous, having more than one meaning. Their antonyms and synonyms are numerous. The words or word equivalents that the UP use more frequently are generally shorter, while those they use less frequently are longer.
UP language contains both proper names and pronouns. The latter include at least three persons and two categories of number. Their language contains numerals, though they may be as few as “one, two, and many.”
The UP have separate terms for kin categories that include mother and father. That is, whereas some peoples include father and father’s brothers in a single kin category, and lump mother with her sisters—so that it is obligatory or normal to refer to each of one’s parents with terms that lump them with others—it is not obligatory among the UP to refer to their actual parents in ways that lump mother with father.
UP kinship terms are partially or wholly translatable by reference to the relationships inherent in procreation: mother, father, son, daughter. The UP have an age terminology that includes age grades in a linear sequence similar to the sequence child, adolescent, adult, etc. Our first reflex is to think that it could not be otherwise, but it could: an elderly person can be “like a child”; an age classification that had a term indicating “dependent age” could break from the normal pattern of linearity.
The UP have a sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic, even when it comprises three or four categories. When there are three, one is a combination of the two basic sexes (e.g., a hermaphrodite), or one is a crossover sex (e.g., a man acting as a woman). When there are four there are then two normal sexes and two crossover sexes.
Naming and taxonomy are fundamental to UP cognition. Prominent elements in UP taxonomy and other aspects of their speech and thought are binary discriminations, forming contrasting terms or semantic components (a number of which have already been mentioned—black and white, nature and culture, male and female, good and bad, etc.). But the UP also can order continua, so they can indicate not only contrasts but polar extremes with gradations between them. Thus there are middles between their opposites, or ranked orders in their classifications. The UP are able to express the measure of things and distances, though not necessarily with uniform units.
The UP employ such elementary logical notions as “not,” “and,” “same,” “equivalent,” and “opposite.” They distinguish the general from the particular and parts from wholes. Unfortunately, the UP overestimate the objectivity of their mode of thought (it is particularly unobjective when they compare their in-group with out-groups).
The UP use what has been called “conjectural” reasoning to, for example, deduce from minute clues the identification, presence, and behavior of animals, or from miscellaneous symptoms the presence of a particular disease that cannot in itself be observed and is a wholly abstract conception.
Language is not the only means of symbolic communication employed by the UP. They employ gestures too, especially with their hands and arms. Some of their nonverbal communication is somewhat one-sided, in that the message is received consciously but may be sent more or less spontaneously. For example, the squeals of children, cries of fright, and the like all send messages that UP watch closely or listen to carefully, even though the sender did not consciously intend them to communicate. The UP do not merely listen and watch what is on the surface, they interpret external behavior to grasp interior intention.
Communication with their faces is particularly complex among the UP, and some of their facial expressions are recognized everywhere. Thus UP faces show happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and contempt, in a manner entirely familiar from one society to another. When they smile while greeting persons it signifies friendly intentions. UP cry when they feel unhappiness or pain. A young woman acting coy or flirting with her eyes does it in a way you would recognize quite clearly. Although some facial communication is spontaneous, as noted earlier, the UP can mask, modify, and mimic otherwise spontaneous expressions. Whether by face, words, gesture, or otherwise, the UP can show affection as well as feel it.
The UP have a concept of the person in the psychological sense. They distinguish self from others, and they can see the self both as subject and object. They do not see the person as a wholly passive recipient of external action, nor do they see the self as wholly autonomous. To some degree, they see the person as responsible for his or her actions. They distinguish actions that are under control from those that are not. They understand the concept of intention. They know that people have a private inner life, have memories, make plans, choose between alternatives, and otherwise make decisions (not without ambivalent feeling sometimes). They know that people can feel pain and other emotions. They distinguish normal from abnormal mental states. The UP personality theory allows them to think of individuals departing from the pattern of behavior associated with whatever status(es) they occupy, and they can explain these departures in terms of the individual’s character. The UP are spontaneously and intuitively able to, so to say, get in the minds of others to imagine how they are thinking and feeling.
In addition to the emotions that have already been mentioned, the UP are moved by sexual attraction; sometimes they are deeply disturbed by se
xual jealousy. They also have childhood fears, including fear of loud noises and—particularly toward the end of the first year of life—of strangers (this is the apparent counterpart of a strong attachment to their caretaker at this time). The UP react emotionally—generally with fear—to snakes. With effort, the UP can overcome some of their fears. Because there is normally a man present to make a claim on a boy’s mother, the Oedipus complex—in the sense of a little boy’s possessiveness toward his mother and coolness toward her consort—is a part of male UP psychology.
The UP recognize individuals by their faces, and in this sense they most certainly have an implicit concept of the individual (however little they may explicitly conceptualize the individual apart from social statuses). They recognize individuals in other ways too.
The UP are quintessential tool makers: not simply because they make tools—some other animals do too—but because they make so many, so many different kinds of them, and are so dependent upon them. Unlike the other animals, the UP use tools to make tools. They make cutters that improve upon what they can do with their teeth or by tearing with their hands. They make pounders that improve upon what they can do with their teeth, fists, feet, knees, shoulders, elbows, and head. They make containers that allow them to hold more things at one time, to hold them more comfortably or continuously, and to hold them when they otherwise couldn’t, as over a fire. Whether it be string, cord, sinew, vine, wire, or whatever, the UP have something to use to tie things together and make interlaced materials. They know and use the lever. Some of their tools are weapons, including the spear. The UP make many of their tools with such permanence that they can use them over and over again. They also make some of their tools in uniform patterns that are more or less arbitrary—thus we can often tell one people’s tools from another’s. Such patterns persist beyond any one person’s lifetime. Since tools are so closely related to human hands, we might note in passing that most people among the UP are right-handed.
Human Universals Page 20
