The UP may not know how to make fire, but they know how to use it. They use fire to cook food but for other purposes too. Tools and fire do much to make them more comfortable and secure. The UP have other ways to make themselves feel better (or different). These include substances they can take to alter their moods or feelings: stimulants, narcotics, or intoxicants. These are in addition to what they take for mere sustenance.
The UP always have some form of shelter from the elements. Further ways in which they attend to their material needs will be discussed later.
The UP have distinct patterns of preparation for birth, for giving birth, and for postnatal care. They also have a more or less standard pattern and time for weaning infants.
The UP are not solitary dwellers. They live part of their lives, if not the whole of them, in groups. One of their most important groups is the family, but it is not the only group among them. One or more of the UP groups maintains a unity even though the members are dispersed.
The UP have groups defined by locality or claiming a certain territory, even if they happen to live almost their entire lives as wanderers upon the sea. They are materially, cognitively, and emotionally adjusted to the environment in which they normally live (particularly with respect to some of its flora and fauna). A sense of being a distinct people characterizes the UP, and they judge other people in their own terms.
The core of a normal UP family is composed of a mother and children. The biological mother is usually expected to be the social mother and usually is. On a more or less permanent basis there is usually a man (or men) involved, too, and he (or they) serve minimally to give the children a status in the community and/or to be a consort to the mother. Marriage, in the sense of a “person” having a publicly recognized right of sexual access to a woman deemed eligible for childbearing, is institutionalized among the UP. While the person is almost always a male, it need not necessarily be a single individual, nor even a male.1
The UP have a pattern of socialization: children aren’t just left to grow up on their own. Senior kin are expected to contribute substantially to socialization. One of the ways children learn among the UP is by watching elders and copying them. The socialization of UP children includes toilet training. Through practice, children and adults perfect what they learn. The UP learn some things by trial and error.
One’s own children and other close kin are distinguished from more distant relatives or nonrelatives among the UP, and the UP favor their close kin in various contexts.
UP families and the relationships of their family members to each other and to outsiders are affected by their sexual regulations, which sharply delimit, if not eliminate, mating between the genetically close kin. Mating between mother and son, in particular, is unthinkable or taboo. Sex is a topic of great interest to the UP, though there may be contexts in which they will not discuss it.
Some groups among the UP achieve some of their order by division into socially significant categories or subgroups on the basis of kinship, sex, and age. Since the UP have kinship, sex, and age statuses, it follows, of course, that they have statuses and roles and hence a social structure. But they have statuses beyond those of sex, age, and kinship categories. And while these are largely ascribed statuses, they have achieved statuses too. There are rules of succession to some of their statuses.
Although it may be only another way of saying that they have statuses and roles, the UP recognize social personhood: social identities, including collective identities, that are distinguishable from the individuals who bear them. The distinction between persons and individuals involves the entification of the former; i.e., the UP speak of statuses as though they were entities that can act and be acted upon, such as we do when we say, for example, that “the legislature” (a social entity) “punished the university” (another social entity).
Prestige is differentially distributed among the UP, and the members of UP society are not all economically equal. They acknowledge inequalities of various sorts, but we cannot specify whether they approve or disapprove.
The UP have a division of labor, minimally based on the sex and age statuses already mentioned. For example, their women have more direct child-care duties than do their men. Children are not expected to, and typically do not, engage in the same activities in the same way that adults do. Related to this division of labor, men and women and adults and children are seen by the UP as having different natures. Their men are in fact on the average more physically aggressive than women and are more likely to commit lethal violence than women are.
In the public political sphere men form the dominant element among the UP. Women and children are correspondingly submissive or acquiescent, particularly, again, in the public political sphere.
In addition to their division of labor, whereby different kinds of people do different things, the UP have customs of cooperative labor, in which people jointly undertake essentially similar tasks. They use reciprocal exchanges, whether of labor, or goods, or services, in a variety of settings. Reciprocity—including its negative or retaliatory forms—is an important element in the conduct of their lives. The UP also engage in trade, that is, in nonreciprocal exchanges of goods and services (i.e., one kind of good or service for another). Whether reciprocally or not, they give gifts to one another too. In certain contexts they share food.
Whether in the conduct of family life, of subsistence activities, or other matters, the UP attempt to predict and plan for the future. Some of their plans involve the maintenance or manipulation of social relations. In this context it is important to note that the UP possess “triangular awareness,” the ability to think not only of their own relationships to others but of the relationships between others in relation to themselves. Without such an ability they would be unable to form their ubiquitous coalitions.
The UP have government, in the sense that they have public affairs and these affairs are regulated, and in the sense that decisions binding on a collectivity are made. Some of the regulation takes place in a framework of corporate statuses (statuses with orderly procedures for perpetuating membership in them).
The UP have leaders, though they may be ephemeral or situational. The UP admire, or profess to admire, generosity, and this is particularly desired in a leader. No leader of the UP ever has complete power lodged in himself alone. UP leaders go beyond the limits of UP reason and morality. Since the UP never have complete democracy, and never have complete autocracy, they always have a de facto oligarchy.
The UP have law, at least in the sense of rules of membership in perpetual social units and in the sense of rights and obligations attached to persons or other statuses. Among the UP’s laws are those that in certain situations proscribe violence and rape. Their laws also proscribe murder—unjustified taking of human life (though they may justify taking lives in some contexts). They have sanctions for infractions, and these sanctions include removal of offenders from the social unit—whether by expulsion, incarceration, ostracism, or execution. They punish (or otherwise censure or condemn) certain acts that threaten the group or are alleged to do so.
Conflict is more familiar to the UP than they wish it were, and they have customary, though far from perfect, ways of dealing with it (their proscription of rape and other forms of violence, for example, does not eliminate them). They understand that wronged parties may seek redress. They employ consultation and mediation in some conflict cases.
Important conflicts are structured around in-group–out-group antagonisms that characterize the UP. These antagonisms both divide the UP as an ethnic group as well as set them off from other ethnic groups. An ethical dualism distinguishes the in-group from the out-group, so that, for example, cooperation is more expectable in the former than with the latter.
The UP distinguish right from wrong, and at least implicitly, as noted earlier, recognize responsibility and intentionality. They recognize and employ promises. Reciprocity, also mentioned earlier, is a key element in their morality. So, too, is th
eir ability to empathize. Envy is ubiquitous among the UP, and they have symbolic means for coping with its unfortunate consequences.
Etiquette and hospitality are among UP ideals. They have customary greetings and customs of visiting kin or others who dwell elsewhere. They have standardized, preferred, or typical times of day to eat, and they have occasions on which to feast. In other ways, too, they have normal daily routines of activities and are fundamentally diurnal.
They have standards of sexual modesty—even though they might customarily go about naked. People, adults in particular, do not normally copulate in public, nor do they relieve themselves without some attempt to do it modestly. Among their other taboos are taboos on certain utterances and certain kinds of food. On the other hand, there are some kinds of food—sweets in particular—that they relish.
The UP have religious or supernatural beliefs in that they believe in something beyond the visible and palpable. They anthropomorphize and (some if not all of them) believe things that are demonstrably false. They also practice magic, and their magic is designed to do such things as to sustain and increase life and to win the attention of the opposite sex. They have theories of fortune and misfortune. They have ideas about how to explain disease and death. They see a connection between sickness and death. They try to heal the sick and have medicines for this purpose. The UP practice divination. And they try to control the weather.
The UP have rituals, and these include rites of passage that demarcate the transfer of an individual from one status to another. They mourn their dead.
Their ideas include a worldview—an understanding or conception of the world about them and their place in it. In some ways their worldview is structured by features of their minds. For example, from early infancy they have the ability to identify items that they know by one sense with the same items perceived in another sense, and so they see the world as a unity, not as different worlds imposed by our different sense modalities. Their worldview is a part of their supernatural and mythological beliefs. They have folklore too. The UP dream and attempt to interpret their dreams.
However spiritual they may be, the UP are materialists also. As indicated by their language having the possessive for use on “loose property,” the UP have concepts of property, distinguishing what belongs—minimal though it may be—to the individual, or group, from what belongs to others. They also have rules for the inheritance of property.
In addition to their use of speech in poetic or polished ways, the UP have further aesthetic standards. However little clothing they wear, they nonetheless adorn their bodies in one way or another, including a distinctive way of maintaining or shaping their hair. They have standards of sexual attractiveness (including, for example, signs of good health and a clear male preference for the signs of early nubility rather than those of the postmenopausal state). Their decorative art is not confined to the body alone, for the UP apply it to their artifacts too. In addition to their patterns of grooming for essentially aesthetic reasons, they also have patterns of hygienic care.
The UP know how to dance and have music. At least some of their dance (and at least some of their religious activity) is accompanied by music. They include melody, rhythm, repetition, redundancy, and variation in their music, which is always seen as an art, a creation. Their music includes vocals, and the vocals include words—i.e., a conjunction of music and poetry. The UP have children’s music.
The UP, particularly their youngsters, play and playfight. Their play, besides being fun, provides training in skills that will be useful in adulthood.
The materials presented in this chapter—essentially a list of absolute universals—draws heavily from Murdock (1945), Tiger and Fox (1971) and Hockett (1973) and also from many other sources that are cited in the bibliography. In some cases I have added items to the list because my own experience or that of a colleague or student has convinced me that the items ought to be there even though appropriate references could not be found. In a few cases I have counted something as a universal even though that required setting aside ethnographic testimony. There are, for example, some reports of societies in which getting into other people’s minds (empathizing, divining intent or inner feeling, and the like) is not done or even conceived as possible. My assumption is that these reports may be emically correct but not etically. For example, Selby (1974:106–107, 109) reports that the Zapotec, at least in some situations, do not think they can get into other people’s minds, but he gives a clear case of this happening (1974:56). Similarly, to the Kaluli belief that “one cannot know what another thinks or feels,” Ochs and Schieffelin (1984:290) comment that the Kaluli “obviously” do “interpret and assess one another’s…internal states.”
In an equally few cases I omitted items from this chapter that nevertheless do appear in the bibliography—because I was not sufficiently convinced by the references. For example, after surveying ethnographic literature on abortion, Devereux (1967:98) felt the evidence was so strong for universality that he dismissed some reports of its absence. He may be correct, but his argument did not quite convince me and I decided to err on the side of caution and to count abortion as a near-universal. Similarly, Otterbein (1987) states in various places that the absolute universality of capital punishment is one of the major finds of his survey. But in other places in the same work he speaks more cautiously of the possibility that it is only a near-universal. I decided to accept the cautious judgment.
More important than uncertainties about the boundaries between universals and near-universals is the issue of adequate conceptualization or definition of particular universals. For example, the conceptualizations of marriage and the family that I presented are those that currently seem the most convincing to me; they have been differently conceived or defined in the past and may undergo further revision in the future.
There are also some general problems of conceptualization which, were they properly addressed, would have led to a different presentation than the one above. As was discussed in chapter 2, some scholars distinguish between the surface (or substantive) universals and those that lie at some deeper level. This chapter has been more concerned with the former. A more serious pursuit of universals at the deeper level of process or innate mechanism may presumably unearth universals that are at present wholly unknown and almost certainly would produce hierarchical orders among some sets of universals, orders that distinguish the fundamental processes from their more superficial consequences.
Setting aside the issue of hierarchy, there are other problems with how the list of universals is ordered: which to start with, which to put in a set with which. Murdock (1945) took the easy way out and ordered his list alphabetically. While it seemed appropriate to me to begin with culture itself, and then to explore language, the order in which the remaining sets or clusters of items is presented is arbitrary. There is arbitrariness in each cluster, too, partly because I wanted to minimize repetitions. Repetitions do occur, and a fuller and truer account would include more repetitions or perhaps would show the interconnections between items by means of a diagram. For example, empathy (phrased in different ways but with the meaning of understanding another person’s inner states) occurs in the description of the UP in the context of communication, morality, and psychological personhood—and is implicit elsewhere.
In sum, a fuller and truer account of the UP would in various ways show the relationships between the universals. But then a fuller and truer account of the UP would list their conditional universals (and their interrelationships and hierarchies) and would also offer explanations of the universals and their interrelationships. Anthropology has scarcely begun to illuminate the architecture of human universals. It is time to get on with the task.
Footnotes
1. Among some peoples, for example, a woman A may assume the status of a man, take a woman B as wife, and then arrange for the wife B to bear children to which A will be the social father.
7
Universals, Human Nature,
and Anthropology
Universals help delineate the nature of the human species as such. To do this…has been the principal scientific aim of anthropology.
Goodenough 1970:130
[There is an] uninvited guest which has been seated…beside us and which is the human mind.
Lévi-Strauss 1953:4
The present essay is for me one of the most difficult I have ever attempted. This is because I am having to submit to question some of the axioms anthropologists of my generation—and several subsequent generations—were taught to hallow. These axioms express the belief that all human behavior is the result of social conditioning.
Turner 1983:221
Universals exist, they are numerous, and they engage matters unquestionably of anthropological concern. Universals can be explained, and their ramified effects on human affairs can be traced. But universals comprise a heterogenous set—cultural, social, linguistic, individual, unrestricted, implicational, etc.—a set that may defy any single overarching explanation. If, however, a single source for universals had to be sought, human nature would be the place to look. Human nature is not, however, something that we can always ascertain directly. Thus by the same token that we may seek the explanations for universals in human nature, we may use universals, as Goodenough says, as guides in the search for human nature.
Within human nature, surely it is the big and complex human mind that deserves our greatest attention. Lévi-Strauss understated the case by noting the presence of the human mind in the symposium of linguists and anthropologists that elicited his comment above: the human mind has always been with them, and crucially so, as I tried to illustrate in the first chapter.
Laying a foundation for understanding human nature and, hence, the human mind is the single most important unfinished piece of business in the social sciences today. Undertaking this task, in which the study of universals has an important part to play, will not be easy—for reasons that Turner neatly expresses.
Human Universals Page 21
