MAKING THE CASE FOR INTERNALIZATION
The process of absorbing the values and rules of a culture is subtle, and usually it’s all but invisible to observers—but it is important nonetheless. In considering the individual internalization of societal rules, we need to reconsider here several names. One is sociological theorist Talcott Parsons,13 who in portraying society functionally, as a system in equilibrium, followed Durkheim in seeing individuals as being deeply and all but automatically identified with their cultures and their group’s rules. Parsons saw the individual internalization of values as an important element in providing cultural continuity for social groups.
Another name is that of the well-known economist Herbert Simon. Basically, in his terms being culturally “docile” means that an individual can and does readily take on any behavior offered by the culture. As we’ve seen in Chapter 3, Simon came up with the idea that being innately good at learning the culture is so individually adaptive that it could actually be “subsidizing” some altruism.14 Economist Herb Gintis has advanced these concepts through a modern evolutionary economics approach that demonstrates the interaction of both genes and culture,15 and he has tied Simon’s piggybacking model directly to moral internalization.
In effect, both Parsons and Gintis are talking about one very basic conscience function, namely, the personal absorption of rules and values. And this leads to the conformist tendencies in humans that were discussed long ago by biologist Charles Waddington and more recently by psychologist Donald T. Campbell.16 Nothing could be more important for perpetuating the moralized kind of social life that humans lead, and children begin to learn about these rules early in life.
Our qualitative portrait of LPA moral internalization will begin with some suggestive if indirect evidence for hunter-gatherers’ rule-internalization—something that ethnographers in the field don’t usually even think about because they already have their hands full describing just the main adult social and subsistence patterns they meet with. Child-rearing is where this all begins, and the good news is that at least a few hunter-gatherer ethnographers have focused on children and the process of moral socialization. Still more fortunately, two of the best happen to have studied children among Bushmen and Inuit speakers, respectively, with attention to the details of internalization.
With respect to moral socialization, LPA foragers have benefited mainly from Briggs’s long-term, intensive studies of Eskimo children, and from Pat Draper’s investigations with the Bushmen. In laboratory settings, however, the moral development of children in modern societies has in fact been studied intensively by various scholars over the past several decades,17 and with great success, following the pioneering work of psychologist Jerome Kagan.18 And because the responses studied in modern children are innate, they apply as well to hunter-gatherer children because we all share the same genes.
The further internalization that takes place in adults is still largely taken for granted by scholars, even though the universal moralistic preaching in favor of altruism that Campbell discussed for early civilizations suggests that this is a human universal.19 I’ve already documented such adult-level preaching statistically for LPA foragers, but here some more direct and personal evidence of moral internalization will be useful.
For adults, probably the best one piece of evidence I’m aware of comes not from the usual ethnographic generalizations, which basically take internalization for granted, but from anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s active participation in an indigenous activity.20 The North American Cree do not quite qualify as LPA foragers because they were so heavily involved in the fur trade before they were studied, but the story I’m about to quote strikes me as typical, and it provides a major hint about how deeply-internalized altruistic giving can be among hunters who are all alone, out in the field.
Leacock accompanies her informant Thomas on a hunting trip, and while they are far afield they encounter two men, known to them slightly, who are very hungry. Thomas gives these acquaintances all of his flour and lard, and Leacock’s quoted description makes clear that Thomas spoke considerable English:
This meant returning to the post sooner than he had planned, thereby reducing his possible catch of furs. I probed to see whether there was some slight annoyance or reluctance involved, or at least some expectation of a return at some later date. This was one of the very rare times Thomas lost patience with me, and he said with deep, if suppressed anger, “suppose now, not to give them flour, lard—just dead inside.” More revealing than the incident itself were the finality of his tone and the inference of my utter inhumanity in raising questions about his action.21
Mention of a “dead” feeling suggests deep internalization, and because this was a matter of being generous to mere acquaintances, we may assume that the generosity was extrafamilial. In a similar Hadza case, James Stephenson, an adventurous New York landscape architect who travels to northern Tanzania to hunt with the Hadza for extended periods, reports that one time a hungry pair of strangers were met hunting far out in the bush and, again, the quite-costly sharing seemed to be automatic and deeply ingrained.22 The Hadza are, in fact, LPA foragers, and I’m mentioning this anecdote, published by a nonethnographer, because it fits with what Leacock told us, and because normally such descriptions don’t find their way into standard ethnographies. I wish they did.
In searching my ever-growing coded database for additional direct evidence of adult values internalization, I found nothing to closely parallel these two very revealing generosity anecdotes. However, just after the turn of the twentieth century Edward Westermarck, a Finnish sociologist who was a sensitive analyst of moral emotions and who made adept use of world ethnography,23 spoke of internalization without using the word. He gave a number of examples from sedentary tribal societies of people identifying emotionally and deeply with the customs of their tribal groups, and he also gave one example from an LPA forager group, which I shall quote here: “Mr. Howitt once said to a young Australian native with whom he was speaking about the food prohibited during initiation, ‘But if you were hungry and caught a female opossum, you might eat it if the old men were not here.’ The youth replied, ‘I could not do that; it would not be right’; and he could give no other reason other than that it would be wrong to disregard the customs of his people.”24
These three anecdotes are at least suggestive. In fact, Leacock’s and Stephenson’s accounts have a ring of authenticity that speaks convincingly, to me, of extrafamilial generosity’s being deeply ingrained in the Cree and the Hadza. My qualification to make such a judgment comes from the hundreds and surely thousands of hours I’ve spent reading other people’s hunter-gatherer ethnographies and also from the time I’ve spent with Navajos and Serbs as nonforagers who still live in small, cooperative communities. I can only wish that such revealing case histories were available in all of the several hundred ethnographic reports I have covered.
With respect to Howitt’s anecdote, which does not relate to generosity, my ethnographic intuitions tell me that he was not necessarily getting a full account of what was going on. With respect to the youth’s breaking an important food taboo when cultural enforcers (the old men) were absent, there’s another enforcement agency that might well have been operative. We’ve seen that supernatural sanctions are widely believed in by LPA foragers, and it’s likely that clandestinely eating a proscribed “possum” would be noted by such forces. If so, in his mind he—or his entire group—might be visited with some kind of dire punishment. Belief in supernatural sanctioning can aid in the internalization of rules.
Of course, as a very different kind of evidence we have the universal group-level sharing patterns that are routinized with respect to large game. People engage in them by habit, and with little real conflict, precisely because they have internalized the values and rules involved. There’s also the fact that even the most prolific hunters seem to enjoy participating in these systems—and basically seem to give up their carcasses without too much a
mbivalence even though once in a long while cheating obtains. Even more telling is that injured or disabled band members are assisted by unrelated band members through their meat contributions on the basis of a group ethos that calls for helping those in need. As we’ll be seeing in Chapter 11, such contingent help is given in part on the basis of past generous behavior.
On the whole, internalization effects seem to be rather subtle, and they’re quite difficult to separate from other agencies of motivation involved with meat-sharing, such as apprehension about seeming stingy, which is based on reputational concerns and in extreme cases on fear of active punishment. For instance, the Cree trapper Thomas surely knew that if he turned down the pair of hungry men, they might “bad-mouth” him to people he knew and thereby damage his reputation as a properly generous man. At the same time, his costly generosity might very well be mentioned when they arrived back in their camp, and through the exchange of favorable gossip he might gain in his public esteem in his own camp. But neither of these socially expedient personal considerations would account for the “dead” feeling he mentioned with such gravity. He obviously had absorbed his culture’s values about sharing and in fact had internalized them so deeply that being selfish was unthinkable.
The depth of emotions that accompanies internalization has also been emphasized by Pat Draper, one of the earlier Bushman scholars. Draper’s account of a young !Kung woman who felt herself to have been shamed helps us to understand how shame feelings are involved with the internalization of values and rules:
When an individual runs afoul of some norm and the sentiment of the camp is against him, he reacts in a way that seems extreme to a Western observer. Further, the way the wrongdoer reacts to the frustration of criticism suggests that the social norms are very well internalized by the individual. For example, a young woman, N!uhka, about seventeen years old and unmarried, had insulted her father. Seventeen years of age is late to be still unmarried in this society, and her father often talked with her and with relatives about eligible men. She was rebellious and uninterested in the older men who were named. (She was also having a good time flirting with the youths in camp who were her age-mates but judged too young to make good husbands.) In a flippant way she cursed her father. He reprimanded her and immediately other tongues took up a shocked chorus. . . .
N!uhka was furious but also shamed by the public outcry. Her reaction took this form: she grabbed her blanket, stomped out of the camp off to a lone tree about seventy yards from the circle of huts. There she sat all day, in the shade of the tree, with a blanket over her head and completely covering her body. This was full-scale Bushman sulk. She was angry but did not further release her anger apart from this gesture of withdrawal. She kept her anger inside, incidentally at some personal cost, for that day the temperature in the shade was 105 degrees Fahrenheit—without a blanket.25
REARING CHILDREN TO BE MORAL
My own interest in moral socialization goes back to the beginning of my life as an academic, and it involves what might be called an anthropological tragedy as far as my earlier professional career trajectory was concerned. For sedentary nonliterate people who are tribal, as opposed to foragers, the moral socialization of children has been a focus in a small group of earlier tribal or peasant ethnographies,26 and I would have contributed to this body of work had it not been for a type of mishap that sometimes catches up with ethnographers as they try to do fieldwork under exotic and politically tricky circumstances.
In 1972, I completed a Ph.D. dissertation that was based on collecting 10,000-plus definitions of 256 morally based cue words, which I had elicited from forty Serbian friends and neighbors in Upper Morača Tribe.27 In 1975, I returned to Montenegro to conduct similar interviews with children of different ages in order to study the stages at which these moral concepts became partially or fully articulated. Unfortunately, just as I was returning to the field, a colleague from a large American university was accused of seriously abusing his research privileges elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, and I was forbidden to begin this fieldwork in Montenegro. This was a real shock, but the result was that I eventually turned my interests to the study of wild chimpanzees—a decision I have never regretted, even though I still wonder what I might have learned about the formative Serbian conscience and the internalization of values and rules.
LPA hunter-gatherers everywhere are deeply moralistic about their rules of conduct, which is a good general way of demonstrating that they have internalized the underlying values. But how, exactly, did N!uhka develop into a Kalahari person of such moral sensitivity? When laboratory scientists working with children in our own culture demonstrate experimentally when and how rule internalization takes place and a conscience begins to form,28 I believe they are tapping into a universal aspect of moral life that is far more difficult to document ethnographically than experimentally.
At about two years of age our children in America not only begin to recognize themselves in mirrors, but they also start to blush with embarrassment and experience feelings of shame.29 Couple these patterns with tendencies to help others in need, which appear in the same age range or earlier,30 and we’re extremely well evolved to become both extrafamilially generous and moral—as long as an appropriate cultural environment is present. These ingrained developmental windows are so predictable that surely LPA foragers are dealing with the same developmental potential.
We also may assume, however, that some cultural diversity exists in how their children are morally socialized. In this respect, in studying Inuit moral socialization, Briggs’s role was that of careful describer, not experimenter, and a striking finding she made was that the Inuit go out of their way to force children to think very early about serious moral problems they’ll be facing later in life. In fact, they do this very frequently, and in our eyes they do so rather cruelly, through stressful teasing.
What they do is to pose hypothetical moral dilemmas fully as nasty as the ones used by Harvard philosophers in their research on the responses of adults, whose MRIs they are monitoring. Two contrasting runaway-trolley dilemmas have been designed to produce different degrees of psychological stress that will light up different areas of the brain depending on whether the fat man has to be pushed off the bridge to his death actively or the subject merely is throwing a switch to stop the trolley and save five lives by sacrificing one.31 The dilemmas studied by Briggs are totally natural, and in this context one of her research articles is titled “Why Don’t You Kill Your Baby Brother? The Dynamics of Peace in Canadian Inuit Camps.”32 Confronting children shockingly with their own emotions, including antisocial emotions, takes place in various parts of the far-flung Arctic, so this is not just a local anomaly. Briggs says:
These games are small exchanges, spontaneous in occurrence but highly stereotyped in form, between a child and one or more other people, who may be older children or adults of either sex. Sometimes the older person teases the child in some standardized way: “Where’s your [absent] daddy?” “Whose child are you?” “Do you wrongly imagine you’re lovable?” “Shall I adopt you?” “Shall I hit your nasty old mother?” At other times the game consists in tempting the child to engage in some disvalued behavior: “Don’t tell your sister you have that candy; it’s the last one; eat it all yourself.” There are a great many such games; they are played all the time by everybody and a very high proportion of interactions with small children take this form. Most interesting is the fact that the games occur with only minor variations in Inuit groups that have no contact with one another, and their forms remain stable over generations. . . . By making conflicts salient to children, they help to create a sense of danger and, ultimately, commitment to the values.33
Commitment to values means internalization, and Briggs makes clear how this emotionally based internalization of values and rules of behavior prepares the Inuit child for a conformative social life as an adult:
All these playful messages are delivered in a form that is extremely vivid, persona
l, and larger than life, and that makes it easy for children to see the problems posed for them by their contradictory feelings, to perceive emotionally the fatal consequences of a wrong choice of behavior, and to feel that since they have “bad” feelings, they are themselves vulnerable to the sanctions illustrated for them. To be sure, at one level the medium of the message is just a game, and therefore a cathartic way of coping with the contradictions that trouble us in real life. But at the same time, at another level, a doubt is engendered as to whether it really is a game, and the dangerous possibility that it might not be—the resulting fear—must make children try harder to conform than they might do if they did not feel themselves vulnerable to sanction.34
In Briggs’s opinion internalization is about the interplay of conflicting emotions:
Moreover, the values themselves become emotionally charged as a result of the threats that surround them. A child who is asked, “Why don’t you die so I can have your shirt?” may start to value the shirt and keeping it, more; and on the other hand, s/he may come to place a high value on giving, because it is difficult to give away something one wants to keep. And when s/he gives—the shirt or something else—the recipient too will value the gift because s/he knows it was hard to make. Similarly, the child who is asked, “Why don’t you kill your baby brother?” may love more strongly, and may value loving more, to compensate for the dislike s/he is made aware of feeling, along with his/her affection.35
This clinical analysis accords with something we know from common sense. Humans are set up to be ambivalent when it comes to many of the social choices we make.36 On one side there will always be our usefully egoistic selfish tendencies, and on the other there will be our altruistic or generous impulses, which also can advance our fitness because altruism and sympathy are valued by our peers. The conscience helps us to resolve such dilemmas in ways that are socially acceptable, and these Inuit parents seem to be deliberately “exercising” the consciences of their children to make morally socialized adults out of them. This was particularly the case with the Inuit Briggs studied in Cumberland Sound.
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