The Silo Effect

by Gillian Tett

  This process applies to longer-term memory too. Psychologists have noted that our brains often operate with so-called mnemonics, or mental markers, which enable us to group together our ideas and memories on certain topics to make them easy to remember. This is the neurological equivalent, as it were, of creating files of ideas inside an old-fashioned filing cabinet, with colorful, easy-to-see (and remember) labels on the topic. Sometimes this processing of clustering is conscious. More often it is not, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman has noted.8 Either way clustering ideas into bundles enables us to create order and arrange our thoughts. “You can’t think or make decisions, let alone create new ideas . . . without using a range of mental models to simplify things,” argue Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny, two management consultants. “Nobody can deal with the many complicated aspects of real life without first placing things in such boxes.”9

  This need to classify the world, however, does not just apply to our internal mental processes. Social interaction requires shared classification systems too. This, after all, is what a language is at its core: namely a commonly held agreement between people about what verbal sounds will represent which buckets of ideas. However, societies or social groups have cultural norms too, which shape how people use space, interact with each other, behave, and think. A crucial part of those shared social norms—if not the central element of a “culture”—is a commonly held set of ideas about how to classify the world, and impose a sense of order. Just as our brains need to classify the world to enable us to think, societies need to have a shared taxonomy to function. Back in the seventeenth century, the French philosopher René Descartes observed “I think, therefore I am” (or, to cite what he actually wrote in Latin and French respectively, “cogito ergo sum,” or “je pense, donc je suis”).10 But it is equally true to say “I classify, therefore I think and am a social being.”

  But while the act of classification is universal, the way we do it is not: different societies use a wide range of classification systems to organize the world. These vary even when dealing with issues that seem to be universal, such as natural phenomena. In theory, the way humans experience colors should be consistent. We all live in the same universe, with the same spectrum of light, and most of us have similar eyeballs (except for individuals prone to color blindness). But in practice, human societies do not classify colors in the same way. For decades Brent Berlin, an anthropologist, worked with Paul Kay, a linguist, to study how languages around the world described the color spectrum.11 They found at least seven different patterns: some groups in Africa seemed to divide the world into merely three color buckets (roughly, red, black, and white), but some Western cultures used five times as many categories. That finding prompted Caroline Eastman and Robin Carter, two cognitive anthropologists (or people who work in a subset of the discipline analyzing culture and the mind), to conclude that while the color spectrum may be a universal, the way we classify it is not. “Colors can be represented as a grid showing a variation of wavelengths (hues) and brightness,” Eastman and Carter wrote. “Each color term represents a region on this grid containing a focal point which is generally agreed to be described by that color term. [But] although there is general agreement on the foci both across cultures and within cultures, there is much less agreement on the boundaries.”12

  The way that other parts of the natural world are classified varies as well. Birds are found almost everywhere around the world. But some cultures consider birds to be an animal, and do not differentiate between birds; others make precise distinctions. The English word “seagull,” for example, is not a category that translates easily into other languages. Similarly, different animal categories can have different associations in different places. Jared Diamond, for example, has looked at how different cultures around the world define their fauna and flora. (Diamond sometimes defines himself as an “environmental anthropologist,” which is a another subset of the discipline.) He points out that while the concept of a “horse” is associated with meat in France, and a “cat” viewed that way in China, those categories of animals are not classified as “edible” in a place such as America.13

  The taxonomy of social relationships varies even more. Sexual reproduction is universal. However, anthropologists and linguists have discovered at least six different systems for “mapping” kin in different societies around world (in cultural anthropology courses at universities these are known as the “Sudanese,” “Hawaiian,” “Eskimo,” “Iroquois,” “Omaha,” and “Crow” systems). There is even greater variation in how societies organize their space, define jobs, imagine the cosmos, organize economic activities, or track time. In some cultures, “cooking” is classified as a uniquely female job, performed by women inside the domestic sphere. But in suburban America, when cooking entails a barbecue and meat, it is often classified as a “male” pursuit. Similarly, in Jewish culture, Saturday is classified as a holy day; however, in Muslim culture it is Friday, while in Christian cultures it is Sunday. In many non-Western societies—such as tribes in the Amazon—there is no sense of a seven-day week at all, far less a weekend. So too with dance. Numerous societies have rituals for dancing. However, in some societies dancing is classified as a religious activity. In others it is considered profane, or the very opposite of sacred. In some places, men do not dance with women, but in other cultures the whole point of dancing is that men and women should dance together. The only element that is absolutely common to all these diverse situations is that wherever and however people dance, eat, cook, arrange their space or family lives, they tend to assume that their own particular way of behaving is “natural,” “normal,” or “inevitable”—and they usually consider that the way that other people dance (and classify the world) is not. This variety illustrates a simple, but crucially important, point: the patterns that we use to organize our lives are often a function of nurture, not nature. That makes them fascinating to analyze. And one person who had a particularly interesting perspective on them was the man who stood watching the dancers—and nondancers—in the Béarn hall, namely Pierre Bourdieu, one of the fathers of modern anthropology.

  BOURDIEU NEVER SET OUT to be an anthropologist. He spent the early years of his life assuming that the best way to make sense of the world—if not the only way—was to study philosophy. It seemed a natural assumption, given that he came of age in postwar France, at a time when philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre commanded extraordinary popular prestige. “One became a philosopher [then] because one had been consecrated and one consecrated oneself by securing the prestigious identity of a ‘philosopher,’ Bourdieu explained.14 And Bourdieu was hungry for an identity. He was born in 1930 in Denguin, a tiny hamlet close to Béarn, and his father was a sharecropper-turned-postman who never completed his education. At the age of eleven Bourdieu won a scholarship to attend a boarding school in Pau, a city down in the valley. But it was a scarring experience. As a rural peasant in a sea of wealthier, urban children from Pau, Bourdieu felt inferior. “I think that Flaubert was not entirely wrong in thinking that ‘someone who has known boarding school has learned, by the age of twelve, almost everything about life,’ ”15 he observed. “I lived my life [at boarding school] in a state of stubborn fury . . . caught between two worlds.”

  In an effort to fit in, he excelled at his lessons and played rugby with ferocious passion; the sport was wildly popular in South West France. But French society was a stratified, class-ridden place, where people were classified into groups though numerous subtle signals, embedded in language, demeanor, culture, and posture. Bourdieu felt an outsider and he constantly rebelled against the ferocious discipline. “The old seventeenth century [school] building, vast and rebarbative, with its immense corridors, the walls white above and dark green below, or the monumental stone staircases . . . left no secret corner for our own solitude, no refuge, no respite,”16 he recalled. “The adult man who writes this does not know how to do justice to the child who lived through these experiences, his times of
despair and rage, his longing for vengeance.”

  At seventeen, Bourdieu escaped by winning a scholarship to the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris to study philosophy. After graduating with a high mark, he embarked on a postgraduate research program to explore the epistemology (or knowledge system) of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, another revered early-twentieth-century French intellectual giant, who worked as a phenomenological philosopher. But then his life took an unexpected turn. In 1955, at the age of twenty-five, Bourdieu was called up to perform military service. Usually, elite students just served as officers in pleasant rural locations. But when Bourdieu was summoned, a bloody civil war had started to loom to the south. Although France had ruled Algeria for over a hundred years, Algerian rebels were demanding independence. Bourdieu told his military superiors that he strongly opposed the Algerian War on principle, since (like many young French intellectuals), he loathed colonialism. The army punished him by assigning him to the front line. “I first landed in the Army Psychological Service in Versailles, following a very privileged route reserved for students of the Ecole Normale,” he explained. “But heated arguments with high-ranking officers who wanted to convert me to [support] “L’Algérie Française” [French-run Algeria] soon earned me a reassignment.”17

  In the summer of 1955 Bourdieu traveled south across the Mediterranean on a boat, in a military unit “made up of all the illiterates of Mayenne and Normandy and a few recalcitants.”18 On the ship he “tried in vain to indoctrinate my fellow soldiers” to oppose the war. But the soldiers already had a strong set of prejudices about Algeria and deeply held views about how the Algerians should be classified. “Even before setting foot in Algeria, they had acquired and assimilated the whole vocabulary of everyday racism [with] extreme submissiveness towards the military hierarchy,” he lamented. Isolated, Bourdieu spent months in a desert town called Orléansville, defending an ammunition dump against guerrilla attacks, before being reassigned to Algiers, the capital.

  As the war escalated, Bourdieu doggedly worked on his doctoral project out of a tiny bunk room in a military garrison in Algiers. Academic reflections offered one welcome escape from the horrors of a war that Bourdieu considered unjust. But he steadily became disillusioned with philosophy too. Back in the rarefied, safe, intellectual atmosphere of Paris, Bourdieu had believed—like many young French intellectuals—that the abstract philosophy of thinkers such as Sartre or Merleau-Ponty offered the perfect key to understanding the world. But amid the horror of Algerian War, it seemed ridiculous to think that abstract philosophy alone could explain real life. By late 1955 Algerian rebels were not just mounting attacks on ammunition dumps, but slitting the throats of French military personnel and civilians. The French army was using brutal tactics to fight back. They staged house-to-house raids, arrested thousands of suspected rebels, tortured captives, bombed villages, and resettled tens of thousands of people, out of their mountain villages into sterile, quasi-camps. So Bourdieu changed tack, and decided to write a book about real life in Algeria, instead of the philosopher Merleau-Ponty. “[I wanted] to tell the French people . . . what was really going on in a country of which they knew next to nothing . . . in order to be some use, and perhaps also to stave off the guilty conscience of the helpless witness of an abominable war.”19 And to do so, he turned to a discipline that was just starting to become fashionable, due to the writings of French academic Claude Lévi-Strauss: the world of anthropology.

  TO SOME PEOPLE, BOURDIEU’S interest in anthropology might have seemed baffling. Anthropology has often been considered a strange discipline: difficult to define and for outsiders to understand. It is simultaneously everywhere in modern intellectual thought, but nowhere. The word comes from the Greek (anthropos literally means “the study of man”) and the first recorded example of somebody trying to study human culture in a systematic way probably appears in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus in 450 BC. (When he wrote about the battles between the Greeks and Persians, Herodotus devoted a considerable amount to an analysis of the cultural differences that he saw, comparing and describing them as distinct social systems and patterns.)20 Then, during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the concept of anthropology reappeared when men such as David Hume declared a desire to “study the nature of mankind.”21 But in the nineteenth century, this endeavor turned into a full-fledged academic discipline. “When anthropology was born, shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century, two factors, above all others, determined its form,” as Ernest Gellner, an anthropologist, notes. “Darwinism and colonialism.”22 The nineteenth-century elite in Europe and America felt a need to understand the “alien” peoples that they were encountering in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (usually because they wanted to control them, tax them, or convert them to Christianity, or all three). Meanwhile, the emergence of Charles Darwin’s ideas about evolution was sparking a passionate debate and interest in the question of what it meant to be human. Just as biologists and zoologists were trying to understand how the animal kingdom evolved, historians and social scientists became interested in studying how “primitive” peoples had developed over the centuries into “advanced” societies. One facet of this inquiry revolved around the physical evolution of humans. Another, though, focused on the social and cultural evolution. “The European and North American conquests of extensive regions previously inhabited only by simpler societies inevitably inspired the idea that these populations could be used as surrogate time machines,” Gellner notes. “Anthropology was born out of an intense curiosity about the past, about human origins.”23

  One of the first men who blazed a path on this intellectual road was James Frazer, a nineteenth-century Scottish intellectual. He collected extensive data on myths and legends from around the world, and collated these into a highly influential book, The Golden Bough, which explored how human consciousness and culture had moved from being “primitive” to “civilized.” Numerous other anthropologists took a similarly evolutionary approach. But at the turn of the century Franz Boas embarked on a similar project with the Native Americans. Boas had started his academic career as a botanist, but during a trip to the Arctic he became fascinated by how the Eskimos classified snow, and dove into cultural anthropology instead. He then switched his attention to the Native Americans, gathering artifacts and material about their customs and “primitive” minds, which he plotted into groups. But then he floated a striking idea: maybe it was wrong to assume that humans always evolved in a social sense along a single path. Perhaps culture should be studied on its own terms.

  As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, this antievolutionary idea spread: anthropologists gradually moved away from their earlier assumptions that non-Western cultures were always inferior, or less developed than the cultures of Europe or America. They could not always be squeezed into patronizing historical models.

  Bronislaw Malinowski exemplified this shift. An ethnic Pole who was born in the former Austro-Hungarian empire, he studied at the London School of Economics, he started his academic career doing old-fashioned anthropology, studying the indigenous people of Australia. Then, when World War I broke out, he realized he could be interned in Australia as an enemy national. To avoid that, he headed for the Trobriand Islands, near Papua New Guinea, and ended up staying there far longer than expected due to the war. As a result, instead of just swooping in and out, gathering artifacts, which would later be analyzed from the comfort of a faraway library, he ended up pitching his tent among the Trobriand villagers and living there for many months. That enabled him to watch the villagers for an extended period, as a fly on the wall, leaving him convinced that it was quite wrong to label the Trobriand Islanders as “primitive.” On the contrary, Trobriand culture had a certain beauty and rhythm of its own that needed to be understood in its own terms. This was epitomized by a ritual known as the Kula, which involved the elaborate exchange of shells between different islands. To a casual observer, this practice might have seemed quaint, bizar
re, and pointless, particularly since the shells did not appear to have any immediate value or use. However, Malinowski pointed out that the Kula was not just a sophisticated and elaborate system, but it had a crucial social function, since the exchange of shells not only defined who was in the social group, but also created ties of obligation and trust linking the archipelago.

  In 1922 Malinowksi published a book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, that described his findings.24 It changed the discipline. Around the world, young anthropologists started to conduct what they called “participant observation” and “ethnography,” or the process of watching the people they studied and then writing thick descriptions. British anthropologists such as Evans Pritchard went to Sudan, and John Radcliffe-Brown went to the Andaman Islands, Margaret Mead, an American anthropologist, went to Polynesia, and Ruth Benedict went to Australia and then studied Japan. Clifford Geertz, another American luminary, went to Bali, and Maurice Bloch left France for Madagascar. And as this new breed of anthropologists conducted their research, the discipline of anthropology effectively split into two. One stream, known as “cultural anthropology” in America (or “social anthropology” in Europe) looked at culture and society; the second stream, called “physical anthropology,” studied human evolution and biology. Initially, these endeavors had been entwined. But when anthropologists started looking at social systems in the present, the study of human evolution began to seem less connected to modern culture, and some anthropologists started to find more affinity with other disciplines, such as linguistics.