Anthropology

Probably the most difficult point to make and make clearly is that not only is culture imposed upon man but it is man in a greatly expanded sense. Culture is the link between human beings and the means they have of interacting with others.

—Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (1959)

Anthropology literally means “the study of man”: and the unit favored by anthropological study, in contrast to other man-oriented disciplines, is culture, which Margaret Mead roughly defined as “that system of learned, transmissible and modifiable behavior.” Thus, culture is not just manners, politics, history, and artistic expression, but the sum total of concepts, skills, arts, institutions, etc. of a given people at a given time—everything in a civilization that is not biologically inherited and yet imposed upon most, if not all, of its members. Anthropology customarily deals with the scholar’s first-hand observations of primitive peoples; for unlike the historian who researches largely in libraries, the anthropologist goes to live among his subjects, literally immersing himself in their culture, as a “participant observer,” as much as possible—for several months, if not years. The discipline’s American and European founders, Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski respectively, set the professional example by going to live, again respectively, with the Eskimos in Baffin Island and in the Trobriand Islands around the turn of the century. The result of this been professional prerequisite of “field research” has customarily been a detailed study of characteristics peculiar to a culture, or the institutions common to that society (kinship systems, religious beliefs, family structure, communication, etc.), which are implicitly compared with those in another culture (generally the scholar’s own). For these reasons, anthropological writing usually blends description, if not anecdote, with explanation.

If the major British studies between the Wars emphasized either the transition from ritual to myth (a concern ultimately indebted to James G. Fraser’s The Golden Bough), or followed Malinowski’s “functionalism” in tracing social practices largely to the satisfaction of bodily needs, the major pre-WWII American studies, such as those by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, emphasized the purposes, structures and rules (and reasonableness) evident in the different social institutions of pre-industrial peoples—for instance, whether families were matriarchal or patriarchal. The most important new anthropology, in America at least, favored, in contrast, psychological experiences, especially cultural differences in an individual’s perception of his environment, making more articulate the subtle discrepancies that field workers have always sensed. This development is related to an increasing refinement of an earlier interest, only partially the domain of professional anthropologists, in the particularities of national character. (A new archaeology, exemplified by the work of Gordon R. Willey and Robert J. Braidwood, transcended mere collecting and reflected anthropology’s influence by reconstructing whole prehistoric settlements from minimal physical evidence.) Beyond that, recent American anthropology has renewed an earlier interest in cultural evolution, or the characteristics of civilized development; and although this runs against an earlier generation’s commitment to cultural relativity (which is, by definition, contrary to the principle of “evolution”), an implicit intention of anthropology has always been (and remains) alleviating the ethnocentrism of educated readers, as well as their fear and ignorance of uneducated peoples. From this, along with more pressing current evens, has come an unending interest in race and its relation to society. Throughout the period slowly emerged yet another new kind of anthropology, overlapping with biology and at times geography—a new social science, called ecology, that grew from an increasing awareness of variations in mankind’s relationship to his environment. Finally, it should be noted that, according to Eric R. Wolf, membership in the American Anthropological Association increased twenty-fold between 1941 and 1964; and if most pre-WWII fieldwork was generally done by individuals who were insecure in their personal identity and purposes, teamwork has since become more customary.

The cultural anthropologists developed a particular way of regarding an entire society—a sense of great encompassing distance and an analytical method unlike that practiced in any other discipline; and it became inevitable that this kind of trained sensibility should apply itself to more modern cultures, if not one’s own. At the beginning of World War II, several major anthropologists decided to make studies of national character their contribution to the war effort. Since the anthropologists usually asked which cultural practices had a pervasive influence upon personality, the resulting books were indicatively different both in approach and conception from interpretative history. The first to appear was Margaret Mead’s And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942), which applies this culture-and-personality method, derived from the anthropologist’s own experience with small cultures, to the complexities of her own large culture. She concludes that the paradoxical relation of authority to freedom within the family has had a subsequent influence upon the general maturation processes, the interaction of the sexes, and the quest for social success without personal immodesty. (As a pronounced cultural relativist, Mead asserts at the beginning, “I prefer Americans with clothes, just as much as I prefer South Sea Islanders without them.”) Ruth Benedict, by contrast, used a related technique to study modern Japan in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946); but since she never visited the country, her work raised the issue of whether the anthropologist could work, like the historian, solely from secondary sources. As an indefatigable supporter of her intellectual commitments, Mead defended Benedict’s perceptions (largely since confirmed by others) and even those of another colleague in their project, Geoffrey Gorer, an English writer residing in America, whose book on The People of Great Russia (1949), co-authored with the British psychoanalyst John Rickman, attributed Russian behavioral peculiarities to the national practice of swaddling children. The dubiousness of Gorer’s generalizations about the United States, expressed in his earlier book, The American People (1948), made many native critics doubt his book about Russia, if not the anthropological method itself. For all the validity of their initial purposes, national-character studies slowly fell into disrepute. A more recent book about America, written by an academic anthropologist, Jules Henry’s Culture Against Man (1963), turns into a slipshod polemic against familiar bugaboos.

The variety of culture and thus the singularity of each one have been fundamental themes of anthropology; but if studies done between the Wars, epitomized by Benedict’s popular Patterns of Culture (1934), emphasized such overt matters as kinship systems and other social institutions, a subsequent generation of anthropologists focused upon more subtle, covert qualities—not explicit, but implicit culture—such as differences in individual sensory perception and procedures of expression, often making visible (and verifiable) what was previously invisible. Edmund S. Carpenter’s Eskimo (1959), for instance, observes his subjects’ behavior to discover sensory experience and thus a spatial orientation quite different from his own. The Eskimo find their way, Carpenter notes, through unmarked trails that “I simply could not see, even when I bent close to scrutinize it.” Eskimo perceive slight variations in the winds; they can spot an airplane “long before I could see anything, and the children could continue to watch it long after it had disappeared from my view.” Eskimo take apart, repair, and reassemble engines, watches, and other complicated machinery. Their carvers do not intend to make a seal or a human figure but literally “find” their subjects while whittling at the chunk of ivory. “Aivilik narrators shun single perspective, preferring to describe an object from many angles, or to evoke a mood by juxtaposing discontinuous images.” Both their art and their viewing habits reveal they lack any sense of bottom-and-top (or strict verticality).

Carpenter’s method depends upon observing a behavioral difference and then identifying its origins in a sensory orientation that must be peculiar to the Eskimos’ culture. Their heightened awareness of airplanes reveals, for instance, not “that their eyes were optically superior to mine, merely that such observations are meaningful to them and that years of unconscious training have made them masters at it.” Their competence with machinery Carpenter attributes to “their acute observation of details,” which can also be traced to environmental conditioning. The absence of strict verticality in their perception or fixed perspective in their art provokes the anthropologist’s most profound observations on sensory differences: “They define space more by sound than by sight.” The Eskimo’s unusual sensory conception of space Carpenter sensitively defines as “acoustic space,” which is radically unlike the visual space of post-literate Western peoples; for if visual space has an up and down, as well as corners, acoustic space is, like sound, an hemispherical envelope with no front and back, neither straight lines not perpendicular joints.

Auditory space has no favored focus. It’s a sphere without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It is not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries; it is indifferent to background. The eye focuses, pinpoints, abstracts, locating each object in physical space, against a background; the ear, however, favors sound from any direction.

This conception of space informs the perceptual world of pre-literate peoples—Eskimo being among the few examples remaining in the modern world. The ultimate implicit theme of Carpenter’s concise and profound essay is how truly alien a non-literate culture can feel to Western senses.

Edward T. Hall’s The Silent Language (1959) is a more general study of similarly subtle perceptual phenomena, his theme being cultural variations in articulate non-linguistic expressions—“communicating our real feelings in our silent language—the language of behavior.” Indeed, Hall gauges the existence of a distinctive culture by the internal comprehensibility and geographical limits of certain non-linguistic communication. Acknowledging Benjamin Lee Whorf’s thesis that a culture’s language molds both an individual’s behavior and his perception of reality, Hall suggests that just as cultures exhibit differences in verbal language, so each has an indigenous way of communicating with space, time, and proximity. For instance, being a half-hour late to an appointment in Switzerland has a completely different meaning from identical tardiness in Italy or in Iran; and the same physical behavior that means one thing in one culture implies meanings quite different in another.

Iranian men read poetry; they are sensitive and have well-developed intuition and in many cases are not expected to be too logical. They are often seen embracing and holding hands. Women, on the other hand, are considered to be coldly practical. They exhibit many of the characteristics we associate with men in the United States.

Americans, in handling time, prefer to concentrate upon a succession of separate tasks, while a Latin American feels more comfortable doing several things at once—with non-compartmentalized time, so to speak. The chief in a U.S. bureaucracy has the office in the corner, with a closed door separating him from his subordinates. “In French offices, the key figure is the man in the middle who has his fingers on everything.”

Unlike most major works in the field, The Silent Language has a practical purpose, exemplifying what is called “applied anthropology.” Hall argues that unless an American working or traveling abroad becomes aware of how his culture has conditioned certain sensory biases, he is likely to have an ethnocentric view of his perceptual systems. As a sometime director of Point Four training programs, Hall proposes the development of a descriptive code that charts non-linguistic behavior as accurately as a score with horizontal lines and clefs charts musical sounds and, then, a method for gradually understanding the behavior language implicit in another culture’s behavior. This has three successive levels of perceptual assimilation, involving first isolates of the particular events, and then sets, and finally patterns, which, to pursue the analogy announced in the book’s title, are the words, clauses, and sentences of non-verbal communication.

Hall’s subsequent book, The Hidden Dimension (1966), develops his earlier concern with cultural differences in spatial perception to forge a “proxemics,” as he calls it, or the systematic definition of each culture’s spatial predilections. A German’s sense of privacy—alone in a closed room—would be intolerable confinement to an Arab, for instance. American cities usually follow a grid pattern, while French planners prefer the star (like Pierre L’Enfant’s culturally atypical Washington, D. C), and so on. Here the practical point of Hall’s applied anthropology is that city planners and architects must ascertain in advance the spatial preferences of the people for whom they build, for if the goal is finally the creation of congenial environments, then buildings must suit their incipient inhabitant’s particular sense of space. The implications of this wisdom eventually extends beyond planning into politics and education; for finally Carpenter and Hall both successfully developed the earlier generation’s advocacy of cultural relativity into perceptual relativity.

As the “natural history of man,” in Edward Burnett Tylor’s phrase, anthropology assimilates an initially biological concern with human evolution, now regarded not in the detail typical of a historian like Arnold Toynbee, but with a sweep and scale that, as in national-character studies, exhibits the broad perspective intrinsic in the discipline at its best. The cultural relativism expounded by Boas and popularized by Benedict was, as noted before, counter-evolutionary—no culture was superior, more “advanced,” or less “primitive” than any other (though “pre-literate” and “pre-industrial” remained acceptable terms). Boas also resisted comprehensive generalizations with the declaration that, “Absolute systems of phenomena as complex as those of culture are impossible. They [schematic interpretations] will always be reflections of our own culture.” However, anthropologists after WWII tended, with increasing agreement, to acknowledge evolutionary conceptions of human history. Leslie White’s The Science of Culture (1949) defined progress as the increase in energy available to every man, also developing objective methods for measuring the per-capita increase in a particular culture.

Well and true as this scheme might be, post-War anthropology needed a more subtle evolutionary measure—one that at minimum acknowledged the critical truth of cultural relativism. In a succession of papers eventually collected as Theory of Cultural Change (1955), Julian Steward proposed a “multi-lineal” approach that regarded cultural development as occurring differently (and, thus, relatively) in different cultural areas. If the uni-lineal approach followed Darwin’s imagery in regarding all cultures as progressing through similar stages of development, the multi-linealist advocated studying each stage on its own terms and then in relation to both its predecessors and successors and then to roughly similar sequences in other cultures. As Eric R. Wolf summarizes Steward’s contribution:

He emphasized those sequences of parallel development that he could establish empirically, such as the repeated development of the same forms of social and political organization among certain kinds of hunters and gatherers, the parallel development of the great societies based on irrigation, the parallel development of horse-riding nomads in North and South America as the result of the introduction of the horse to the Western hemisphere.

Assimilating Steward’s point, two younger anthropologists who had studied with White, Marshall D. Sahlins and Elman R. Service, drew a crucial distinction in Evolution and Culture (1960) between specific evolution (Steward’s domain) and more general evolution. The latter defines the clear progress from lover levels to higher ones, as exemplified by White’s measure of greater efficiency in energy exploitation; thus, this new evolutionary thinking returned American anthropology to the old image (Lewis Henry Morgan, nineteenth-century) of human history as a succession of distinct social forms.

Indicatively, even Margaret Mead, in her Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964), acknowledges non-relative progress in the course of identifying the primary social origins of cultural advance (seen to be a small group of interacting individuals). Weston La Barre’s The Human Animal (1954) implicitly elaborates Leslie White’s point by characterizing modern technology as producing “a new kind of [general] evolution” by extending man’s physical body and sensory systems:

He has long since gone outside his own individual skin in his functional relatedness to the world. The real evolutionary unit now is not man’s mere body; it is “all-mankind’s-brains-together-with-all-the-extrabodily-materials-that-come-under-the- manipulation-of-their-hands.”

La Barre’s further point was that this new evolution changes man’s cultural existence several times faster than the old; and this idea of acceleration was assimilated into the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky’s contention in Mankind Evolving (1962) that human evolution stemmed from not just heredity and similarly purely biological processes but “the interaction of biology and culture. There exists a feedback between biological and cultural processes.” Thus, man evolves, in every sense at a pace much speedier than before.

By the mid-sixties, certainly, most anthropologists had accepted cultural evolution without succumbing to the ethno-centrism (and implicit racism) characteristic of the nineteenth-century evolutionary mentality. This change served to reopen the previously closed question of race and its relation to culture. Earlier Franz Boas had exhaustively demonstrated, contrary to the popular belief of his own time, that contemporary “races” were too intermixed and unstable to become anthropological categories about which one could generalize. Although one of Boas’s prodigious ethnological projects (1912) showed that Americans whose ancestors had lived longer in the United States had larger skulls than the offspring of recent immigrants (thus superficially suggesting the old Lamarckian position that biological characteristics are inherited), Boas argued instead that a person’s genetic constitution offered a potentiality whose results depended upon environmental and cultural factors. The intellectual point was the minimizing of “innate” differences between one race or one ethnic group and another.

Recent anthropologists have attempted to relate particular social traits of Negro America—the observable differences unacknowledged by relativistic anthropologists—to African origins, Meville Herskovits even arguing in his inappropriately titled The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) that everything not also present in white U.S. culture had its origins in Africa. More recent writers, such as the novelist Ralph Ellison in Shadow and Act (1964) and the folklorist Roger Abrahams in Deep Down in the Jungle (1964) have interpreted these indigenously Negro-American elements as evidence of a distinct culture (Black Anglo Saxon Protestant) developed, independent of degree of skin color, during centuries here. The question of “how different” this BASP culture was from WASP knew no objective measure, but the notion that Negro-Americans “have no culture” is a journalistic (or fund-raiser’s) shibboleth that has no anthropological merit. On the other hand, the recurring fad of Africanism’s attempts to impose upon Negro-America a cultural tradition that, racial resemblances notwithstanding, had little genuine cultural connection or immediacy. The anthropological truth remained that no generalizations were universally applicable to any biological race, through racial groups within a larger, multi-racial society invariably devolved their own cultural distinctiveness.

The theme of cultural variety, along with the ultimate singularity of each culture, also informed anthropological ecology, which studied how effectively particular cultures related to their natural environments. The geographer Ellsworth Huntington, in his pioneering Mainsprings of Civilization (1945), for instance, briefly compared the ecological success of Iceland to the failure of Newfoundland, two small countries roughly similar in latitude and climate. To this ecological discrepancy in coping with nature he attributes all the cultural differences between Iceland’s highly literate and honorable culture and Newfoundland’s general despair. Another kind of ecological anthropology recognized that through tools and then technology modern man adapts himself to his environment, or adapts the environment to him. Its exponents studied comparatively both the nature of technological adaptation and the development of social agencies to mediate the relationship. From this followed am investigation into a culture’s demands upon resources and energy supplies (including food), as well as the pollution of nature through human and industrial wastes. The ecological studies of contemporary America tended to follow the American George Perkins Marsh (1801-81) in systematically studying man’s alteration of the environment, such as the impact of the million tons of chemical detergents used each year. Ecologists like Barry Commoner or Gregory Bateson frequently focused upon a short historical trend, such as increasing carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, and then extrapolated its effects into predictions of ecological disaster. Indeed, this kind of ecological thinking tended to predict the apocalyptic unbalancing of the universe no matter what happened; for regardless of whether one ecologist saw man’s activities increasing the Earth’s temperature, and other saw it decreasing, the projected result, if extended far enough, would surely be disastrous. Neither position, however, considered that man’s activities might have contrary or deflecting effects, or that historical trends could be reversed without any necessary change in their causes either by technological palliatives or through some outside force that changed the interactions between cause and effects. The need for environmental concern notwithstanding, the study of anthropological ecology seemed to demand a conceptual breakthrough that would recognize more complexity and variety in man’s relations with his environment than has so far been acknowledged.

The intellectual achievement of recent American anthropology included, among other things, the addition of new dimensions to the earlier theme of cultural relativism. The original perceptions of this kind of anthropology suggested that the issue of subtle sensory differences had not yet been fully investigated. Except for the competition of French structuralism, most influentially represented by Claude Levi-Strauss (himself residing in Washington, D.C., during WWII), American anthropology earned pioneering intellectual impact around the world; and in comparison to the Parisians, whose preoccupation with kinship systems was old-fashioned and ideas were excessively abstract, the best American work seemed at once far more concrete and far more advanced. Indeed, the reacceptance of evolution inculcated a new sense of historical change, in addition to an interest in cultural progress that was incidentally relevant to such contemporary concerns as the modernization of pre-industrial nations. Within the profession, the end of the Boasian resistance to cross-cultural generalizations permitted renewed interest in larger questions; but on the other hand there arose a self-conscious academicism that favored the monograph and the professional-journal article over the book. (In fact, books are often dismissed per se as vehicles intended not for one’s professional colleagues but for general readers.) Through this specialization serves to insulate anthropological trivia from any larger public, the end result could well be contrary to the classic humanistic intentions of “the study of man.”

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Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle....Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1966.

Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934.

———. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

———. Race, Science and Politics. N.Y.: Viking, 1959.

Birdwhistell, Raymond L. Introduction to Kinesics. Louisville: Univ. of Louisville, 1952.

Carpenter, Edmud S. Eskimo. Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1959.

Coon, Carleton S. The Origin of Races. N.Y.: Knopf, 1963.

Hall, Edward T. The Silent Language. Garden City: Doubleday, 1959.

———. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966.

Herskovits, Melville. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon, 1958.

Huntington, Ellsworth. The Mainsprings of Civilization. N.Y.: Wiley, 1945.

Kardiner, Abram, and Edward Peeble. They Studied Man. N.Y.: World, 1961.

Kroeber, A. L., ed. Anthropology Today. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1952.

La Barre, Weston. The Human Animal. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1954.

———. “The ‘Koktel Parti’,” New York Times Magazine (Dec. 9, 1956).

McGiffert, Michael, ed. The Character of Americans. Homewood, IL: Dorsey, 1966.

Mead, Margaret. And Keep Your Powder Dry. N.Y.: Morrow, 1942.

———. Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority. N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1955.

———. New Lives for Old. N.Y.: Morrow, 1956.

———. Continuities in Cultural Evolution. New Haven: Yale Univ., 1964.

Radin, Paul. The World of Primitive Man. N.Y.: Abelard-Schumann, 1953.

Sahlins, Marshall D., and Elman R. Service. Evolution and Culture. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1960.

Steward, Julian. Theory of Cultural Change. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois, 1955.

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White, Leslie. The Science of Culture. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus, 1949.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought and Reality. N.Y.: Wiley, 1966.

Willey, Gordon R., and Peter Phillips. Method and Theory in American Archaeology. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1958.

Wolf, Eric R. Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964.