I’d like to take this occasion to offer a few observations on themes that tie the papers we have heard today and Mead’s work together, and both, in turn, to the practice of anthropology. Rather than comment directly on the papers, I want to try to tie them together and hopefully not be too redundant. My comments will by no means exhaust the issues we can discuss next, nor do they do justice to the richness of the papers presented by the panelists, nor, for that matter, Mead’s careers.
The title of this panel – both the title that is and the title that isn’t – offers as good a place as any to begin my reflection. The panel is entitled “Reconfiguring Human Nature,” but an earlier suggestion was “Beyond Nature vs. Nurture.” I think either title helps highlight issues from Mead’s career, contemporary research and politics and some of the work done by our panelists. I’ll begin, however, with the title that isn’t, not because I consider it a good one, but, instead, because I think for some people it might be rather like the proverbial elephant in the middle of the living room.
Nature vs. nurture. Mead is often associated with this pithy conundrum, which can also be thought of as biology vs. culture, despite the facts that it doesn’t do justice to the question she asks and that it is really only pertinent to maybe half of her career. She is often linked to a rather odd version of cultural determinism that would hold, if I could think of anyone who espoused it, that human biology simply doesn’t matter. Mead certainly believed that people have innate biological predispositions, or what she called temperaments, which are at least in part hereditary, as she pointed out in Sex & Temperament. Her studies of childrearing and the psychological molding of the individual considered how innate dispositions were shaped by social and cultural milieus in addition to individual circumstances. She also believed that a person could have a temperament fundamentally at odds with the culture in which that person found him or herself – a cause of social deviance, as discussed this morning. However, as she puts it in Sex & Temperament, in free societies, “the minutiae of cultural behavior” are not carried in the individual germ plasma, so that the same predispositions would be expressed differently in different cultures. An important point was that the variations in temperament and capacities were in some sense biologically determined, in addition to culturally and situationally molded, and were not explicable along either lines of sex or race. Under the superficial differences of race and sex, we all live on the same arc of human potentiality theorized by Ruth Benedict.
Mead’s work was already beyond any simplistic nature vs. nurture dichotomy, but some of our panelists have considered the relationship between biology and culture in a very different way. Martin, Rapp and also Ginsburg have all looked at how scientific understandings of biology are themselves both culturally expressed and socially constituted. This does not mean that biology is less real, but that we understand it through metaphor, and our understandings are also shaped by our social positions and experiences. Furthermore, biological issues are enmeshed in social institutions and practices. From the point of view of a socio-cultural anthropologist, it is indeed hard to see how things could be otherwise since a central problem for us, as Roy Rappaport once observed, is that we are meaning-making animals who must live in a world without any inherent meaning. In this society, we place a particularly strong faith in biology as something that is “really real,” and the natural sciences as disciplines that produce “real” knowledge. This, perhaps, helps explain why, as I think di Leonardo’s examples of her encounters with the press make clear, the elephant refuses either to remain in the parlor behind closed blinds or simply to die. This being the case, it is important to analyze, as Martin ;notes, the social arrangements that our understanding of biology can promote and naturalize. In this sense, biological facts are also socially constituted regimes of truth.
So much for the title that isn’t. The title that is, is “Reconfiguring Human Nature.” I confess that I cannot don the costume of human nature expert because I have always been puzzled by what exactly people mean by the term. So I went to my dictionary. My Webster’s Dictionary defines it as “the nature of human beings as (a) the complex of behavioral patterns, attitudes and ideas which human beings acquire socially; or (b) the complex of fundamental dispositions and traits of human beings.” If I had been obliged to define our nature prior to looking it up, I would have said – as indeed I have said to students and classes – that it is our nature to be social and cultural beings, and Webster seems to agree with me, in the first definition. What’s more, this definition seems to say that human nature is, in fact, a configuration, a complex of patterns. Or, perhaps it would be more correct, if less grammatical, to say “human nature” are. There is, however, a tension between the first definition and the second, since the first would seem to necessitate many different configurations, while the second implies that there is a single, fundamental set of traits. It is the latter sense that permits socio-biology to most successfully don the costume of human nature expert.
To configure is to set up for operation in a particular way, and a configuration is a relative arrangement of parts of elements, and also a gestalt (Webster again). It echoes Ruth Benedict’s idea of configurations of culture (the actual title of an article that presents the patterns of culture) that influenced me so much. To “reconfigure” implies active agency in rearranging things into a new whole, for some reason. In her book, With a Daughter’s Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson refers to Mead as a “builder.” This, I think, aptly captures Mead’s energy and also her sense that society could be perfected. She believed that anthropology could teach lessons from other socio-cultural configurations, which could be used to improve our own society by showing alternative possibilities. This reflects the faith in our ability to reconfigure ourselves as well as her time, as di Leonardo has pointed out.
Recent work on human nature and biology has moved in two directions raised by the panelists. On the one hand there is the idea that we can encounter the root of human behavior, or nature, directly in biological evolution or processes. Here we get the rather scary arguments, for example, that men are predisposed to race, because this would increase their fitness. Arguments abound for how we must have evolved from an imagined past, early in homo sapien history (and some of the panelists have also talked about how that past is created, in part through contemporary populations and projecting them into a past). I have even heard people say that men are genetically predisposed to bonk mastodons over the head, and I’m amazed by it. It must be a life of frustration, wanting to take a spear to a mastodon and not be able to. I really have increased respect for all the men I know. Biological reductionism means human nature cannot be changed. On the other hand, recent developments in medical science and technology sometimes seem to move us beyond biology; as one author says, “beyond nature,” by permitting us to manipulate it; i.e., we are reconfiguring human biological nature. However, research done by Martin and Ginsburg all shows how the understanding of control over biology is itself at least partially socially and culturally produced.
Which leads to issues of representation. The final theme I find both connecting and distinguishing today’s papers needs work. There is a great deal of interest in representation and narrative in anthropology now, including the politics of the stories we tell about ourselves and about the people we construct as “other.” Mead, too, of course, was interested in representation, but the way in which we think about modes of representation has changed since then. In Mead’s time, representational choices were primarily thought of in terms of audience and as more or less painful ways of conveying the content of what one wished to say. We are now also interested in the politics of representation and the ways in which discourses constitute subjects. These papers and Mead’s career raise a common concern regarding representation, however. In a discussion of Freeman’s book, Roy Rappaport contrasts myth and science. Myths, he writes, are accounts “bearing upon the origin and nature of the world’s proper order, and upon actions that conform to and thus realize that order, and as such are moral; or, that violate and undue that order, and are, ipso facto, immoral.” They tend to deal with issues that are cognitively or ethically problematic and deal with matters that are ambiguous or contradictory. Rappaport continues, “Myths cluster in a more or less coherent mythos that constitute a society’s logo; its idea of natural and moral order.” However, he places Mead, in Freeman’s books, in different mythic clusters, so it is clear that a society can have competing myths and competing truths. Myths present ultimate truths that guide our actions. The cultural construction of reality was one such myth associated with Mead, not because she was the only person who made such arguments, but because she most successfully communicated with the public. Her mythic stature does not mean that her work was not also good science, even if it was incomplete, as any ethnography is. Clearly, in this sense of the myth, it is not meant to imply that somehow it is false; that it’s a truth that guides us.
We can also think of myth in the sense as akin to Faucet’s discussion of “regimes of truth,” produced through discursive fields and practices. Politics is conducted, at least in part, through such myths, representing competing truths and moral orders. What myth, then, do we want anthropology to convey today? What worlds do we want to build? Rappaport wrote: “Margaret Mead knew, better than any anthropologist of her time, ethnography should make available to humanity as a whole what it discovers about law and meaning in individual societies, so that humanity as a whole, through some of the individuals composing it – including, perhaps, ethnographers – can construct larger conceptions of itself and its place in the world.”
The panelists offer suggestions that articulate well with this need to convey the anthropological truths in which we have faith, and fight the war of representation. Di Leonardo suggests that we embrace a broader vision of anthropology which would focus our collective attention toward history and power, and steadfastly refuse to don the Halloween costumes provided us, while she also warns of the difficulties we may have making our truths heard. Rapp addressed the issues of people creating their own narrative, and whose knowledge counts. Martin suggests that ethnography can serve as a technology of sociality and can persistently and compellingly offer an alternative understanding of human nature – instrumental, governmental and biological reductionism. It makes contexts, including the context that di Leonardo emphasized, live. “Persistent” and “compelling” are words that describe not only the work done by participants on both panels today, but also Mead, herself. Rappaport points out that we cannot choose not to have myths, and that the world is always full of candidates for canonization. The question is what myth we want to purvey, to guide us into the future, and whether, to quote Rappaport again, “the texts we choose will be as humane and liberating as the texts she gave us.”
