Cultural Bias within Biological Anthropology

1. Introduction

In an article posted to the Internet Journal of Anthropological Studies, Justin Lee illustrates the difficult position occupied by cultural anthropologists today. They are trapped. Pressed upon by the forces of the western ideal, from which anthropology originated, and its founding principle of cultural relativism, they are being forced to reconsider their social and political role in the societies they study and the world at large. Many have tried to form or follow a basic code of human rights for a categorization of practices that are hurtful in any culture. Such codes, Lee points out, are almost invariably imported from the anthropologist’s own culture. Still, many point to shocking practices like the spousal abuse among the Yonomamo or female genital mutilation in sub-Saharan African as examples of the need for such a code.

While the cultural anthropologist is considering the tricky problems of human rights and harm to a fellow human, the biological anthropologist is examining cultures using bone and stone. Given the fragmentary nature of their evidence, one is inclined to ask what forms the basis for the extrapolations that inevitably follow. Biological anthropologists have a responsibility similar to their cultural anthropology counterparts.

Unfortunately biological anthropologists also fall prey to ethnocentrism. This has been manifested most dramatically in the past assertion of a male-dominated and male-supported human condition. It is still present in the presupposition that prehistoric hominid cultures are knowable without any idea of the values of their members. While a full exploration of the reasoning behind such a presupposition would require more time and research than is feasible here, the idea of the application of cultural relativism to evolutionary biological anthropology will be elaborated.

By first examining what anthropologists mean by culture, a realistic concept of cultural relativism that could be applied to evolutionary biological anthropology can be identified. This can then be examined against evolutionary anthropology’s methods and, where appropriate, be used to suggest improvements.

2. Culture

"Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver." Attributed to Hermann Goering

The nature of the debate over the definition and analysis of culture has become such that one would be less than surprised seeing Herr Goering wade into the fray, revolver in hand. Definitions range from Sir Edward Burnett Tylor’s well known "complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society," to the most modern and radical.

In a Journal of World Anthropology article "The Reality of Cultural Integration," John O’Brien notes that there is a tendency to view culture as "either a preexisting reality with superordinate causal authority, or totally constructed and impotent epiphenomena." Neither of these extremes seems tenable. Although culture is meaningless without the individual (or more accurately, the interaction of individuals), it also survives any individual in a population group.

Susan Wright, as president of Section H of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, elaborates on culture by distinguishing two different approaches. The traditional (Wright uses the somewhat pejorative "old idea of culture") approach viewed people as culture-bound. People are born, live, and die within cultures and pass them on to their offspring. Each individual has his or her culture and is a member of a cultural group. Wright criticizes this traditional approach as, "treating ‘culture’ as if it were a set of ideas or meanings which were shared by a whole population of homogeneous individuals—which empirically was not the case." She also points out that the traditional approach does not adapt well to changing political and economic situations.

The alternative she offers is Brian Street’s definition of culture as "an active process of meaning making and contestation over definition, including of itself." Street’s definition is, of course, intentionally paradoxical, but his "contestation" that culture is an active process deserves consideration.

As we have moved from a world of many separate and scarcely related population groups toward a technologically unified world society, the meeting of cultures has produced combination, absorption, and in many cases suppression. These processes fit the Street definition of culture but tend to weaken the traditional model which has held a culture to be an immutable institution. In Tylor’s time this explanation of culture synthesis was unnecessary because of the strong taboos against associating (studying, worshipping, marrying) outside of one’s native society.

After pointing out that cultures are being redefined, proponents of the constructivist view of culture go on to seek the arbiters of cultural definition. Wright suggests that "people, differently positioned in social relations and processes of domination, use economic and institutional resources available to them to try and make their definition of a situation ‘stick’, to prevent others’ definitions from being heard, and to garner the material outcome…[sentence continues due to editing error]." This idea has an obvious origin in Marxist theories of class struggle.

3. Cultural Relativism

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once! Camille Paglia

Noting that Wright’s article owes a debt to modern, western political theory brings us to the idea of cultural relativism. It is clear that culture is in some way changeable from outside sources. It is also beyond debate that culture is effective on its members as well as being affected by them, the bottom line being that individual cultures are continually changing. This, I believe, merely reflects worldwide trends toward increasingly rapid and broad changes in all societies as humans push to the limits of the planet in every way. And wherever we go we bring changes with us. Each "forgotten society" we contact or push other societies into is inevitably changed. Some of that change stems from the mere introduction of strangers into a society, but a greater threat of change lies within the attitudes of the contact person who is, under ideal circumstances, the anthropologist.

According to Lee, "One of the basic cornerstones in anthropology has been the concept of cultural relativity." It is an attempt to avoid ethnocentrism, a form of egoism that argues that one’s native culture is the best culture. It was a tenet of anthropology from one of its founding fathers, Franz Boas. Lee quotes from Peter Hammond’s Cultural and Social Anthropology to give a broader understanding of cultural relativity.

In naïve form, cultural relativism asserts that all people, all cultures, are equally good: if they are cannibals, well, that’s not for me, but de gustibus… In more sophisticated form it asserts that each culture must be valued in its own terms: does it satisfy the people themselves? If they are cannibals, what satisfaction does eating human flesh supply in terms of native values [emphasis added]? There is much to be said for this point of view; the evaluation of infanticide in the Arctic or the eating of grubs by the Arunta cannot be judged through the love we feel toward our children or by our culinary predilections. For this is judgement of good versus bad, and the good is defined in terms of conditioning that each of us has had, in terms of our own cultural values.

Hammond’s definition points out the need to consider native values. Just as I wouldn’t want a person of the Arunta to force me to eat grubs, because I do not consider that to be in my best interest, so I will not tell them to adopt a purely democratic republic system of government, which they might not perceive to be in their best interest.

For the average person, cultural relativism is a difficult goal. Each culture fills its members with prejudices and preconceptions for approaching any idea. These can be so deeply ingrained in us that we mistake them for natural law, or revealed truth, or any of the other names these deeply held beliefs have acquired. Lee examines an article advocating a statement of Universal Human Rights as an example of these beliefs manifesting themselves as apparent natural law. Lee points out, with true cultural relativism, that any attempt to conceptualize universal harm, from which all people need to be protected, is too convoluted to be an acceptable theory. More tellingly, he gives several examples of forced cultural change for a population having disastrous effects. Today, these attempts at exporting our culture are referred to as colonialism or imperialism.

4. The Great Leap of Faith

Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who gives us this assurance. Bertrand Russell

While the work of the biological anthropologist has more to do with solid physical evidence than their cultural counterparts, the prejudices they bring to these studies are no less effective on their work. Since much of the inquiry that is termed anthropology, was at one time part of philosophy, many of the debates that have raged through philosophy in the past, still resonate in anthropology today.

One idea from the era of the industrial revolution still permeates biological anthropology: the myth of inevitable human development. The idea that the history of the human brain has been one long record of progress simply because it keeps getting bigger is an example of how biological anthropologists perceive progress where it is not demonstrable. For all we know, the common ancestor of chimps and humans had modern language capabilities, although they would have had to communicate in a much different way due to differences in throat anatomy. It may be that chimpanzees, which have now demonstrated significant language capability, simply grew out of its use. While this scenario strikes us as unlikely, it points out the fact that anthropologists who study human origins, biological anthropologists, bring preconceptions to their field.

An anthropologically famous preconception, derided in recent years, is the assumption that men were the breadwinners of prehistoric societies. This view was commonly held until the revolutions in anthropology of the 1950s and 60s. Refutations have been offered, pointing out that modern hunter-gatherers receive up to 70% of their food intake from the gathering work of women. Even this refutation, though, assumes that a society in the past, whose values we know nothing of, operated in much the same way as a modern society. The underlying assumption being that our culture has been a building in progress throughout time.

And yet biological anthropology’s preconceptions are not strictly limited to their interpretations of the past. In his book, The Mismeasure of Man, evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould soundly refutes arguments of psychologists and anthropologists who would support "the argument that intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted as a single number capable of ranking all people on a linear scale of intrinsic and unalterable mental worth." Admittedly, this concept did originate predominantly from psychology but it has supporters in other fields, such as Roger Pearson, author of several books on anthropology.

Anthropology in general would do well to adhere to the dictates of cultural relativism. The goal of relativism is to divorce oneself from the biases that are pounded into us by our upbringing within a culture. All cultural biases are invitations to prejudice and contempt of other people as primitive. The mere fact that we have, until recently, referred to people who are not technologically advanced as primitive betrays this bias. We are learning that our tools are no less good or evil than the tools of people living by hunting and gathering. Perhaps it is time to reconsider our classification of early people as primitive.

5. Conclusion

It’s fun to fantasize about what life must have been like as a prehistoric ancestors. It may even be scientifically useful to hypothesize about such matters as prehistoric hominid cultures. But without direct evidence of the values of early peoples we are merely painting our own handprint over that of our ancestors on the wall of history. We are denying the quirkiness and individuality of our species. We are stealing the past.

6. Works Cited