From: stcmille@panix.com (Steve Miller)
Subject: Convergence of Personality and Evolution threads here
Summary: DIG
Keywords: IT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 15:47:20 GMT

It occurs to me that there is an interesting point of convergence in the
two threads about the "personality" of a culture and the application of
biological evolutionary theory to social/cultural evolution.

Both are cases of analogical thinking - that is, taking as paradigmatic
the way one realm or level works and applying it to another.  

Thus, with personality becoming a characteristic of a society:  This was
an important mode of thought in anthropology from the 20s through the
50s, roughly, when the so-called "culture and personality" school 
in American anthropology.  This school had at its base this 
unexamined presupposition, that cultures could exhibit certain modal
personalities in the same sense that individuals can.  (I suspect that
many psychologists, too, would feel that the reduction of personality to
a few types is reductionistic.)  This analogy - society as a projected
individual - as well as its inverse, the individual as merely an
instantation of an undifferentiated society - is pervasive and very old.
We find it in religious contexts, in all sorts of sociologies (the king
as the corporeal representative of the people), and elsewhere.  It is,
to an extent, "common sense."  This is why it is a seductive kind of
thinking and one that is hard to avoid.  And yet, there is no reason for
us to think, in a scientific sense, that cultures ought to "have
personalities" in the same sense that individuals do.  If cultures are
indeed "emergent" phenomena (bad word, I know), then we would expect
them precisely NOT to exhibit personalities.  And I think that it is
ultimately futile to characterize societies this way, at least if we are
trying to do good anthropology.  Characterizing societies this way is
what the people we study do.  We should avoid taking the native's terms
as our terms of analysis.

As for evolutionary thought, (and I have covered this somewhat in a
previous post) a similar pattern can be seen.  In this case, cultures
are analogized to natural systems - to ecosystems or species or niches
or whatever.  Social formations like technologies or rituals or language
or whatever are likened to traits.  Yet we can see that 'survival of the
fittest" is generally not the way that social systems work.  How often
would we expect to find the following: when a species (say "dodos") is
threatened, the remaining members of "dodos" go join another species
(say "emus"), bringing with them some dodo traits that effect but do not
overwhelm essential emu-ness?  Cultures and societies are not species
and the attempt to apply natural selection/evolution to them is
obscuring and not illuminating.  (I'm not saying that evolution - as a
non-natural history concept - is useless in studying society,
incidentally.  I think it may be quite useful.)  

So my thesis here is that analogical thinking about the world - in terms
of turning society into an individual and in terms of turning society
into nature - is destructive of our understanding of it.  I think
anthropologists are uniquely qualified to identify areas where such
modes of thought occur.  They are extremely hard to identify from
within a culture, specifically because they appear to be so "natural."
But they are folk knowledge, in the end.

I hope somebody gets around to slamming this!









-- 

__________________________________________________________
Steve Miller				stcmille@panix.com
		A Famous Rock Star!
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology