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Contents

The poverty of selectionism (TIM INGOLD) page 1

BOB SIMPSON Imagined genetic communities 3

SHARON E. HUTCHINSON Nuer ethnicity militarized 6

TOM HALL and HEATHER MONTGOMERY Home and away 13

JOHAN LINDQUIST Modern spaces and international hinterlands 15NARRATIVE 18 JONATHAN BENTHALL on Malinowskis tent

COMMENT 19 DECLAN QUIGLEY on Rapportage, DAVID SHANKLAND andBEN BURT on the ASA 2000 conference

CONFERENCES 23 JULIA PANTHER on the ASA 2000 conference,ANDR ITEANU on Processes of naming

OBITUARY 25 HARALD E.L. PRINS on A.H.J. PRINSLETTERS 26 TOM BRASS on Bill EpsteinNEWS 26 CALENDAR 28 RAI NEWS 29 CLASSIFIED 31

CAPTION TO FRONT COVERpage 30

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The poverty of selectionismI am a strong believer in the principle that in scholarlydebate, one should respect the arguments of ones oppo-nents, however much one may disagree with them. There aretimes, however, when this principle of tolerance is stretchedto the limit, and nowhere has this been more so in my expe-rience than in encounters with the more fervent advocatesof neo-Darwinism in the human sciences. These people sailunder a number of flags: there are sociobiologists, evolu-

tionary psychologists, gene-culture coevolutionists andmemeticists1 the latter, perhaps the most bizarre variant ofall, holding that the human mind-brain is parasitized by par-ticles of culture (so-called memes) that cause their humanhosts to behave in ways conducive to their getting copiedinto other peoples heads, much as the cold virus, in causingthe sufferer to sneeze, succeeds in infecting everyone else inthe vicinity. What these approaches have in common is abelief that everything from the architecture of the mind tothe manifold and ever-changing patterns of human behav-iour can be attributed to designs or programmes that havebeen assembled from elements of intergenerationally trans-missible information, through a process of variation underselection analogous, if not identical, to that which is sup-

posed to bring about the evolution of organic forms.Following a widely accepted shorthand, I shall call themselectionist approaches.

With one or two notable exceptions,2 the impact of neo-Darwinian selectionism in social and cultural anthro-pology has been negligible. There are good reasons forthis. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, it was quite popular totalk about the replication and diffusion of what were thencalled culture traits, and by the 1950s it had becomeconventional to distinguish culture, as an underlying pat-tern of rules and representations, from its outward, behav-ioural manifestations. Analogies and comparisons betweencultural and biological evolution were commonplace.3 Butsince then, and especially over the last quarter of a cen-tury, sociocultural anthropologists have advanced waybeyond these rather elementary formulations. Where oncethey thought of culture as a kind of content whether con-ceived as clusters of traits, bundles of instructions, orcompendia of rules and representations which filled thecapacities of the human mind, they are nowadays muchmore conscious of culture as process. This process is anunfolding of relations among people and between peopleand non-human components of the environment, out ofwhich knowledge and understanding is continually beinggenerated or produced. Even within those situations wemight label as learning, it is recognized that knowledgeis not so much transmitted ready-made as produced anew

that is, it is being reproducedrather than replicated. Andwe now understand much better, too, how persons comeinto being as centres of intentionality and awarenesswithin fields of social relationships, which are in turn car-ried forward and transformed through their own actions.4

Selectionists are unaware of these significant develop-ments in social and cultural theory. They have not read therelevant literature, nor do they feel the need to do so, espe-cially because they think theyre ahead of everyone else.But for me, reading their work is like stepping into a timemachine, and going back to the days, long before I wasborn, when issues of culture traits and their diffusion wereall the rage. There is, really, a very fundamental differenceof approach between most contemporary social and cul-

tural anthropologists and advocates of selectionist models the majority (though not quite all) of whom come frombiological anthropology or other disciplines like cognitivescience or evolutionary biology. It is that socioculturalanthropologists have spent a lot of time deeply immersed,usually through fieldwork, in another way of life. Theirimmediate concern is to try to understand this life, and to

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convey that understanding to others. The overriding con-cern of selectionists, on the other hand, seems to be todemonstrate the universal applicability of their explana-tory models (with blithe disregard, incidentally, for thehistorical specificity of their provenance). In this enter-prise, any empirical data, however simplified, caricaturedand divorced from its context, is grist for their theoreticalmill. Few selectionists have ever conducted any properfieldwork, and they know nothing of the challenge thatsuch work can pose to ones most basic assumptions. The

people with whom the anthropologist works, and whoselives end up being catalogued in the records of ethnog-raphy, may base their understandings on assumptionsutterly incommensurate with those built into selectionistmodels. But this is of no concern to the advocates of suchmodels. While the selectionist proudly attributes scientificstatus to his or her accounts of other peoples lives, theaccounts of the people themselves are packaged as justanother traditional worldview, supposedly downloadedover the generations from one passively acquiescent headto another, and whose adaptive significance the selec-tionist might then set out to explain. Behind all this is theold dichotomy between reason and tradition, which hasdone so much to sustain the Wests sense of its own supe-riority over the rest, and to disqualify and disempowerlocal forms of knowledge and understanding.

I have yet to read any interpretation of social or culturalphenomena by a selectionist that has added anything towhat we know already by other means. To be sure, selec-tionists pride themselves on being able to come up withwhat they like to call testable hypotheses according towhich, for example, a certain pattern of behaviour is likelyto become established in a population if environmental con-ditions are conducive to the replication and diffusion of theprogrammatic instructions of which this behaviour is theobservable output. Such hypotheses, however, are funda-mentally misconceived. For one thing, the idea of culture as

consisting in transmissible and diffusable bundles ofinstructions is based on the false assumptions, firstly, thatthe meaning of each instruction can be specified independ-ently of the particular environmental contexts of its appli-cation, and secondly, stemming from this, that informationis tantamount to knowledge. For another thing, no knownform of learning in human society can reasonably bedescribed as a simple process of replication. Moreover,what people do is embedded in lifelong histories of engage-ment, as whole beings, with their surroundings, and is notthe mechanical output of interaction between pre-replicatedinstructions (whether genetic or cultural) and prespecifiedenvironmental conditions, as selectionists would have us

believe. But quite aside from all these objections, the veryidea that one is actually testing hypotheses is merely acover for using natural selection as a logical device to turndescription into explanation. In effect, what selectionistshabitually do is to redescribe the phenomena under investi-gation in their terms, and then use the metaphor of selectionas a trick which appears to convert a description ofwhat isgoing on into an explanationforit. The fact that most advo-cates of selectionist models have allowed themselves to bemystified by their own procedures does not make them anymore defensible.

Selectionism strikes me as such bad science, and so fullof shoddy thinking, that I find it very hard to respect.Applied to the realms of social and cultural phenomena ithas been utterly disastrous. Perhaps we should not get toohot under the collar about this. As I have already noted,few sociocultural anthropologists take it seriously. Butother people do. Indeed over recent years, selectionistshave run an extraordinarily successful and well-fundedpublic relations exercise, backed up by all the scholarlyparaphernalia of academic conferences, edited volumes,specialist journals and lengthy lists of references in whichthey all cite one another. Dissenting voices, however, havebeen comprehensively suppressed. Far from remainingindifferent to all of this, it leaves me feeling viscerallyangry. Indeed I have often been taken aback by thestrength of my own reaction, and I have wondered aboutthe reasons for it. Part of the problem, perhaps, lies in thesheer hubris with which selectionists advance their claims.Not for them the ramblings of woolly-minded humanistswhen Darwin and hard science point the way! Why botherto read or engage with the work of generations of socialand cultural theorists when it is perfectly obvious thathuman beings are hard-wired meme-replicatingmachines? All this stuff about agency and structure, abouthow persons come into being within fields of social rela-

tionships, about culture as process rather than transferablecontent, is so much froth. Humanists can only deal inproximate realities; neo-Darwinian human science revealsthe ultimate causes of things.

For those of us who have struggled mightily to find alanguage adequate to the task of comprehending the rangeand variety of human experience, it is indeed galling tohave to listen as selectionists, flaunting their ignorance ofsocial and cultural anthropology as though it were a markof radicalism and intellectual virility, rehearse their ante-diluvian notions of culture and their strip-cartoon soci-ology in the name of a brave new science. The naivety,ethnocentricity and sheer prejudice of their understanding,

at times, beggar belief, but far worse is their refusal tocountenance the legitimacy of approaches other than theirown. Surely the one thing we should not tolerate, in schol-arly debate, is intolerance. And I have found neo-Darwinian selectionists peculiarly intolerant of anyintellectual challenge to their point of view. They simplyassume it to be unassailable and refuse to discuss it fur-ther. Their favourite ploy, of course, is to brand anyonewho doesnt fall into line as a crypto-Creationist. And thatreally is sinking pretty low! Social and cultural anthropol-ogists, I believe, cannot afford to maintain a stance ofstudied indifference to selectionism. Its reductionist for-mulations and cardboard stereotypes fly in the face of the

generous understanding of the richness and depth ofhuman knowledge and experience for which we havealways fought. What is required is a policy not of appease-ment but of vigorous, principled and public opposition. !

Tim Ingold

University of Aberdeen

2 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 16 No 3, June 2000

1. References to the literatureon sociobiology are legion. Onevolutionary psychology, seeBarkow, Cosmides and Tooby(1992); on gene-culturecoevolution see Boyd andRicherson (1985) and Durham(1991); on memetics, seeBlackmore (1999).

2. The most prominentexception is Sperber (1996).

3. As long ago as 1956, theanthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn,

participating in aninterdisciplinary group that hadteamed up to explore theanalogies between genetic,linguistic and cultural evolution,had coined the expressioncultural genotype to refer to thepattern of rules andrepresentations underlyingmanifest behaviour (Gerard,Kluckhohn and Rapoport 1956).Almost fifty years on,selectionists are still marketingthe idea as though it were brandnew.

4. See Ingold (1990).

Barkow, J. H., L. Cosmides andJ. Tooby 1992. The adaptedmind: evolutionary psycholo-

gy and the generation of

culture.New York: Oxford

UP.Blackmore, S. 1999. The meme

machine. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

Boyd, R. and P. J. Richerson1985. Culture and theevolutionary process.

Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press.

Durham, W. H. 1991.Coevolution: genes, culture

and human diversity.

Stanford, CA: Stanford UP.Gerard, R. W., C. Kluckhohn

and A. Rapoport 1956.Biological and cultural evo-lution: some analogies andexplorations.BehavioralScience 1: 6-34.

Ingold, T. 1990. An anthropo-logist looks at biology.Man(N.S.) 25: 208-29.

Sperber, D. 1996.Explainingculture: a naturalistic

approach. Oxford:Blackwell.