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• Peter Struck

  Deep History and the New Universals

  Tags:

  Africa,

  anthropology,

  genetics,

  Jorge Luis Borges,

  Michel Foucault,

  Peter Struck,

  philosophy

  Michel Foucault begins his monumental book The Order of Things by citing a certain Chinese encyclopedia, which he had found referenced in an article by Jorge Luis Borges:

  Animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.

  Foucault used this lavishly peculiar taxonomy to make the point that our cultural preconceptions dramatically shape the world that we see. His work set a generation of scholars in the humanities on the track of strict cultural determinism: We are what our culture makes of us. In an infelicitous side effect, the idea of the “human” was just about chased out of the humanities, scholars after Foucault became very cautious about making universal statements about all of humanity or invoking human nature to explain why people act the way they do.

  Recently, human nature has been making a comeback in many fields. A new window has been opened onto the broader human story which suggests that cultural differences many not run quite so deep after all. Twenty years ago at the University of Hawaii, a geneticist named Rebecca Cann compared blood samples from people of widely varying descent, applied an algorithm to the mutations in the mitochondrial DNA (which changes at a very steady rate), and was able to conclude that every living female of the species Homo sapiens descends from a single female who lived in Africa about 170,000 years ago. This was a stunning finding, and it meant that the human family was much more closely related than nearly anyone had thought. If a generation is about 20 years long, there were now only about 8,000 of them that separated us from mitochondrial Eve.

  Cann’s article set off a flurry of studies, and a new field of study was born. According to the more recent findings of “archaeogenetics,” which was given a huge public push in 2005 with the launch of National Geographic's Genographic Project, the timespan between our earliest progenitors and ourselves has shortened even further. We now know that 70,000-40,000 years ago, the human family consisted of about 2,000 souls who, out of extraordinary cunning, had succeeded in outcompeting all other species for food sources, emerged triumphant from Africa, migrated up through Central Asia, and went on from there to dominate the planet. The details are being refined, but the overall message is very much intact. The human species differentiated itself from the others much more recently than anyone had thought or imagined, and until about 2,500 generations ago (something like 1,000 lifetimes), we were all pretty much members the same extended clan of predators roaming the African savanna. Historians are only beginning to appreciate the implications, but the compressed time frame makes cultural determinists look dogmatic. If the human family is both relatively young and tightly related, might we not talk about human culture as in some way species-specific and not just say French or tribal or capitalist?

  Of course, one is wary of remaking old mistakes. Some are too ready to embrace biological determinism, for whatever reasons, by reducing ethics to genetics or by turning to cognitive scientists to explain the meaning of grief or god with brain scans. The better work, like that of Daniel Lord Smail, medieval historian at Harvard, and Gary Tomlinson, an historian of music at Penn, is developing what we might call "cultural behaviorist" approaches to human action. Smail's recent On Deep History and the Brain treats culture as a large set of "psychotropic" interventions meant to steer our behaviors and social patterns, and draws a line from the invention of agriculture through alcohol, coffee, chocolate, and pornography. Tomlinson is working on a book tracing the origins of music, which for him means addressing a cluster of broadly shared human capacities, related to language, that are deeply social in nature, rely on complex combinatorial thinking capacities, and mark us as having a capacity for mutual attunement to a rhythmic beat. In these books, the importance of culture is neither overlooked nor considered in a vacuum, but seen as a kind of software that sometimes regulates and is sometimes regulated by the biological hardware on which it was developed to run.

  Perhaps the most profound implication of this reorientation toward human universals has to with what we will now make of the universal itself. Finding something common across many cultures, scholars in previous generations used to presume to have something "true," in a mysterious sense, since people assumed to be impossibly far removed from each other arrived independently at the same conclusion. Having been introduced to mitochondrial Eve, we might now have to settle for seeing such coincident observations as vestiges of a relatively recent common past, and, rather unmysteriously, as qualities of the particularly successful species we have come to be. And what of our Chinese list of emperors? Borges famously collected both real and imaginary esoterica, and his Chinese list turned out to have been one of the stray bits he made up. Foucault was surely right to say that some perfectly universal human nature is a fiction, but so is the idea that we are only what our cultures tell us to be.
  

  July 29, 2009
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