The Origin of Cultures

How Individual Choices Make Cultures Change

W Penn Handwerker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781598740677
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315417714
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

What makes a 17-year-old girl decide to wrap a bomb around her body, walk into a supermarket, and detonate it, killing herself and an 18-year old girl shopping there? In this provocative and important book, renowned anthropologist W. Penn Handwerker shows that individual choices, from the fatal to the mundane, are fundamentally questions of culture—what it is, where it comes from, and the complex ways it changes and evolves. In accessible and engaging prose, he walks readers through the process of how the human imagination produces new things, shaped by culture and experience but also constantly evolving in unpredictable ways. He shows how understanding cultural dynamics, which explain one girl's decision to murder and another girl's decision to shop, will help us address critical policy questions, from reducing the likelihood of terrorist attacks to responding to global epidemics and addressing climate change.

Chapter One
The Puzzle

This book explains where new cultural things come from and how they become concentrated in the collective agreements and patterned behavior we call cultures. The answers will help you understand otherwise senseless events, like why Ayat al-Akhras detonated the bomb she had wrapped around her body to murder Rachel Levy.

The fact that both girls were about the same age (17, 18) captured media attention for a day or two. Less interesting was that the bomb that Ayat set off in Jerusalem’s Kiryat Yovel supermarket also killed the guard who stopped her near the door and wounded twenty-eight other shoppers. After all, this was only one of 108 terrorist attacks in Israel in 2002, and it only killed two people. The Khobar Towers bombing in Saudia Arabia in 1996 had killed ten times this number. The U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 killed more than ten times the number of people killed in the Khobar Towers bombing. The attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, killed significantly more than ten times the number of people killed in the U.S. Embassy bombings, three orders of magnitude greater than the deaths at the Kiryat Yovel supermarket.

In the mid-20^th century, terrorist incidents reported in the international media numbered one or two per year. The number rose to around one per day through the late 20^th century. Terrorist incidents skyrocketed to around three per day by the first years of the 21^st century. The attack that killed Rachel Levy constituted only one of the 760 terror attacks on Israel carried out after the signing of the Oslo agreement in 1993, which was intended to establish nonviolent relations between Israel and Palestinians. Rachel Levy died in Israel. But jihadist terrorist attacks have also killed Russians, Americans, British, Danes, Canadians, Saudis, Germans, French, Egyptians, Jordanians, Indians, Australians, Japanese, Filipinos, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Afghanis. Jihadists left Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh dead on the sidewalk with a knife in his chest and the editor of a Sudanese newspaper, Mohammed Taha, without a head. Jihadist threats drove Hirsi Ali, a member of the Dutch parliament, to flee to the United States, and they caused Seyran Ates, a German women’s rights lawyer who won the Berlin Women’s Prize in 2004 and a Civil Courage Prize in 2005, to close her law practice. Over the last 3 years, jihadists have carried out more than 700 attacks in southern Thailand. The Rand-MIPT database now contains information on nearly 31,000 terrorist attacks carried out since 1968.

Why would a girl kill herself to murder people who she did not know and had done her no harm? If she felt impelled to kill, why not learn to shoot a rifle and kill soldiers at a distance? But why did she kill—why not write to the newspaper or hold a nonviolent protest? Why not complete her secondary schooling, complete college, get an MBA, and start a business that manufactured farm implements or household furniture to raise her compatriots’ standard of living, and help transform Palestine into a prosperous, independent state?

Quick answers don’t get to the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is that Ayat did not act alone, and the elements that went into her behavior may be traced to a striking array of places and times, including ancient Jewish thought in the 3^rd millennium BC, China in the 8^th century, and Bell Labs in the 20^th. How did they originate? What happened for them to get from their origins to concentrate in Ayat’s mind and behavior?

And not only Ayat’s mind and behavior—large numbers of people throughout the world risk their lives, or kill themselves, to participate in a global jihadic culture by murdering people they do not know and who did them no harm. They don’t write letters to newspapers. They don’t hold peaceful protests. They don’t start businesses that produce food or household furniture. Like all cultures, this one consists of patterned behavior and a coordinated set of activities (involving recruitment, training, supplies, financing, target selection, insertion, detonation, and advertisement), which its participants rationalize with a set of shared norms, which derive from shared assumptions about the things that make up the world of experience. Sayyid Qutb and, later, Ayman Muhammad Rabi’ Al-Zawahiri, made explicit the most important of the assumptions that rationalize jihad:

• • Allah constitutes the highest authority for human affairs;
• • Shari’a, based primarily on the word of Allah (the Qur’an) and the practices of the Prophet Muhammad, constitutes the ultimate law for all humans;
• • apostasy consists of any rejection of the first two principles and constitutes a crime punishable by death;
• • Muslims who reject the first two principles, any non-Muslim who rejects Islam by failing to convert, and democracies, because they assume that the people who are governed constitute the ultimate authority for human affairs, count as examples of apostasy.

The norms of jihadic behavior follow from these assumptions:

• • democracies should be destroyed; and
• • all individuals guilty of apostasy, Muslim or non-Muslim, should be killed.

The cultural inviolability of the central assumptions about Allah and Shari’a, the definition of apostasy, its association with the death penalty, and what counts as apostasy vary dramatically from one time and place to another and within any given region at a particular time. Jihadic culture adherents generally consider Saudi Arabia an apostate, for example, despite its application of Shari’a, which has been so rigid that its religious police refused to let schoolgirls flee a burning building because they were insufficiently covered. By contrast, the Newsweek story of Ayat’s murder-suicide by Joshua Hammer reported that her fiancé said that he would have stopped her if he had known ahead of time and hoped that God would forgive her—the Qur’an condemns both homicide and suicide as sins. Although jihadists joyfully advertised her death, Ayat’s father voiced the intense pain that parents endure with the death of a child.

Muslims ordinarily don’t think and act very differently from ordinary Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, or Jews. And, in that, we glimpse the shared humanity that produces cultural similarities and, sometimes, dramatic cultural differences, by concentrating in one shared set of understandings and coordinated activities things that originated at many different places and times.

This book will show that the cultural processes that explain Ayat’s murder of Rachel also explain why Rachel went to the supermarket. It will also show that the processes that led Ayat to murder Rachel operate independently of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism and result at other times and places in 62 million people murdered in the U.S.S.R. between 1917 and 1987, genocides in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Darfur, and the battering and death of women and children worldwide. The processes that explain mass murder also explain cultural resiliency and come unbidden from people born, just like you and me, with minds that think creatively and respond predictably to variation in the consequences of choices.

This book focuses on the evolution of human choices. Here’s one central finding: Human imagination consistently produces new things as well as new ways of thinking about old things that radically change the options from which we may choose. We confidently predict unpredictability—that we cannot perfectly predict the choices any one person will make. We thus can’t tell you precisely why Ayat, but not her school friends, fiancé, or parents, chose to kill herself. We also cannot foretell the future effectively.

Here’s another central finding: Consequences matter. We thus confidently predict predictable effects of specific kinds of consequences. When people choose to kill themselves, suicide must not produce consequences that compare badly with the consequences of making a different choice. Given the time and circumstances of her birth and upbringing, this probably held true for Ayat.

Cultures originate out of the choices individuals make within the bounds of their specific experiential history. The criteria by which people make these choices explain the origins and evolution of specific cultures. They also suggest what it may take to effectively address contemporary policy questions—like how we can:

• • reduce the likelihood of terrorist acts;
• • effectively respond to a global avian flu epidemic;
• • improve the health and material well-being of people throughout the world;
• • maintain or increase energy supplies; or
• • deal with fundamental climate change.

You’ll need some background to understand how and why mechanisms in the minds with which you and I were born create cultures and change them. Chapter 2 will explain where new cultural things come from and how the Islam of Ayat evolved out of Christianity and the Judaism of Rachel. In the process, it will explain:

• • why new things must come from old things;
• • why the things of the moment set limits on the future;
• • why individuals can’t help but create new things;
• • why each of us is unique and can’t be otherwise;
• • why we all make mistakes all the time; and
• • why we can’t predict the future.

Chapter 3 will outline the principal patterns of cultural evolution that emerge from the ways in which minds take information from sensory fields and produce cultural outputs. These include why the contemporary jihadic culture that captured Ayat, like all cultures, consists of things created at other times in other places and why Ayat murdered Rachel in a supermarket. In the process, it will explain:

• • how and why people with no contact invent the same things;
• • how and why cultures evolve divergently;
• • how many cultures may contribute to the evolution of a single cultural synthesis;
• • how and why cultural diversity in today’s world emerged from periods of isolation and later information flow;
• • why information volume regulates how much we learn from our neighbors, which makes enclaved cultures evolve in different directions than the cultures that surround them; but
• • that the utility of information regulates what we learn.

Chapter 4 will explain why we act on useful information and what makes something useful or not. In the process, it will explain how living in fear that your father, uncles, or brothers may kill you, as Ayat probably did, changes how you look at the prospect of killing yourself. Thus, it will explain:

• • why people learn some things but not others;
• • why people weigh costs and benefits;
• • why never “looking death in the eye” promotes fantasy;
• • why winnowing makes cultures look, in retrospect, like they were purposefully designed to minimize energy expenditure and maximize energy capture;
• • why human culture history exhibits directional change toward increasing levels of productivity; and
• • why the most consistent producers of cultural evolution are climate change, population change, and the human exercise of power.

Chapter 5 will examine how specific variation in consequences produces specific forms of cultural evolution and establish a framework for better characterizing the cultural clashes that led Ayat to murder Rachel. In the process, it will explain:

• • how and why climate change, population change, and human behavior dictate our choices;
• • why Lord Acton was right;
• • why Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and Beccharia were right; and
• • what this means for the direction of cultural evolution.

Chapter 6 will look at lessons learned and will end where it began, with Rachel, Ayat, and a jihad against Western culture solely dependent on that culture for whatever success it may achieve. In the process, it will explain:

• • how our minds formulate and select among choice options;
• • what democratic Japan has in common with the Bowl Championship Series;
• • why religions, like guns, don’t kill unless someone pulls the trigger; and
• • why the cultural assumption that each person knows best may produce the most resilient cultures.

First, however, let’s look more closely at this thing we call culture. Culture takes on different meanings, depending on how you look at it, and a satisfactory account must explain important features of each view. Most important, this book will account for both ideas and behavior and explain why and how they come to correspond fairly closely, but never close to perfectly. It will also account for our ancestors’ proclivity for doing things better and better, and why doing things better meant creating qualitatively different ways of living as our ancestors shifted from simple hunting and gathering to food production to free-market industrial production. I will explain how some cultures acquire names and others don’t, how each of us participates in many cultures, some of which extend around the globe, and how and under what circumstances cultures either change or remain the same. But the underlying issue concerns human minds and how they work to learn some things but not others.

What's This Thing Culture?

In his 1871 book Primitive Culture, Edward B. Tylor wrote that culture consists of “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (p. 1). Tylor thus provided anthropology its first modern definition of culture. He made two important observations. First, culture is a holistic, integrated thing. Culture isn’t just art, or families, or ways of making a living, or religion. Culture is all of these and more because the things that comprise it fit together. Second, we acquire it by virtue of living with other people—we learn our cultures.

Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn published a comprehensive review of uses of the term culture in 1952. They found a consensus about this acquired, holistic thing that focused Tylor’s enumerative definition more tightly. “Culture,” they wrote, “consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior, . . . including their embodiments in artifacts” (1952:181).

Over the last half of the 20^th century, anthropologists used the word culture to refer to an array of things. Marvin Harris and a small number of other cultural anthropologists, along with most archaeologists and biological anthropologists, continued to write about culture as something that encompassed both ideas and behavior. Archaeologists, of course, work primarily with the embodiment in artifacts of “patterns of and for behavior,” material culture. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the anthropologist Ward Goodenough argued that the most useful definition of culture was the one that restricted it to shared ways of thinking about the world. Cognitive anthropologists like Roy D’Andrade systematically examined the structure, organization, and operation of culture as a shared set of ideas. By the end of the 20^th century, most cultural anthropologists had adopted this narrower view of culture. I did, too, for most of my career. However, over the past few years I’ve come to think of a culture as a (more-or-less) coherent set of patterned and coordinated activities rationalized by a shared set of norms, which are rationalized by a shared set of assumptions about the world of experience. I place emphasis on behavior rather than ideas because behavior provides the information our minds use to produce behavior, and what we do or don’t do determines how well, or if, we live.

Directional Change in Productivity

Culture, too, means different things depending on the level of comparison we use. If we focus on ourselves as individuals, it’s plain that each of us constitutes a unique being. If we focus on ourselves as fellow members of the same biological group, Homo sapiens, we see similarities that dramatically set us and our ancestors apart from other living things. A survey of our shared history over the last 300,000 years or so, for example, reveals dramatic growth in productivity, the number and kind of cultural elements, and the complexity of their organization. In the middle Stone Age, our ancestors made a living by foraging—hunting game and gathering plants. Initially, they used simple, partially flaked stone cobbles, stones that had been carefully and fully chipped to resemble a flattened, pear-shaped oval with a sharp edge around most of the circumference, called hand-axes, sharp blades that had been carefully removed from fine-grained stone cores, grindstones, and pigments. Over time, they added small, sharp stone points and they developed techniques for shell fishing, long-distance trade, fishing, mining, and means to make tools out of bone, including barbed points. By the beginning of the late Stone Age, they made a wide variety of tools with very small shaped stones called microliths and made beads and drew images. Soon afterward, our ancestors added to their material inventory polished stone tools, basketry, nets, weirs, storage techniques and implements, sleds and canoes, bows and arrows, pottery, and domesticated dogs. Despite birth and death rates that produced very, very slow population growth rates (on the order of .001% per year), our foraging ancestors populated Africa by 100,000 years ago, Asia by 50–60,000 years ago, Europe by 40,000 years ago, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia by 40,000 years ago, and the Americas perhaps as early as 35,000 years ago.

About 10,000 years ago in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Southwest Asia, East Africa, West Africa, North America, Mesoamerica, and South America, specific foragi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Puzzle
• 2. What Makes a Door?
• 3. Sensory Fields and Cultural Outputs
• 4. Why We Don't Learn What We Could
• 5. Consequences Depend on the Distribution of Power
• 6. Lessons Learned
• Index
• About the Author