In and Out of Each Other's Bodies

Theory of Mind, Evolution, Truth, and the Nature of the Social

Maurice Bloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317257721
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

What is human sociality? How are universals such as truth and doubt variously demonstrated and negotiated in different cultures? This book offers an accessible introduction to these and other fundamental human questions. Bloch shows that the social consists of two very different things. One is a matter of continual adjustments between individuals who read each others' minds and thus, as in sex and birth, "go in and out of each other's minds and bodies." The other is a time defying system of roles and groups. Interaction at this level is created by ritual and is unique to humans. What is referred to by the word "religion" is a part of this, but it is not separate. The study of "religion" as such is therefore theoretically misleading. A second major theme is the way truth is established in different cultures. Bloch's arguments go against recent approaches in anthropology which have sought to relativize ideas of the social and religion.

1

Durkheimian Anthropology and Religion

Going In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies¹

In memory of Skip Rappaport

Emile Durkheim’s work has always been criticized for reifying the social and situating it in an indeterminate zone between actors’ consciousness and positive facts. In this chapter, however, I am not concerned with exploring whether this criticism of the founder of French sociology’s work is justified. My purpose instead is to show that it is possible to retain some aspects of Durkheim’s conclusions about the nature of religion and of the social with types of argument quite different from those he employed. My framework here is that of modern evolutionary natural science and recent understandings of the specificities of the human mind/brain.

Such an evolutionist perspective tends to make social/cultural anthropologists uncomfortable. I hope that as they read on, they discover that an evolutionist perspective does not necessarily lead to the dangers they envision; and that it can even be reconciled with some of their most cherished ideas that will emerge all the stronger as a result.

But because one might as well hang for a sheep as for a lamb, I begin my argument much further back than is usual in evolutionary anthropology with a consideration of the very earliest stages of life on earth, when unicellular organisms associated together to form multicellular units in the Cambrian era.

During this crucial transition, and for millions of years, it was far from clear whether those early multicellular organisms were one or many because they were in an in-between stage. This biological conundrum still exists, in varying ways and to varying degrees, for many subsequent and more complex forms of life. An extreme example is coral, about which one can argue equally plausibly either that the minute units of which it consists are separate organisms or that whole coral branches (or even whole reefs) are one single animal.

The difficulty of isolating the “individual” does not only apply for such exceptional life forms. The issue of identifying the specific unit on which natural selection acts arises in respect of all living things and has become particularly acute in modern biology. Does natural selection occur at the gene level or on combinations of associated genes? Or is it at the level of the individual? Or on a larger group that shares genes to differing degrees (Stotz and Griffiths 2004)?

This sort of question is particularly problematic when we are dealing with social species. Is it the bee or the hive that is the animal? After all, the bees in a hive are as genetically identical as are the different bits of the human body, and a hive possesses only one set of working reproductive organs.

The biological problems do not end there. When does an embryo become separate from its mother? Is a live spermatozoid a unit? More generally, how far are parents one with their children, and are descendants of individuals their continuation or new units? Are descent groups one body? Do members of one caste have unique distinctive types of blood? Are nations one people? Are we all the children of God in the brotherhood of Christ? Is society, as Durkheim claimed, more than the sum of the constituent individuals?

Here, those readers who have already given me up as some sort of biological reductionist, indifferent to the higher purpose of cultural anthropology, might summon a flicker of interest with these more familiar disciplinary questions. They may even begin to hope that I might have something to say about religion and ritual, which, after all, is what this book is about. I shall get there … eventually. And indeed, my prime purpose in this chapter is to consider the theoretical implications of the way I have just managed to slitherfrom a discussion of the structure of coral to hoary classical subjects in anthropology and even to central tenets of some interpretations of the Christian religion.

If the reader is totally unsympathetic to the approach, however, I propose they will already have revelled in identifying a familiar sleight of hand: representing facts about the world as if they were just that, without having first recited the anthropologists’ exorcism prayer.

I humbly acknowledge that everything I say is nothing but an epiphenomenon of my present cultural position and time and that this inevitably leads me to essentialize a particular cultural position and then mercilessly impose it on defenseless people.

In other words, I have been guilty of suggesting that my scientific knowledge, a mere elitist manifestation of my own culture, is somehow the basis of the propositions made by those people around the world who say things like this: “The members of our group, which has existed since the beginning of time, share a distinctive type of bone”; or “Our lineage consists of one body”; or “Initiation reunites us with our ancestors”; or “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

I would have thus committed all the category mistakes in the book. Especially in having forgotten the fact that the cultural creates an impenetrable screen between what is and our cultural representations. Familiar arguments of this kind might be partly justified as first steps when we teach an introduction to anthropology,² but in this chapter I argue that when left in categorical form, they are as misleading as the ethnocentricism that anthropologists love to denounce.

We can start with a classic and familiar polemic as a way of introducing the theoretical position I shall adopt here.

In the bad old days, so the story goes, anthropologists used to think that kinship was based on the fact that people go in and out of each other’s bodies. Indeed, they might have stressed that the physical separation of a child from its mother takes quite a while, with intermediate phases such as breast feeding and child care. Some of these earlier vulgar anthropologists went as far as to suggest that the care given by fathers to infants was somehow the consequence of having gone into the mother during sexual intercourse. They argued that these “natural” foundations were the common base of all different kinship systems (Yanagisako and Collier 1987, 30–35).

Such naïveté, however, was soon to be severely disciplined by developments in our subject. First, anthropologists stressed the old platonic point that humans do not live in the world as God or the scientists see it, but via their own understanding of it (I don’t see why this does not apply to other animals, too). From this they argued that the foundation (i.e., going in and out of each other’s bodies) cannot be the direct foundation of social knowledge. This correction was, however, soon deemed not to have been severe enough. It was not simply that people saw the world “through a glass darkly”; it was that they did not see it at all. There was no such fact as that people went in and out of each other’s bodies; they were just accidental cultural representations of which my particular formulation is only one among many. Thus, to talk of different, culturally constructed kinship systems as if they were cultural interpretations of a single reality was a fallacy. In a wonderful metaphor, David Schneider explained that if you went out into the world armed with a kinship-shaped cutting tool, you inevitably got kinship-shaped pieces. By this he implied that if the tool had had any other shape than the western–shaped kinship tool, which would be the case with the tools used by the “others,” you would have gotten a quite different shape (Schneider 1984, 198).

I have always liked this metaphor of Schneider’s because, as a child, I used to spend much time watching my grandmother making biscuits. She would roll out a large flat pancake of dough on the marble of the kitchen table, and with a few ancient tin tools she would cut out various shapes. This is exactly what Schneider has in mind. But the other reason why I like his metaphor is that what is wrong with it is also obvious. The world in which people go in and out of each other, the denounced foundation, is not (as Schneider’s analogy suggests) inert, undifferentiated, and flat like biscuit dough. It has a shape, and this shape, while it does not determine the way the world will be represented, severely restricts the parameters of what is likely.

Plato also used a culinary metaphor to talk about the world. For him, however, the world was more like a roast chicken than pastry, and unless you really wanted to make things difficult for yourself, you would “carve it at the joints,” wherever they occurred on the animal you were serving up.

Indeed, it is the dialectic between the facts of sex and birth and the cultural representations of these phenomena that most promises to advance our understanding of the nature of human beings, which, of course also involves the cultural (and hence historical) aspect. But examination of this dialectic is what the Schneiderian rhetoric makes impossible by refusing to allow us to ask what the representations “are about” and what the world is like. A trivial objection to the effect that not all languages have a word for what anthropologists call “kinship” puts a stop to any consideration of the really important questions about our species.

And there is yet something else that is obscured by Schneider’s figure of speech. The cutting tools, which represent concepts in the metaphor, also have to be explained. There is no doubt that these tools are the products of specific histories but they nevertheless have had to be usable by the minds of the human beings who employ them. Here again, the world interacts in a challenging way with the representations that cultural anthropologists study. It is banal to stress merely that the world we live in is culturally constructed; what is of interest is the indirect relation of the construction to what is constructed and how the construction is used.

This chapter, however, will not pursue the implications of the link between the fact that we go in and out of each other’s bodies in birth and sex and the cultural representations of this fact in kinship systems. Many (I do not include myself among them) might feel that this topic has grown tiresome. I merely evoke the controversy to stress that because all cultures interpret, and have to interpret, the fact that we go in and out of each other in sex and birth, they also have to interpret the consequent fact that for us (as with coral) there is indeterminacy concerning the physical boundaries of individuals. For instance, the so-called “descent theorists” of my anthropological youth were fascinated with groups of people who declare themselves to be “one body”; in other words, corporate groups. These statements are interesting not because they are flights of fancy proving yet again that the world we live in is culturally constructed but because they are in part motivated by the very real fact of the indeterminacy and arbitrariness of the boundaries of biological units.

My focus in this chapter concerns another real fact about human beings that, although it concerns a matter different from kinship, is not altogether unrelated to it. Indeterminacy and arbitrariness of boundaries are not simply the result of the sexual character of our species and the way it reproduces itself. They are also due to another feature of Homo sapiens. Individuals go in and out of each other because of certain characteristics of the human nervous system. This form of interpenetration is as material as sex and birth; but unlike sex and birth it is more or less unique to our species (Povinelli et al. 2000; Decety and Somerville 2003).

I have already mentioned that, although the boundaries of individual units are arbitrary among all living forms, this ambiguity takes on a special, perhaps more extreme form in social animals because the social—of itself and by definition—continually reconnects the individuals whom time and genealogical distance are separating. Such a process occurs in a variety of ways in different life forms because of the mechanisms that make the social differ according to the species concerned. So it is not surprising that the specific basis of human sociability is a product of those capacities of our species that make it distinctive (Humphrey 2002).

One thing that normal human babies do at about 1 year old, but our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, never do, is point at things, not because they want what they designate—they do this, but so do chimps—but because they want the people around them to pay attention to the same things. In other words, they want the people they are with to adjust their minds in harmony with theirs—in short, to share intentionality (Gopnik 1993; Tomasello and Rakoczy 2003; Tomasello 1999). This demonstrative pointing is one of the first stages of the development of that unique and probably most important of human capacities: the ability to “read” the mind of others, a capacity that is somewhat oddly referred to as “theory of mind” (TOM for short). This ability continues to develop from the age of 12 months on until the child reaches the age when it can be shown that the child “knows” that other people act in terms of the beliefs or concepts they hold, rather than in terms of how the world is (Wimmer and Perner 1983). By “know,” I simply mean that the child and, of course, the adult, acts in terms of their reading of the beliefs of alter and continually adjusts her behavior accordingly. I do not mean that the person who does this is necessarily conscious of the process (a point to which I shall return in a moment). The whole process is far too complex and too rapid for that to be possible. Nonetheless, the importance of TOM can hardly be overestimated. Those familiar with Gricean theories of linguistic pragmatics will realize that it can be argued, convincingly in my opinion, that this continual mind reading is what makes linguistic communication, and indeed all complex human communication, possible (Sperber and Wilson 1986).

It is legitimate to think that to talk of the mutual mind reading on which our social life is based is, at best, simply a metaphor; at worst, a mystification. However, I want to stress that the metaphor refers to an empirical phenomenon of interpenetration, even though admittedly we don’t stick our finger into each other’s brains in some kind of mental intercourse.

Just how material the process of mind reading may be has become clearer in the light of recent neurological findings. For instance, many researchers now argue that the unique human ability to read the mind of those with whom we interact is ultimately based on a much more general feature of the brain that is not confined to humans: the so-called “mirror neurones” (Gallese and Goldman 1998).

Perhaps the term is misleading. What is being referred to is an observation that has been made possible by modern neural imagery. The term mirror neurones means that exactly the same neurones are activated in our brains when, for example, we see someone raising their arm to point at the ceiling as when we perform the action ourselves. In other words, the action of alter requires from us a part of the same physiological process: the neural part as the action of ego. Indeed, a moment’s reflection makes us realize that, even without the arcane and somewhat contested biology of mirror neurones, the very nature of human communication must involve something like this (Decety and Somerville 2003).³

Let us consider a simple act of linguistic communication. Here I follow Sperber and Wilson’s theory of relevance fairly closely (Sperber and Wilson 1986). For my message to come across when I say, for example: “Today we honor the memory of Roy Rappaport” a mechanism must occur that enables you to penetrate my brain and align yours so that its neuronal organization resembles mine. In order to do this, we both had to use a tool, sound waves in this case, but it cannot possibly be the sound waves, as such, that carried my meaning to you. Sound waves, poor things, are just sound waves. The reality is that sound waves enable me to modify your brain, or mind, so that its neuronal organization in part resembles mine, admittedly in a very limited way. And, of course, the ability to communicate in this way—to connect our neurones—is what makes culture possible because culture must ultimately be based on the exchange of information. This can then be combined with other information and then transformed or reproduced through time and across space in a uniquely human way.

The parallel neuronal modification implied by communication has further important implications. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Durkheimian Anthropology and Religion: Going In and Out of Each Other’s Bodies
• 2. Why Religion Is Nothing Special but Is Central
• 3. Truth and Sight: Generalizing without Universalizing
• 4. Teknonymy and the Evocation of the “Social” among the Zafimaniry of Madagascar
• 5. Is There Religion in Çatalhöyük or Just Houses?
• 6. Types of Shared Doubt in the Flow of a Discussion
• 7. Toward a Cognitive Anthropology Grounded in Field Work: The Example of “Theory of Mind”
• 8. Lévi-Strauss as an Evolutionary Anthropologist
• Index
• About the Author