Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology

Humanity, Culture and Social Life

Tim Ingold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9781138033429
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134976539
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

* Provides a comprehensive survey of contemporary thinking in biological, social and cultural anthropology and establishes the interconnections between these three fields.
* Useful cross-references within the text, with full biographical references and suggestions for further reading.
* Carefully illustrated with line drawings and photographs.
'The Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology is a welcome addition to the reference literature. Bringing together authoritative, incisive and scrupulously edited contributions from some three dozen authors. The book achieves an impressive breadth of coverage of specialist areas.' - Times Higher Educational Supplement
'Recommended for all anthropology collections, especially those in academic libraries.' - Library Journal
'This is a marvellous book and I am very happy to recommend it.' - Reference Reviews

1 HUMANITY

1

INTRODUCTION TO HUMANITY

Tim Ingold

THE HUMAN SPECIES

All people around the world belong to a single species, designated sapiens, the only extant species of the genus Homo. Indeed, many anthropologists argue that human beings of a biologically ‘modern’ form all belong to one subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, which long ago replaced the more ‘archaic’ subspecific forms – notoriously the so-called Neanderthals {Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). Be that as it may, by regarding human beings as members of a species we are led to ask the kinds of questions about them that we might ask of any other species in the animal kingdom. How did they evolve? What are the most distinctive morphological and behavioural characteristics marking them off from those species to which they are most closely related? From what sources in their environments, and by what means, do they obtain their food? And what factors govern the balance in their populations of fertility and mortality, and hence their rate of increase? It is of course impossible to treat each question independently of the others: to understand how a species evolves, for example, we need to know how it relates to its environment in the quest for food, and how variations in morphology and behaviour contribute to reproductive success. Nevertheless, these questions can be distinguished as major foci of inquiry and, taken together, they serve to establish a broad agenda which is followed by the articles making up the first part of this volume in their attempts to find answers for the human species.

To summarize very briefly: Articles 3 and 4 are principally concerned with the problems of human evolution – 3 with the conditions under which the line of descent leading to humankind diverged from those leading to present-day apes, 4 with the emergence, during a much later period, of the human species from pre-human, ancestral hominids. Articles 5 and 6 deal, respectively, with the two characteristics of human beings which have most commonly been taken to distinguish them from other animal species, above all from non-human primates: spoken language and the habitual use of tools. Articles 8 and 9 turn to consider the ways in which human beings draw a subsistence from their environments, reviewing on the one hand the social and ecological relations entailed in the exploitation of plant and animal resources, and on the other hand the nutritional and cultural significance of these diverse foods for human groups. Finally, Articles 10 and 11 are concerned with overall demographic trends: 10 with the dynamics of human population growth throughout prehistory; 11 with more recent historical trends – especially in the wake of European colonization – focusing on disease as the major agent of mortality.

I have omitted two articles from this topical summary: these are Articles 2 and 7. They differ from the others in that they deal primarily with conceptual rather than substantive issues. Article 2 sets the stage by considering what it means to ask questions about humanity as a species rather than as a condition – for it is this, above all, that has traditionally distinguished approaches in biological anthropology from those in the social and cultural branches of the discipline. And Article 7 addresses in a novel way the vexed question of how to integrate what is usually regarded as the defining characteristic of the human condition – namely culture – within an encompassing theory of evolution. Focusing as it does on the ways in which animals (including humans), in their activities, modify or transform their own environments, and on how these environments are in turn ‘passed on’ to subsequent generations in the form of altered pressures of selection, this article serves as an effective bridgehead between the evolutionary concerns of those preceding it and the more ecological orientation of those that follow.

By way of introduction, I now take the four questions from which I began as my guide and, in commenting on them, highlight some of the principal issues – whether of agreement or contention – that are raised by the articles of this part. First, however, a note is called for regarding the peculiar status of the human species as an object of scientific enquiry. A fact on which both Ingold (Article 2) and Tobias (Article 3) remark is that Linnaeus, in proposing the separate genus Homo for humankind, chose to characterize it by means of the single, cryptic expression Nosce te ipsum (‘Know for yourself). Now two interpretations can be placed on this. One, which Tobias puts forward, is that Linnaeus was taking the bold and unorthodox step of deposing humans from their pedestal of assumed uniqueness and supremacy over the natural world, to place them four-square among the animals. Indeed Linnaeus declared himself hard-pressed to find any definitive criterion whereby human beings could be distinguished anatomically from the apes. On the other hand, as Ingold observes, the demonstration of the anatomical similarity between apes and humans provided the foundation upon which Linnaeus could claim that humans are set apart by a criterion of a quite different order from the criteria that may be used to distinguish non-human species from one another in nature. It is in our wisdom, Linnaeus thought, not in our bodily form, that we differ essentially from apes. In other words the human distinction lies in the unique possession of the intellectual faculty of reason, which makes of us the only beings who can seek to know, through our own powers of observation and analysis, what kinds of beings we are. There are no scientists among the animals.

I dwell on this point since it highlights a contradiction that is still with us today, and which continues to act as a stumbling block in our deliberations on the nature of humanity as a biological species. It is now generally accepted that this species has evolved, like any other, through a Darwinian process of variation under natural selection. And unlike Linnaeus, contemporary students of human evolution are able to point with some precision to a whole cluster of anatomical features by which human beings may be distinguished not only from extant, non-human primates but also from their prehuman, hominid forebears. It has become conventional in palaeoanthropology to classify individuals possessing this suite of features as ‘anatomically modern humans’. But these humans did not evolve as scientists, let alone with a ready-made theory of evolution. Science and its theories are widely understood to be the products of a cultural or civilizational process quite separate from the process of biological evolution: a cumulative growth of knowledge that has left our basic natures unaffected. And this is where the contradiction reveals itself, for such a process – which purports to raise humanity onto a level of existence above the purely biophysical – is presupposed by science as providing the platform from which its practitioners, who are of course humans too, can launch their declarations to the effect that the human is just another species of nature. Why else do they find it necessary to refer to individuals of the species, in qualified terms, as anatomically modern humans? The implication is that the earliest human populations, though biologically pre-equipped with all the requisites for modern life, yet stood on the threshold of culture. Somewhere along the line leading from these early people to contemporary scientists (who are inclined to regard themselves as the arch-representatives of rational modernity) the process of culture must have ‘started up’, gradually gaining the upper hand in the direction of human affairs. History appears as the progressive realization of the latent capacities of our ancestors, biologically ‘fixed’ in the course of evolution.

EVOLUTION AND BEHAVIOUR

Until recently, palaeoanthropologists could base their reconstructions of human evolution on two sources of information: first, the fossilized remains of skeletal material; and second, the artefactual evidence, principally in the form of stone implements. To these, a third source has lately been added, based on biomolecular surveys of living populations. The aim of the latter is to measure the degree of difference between populations in their genetic material and, assuming a constant mutation rate, to estimate the time that has elapsed since their divergence from a common, ancestral population. The results of studies employing these different sources have not always been consistent. This could be put down to the paucity of fossil or artefactual material, or to ambiguities in its interpretation, or alternatively to the artificiality of the assumptions entailed in the method of molecular dating. But there is a more serious problem that goes to the heart of the conceptualization of evolution in modern biology. Palaeontologists who work with fossils naturally think of evolution in terms of gradual changes of form, or of skeletal architecture. Archaeologists who work with artefacts are alert to what they reveal about changes in behaviour. Molecular biologists, for their part, assume that evolutionary change ultimately comes down to changes in the relative frequencies of genes. However, granting the facts of morphological, behavioural and genetic change, can we assume that they always take place in step, as though change in any one respect necessarily entailed corresponding change in the other two?

This question is critical both to Tobias's account, in Article 3, of the earliest phases of hominid evolution, and to Gamble's discussion, in Article 4, of the replacement by ‘anatomically modern’ humans of their ‘archaic’ predecessors. As regards the former, biomolecular studies at present indicate that the lines of descent leading respectively to chimpanzees and human beings diverged at some time between 6.4 and 4.9 million years ago. This point of divergence is taken to mark the origin of the hominids, of the genus Australopithecus, and subsequently Homo. Yet Tobias warns that while it may indeed mark the emergence of the molecular genetic constellation of the hominids, we cannot assume that the distinguishing anatomical features would have emerged at the same time. What evidence there is suggests that these features appeared somewhat later, and in a piecemeal or ‘mosaic’ fashion rather than all at once. Thus the genetic divergence does not translate, automatically and immediately, into a morphological one. Nor does it have any inevitable behavioural correlate.

Turning to the problem of the origin of ‘modern humans’, molecular dating places this between 140 and 290 thousand years ago, while the oldest fossils of an anatomically modern form are dated to 130 thousand years ago. Though these dates are in reasonable agreement, Gamble counsels against any hasty inference that genetically modern humans were modern in their behaviour as well. Evidence for the technical, linguistic and cultural characteristics that are generally taken as the hallmarks of modern human behaviour does not appear until some 40 thousand years ago. In other words, it seems that for the greater part of their time on earth so far, human beings – though genetically and anatomically within the contemporary range of variation of the species – lacked the essential behavioural capacities by which they are distinguished today!

To understand why this is such a problem, we have to return to a question to which I have already alluded. What is a ‘modern human’? The simple but facile answer is to say that the label is merely shorthand for ‘a member of the sub-species Homo sapiens sapiens’. Modern humans, it is often claimed, are ‘people like us’. Yet it might reasonably be objected that the human beings of 40 thousand years ago were not like us at all, whoever ‘we’ may be. Not even contemporary hunting and gathering societies can be regarded as Palaeolithic survivals. The conventional response to this kind of objection is to point out that they were like us biologically but not culturally: while biologically modern, they were culturally primitive. And the process which took humanity from its Palaeolithic origins to modern science and civilization was one not of evolution but of history.

But these dichotomies – between biology and culture, evolution and history – are sorely troublesome. For they set us in search of a baseline of universal human capacities, such as the capacity for language, or the capacity for culture, which must be amenable to specification independently of the diverse contexts of development in which human beings may grow up speaking this or that language, or skilled in this or that repertoire of cultural practices. Now a context-independent specification of an organism is, by definition, genetic. The definitive capacities of humanity must therefore be separately ‘packaged’ as properties of the modern human genotype. But if this genotype was already in place some 130 thousand years ago, why did it take another 90 thousand years for its phenotypic effects to appear in the archaeological record, in the form of such things as regionally specific tool traditions, structured camp sites, exotic trade goods, art and ornamentation, ritualistic burial, and so on?

Wynn's discussion of human tool-using and tool-making, in Article 6, brings us up against the same problem. Contrasting what he calls the ‘natural history tradition’ and the ‘sociocultural tradition’ in research on tool behaviour, he points out that the former is unable to countenance any change in tools or ways of using them, save as reflections of evolutionary changes in the capacities of the species concerned. The latter, by contrast, is inclined to attribute tools and their uses to an autonomous cultural subsystem, a technology, that undergoes a progressive development of its own without requiring any further restructuring of the biological equipment of its operators. The first tradition is predominant in ethological studies of non-human animals, the second in anthropological studies of human beings. But it is also true that in the study of human evolution, tools and tool behaviour are commonly treated as indices of the evolving capacities of their makers-cum-users, up to the point at which ‘modern’ capacities were established.

From that point on, it is imagined that technology ‘took off’, following a historical trajectory thenceforth effectively decoupled from the process of evolution. Thus Palaeolithic hunter–gat...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• General introduction
• The contributors
• Part I: Humanity
• Part II: Culture
• Part III: Social Life
• Index