at0006 2col.

qxd 02/06/00 13:01 Page 1

The poverty of selectionism

Vol. 16 No. 3 June 2000
Every two months
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 15
NARRATIVE 18 JONATHAN BENTHALL on Malinowski’s tent
COMMENT 19 DECLAN QUIGLEY on ‘Rapportage’, DAVID SHANKLAND and
BEN BURT on the ASA 2000 conference
CONFERENCES 23 JULIA PANTHER on the ASA 2000 conference,
ANDRÉ ITEANU on Processes of naming
OBITUARY 25 HARALD E.L. PRINS on A.H.J. PRINS
LETTERS 26 TOM BRASS on Bill Epstein
NEWS 26 CALENDAR 28 RAI NEWS 29 CLASSIFIED 31
CAPTION TO FRONT COVER page 30
Editor: Gustaaf Houtman
Editorial Panel: Robert Foley, Alma Gottlieb, Karl Heider, Michael Herzfeld, Solomon Katz, John
Knight, Jeremy MacClancy, Danny Miller, Howard Morphy, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Stephen
O. Murray, Judith Okely, Jarich Oosten, Nigel Rapport, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Masakazu Tanaka,
Christina Toren, Patty Jo Watson
Royal Anthropological Institute Offices: For all correspondence except subscriptions, changes of
address etc. 50 Fitzroy Street, London W1P 5HS. Registered charity no. 246269. Tel +44 (0)20 7387
0455, fax + 44 (0)20 7383 4235, Email rai@cix.compulink.co.uk. WWW homepage:
http://rai.anthropology.org.uk
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY is mailed free of charge every two months (February, April, June,
August, October, December) to Fellows and Members of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Individuals may subscribe as Members for £18 or US$28
Signed articles represent the views of their writers only. All submissions other than short reports and
letters are peer-reviewed. We will pay a copyright fee if we inadvertently infringe picture rights.
Copy date: 1st of odd months. Notes for contributors available on request.
Publishers: Blackwell Publishers Limited, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Information for subscribers: New orders and sample copy requests should be addressed to the
Journals Marketing Manager at the publisher’s address above (or by email to jnlsamples@black-
wellpublishers.co.uk, quoting the name of the journal). Renewals, claims and all other correspondence
relating to subscriptions should be addressed to Blackwell Publishers Journals, PO Box 805, 108
Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1FH, UK (tel: +44 (0)1865 244083, fax: +44 (0)1865 381381 or email:
jnlinfo@blackwellpublishers.co.uk). Cheques should be made payable to Blackwell Publishers Ltd, in
£ sterling drawn on a UK bank, or in US$ drawn on a US bank. Payment may also be made by
American Express, Diners, Mastercard or Visa. Subscription forms are available on the Blackwell
website (see below).
Internet: For information on all Blackwell Publishers books, journals and services log onto URL:
http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk.
Subscription rates for 2000 are as follows (Canadian customers/residents please add 7% for GST):
Institutions: Europe £36, N. America US$58, rest of world £36. Individuals: see above.
U.S. Mailing: Periodicals postage paid at Rahway NJ. Postmaster: send address corrections to
Anthropology Today, c/o Mercury Airfreight International Ltd, 365 Blair Road, Avenel, NJ 07001,
USA (US mailing agent).
Advertising: Managed from the RAI offices. Page: £337. 1/2 page £182. 1/3 page col. £125. 1/2 col.
£63, plus VAT for UK customers. 10% discount for c/r copy. Copy date: 15th odd months.
© RAI 2000. For copyright statement see page 3. Printed and bound by Chameleon Press, London.
ISSN 0268-540X (formerly ISSN 0307-6776)
I am a strong believer in the principle that in scholarly
debate, one should respect the arguments of one’s oppo-
nents, however much one may disagree with them. There are
times, however, when this principle of tolerance is stretched
to the limit, and nowhere has this been more so – in my expe-
rience – than in encounters with the more fervent advocates
of neo-Darwinism in the human sciences. These people sail
under a number of flags: there are sociobiologists, evolu-
tionary psychologists, gene-culture coevolutionists and
memeticists1 – the latter, perhaps the most bizarre variant of
all, holding that the human mind-brain is parasitized by par-
ticles of culture (so-called memes) that cause their human
hosts to behave in ways conducive to their getting copied
into other people’s heads, much as the cold virus, in causing
the sufferer to sneeze, succeeds in infecting everyone else in
the vicinity. What these approaches have in common is a
belief that everything from the architecture of the mind to
the manifold and ever-changing patterns of human behav-
iour can be attributed to designs or programmes that have
been assembled from elements of intergenerationally trans-
missible information, through a process of variation under
selection 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 them
selectionist 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 for
this. Back in the 1920s and 1930s, it was quite popular to
talk about the replication and diffusion of what were then
called ‘culture traits’, and by the 1950s it had become
conventional to distinguish culture, as an underlying pat-
tern of rules and representations, from its outward, behav-
ioural manifestations. Analogies and comparisons between
cultural and biological evolution were commonplace.3 But
since then, and especially over the last quarter of a cen-
tury, sociocultural anthropologists have advanced way
beyond these rather elementary formulations. Where once
they thought of culture as a kind of content – whether con-
ceived as clusters of traits, bundles of instructions, or
compendia of rules and representations – which filled the
capacities of the human mind, they are nowadays much
more conscious of culture as process. This process is an
unfolding of relations among people and between people
and non-human components of the environment, out of
which knowledge and understanding is continually being
generated or produced. Even within those situations we
might label as ‘learning’, it is recognized that knowledge
is not so much transmitted ready-made as produced anew
– that is, it is being reproduced rather than replicated. And
we now understand much better, too, how persons come
into being as centres of intentionality and awareness
within 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 the
relevant literature, nor do they feel the need to do so, espe-
cially because they think they’re ahead of everyone else.
But for me, reading their work is like stepping into a time
machine, and going back to the days, long before I was
born, when issues of culture traits and their diffusion were
all the rage. There is, really, a very fundamental difference
of approach between most contemporary social and cul-
tural anthropologists and advocates of selectionist models
– the majority (though not quite all) of whom come from
biological anthropology or other disciplines like cognitive
science or evolutionary biology. It is that sociocultural
anthropologists have spent a lot of time deeply immersed,
usually through fieldwork, in another way of life. Their
immediate concern is to try to understand this life, and to
at0006 2col.qxd 02/06/00
1. References to the literature
on sociobiology are legion. On
evolutionary psychology, see
Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby
(1992); on gene-culture
coevolution see Boyd and
Richerson (1985) and Durham
(1991); on memetics, see
Blackmore (1999).
2. The most prominent
exception is Sperber (1996).
3. As long ago as 1956, the
anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn,
participating in an
interdisciplinary group that had
teamed up to explore the
analogies between genetic,
linguistic and cultural evolution,
had coined the expression
‘cultural genotype’ to refer to the
pattern of rules and
representations underlying
manifest behaviour (Gerard,
Kluckhohn and Rapoport 1956).
Almost fifty years on,
selectionists are still marketing
the idea as though it were brand
new.
4. See Ingold (1990).
Barkow, J. H., L. Cosmides and
J. Tooby 1992. The adapted
mind: evolutionary psycholo-
gy and the generation of
culture. New York: Oxford
UP.
Blackmore, S. 1999. The meme
machine. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Boyd, R. and P. J. Richerson
1985. Culture and the
evolutionary process.
Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago 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 and
explorations’. Behavioral
Science 1: 6-34.
Ingold, T. 1990. ‘An anthropo-
logist looks at biology’. Man
(N.S.) 25: 208-29.
Sperber, D. 1996. Explaining
culture: a naturalistic
approach. Oxford:
Blackwell.
2 ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY Vol 16 No 3, June 2000
13:01 Page 2
convey that understanding to others. The overriding con-
cern of selectionists, on the other hand, seems to be to
demonstrate the universal applicability of their explana-
tory models (with blithe disregard, incidentally, for the
historical specificity of their provenance). In this enter-
prise, any empirical data, however simplified, caricatured
and divorced from its context, is grist for their theoretical
mill. Few selectionists have ever conducted any proper
fieldwork, and they know nothing of the challenge that
such work can pose to one’s most basic assumptions. The
people with whom the anthropologist works, and whose
lives end up being catalogued in the records of ethnog-
raphy, may base their understandings on assumptions
utterly incommensurate with those built into selectionist
models. But this is of no concern to the advocates of such
models. While the selectionist proudly attributes scientific
status to his or her accounts of other people’s lives, the
accounts of the people themselves are packaged as just
another ‘traditional worldview’, supposedly downloaded
over the generations from one passively acquiescent head
to another, and whose adaptive significance the selec-
tionist might then set out to explain. Behind all this is the
old dichotomy between reason and tradition, which has
done so much to sustain the West’s sense of its own supe-
riority over the rest, and to disqualify and disempower
local forms of knowledge and understanding.
I have yet to read any interpretation of social or cultural
phenomena by a selectionist that has added anything to
what we know already by other means. To be sure, selec-
tionists pride themselves on being able to come up with
what they like to call ‘testable hypotheses’ according to
which, for example, a certain pattern of behaviour is likely
to become established in a population if environmental con-
ditions are conducive to the replication and diffusion of the
programmatic ‘instructions’ of which this behaviour is the
observable output. Such hypotheses, however, are funda-
mentally misconceived. For one thing, the idea of culture as
consisting in transmissible and diffusable bundles of
instructions is based on the false assumptions, firstly, that
the meaning of each instruction can be specified independ-
ently of the particular environmental contexts of its appli-
cation, and secondly, stemming from this, that information
is tantamount to knowledge. For another thing, no known
form of learning in human society can reasonably be
described 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 not
the mechanical output of interaction between pre-replicated
instructions (whether genetic or cultural) and prespecified
environmental conditions, as selectionists would have us
believe. But quite aside from all these objections, the very
idea that one is actually ‘testing hypotheses’ is merely a
cover for using natural selection as a logical device to turn
description into explanation. In effect, what selectionists
habitually do is to redescribe the phenomena under investi-
gation in their terms, and then use the metaphor of selection
as a trick which appears to convert a description of what is
going on into an explanation for it. The fact that most advo-
cates of selectionist models have allowed themselves to be
mystified by their own procedures does not make them any
more defensible.
Selectionism strikes me as such bad science, and so full
of shoddy thinking, that I find it very hard to respect.
Applied to the realms of social and cultural phenomena it
has been utterly disastrous. Perhaps we should not get too
hot under the collar about this. As I have already noted,
few sociocultural anthropologists take it seriously. But
other people do. Indeed over recent years, selectionists
have run an extraordinarily successful and well-funded
public relations exercise, backed up by all the scholarly
paraphernalia of academic conferences, edited volumes,
specialist journals and lengthy lists of references in which
they all cite one another. Dissenting voices, however, have
been comprehensively suppressed. Far from remaining
indifferent to all of this, it leaves me feeling viscerally
angry. Indeed I have often been taken aback by the
strength of my own reaction, and I have wondered about
the reasons for it. Part of the problem, perhaps, lies in the
sheer hubris with which selectionists advance their claims.
Not for them the ramblings of woolly-minded humanists
when Darwin and hard science point the way! Why bother
to read or engage with the work of generations of social
and cultural theorists when it is perfectly obvious that
human beings are hard-wired meme-replicating
machines? All this stuff about agency and structure, about
how persons come into being within fields of social rela-
tionships, about culture as process rather than transferable
content, is so much froth. Humanists can only deal in
proximate realities; neo-Darwinian human science reveals
the ultimate causes of things.
For those of us who have struggled mightily to find a
language adequate to the task of comprehending the range
and variety of human experience, it is indeed galling to
have to listen as selectionists, flaunting their ignorance of
social and cultural anthropology as though it were a mark
of 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 to
countenance the legitimacy of approaches other than their
own. Surely the one thing we should not tolerate, in schol-
arly debate, is intolerance. And I have found neo-
Darwinian selectionists peculiarly intolerant of any
intellectual challenge to their point of view. They simply
assume it to be unassailable and refuse to discuss it fur-
ther. Their favourite ploy, of course, is to brand anyone
who doesn’t fall into line as a crypto-Creationist. And that
really is sinking pretty low! Social and cultural anthropol-
ogists, I believe, cannot afford to maintain a stance of
studied indifference to selectionism. Its reductionist for-
mulations and cardboard stereotypes fly in the face of the
generous understanding of the richness and depth of
human knowledge and experience for which we have
always fought. What is required is a policy not of appease-
ment but of vigorous, principled and public opposition. !
Tim Ingold
University of Aberdeen