In the U.S. Southeast, it’s not particularly uncommon to encounter cars and pick-ups with various Confederate Flag bumper stickers or other adornments. One fairly common sticker has a Confederate flag and the phrase, “Heritage, Not Hate.”
When white southerners make such claims about the Confederate flag or other symbols of the Confederacy, that that flag today represents simple pride in “Southern Culture” – and where “Southern Culture” represents a subset of southern cultural traits (in terms of Sapir’s discussion of a third sense of “culture” – see my previous post), things like hospitality, pride in family and region, southern food, a laid back approach to life, etc. – and that it doesn’t represent to them the southern past of slavery and Jim Crow, some are simply being disingenuous. After all, it was largely in response to the civil rights movement that displays of the Confederate flag, including its adoption as part of some state flags, became prominent beginning in the 1960s. (Some don’t bother being disingenuous. I once encountered another bumper sticker featuring a Confederate flag that read, “If I had known, I would have picked my own cotton.” At a roadside stand selling flags, I recently saw for sale a Confederate flag with superimposed German Iron Cross. I’m pretty sure anyone who’d fly that flag fully intends to invoke racism.)
Still, many are sincere in that sentiment. It’s not that they’re unaware necessarily of the South’s sordid race history, so much as they find it easy or convenient to elide it, or they don’t see it as an essential component of “Southern Culture” which for them the Confederate flag stands for, or they don’t see the connection between the plantation past and the present, given the wholesale and real transformation of economic infrastructure and cultural ecology in much of the South.
Plantation agriculture and the attendant race system is not part of the way of life, not part of the “culture core” (see my previous post) for most southerners today (with a major exception being for many migrant laborers working in Florida citrus and plantation remnants elsewhere). For many southern whites, the plantation and all it entailed is simply a matter of the past. For many southern blacks, while the civil rights movement clearly improved the situation dramatically, the plantation past is not so easily elided – 250 years of slavery and another century of Jim Crow aren’t so easy to overlook, and while southern economic infrastructure and mode of production have been thoroughly transformed over the past half century, the economic inequalities associated with previous racism continue to have real and serious economic effects for many southern blacks – the past may be over, but the real effects of it are not yet past for quite a few southern blacks.
In my experience, there is actually quite a bit of commonality and agreement between southern whites and blacks when it comes to the positive valuation of much of the content of “Southern Culture.” Most all can agree about the worth of southern hospitality or about the delicious quality of southern food – food in particular seems a particularly “safe” and enjoyable topic for anyone to talk about (As Chris Rock put it, “Cornbread – ain’t nothing wrong with that”). It is more symbols associated with the Confederacy that generate controversy and about which there is a cleavage of interpretation that often follows racial lines. For many southern whites, the Confederate flag simply stands in for “Southern Culture” and pride in it. For that matter, for many “The Confederacy” has come to stand for nobility, virtue, manliness, and defiant self-reliance rather than the secession of states with slavery based economies. For many southern blacks, that same symbol stands not for “Southern Culture,” but for the Confederacy, which in turn is indelibly tied to lack of freedom or self-reliance and to racial tyranny.
Showing posts with label culture core. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture core. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Monday, July 16, 2007
Southern Culture, Part II
I’d like here to introduce two classic and still insightful anthropological texts, both of which I’ve discussed in earlier posts on this blog: Julian Steward’s ideas about cultural ecology and a “culture core” as developed in Theory of Culture Change and Edward Sapir’s discussion of the meanings or senses in which we use the word “culture” in his essay “Culture – Genuine and Spurious.” (By the way, see a recent blog post at Culture Matters for a good discussion of another portion of Sapir’s essay than I’ll talk about here.)
Cultural Ecology and the Culture Core
In an earlier piece, “Freedom and Restraint, Part II,” where I was discussing various factors which shape culture and human action, I included this section on Steward and his ideas:
Environmental Conditions and Julian Steward’s Culture Core Argument
Environmental conditions do not determine human action in any culture, but they shape, influence, and restrain human action in all cultures.
When examining ways in which physical conditions of the environment shape and constrain human action, I find it useful to revisit Julian Steward’s “culture core” idea. It’s now an “old” idea (first fully laid out in his Theory of Culture Change from 1955), but hardly “out of date.” It has the advantage of being elegant and straightforward. It’s compatible with (in fact was a starting point for) cultural ecological and cultural materialist perspectives on relations between human practice and culture and the environment, but doesn’t require hardcore commitment to such perspectives in order to see its basic merits.
Steward’s reasoning starts with the straightforward fact that human beings have to meet certain basic needs in order to simply continue to exist, such as the need for adequate food, in some contexts the need for adequate shelter and clothing, etc. How humans go about meeting these needs is not straightforward at all, but that they must meet them or die is. Steward further argues that there is always a “culture core” that must maintain a certain degree of functionality. The culture core consists of those elements of culture directly related to meeting basic human needs.
The culture core is where the physical environment influences and possibly constrains cultural patterns most strongly. The culture core consists of patterns of behavior that must be performed using available resources. The nature and distribution of available resources shapes the possibilities for how people can go about making a living. In areas where resources are both plentiful and widely and evenly distributed, there may be many ways to go about meeting basic needs, and so the environment has a lesser constraining influence. In places where resources are scarce and widely scattered in distribution, there may be a much tighter range of possible ways to meet basic needs.
Technology plays a crucial role here. As societies develop technology that enable them to manipulate the physical environment to a greater degree, the environment is less of a constraining influence, or it at least constrains to a lesser degree, and the range of resources that can be utilized and the extent to which land itself might be used as a resource expands. The North American Great Plains are a great place to farm – if you have domesticated animals and steel plows (or tractors) that you’ve developed somewhere else.
In general then, environmental restraints are proportionally more important for smaller societies with lower levels of technology (though the exact nature and distribution of resources and the exact level of available technology shapes the specific degree and type of restraint that the environment plays), while larger societies are less constrained by the environment.
Even for the contemporary world with its global economy, though, the culture core concept and environmental constraint still apply. Basic needs still have to be met. There’s a quite large, but finite, range of ways in which that can currently be done, and crucially it’s not at all clear that current methods of producing basic needs are sustainable at the global level, which is a good reason for anthropologists and others who think mainly about human social relations to be cognizant of issues such as global warming, as well as human-environmental relations in general.
Steward and Southern Culture
The physical and ecological features of the south alone did not determine that plantation agriculture would dominate the south for as long as it did (the Plantation as a socioeconomic system in fact never encompassed the entire South), though those physical features, in combination with given levels of technology and the global economic context did create a context in which, for example, cotton production on plantations was quite profitable both before and after the Civil War, until a combination of changes in ecological conditions (continued degradation of soil) and the global economy (cheap cotton produced elsewhere) undermined the viability of cotton in much of the region (though it’s still an important crop in parts of the South).
The organization of plantations and the economy generally was tied to and influenced by the cultural ecological context, e.g. the particular crop grown made a difference in terms of the social organization of production and local society generally. Areas associated with the growing of cotton, sugar, or tobacco were organized differently, with subtly different patterns of race interaction ensuing. Areas of the South not particularly tied to plantations at all were different still. (There are many fascinating comparative studies of this sort for some Caribbean regions. For example, sugar and tobacco plantation zones of Cuba are quite different socially.)
The components of culture probably most tied to and influenced by cultural ecology and economic structuring were the systems of race and class. The caste-like racial system, in particular, facilitated the functioning of the brutally exploitative plantation as social system, both during and after the official abolition of slavery. Likewise, while there were many factors involved in the dismantling of Jim Crow (including the perseverance of civil rights activists, the televised images of horrors like the beatings during the march from Selma to Montgomery and the shock this provoked, or the Cold War context), one critical component was the demise of the plantation system by the mid-20th century that the racial system had been so intertwined with in practice, undermining southern elites’ economic stake in racial apartheid.
Other elements of southern culture, the food (especially in the sense of specific preparations), dialects, personal dispositions, etc., certainly developed alongside the ecological and economic structuring of the 19th and early 20th century South, but were less clearly intertwined and determined by them. Many of these cultural elements derived from elsewhere, and are more easily able to persist independently of a specific economic context. Ironically, these cultural elements, so highly prized by many southerners today, were not so clearly part of the culture core, were frankly less important in their specific details in terms of sustaining life or an economic infrastructure, and precisely as a result of that have been able to survive the near total transformation of economic infrastructure and cultural ecology that the South has seen over the course of the last half century.
Sapir and Culture
In another earlier post, “Culture, Culture Change, and the Ethics of Cultural Intervention,” I briefly discussed Sapir’s essay. The following paragraph is a selection from that post:
In an important article, “Culture – Genuine and Spurious,” Edward Sapir noted that there are three important senses in which “culture” is used. He recognized that “culture” in the sense of high culture represented a restricted subset of the sense of culture as a total lifeway in that it represented the lifeway of a particular class context. He also noted, though, that there is another important way in which we used “culture.” As with “high culture,” we often use “culture” in a way more restricted than to refer to all aspects of the total patterned lifeway of a population. In this third sense, we mean the core premises of identity, values, ethos, and worldview and a restricted set of practices taken as “typical” or “essential.” It is typically these elements of the lifeway which are most durable, most valued, or that are the intended reference when people speak of their culture. So, for example, maquiladora factories and Coca-Cola are part of the total lifeway of Mexico today, and thus are part of Mexican culture in one sense of the word, but are not the sorts of things people (Mexican or otherwise) typically intend when speaking of “Mexican culture.”
This is what southerners are doing when they focus on certain cultural items as representing “southern culture.” They’re discursively evoking a subset of items, that really do derive from ways of life in the South or that fit with a certain ethos or “feel” (deep-fried twinkies, readily available at any fair in the south these days, can’t be said to derive from an already existing practice, but they certainly fit with an ethos of frying everything and so, “feel” like a southern thing to do), in order to produce “Southern Culture.”
An important point here (that I’ll end with, but also begin my follow-up post with) is that there is no unitary “Southern Culture.” I don’t just mean that cultural practices vary throughout what is really a large region, though that is, of course, the case. I also mean that in Sapir’s third sense of “culture,” when people evoke a specific subset of cultural practices to produce a sense of the essence of their culture – in this case a sense of what is authentically southern and what is quintessentially southern – there are competing views of what “Southern Culture” is.
Cultural Ecology and the Culture Core
In an earlier piece, “Freedom and Restraint, Part II,” where I was discussing various factors which shape culture and human action, I included this section on Steward and his ideas:
Environmental Conditions and Julian Steward’s Culture Core Argument
Environmental conditions do not determine human action in any culture, but they shape, influence, and restrain human action in all cultures.
When examining ways in which physical conditions of the environment shape and constrain human action, I find it useful to revisit Julian Steward’s “culture core” idea. It’s now an “old” idea (first fully laid out in his Theory of Culture Change from 1955), but hardly “out of date.” It has the advantage of being elegant and straightforward. It’s compatible with (in fact was a starting point for) cultural ecological and cultural materialist perspectives on relations between human practice and culture and the environment, but doesn’t require hardcore commitment to such perspectives in order to see its basic merits.
Steward’s reasoning starts with the straightforward fact that human beings have to meet certain basic needs in order to simply continue to exist, such as the need for adequate food, in some contexts the need for adequate shelter and clothing, etc. How humans go about meeting these needs is not straightforward at all, but that they must meet them or die is. Steward further argues that there is always a “culture core” that must maintain a certain degree of functionality. The culture core consists of those elements of culture directly related to meeting basic human needs.
The culture core is where the physical environment influences and possibly constrains cultural patterns most strongly. The culture core consists of patterns of behavior that must be performed using available resources. The nature and distribution of available resources shapes the possibilities for how people can go about making a living. In areas where resources are both plentiful and widely and evenly distributed, there may be many ways to go about meeting basic needs, and so the environment has a lesser constraining influence. In places where resources are scarce and widely scattered in distribution, there may be a much tighter range of possible ways to meet basic needs.
Technology plays a crucial role here. As societies develop technology that enable them to manipulate the physical environment to a greater degree, the environment is less of a constraining influence, or it at least constrains to a lesser degree, and the range of resources that can be utilized and the extent to which land itself might be used as a resource expands. The North American Great Plains are a great place to farm – if you have domesticated animals and steel plows (or tractors) that you’ve developed somewhere else.
In general then, environmental restraints are proportionally more important for smaller societies with lower levels of technology (though the exact nature and distribution of resources and the exact level of available technology shapes the specific degree and type of restraint that the environment plays), while larger societies are less constrained by the environment.
Even for the contemporary world with its global economy, though, the culture core concept and environmental constraint still apply. Basic needs still have to be met. There’s a quite large, but finite, range of ways in which that can currently be done, and crucially it’s not at all clear that current methods of producing basic needs are sustainable at the global level, which is a good reason for anthropologists and others who think mainly about human social relations to be cognizant of issues such as global warming, as well as human-environmental relations in general.
Steward and Southern Culture
The physical and ecological features of the south alone did not determine that plantation agriculture would dominate the south for as long as it did (the Plantation as a socioeconomic system in fact never encompassed the entire South), though those physical features, in combination with given levels of technology and the global economic context did create a context in which, for example, cotton production on plantations was quite profitable both before and after the Civil War, until a combination of changes in ecological conditions (continued degradation of soil) and the global economy (cheap cotton produced elsewhere) undermined the viability of cotton in much of the region (though it’s still an important crop in parts of the South).
The organization of plantations and the economy generally was tied to and influenced by the cultural ecological context, e.g. the particular crop grown made a difference in terms of the social organization of production and local society generally. Areas associated with the growing of cotton, sugar, or tobacco were organized differently, with subtly different patterns of race interaction ensuing. Areas of the South not particularly tied to plantations at all were different still. (There are many fascinating comparative studies of this sort for some Caribbean regions. For example, sugar and tobacco plantation zones of Cuba are quite different socially.)
The components of culture probably most tied to and influenced by cultural ecology and economic structuring were the systems of race and class. The caste-like racial system, in particular, facilitated the functioning of the brutally exploitative plantation as social system, both during and after the official abolition of slavery. Likewise, while there were many factors involved in the dismantling of Jim Crow (including the perseverance of civil rights activists, the televised images of horrors like the beatings during the march from Selma to Montgomery and the shock this provoked, or the Cold War context), one critical component was the demise of the plantation system by the mid-20th century that the racial system had been so intertwined with in practice, undermining southern elites’ economic stake in racial apartheid.
Other elements of southern culture, the food (especially in the sense of specific preparations), dialects, personal dispositions, etc., certainly developed alongside the ecological and economic structuring of the 19th and early 20th century South, but were less clearly intertwined and determined by them. Many of these cultural elements derived from elsewhere, and are more easily able to persist independently of a specific economic context. Ironically, these cultural elements, so highly prized by many southerners today, were not so clearly part of the culture core, were frankly less important in their specific details in terms of sustaining life or an economic infrastructure, and precisely as a result of that have been able to survive the near total transformation of economic infrastructure and cultural ecology that the South has seen over the course of the last half century.
Sapir and Culture
In another earlier post, “Culture, Culture Change, and the Ethics of Cultural Intervention,” I briefly discussed Sapir’s essay. The following paragraph is a selection from that post:
In an important article, “Culture – Genuine and Spurious,” Edward Sapir noted that there are three important senses in which “culture” is used. He recognized that “culture” in the sense of high culture represented a restricted subset of the sense of culture as a total lifeway in that it represented the lifeway of a particular class context. He also noted, though, that there is another important way in which we used “culture.” As with “high culture,” we often use “culture” in a way more restricted than to refer to all aspects of the total patterned lifeway of a population. In this third sense, we mean the core premises of identity, values, ethos, and worldview and a restricted set of practices taken as “typical” or “essential.” It is typically these elements of the lifeway which are most durable, most valued, or that are the intended reference when people speak of their culture. So, for example, maquiladora factories and Coca-Cola are part of the total lifeway of Mexico today, and thus are part of Mexican culture in one sense of the word, but are not the sorts of things people (Mexican or otherwise) typically intend when speaking of “Mexican culture.”
This is what southerners are doing when they focus on certain cultural items as representing “southern culture.” They’re discursively evoking a subset of items, that really do derive from ways of life in the South or that fit with a certain ethos or “feel” (deep-fried twinkies, readily available at any fair in the south these days, can’t be said to derive from an already existing practice, but they certainly fit with an ethos of frying everything and so, “feel” like a southern thing to do), in order to produce “Southern Culture.”
An important point here (that I’ll end with, but also begin my follow-up post with) is that there is no unitary “Southern Culture.” I don’t just mean that cultural practices vary throughout what is really a large region, though that is, of course, the case. I also mean that in Sapir’s third sense of “culture,” when people evoke a specific subset of cultural practices to produce a sense of the essence of their culture – in this case a sense of what is authentically southern and what is quintessentially southern – there are competing views of what “Southern Culture” is.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Freedom and Restraint: Part II
I have written before about the importance of individual autonomy and the priority I place on it for ethical decision making. (See the post, "Tradition and Individual Autonomy.") In a post from a few days ago, “A Different Globalization for Labor,” I discussed Robert J. Flanagan’s book Globalization and Labor Conditions. In that post, I quoted and agreed with his argument that good policy decisions are those that enhance the opportunities of target populations. Likewise, in another post, “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?,” I argued that any culture could be improved, by changes that enhance individuals’ autonomy and freedom. I very much agree with the words of the recently departed Mstislav Rostropovich (whose words I am quoting from a quotation in an editorial in the newsmagazine The Week from May 11, 2007), “Every man must have the right fearlessly to think independently and not merely to express with slightly different variation the opinions which have been inculcated in him.”
There are a number of restraints on freedom of individual human action, and that is the main topic of this post. In general, restraints on individual human autonomy can be divided into two types: natural restraints and social restraints, with social restraints to be discussed in my next blog entry. (I don’t mean to imply that these are clearly and absolutely distinct categories. Given the nature of human culture, various natural restraints are themselves shaped in part by human cultural practices, and social restraints are themselves shaped in part by environmental conditions and human biology. Still, the distinction is a useful one in making matters conceptually manageable.) Both natural and social restraints on freedom are present in all cultural contexts, but in very general terms, as social scale increases, natural restraints proportionally decrease in significance and social restraint generally increases in significance, though beginning in the modern era, various technologies became widely distributed with the effect of the possibility (but no guarantee) of increasing social scale and productivity alongside greater individual autonomy.
Natural Restraints
By natural restraints, I mean factors shaping and constraining free action that are not themselves social relations involving in some way the individuals whose autonomous action is being restrained. I have in mind here two sorts of restraints: human biological constants, and conditions of the physical environment which shape human action.
Human Biological Constants
Simply put, our biological composition and bodies shape the range of possibilities for human action. Biology in no way determines human action. Nor does it alone even determine the range of what is physically possible, for available technology shapes that as well, but the nature of our bodies clearly plays an important role in influencing what is possible (and what is not).
Most of what we do and experience is overwhelmingly shaped (alongside the variety of other factors I’ll address) by how our minds work, the nature of our sensory apparatus, the capabilities and limitations of physical ability, our libido and emotions (not biologically determined to be sure, but having biological components).
At the same time, once acknowledged, I’m less concerned here with such biological constants. While the role of biological constants cannot be ignored, as constants such factors are not instrumental in shaping any understanding of degrees of individual autonomy or differences in degrees of freedom across multiple contexts.
To refer to biological “constants” is not to imply that all humans are biologically identical. That would just be silly. Nor do I mean to imply that human biology is not shaped by a variety of other factors. It is, for example by long-term environmental conditions to which human populations biologically adapt (yielding patterns such as those described by Allen’s Rule, Bergmann’s Rule, or Thomsen’s Nose Rule), or by patterns of social behavior (e.g. the physical effects of exercise or different work patterns).
To speak of biological constants is intended instead to indicate that humans are relatively constant biologically, the physical variation existing within a narrow range for most traits. More importantly here, when it comes to human biology acting as a constraint on human free action, the effect is relatively constant. Arnold Swarzenneger can lift heavier objects than I can, and I can probably comfortably drive a smaller car than he, but while the details of our possible physical actions vary, there’s nothing about the types of activities either of us can engage in that’s different in any significant way. There are types of activities he can engage in that I can’t (because of the fact that he’s wealthy, a movie star, or the governor of California), but not on the basis of biological difference. There are biological differences that are significant for specific purposes (e.g. skin color in relation to a society’s long term history of exposure to ultraviolet radiation), but not generally for purposes of considering human autonomy (e.g. to the extent that skin color might be related to restraint on free action, it is for distinctly non-biological reasons).
Finally, technology might change all of this. Already, biotechnology has in some ways extended normal bodily capacity beyond what would have been the case before (e.g. the role of pacemakers in counteracting heart murmurs so that the heart functions normally). There’s no theoretical reason why biotechnology couldn’t more and more extend what is normal, and if we do enter into a thorough-going cyborg future, the idea of biological constants constraining possible action might be what seems fanciful, but we’re not there yet.
Environmental Conditions and Julian Steward’s Culture Core Argument
Environmental conditions do not determine human action in any culture, but they shape, influence, and restrain human action in all cultures.
When examining ways in which physical conditions of the environment shape and constrain human action, I find it useful to revisit Julian Steward’s “culture core” idea. It’s now an “old” idea (first fully laid out in his Theory of Culture Change from 1955), but hardly “out of date.” It has the advantage of being elegant and straightforward. It’s compatible with (in fact was a starting point for) cultural ecological and cultural materialist perspectives on relations between human practice and culture and the environment, but doesn’t require hardcore commitment to such perspectives in order to see its basic merits.
Steward’s reasoning starts with the straightforward fact that human beings have to meet certain basic needs in order to simply continue to exist, such as the need for adequate food, in some contexts the need for adequate shelter and clothing, etc. How humans go about meeting these needs is not straightforward at all, but that they must meet them - or die - is. Steward further argues that there is always a “culture core” that must maintain a certain degree of functionality. The culture core consists of those elements of culture directly related to meeting basic human needs.
The culture core is where the physical environment influences and possibly constrains cultural patterns most strongly. The culture core consists of patterns of behavior that must be performed using available resources. The nature and distribution of available resources shapes the possibilities for how people can go about making a living. In areas where resources are both plentiful and widely and evenly distributed, there may be many ways to go about meeting basic needs, and so the environment has a lesser constraining influence. In places where resources are scarce and widely scattered in distribution, there may be a much tighter range of possible ways to meet basic needs, and human action is more constrained as a result.
Technology plays a crucial role here. As societies develop technology that enable them to manipulate the physical environment to a greater degree, the environment is less of a constraining influence, or it at least constrains to a lesser degree, and the range of resources that can be utilized and the extent to which land itself might be used as a resource expands. The North American Great Plains are a great place to farm – if you have domesticated animals and steel plows (or tractors) that you’ve developed somewhere else.
In general then, environmental restraints are proportionally more important for smaller societies with lower levels of technology (though the exact nature and distribution of resources and the exact level of available technology shapes the specific degree and type of restraint that the environment plays), while larger societies are less constrained by the environment.
Even for the contemporary world with its global economy, though, the culture core concept and environmental constraint still apply. Basic needs still have to be met. There’s a quite large, but finite, range of ways in which that can currently be done, and crucially it’s not at all clear that current methods of producing basic needs are sustainable at the global level, which is a good reason for anthropologists and others who think mainly about human social relations to be cognizant of issues such as global warming, as well as human-environmental relations in general.
There are a number of restraints on freedom of individual human action, and that is the main topic of this post. In general, restraints on individual human autonomy can be divided into two types: natural restraints and social restraints, with social restraints to be discussed in my next blog entry. (I don’t mean to imply that these are clearly and absolutely distinct categories. Given the nature of human culture, various natural restraints are themselves shaped in part by human cultural practices, and social restraints are themselves shaped in part by environmental conditions and human biology. Still, the distinction is a useful one in making matters conceptually manageable.) Both natural and social restraints on freedom are present in all cultural contexts, but in very general terms, as social scale increases, natural restraints proportionally decrease in significance and social restraint generally increases in significance, though beginning in the modern era, various technologies became widely distributed with the effect of the possibility (but no guarantee) of increasing social scale and productivity alongside greater individual autonomy.
Natural Restraints
By natural restraints, I mean factors shaping and constraining free action that are not themselves social relations involving in some way the individuals whose autonomous action is being restrained. I have in mind here two sorts of restraints: human biological constants, and conditions of the physical environment which shape human action.
Human Biological Constants
Simply put, our biological composition and bodies shape the range of possibilities for human action. Biology in no way determines human action. Nor does it alone even determine the range of what is physically possible, for available technology shapes that as well, but the nature of our bodies clearly plays an important role in influencing what is possible (and what is not).
Most of what we do and experience is overwhelmingly shaped (alongside the variety of other factors I’ll address) by how our minds work, the nature of our sensory apparatus, the capabilities and limitations of physical ability, our libido and emotions (not biologically determined to be sure, but having biological components).
At the same time, once acknowledged, I’m less concerned here with such biological constants. While the role of biological constants cannot be ignored, as constants such factors are not instrumental in shaping any understanding of degrees of individual autonomy or differences in degrees of freedom across multiple contexts.
To refer to biological “constants” is not to imply that all humans are biologically identical. That would just be silly. Nor do I mean to imply that human biology is not shaped by a variety of other factors. It is, for example by long-term environmental conditions to which human populations biologically adapt (yielding patterns such as those described by Allen’s Rule, Bergmann’s Rule, or Thomsen’s Nose Rule), or by patterns of social behavior (e.g. the physical effects of exercise or different work patterns).
To speak of biological constants is intended instead to indicate that humans are relatively constant biologically, the physical variation existing within a narrow range for most traits. More importantly here, when it comes to human biology acting as a constraint on human free action, the effect is relatively constant. Arnold Swarzenneger can lift heavier objects than I can, and I can probably comfortably drive a smaller car than he, but while the details of our possible physical actions vary, there’s nothing about the types of activities either of us can engage in that’s different in any significant way. There are types of activities he can engage in that I can’t (because of the fact that he’s wealthy, a movie star, or the governor of California), but not on the basis of biological difference. There are biological differences that are significant for specific purposes (e.g. skin color in relation to a society’s long term history of exposure to ultraviolet radiation), but not generally for purposes of considering human autonomy (e.g. to the extent that skin color might be related to restraint on free action, it is for distinctly non-biological reasons).
Finally, technology might change all of this. Already, biotechnology has in some ways extended normal bodily capacity beyond what would have been the case before (e.g. the role of pacemakers in counteracting heart murmurs so that the heart functions normally). There’s no theoretical reason why biotechnology couldn’t more and more extend what is normal, and if we do enter into a thorough-going cyborg future, the idea of biological constants constraining possible action might be what seems fanciful, but we’re not there yet.
Environmental Conditions and Julian Steward’s Culture Core Argument
Environmental conditions do not determine human action in any culture, but they shape, influence, and restrain human action in all cultures.
When examining ways in which physical conditions of the environment shape and constrain human action, I find it useful to revisit Julian Steward’s “culture core” idea. It’s now an “old” idea (first fully laid out in his Theory of Culture Change from 1955), but hardly “out of date.” It has the advantage of being elegant and straightforward. It’s compatible with (in fact was a starting point for) cultural ecological and cultural materialist perspectives on relations between human practice and culture and the environment, but doesn’t require hardcore commitment to such perspectives in order to see its basic merits.
Steward’s reasoning starts with the straightforward fact that human beings have to meet certain basic needs in order to simply continue to exist, such as the need for adequate food, in some contexts the need for adequate shelter and clothing, etc. How humans go about meeting these needs is not straightforward at all, but that they must meet them - or die - is. Steward further argues that there is always a “culture core” that must maintain a certain degree of functionality. The culture core consists of those elements of culture directly related to meeting basic human needs.
The culture core is where the physical environment influences and possibly constrains cultural patterns most strongly. The culture core consists of patterns of behavior that must be performed using available resources. The nature and distribution of available resources shapes the possibilities for how people can go about making a living. In areas where resources are both plentiful and widely and evenly distributed, there may be many ways to go about meeting basic needs, and so the environment has a lesser constraining influence. In places where resources are scarce and widely scattered in distribution, there may be a much tighter range of possible ways to meet basic needs, and human action is more constrained as a result.
Technology plays a crucial role here. As societies develop technology that enable them to manipulate the physical environment to a greater degree, the environment is less of a constraining influence, or it at least constrains to a lesser degree, and the range of resources that can be utilized and the extent to which land itself might be used as a resource expands. The North American Great Plains are a great place to farm – if you have domesticated animals and steel plows (or tractors) that you’ve developed somewhere else.
In general then, environmental restraints are proportionally more important for smaller societies with lower levels of technology (though the exact nature and distribution of resources and the exact level of available technology shapes the specific degree and type of restraint that the environment plays), while larger societies are less constrained by the environment.
Even for the contemporary world with its global economy, though, the culture core concept and environmental constraint still apply. Basic needs still have to be met. There’s a quite large, but finite, range of ways in which that can currently be done, and crucially it’s not at all clear that current methods of producing basic needs are sustainable at the global level, which is a good reason for anthropologists and others who think mainly about human social relations to be cognizant of issues such as global warming, as well as human-environmental relations in general.
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