On nature, science & culture: Part III
Culture and mind must be studied together, not apart.
“Entire PhD programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives”.
Bruno Latour1
“I have never been impressed by the argument that, as complete objectivity is impossible… one might as well let one’s sentiments run loose… that is like saying that as a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible, one might as well conduct surgery in a sewer”
Clifford Geertz2
In Part I of this essay I described how interpretation and subjectivity are ubiquitous in human affairs, and utterly essential for understanding what is going on. In Part II I summarised Clifford Geertz’s influential argument: since interpretation and subjectivity are unavoidable in human affairs, then scientific understanding is effectively impossible and as such it is nothing to aspire to. Anthropology and its sister disciplines have absorbed this point deeply—in some cases too deeply, as the quotes above attest. Here in the third and final Part, I describe where Geertz misstepped, and what I think a natural science of culture should look like.
Here is right response to Geertz, from anthropologist and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber: “the wink and the mock wink… have different mental causes and effects”.3 The key word here is ‘mental’. What Sperber is saying is that although Geertz is completely right to say that distinguishing between a wink and a twitch of the eyelid is, in everyday observation, a wholly subjective, interpretative activity, this does not mean that there is no material difference. On the contrary, there is a real, material, causal difference between them—you just can’t always see it on the face. It’s in the brain.
A wink is caused by one type of physical activity, an incidental twitch of the eyelid is caused by a different type, and as a highly social animal we are able to distinguish between them, one way or another. We notice small differences in how the muscles of the face are used, we mix that information with contextual knowledge, and we make decisive inferences about other people’s intentions and their social goals. We readily and quickly conclude that this twitch was the product of one set of psychological and neurological causes, and that other twitch was the product of a different set. We make the occasional mistake of course, but for the most part our inferences about which twitch is a wink and which is involuntary—about which twitch is which—tend to be correct.
You can even push this point to its extreme. There is a physical difference between the brain of a winker and the brain of a twitcher but this difference is ultimately a mental difference that need not be perceptible on the face at all. It is possible for the exact same physical movement to be either a wink or a twitch, and for the audience to be able to tell the difference based on circumstance and context alone. This is, when you stop to think about it, an awesome and astonishing ability. If aliens made nature shows this is what they would highlight. It is the product of minds finely tuned to life in a social milieu.
I have sometimes encountered the view that mental states are somehow “unphysical”.4 I find this very strange. It would be an incredible discovery if mental states turned out not to have any physical basis. What would that even mean? Mental states are physical in the same way that, say, mp3s are. Before mp3s we had vinyl, cassettes and CDs, which are all obviously physical because you can pick them up. And then recording went digital and the physical nature of music became more opaque to the user who has no special knowledge of the new technology. But it’s not magic! There is, somewhere in your hard drive of music, a physical arrangement of matter that represents your favourite song. You can’t cut it out and pick it up but it’s still there. I see no reason to think minds are any different. It’s true that neuroscience hasn’t yet provided all the details of how this works, but so what? Astronomy hasn’t yet told us what the fifth planet of the galaxy of Sirius is made of, but that doesn’t mean it’s “unphysical”. Mental states are comprised of matter (and so is the fifth planet of the galaxy of Sirius).
So Geertz’s observations are right but the lesson he derives from them is not. The insight that cultural phenomena comprise interpretations all the way down (Part I of this essay) does not entail that the study of human lives can only ever be interpretative (Part II). That logic holds only if you ask no questions about what is going on in the mind and in the brain. Questions, in other words, about the intentions of the winker and the inferences that observers make about her. If, alternatively, you start to ask such questions, then the real, material, causal differences between a wink and an involuntary twitch will come into view.
So Geertz and other anthropologists are right to say that a deep understanding of humankind needs detailed engagement with the lives of others on those others’ own terms, and it is true that many people of a more scientific persuasion are too prone to lose sight of this crucial point—but insisting that science has nothing to offer? Nothing at all?! Well there is no response worth uttering if your conversation partner insists, tout court, that there is nothing you might have to say that could ever be of relevance to them.
I think the future natural science of culture must look something like the present-day natural science of epidemiology.
This is no metaphor or figure of speech. Culture is literally epidemiological. There’s a clue in the name: epi (upon), demos (people), logos (study of): the study of what is upon the people. Today the word ‘epidemic’ is today used mostly in the context of medicine, but it was first used in ancient Greece to describe something cultural: it was used to describe a particular style of rhetoric and argumentation due to the philosopher Gorgias, who lived in present day Sicily in the 4th and 5th centuries BC.5 In fact ‘epidemiology’ wasn’t used in a medical context until 1802, when Spanish surgeon Joaquín de Villalba published Epidemiología Española.
We still use the language of epidemiology to talk about cultural things, we just usually limit ourselves to those we view as harmful. We complain how people with foolish ideas have ‘infected’ minds, how wrong-headed beliefs are ‘endemic’ in certain groups, and how community discourse can become ‘poisoned’. Emotions and are sometimes described as ‘contagious’. In 1956 Rock-and-Roll was called a “communicable disease”. And I can go on and on with examples like this, because once you’re alert to it you’ll see how the language of epidemiology is always sneaking in to everyday discourse about ideas and behaviour we view as undesirable.
In March 2019 then British Home Secretary Sajid Javid said, in response to growing levels of knife crime, that he wanted “serious violence to be treated by all parts of government, all parts of the public sector, like a disease.” As one commentator observed, “That sounds radical, but it’s really a metaphor for tackling the underlying social causes of violence rather than just arresting people afterwards—like vaccinating to prevent disease instead of treating people after they get sick”. In 2015 The New Yorker published a short piece with the joking headline “Scientists: Earth endangered by strain of fact-resistant humans”. The science-fiction movie Inception tells the story of a renegade group of mind hackers who attempt to implant ideas into people’s subconscious, and the impact and purpose of doing so is explained in the opening minutes with a monologue full of the language of epidemiology: “What’s the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm?… An idea! Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea’s taken hold in the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate.”
Yet there’s no scientific reason to limit the idea of an epidemic just to the invidious. Disease and sickness are ills against which we must defend ourselves, but belief and behaviour can be good or bad.6 The supernatural, marriage rituals, dental hygiene, the rules of chess, knife crime, tulip mania, nationalism, rock-and-roll, technological knowledge, the British habit of saying “Sorry!” even when they haven’t done anything wrong, and everything else that is cultural: they are all epi demos. One way or another, they are all ‘upon the people’.
Some of my scientific colleagues say that humans are, to use the title of one key book, “Wired For Culture”.7 I think this is profoundly misleading, because “wired for” is not the same as ‘prone to’.8 In many ways these are opposites! The chair I’m sitting on is prone to the accumulation of dust and dirt but that isn’t what its for. In fact if you say that chairs are built for acquiring dirt and dust, then in a real sense you don’t understand chairs at all. Chairs were not built in order to acquire dust. The same logic holds for minds. We are ultra-social great apes, with minds designed for social living, but that does not mean our minds have been shaped by natural selection in order to generate and maintain nationality, taboos, norms, technology, cave art, the Hungarian language or anything else that is cultural. We are, for better or worse, highly prone to such things, indeed often willingly so. But that does not mean we are “wired” for them. It is a critical difference. My body is not wired for the flu, this chair is not wired for dust, and human minds are not wired for culture.
The opposite confusion occurs in popular science writer Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Gladwell rightly adopts the idea of virality to describe culture, but he takes this good point too far. “Ideas…”, he writes, “..can be contagious in exactly the same way that a virus is”. Exactly the same?! No, that is far too much. Ideas and other cultural items do not ‘jump’ from one mind to another through the air, like a virus. We do not sneeze ideas. (Imagine if we did!)
Culture spreads by other means, in particular communication and selective trust. Say, for instance, you tell me the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost are all one and the same. I’m not obliged to believe you. Some people might be highly credulous and very likely to accept this, or they might be part of a social environment in which this belief is so widespread that it doesn’t even occur to them that it might not be true; but still, the possibility of disbelief is there. Or consider that light is both a wave and a particle; or that Napolean is an important historical figure whose deeds shaped the political and military landscape of Europe. I have zero direct, personal, perceptual evidence of either of these facts but I believe them nevertheless: because I have extended trust to some people and institutions that describe and report such things. This dependence on communication and trust is all very different to what happens if two people kiss while one is suffering from the flu. The virus will spread now, there’s no choice to be made. To say ideas spread in “exactly” the same way as virus and disease is to over-simplify and invite misunderstanding.
Here is how the comparison between culture and viruses is insightful and true. In both cases the phenomenon exists at two distinct and complementary levels: the individual and the population; the micro and the macro. In the medical domain, we study how the body works and hence how and why individuals get sick: this is called pathology. We study also whole populations, looking at how they are structured and how disease spreads among them: this is called epidemiology. Then putting these two sources of knowledge together, epidemics are explained, scientifically, as the cumulative effect of countlessly many individual moments of transmission and propagation. Cultural things can and should be explained in the same way, as the macro product of countlessly many micro-moments of behaviour and interpretation.9 To put the point concisely: psychology should be to anthropology as pathology is to epidemiology.
Consider dance. One of the most accomplished and influential swing dancers of the present day is Skye Humphries (e.g. here and here). In an interview Humphries was asked whether he recognised the impact his own individual style has had on the wider community, and his answer focused the question onto something more simple and more concrete. Humphries talked not of where a style of dance might come from but just an individual step, and what he says about that is exactly right about how the macro takes shape from many individual micro-moments: “[It’s] really, really tricky to say where a [dance] step comes from… it’s always so jumbled up; you very rarely can attribute anything to one person. It’ll always be this weird sort of like: someone does something and you see that and it changes and this, like, very gradual process; and then there are people who get to be there at the moment when either it’s captured on footage or… there’s kind of crystallisations of what’s going on [in general]. So I dunno, it’s hard to say where the causation is”.10
Humphries is talking about dance he could just as well be talking about cooking. Or science, fashion, politics, music: choose your own example. The point is that from masses of interpretation and reinterpretation at the levels of individuals does order sometimes emerge at the level of the population. It could be a dance step with a name and recognisable form; or it could be a classic recipe, a scientific hypothesis, an iconic look, a governmental decree or a catchy tune. What anthropologists rightly stress is that these very messy and contingent processes are driven by human minds that have themselves been enmeshed in interpretation and subjectivity since the day they were born. To echo Part I: it’s winks upon winks upon explicated explications. That’s what human worlds are made of.
Recognising this truth and the deep challenge it poses, (too) many anthropologists have renounced the ambition of pursuing natural science altogether. This insulates the discipline in the short term, but it is also an admission of defeat. The ubiquity of interpretation in ordinary social interaction creates a profound challenge for understanding human worlds, and many self-styled scientists do not take those challenges nearly seriously enough: but that is no reason to abandon the scientific project altogether.
On the contrary, these are reasons to be ambitious. The ubiquity of interpretation in ordinary social interaction is a reason not to separate culture and mind, but rather to integrate them. We must study and describe how humans’ profound skills of social cognition enable the many micro-moments of interaction that, when viewed as a whole, we call ‘culture’. Nobody thinks the study of disease in populations should be separate from the study of how the body works—and nobody should think the study of culture should be separate from the study of how the mind works.
Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225-248.
Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In: The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (pp. 3-30). Basic Books.
Sperber, D. (2011). A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences. In: P. Demeulenaere (Ed.), Analytical Sociology & Social Mechanisms (pp. 64-77).
e.g. Shweder, R. A. (2012). Anthropology’s disenchantment with the cognitive revolution. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(3), 354-361.
Canto-Sperber M. (2001). L’épidémie du rhéteur Gorgias en Italie. In: Éthiques Grecques (pp. 431-446). Presse Universitaires de France.
There are some phenomena that are both cultural and medical at the same time. Tobacco addiction is one clear example; loneliness and stress might be others. Study of their epidemiology should, correspondingly, take account of both their psychological and pathological dimensions.
Pagel M. (2012). Wired For Culture: The Natural History of Human Cooperation. WW Norton & Co.
I make a longer version of this argument in: Scott-Phillips, T. (2022). Biological adaptations for cultural transmission? Biology Letters, 18, 20220439.
The first serious attempt to study culture in this way is arguably the work of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in the late 19th century. More recently a community of scholars (of which I am part) have developed the model of ‘Cultural Epidemiology’ and applied it to many cases, such as supernatural beliefs, styles of portraiture, pseudoscientific beliefs, writing systems, bloodletting, kinship, chimeras, folk beliefs about the natural world, and many others. Another label for this body of work is Epidemiology of Representations, and another still is Cultural Attraction Theory. For overviews see e.g. Morin, O. (2016). How Traditions Live & Die. OUP; Scott-Phillips, T., Blancke, S., & Heintz, C. (2018). Four misunderstandings about cultural attraction. Evolutionary Anthropology, 27, 162-173.
At 1h30m49s of this podcast.