Anthropology and Ethics. by May Edel; Abraham EdelReview by: John GulickSocial Forces, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Mar., 1960), pp. 276-277Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2574098 .

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276 SOCIAL FORCES

Such inconsistency may be a healthy thing, especially if nobody except a foreigner objects to it. It night be that Brameld is occasionally influenced unduly by the sophisticated members of his panels.

The book is interesting for the way it relates some of its findings to The People of Puerto Rico, a monu- mental sort of study edited by Julian Steward. Two of the subcultures described in that book were also sampled by Brameld. Perhaps the most glaring incon- sistency between the two books, and Brameld ac- knowledges it, is the difference in the treatment of religion. Judging from The Remaking of a Culture religion is about as incidental to Insular life as it is in middle-class America. The Steward volume suggests that such a judgment is quite false. I do applaud Brameld's heroically successful account of Puerto Rican culture as a unit and his refusal to overplay sub- cultural differences in the manner of the Steward book.

JOHN J. HONIGMANN University of North Carolina

ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHICS. By May Edel and Abra- ham Edel. Springfield, Illinois: C. C. Thomas, 1959. 250 pp. $5.50.

Readers of this stimulating and important book would do well to take seriously the authors' warning that it is an "admittedly very exploratory survey" (p. 6). As I read through it, I often found myself wishing that the Edels had waited until their ideas had reached a more conclusive stage before going into print. Yet, in counter-argument, I wonder if, at the present time, anyone could write a book on the same subject and be more conclusive without becoming doctrinaire. Rather than being premature, therefore, the publication of this monograph is most timely.

It is timely in three senses. First, it reflects what is apparently a current shift in emphasis in anthropology generally; second, it is an example of a relatively new and unusual permutation in cross-disciplinary col- laboration; and third, it demonstrates very effectively how much systematic thinking and carefully aimed research needs to be done in the cross-cultural study of ethics.

For a long time, anthropologists have held "cultural relativity" to be a first principle of their science: no culture may be qualitatively judged in terms of the standards of another; every culture is "as good" and/or "as bad" as every other as far as the participants in each culture are concerned; the anthropologist's task is to describe and analyze how each culture functions as a system, period: the principle may be expressed in a variety of ways. As a working principle, it has played, and continues to play, an essential part in the process of loosening ethnocentric blinders, a process which is essential not only for cross-cultural analysis itself but also for general enlightenment. In the 1940's, however, anthropologists were faced with a dilemma. Nazism could be shown to be a functionally significant trait-complex, not satisfactorily attributable to any such dei ex machina as mob hysteria or the devil. Yet both Nazism and the Greater East Asian Co-Pros- perity Sphere (a functionally significant product, sup- posedly, of bushido and a Japanese version of the Prot-

estant Ethic) were demonstrably and cross-culturally destructive, i.e., they were of questionable survival value for all concerned. Were they "not-wrong" be- cause they were embedded in their respective cultures? Were they "wrong" because they turned out to be of questionable survival value? Those espousing the principle of cultural relativity discovered that in giving an affirmative answer to the first question, they also had to give an affirmative answer to the second and, also, to hold their personal values in abeyance. Pos- sibly, the uncomfortable dilemma could be escaped through this line of reasoning: "No-ethical judgments may be made of behavior as long as it is a recognized intra-cultural pattern, provided that it does not con- stitute a threat to other cultures."

Since current threats to other cultures had raised questions as to the survival of mankind itself, the pro- visional part of the statement could possibly be de- fended on objective, non-ethical, biological grounds alone. But could it? Was not the proviso itself a form of ethical judgment? For years, anthropologists had, with apparent aplomb, reported -the large variety and wide distribution of ethical double standards with regard to "we vs. them." A wide gamut of behavioral patterns-from head-hunting in New Guinea to the Eastern Woodland Indians' torturing-to-death of prisoners to various institutionalized lethal cruel- ties to animals (human and otherwise)-had been left in an ethically neutral zone because they could be shown to be parts of functionally related systems of symbols and behavioral patterns. But now came the death march on Bataan and the ovens of Auschwitz, both functionally relevant to particular cultural pat- terns, and yet to them no anthropologist could grant ethical amnesty.

Like a timid proto-mammal among the dinosaurs, the ethical issue reared its head in the analytic, as well as personal, deliberations of anthropologists. The awkward professional problem which had been raised by these developments could be solved neither by evasion nor by regression to out-and-out ethnocentrism nor by recourse to purely idiosyncratic reactions. New questions must be asked, let the chips fall where they might. Could chronic anxiety, frustration, and hostility be shown, cross-culturally, to be deleterious to sur- vival? Are some cultures more productive of these traits than others? Experiments with psychodiagnostic tests began to suggest that these were not empty questions, as did various cross-cultural studies of "values," a concept closely related to, though not identical with, ethics. These studies, however, raised as many questions as they answered, and the Edels' book points up these unanswered problems.

The Edels ask, do a given people "achieve their low level of aggression only at the cost of general inhibition, so that their low level of initiative and creativity must be chalked up as a part of the price? Or is this lack based on other failings?" And they continue, "If we grant that modern society has reached a point where sharp limits on aggression are necessary, we need more studies of cultures which do minimize aggression, of what prices they pay and of how such prices can be controlled or lowered. But we also need to examine them to see what clues they may yield to a more positive

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LIBRARY AND WORKSHOP 277

facet of the problem, that of shifting the balance from control of in-group aggression to reducing its sources and causes" (pp. 64-65).

The question of whether the values and practices of some cultures are intrinsically superior to those of others has now gone beyond the matter of aggression and hostility. Anthropologists are being involved in the various projects of development of "underdeveloped" areas, in which some practices of western industrial culture are being diffused in such a way that it is clear that changes in values and world view will also be necessitated. Such changes appear to be prices which, as it were, were not figured in the original bargain. Are they justifiable because economic westernization is justifiable? Some anthropologists are beginning to insist that they are. It becomes all the more imperative that objective and systematic procedures (as opposed to intuitions) be developed for the analysis of such questions.

It is possible that collaboration between anthropolo- gists and philosophers (an example of which is the Edels' book) may prove fruitful in the solution of these problems, especially since the collaboration of anthro- pology and psychiatry seems, for the moment at least, to have reached a point of diminishing returns. As the Edels point out, anthropologists have endeavored to describe and analyze the great variety of what is, taking note, sometimes rather crudely, that "what is" includes indeas of what ought to be, as well as the devia- tions therefrom (the whole issue of normative vs. behavioral patterns). The philosopher of ethics, on the other hand, has developed highly refined techniques for the analysis of the logic of various models of "what ought to be." In their later chapters, especially, the Edels emphasize that the new collaboration offers the possibility of testing the models against ethnographic data and, where they fit, to deduce by logical means freed from the emotional biases of intuition, the rela- tive rewards and costs of the various systems. Only on the basis of seeing clearly what the rewards and costs are, can ethical judgments which are not ethnocentric be made. The Edels do not show us in detail how this basis can be established. In this sense their work is pre- mature, but their exploration of the issue is most timely indeed.

In discussing the potentialities of the collaboration, I have also implied the scope of the systematic thinking and research which is called for by this book and by the situation of which it is a reflection. On the philosophical side, some progress has already been made, as the model-fittings of Charles Morris and John Ladd attest. The anthropological side is well reflected by the Edels' earlier chapters (III. The Range of Moral Differences; IV. On Being a Good Mother; V. The Prohibition of Incest; VI. Control of In-Group Aggression). Here they review various aspects of life in which moral issues universally arise. But, as in all previous searches for cultural universals, they find that, though the issues may be universal, the ethics by which they are regu- lateAd are so varied as to be contradictory in some cases. This is a finding which all too clearly demonstrates how enormous is the challenge to the discovery of whether there is, in the human psyche, any possibility

of principles of ethical standization and evaluation which are not theologically or secularly ethnocentric.

JOHN GULICK University of North Carolina

MAN's WAY: A PREFACE TO THE UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN SocIETr. By Walter Goldschmidt. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1959. 253 pp. $2.90.

This book, written for the layman and the anthro- pologist, examines the manner in which men live- specifically the characteristics common to all cultures- and the evolution of culture. The author asserts that the social organizations of all cultures are such that they may be analyzed into a set of universally occurring characteristics, universal because they follow from man's biological needs, and from the requirements of social life. He considers that although every social system is different from every other, broad similarities exist among the social instiutions of sets of existing cultures. To explain these similarities, and the differ- ences, he outlines a theory of social evolution.

As background for the theory, the book defines the set of biological needs that must be met by culture, the "biological constants," offers a brief discussion of the major orientations of anthropological thought, and then lists and defines the social needs that must be met by culture, the "social imperatives." The theory of social evolution is then presented. Applying the theory, Goldschmidt then discusses the evolution of the social imperatives, in particular their relations to various subsistence technologies, and presents an evolutionary schema.

Paralleling the form of the Darwinian system, Gold- schmidt's theory of social evolution asserts the fact of' cultural variation and suggests its source; the theory then presents the mechanism of selection of the variants. In structure, the theory is unique in anthropological literature, and, as presented, is coherent and persuasive. Although it produces results that are clearly multi- linear, the theory differs from that of Steward and from that of White; however it has elements in common with both.

Briefly, Goldschmidt postulates a tendency for tech- nological progress, in particular for progress in sub- sistence technology. Technological progress, according to the author, inevitably has social consequences. Social institutions, as instrumentalities serving the ends of cultural survival, are produced, modified, and discarded. The social institutions do not of themselves evolve, they respond to new circumstances-chiefly technological. The new or modified institutions are always based upon pre-existing culture. Selection of the forms thus produced then takes place on two levels: internal and external. Internally, only those institu- tions are retained which permit some measure of con- gruity or harmony in the social systems of which they are to be constituent. Externally, and Goldschmidt considers that this form of selection may be the more significant, institutions are selected by simple conquest or elimination, and may be further modified in response to the competition situation. Since technological de- velopments tend to be repetitive, parallel institutions

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