You Can't Do Nothing

You Can't Do NothingAuthor(s): Paul BohannanSource: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Sep., 1980), pp. 508-524Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/677439 .

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You Can't Do Nothing

PAUL BOHANNAN

University of California, Santa Barbara

Unless we can think right down to the reaches of mankind's long past and into the future in which the earth is only one part of a known and explored solar system, and in which mankind's problems will become extraordinarily different, we shall not be what we want to be: anthropologists, whatever our area, whatever our specialty, whatever our subdivision.

Margaret Mead Presidential Address, 1960

[Mead 1961]

PROBABLY NO ANTHROPOLOGIST who is not put on the spot of giving a presidential address ever reads a number of past addresses at one sitting. One Sunday morning last summer, I read all of them, starting rather arbitrarily in 1960 and coming up to date- that isn't as great a task as it sounds, for there was an eight-year hiatus from 1968-75.

The first realization was what a serious lot we are. Apparently AAA presidents show little appreciation of the fact that truth can be very funny, and the more nearly true, the more hilarious. Not only was the subject matter serious - that is to be expected - but the demeanor was, taken all together, funereal. Few jokes, no barbed throwaways. Perhaps it was all ecologically determined: none of them had to give a speech in a room called the Pavilion Caprice. Not since the New Orleans meeting in 1969 when the self-styled radical caucus was programmed into the Babylon Room has the annual meeting presented such a challenge.

There are a number of themes that appear and reappear in the presidentials of the past. Probably the programmatic was strongest, telling us what we ought to be doing. Sometimes with circumspection, sometimes with passionate conviction, a couple of them shook their fingers and clucked at us. Next most often, although I have not scored and counted them, is the admonition that we must not lose our holistic approach: more than

PAUL BOHANNAN got his doctor of philosophy from Oxford University in 1951. He has taught at Oxford, Princeton, and Northwestern and is now at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His fieldwork has been among the Tiv of Nigeria (1949-53). Wanga of Kenya (1954-55), the divorcees of the San Francisco Bay area (1963-64), step-families in San Diego (1974-75), and old men living in center-city hotels in San Diego (1975-77). He has just finished editing a book that explores cross-culturally the life course from concep- tion to death, and is currently at work on a cross-cultural study of divorce. His immediate

plans are to replicate his study of divorce; and he has his eye on fieldwork in Inner Mongolia, but that may or may not materialize.

Copyright ? 1980 by the American Anthropological Association 0002-7294/80/030508-17$2.20/1

508



Bohannan] YOU CAN'T DO NOTHING 509

any other virtues, that one was emphasized. Several of our presidents also told us that we had to get into studying our own society and other large-scale civilizations, but none men- tioned any ways and means to reduce the prejudices against hiring people who do, especially if they have not proved their intrepidity by "traditional" field research.

Some of the most interesting ones summarized lifetimes of work. I could not emulate that--my work doesn't seem to me to cluster, and besides I haven't yet done my life's work. Some of the presidentials sought new directions. I decided not to risk that overtly, on the grounds that my new directions would almost surely be your old directions. And besides, if everybody went in my new direction, our balance would be irretrievably lost.

THE FUTURE AS FIELDWORK

Faced with all these models that I couldn't emulate, I did what anthropologists in- variably do: I went someplace where nobody has ever been before. I do not have to deal with authorities. I do not have to go near a library. If anybody contradicts me, I can re- mind them that they have never been there. I decided to go to the future, where at worst my guess is as good as anybody else's.

However, it turns out that even future peeking has a tradition. Summed up very quickly, its method is this. You first find a trend. Then you project the trend. Do this, hope- fully, with several trends. Then you postulate two things: first that the trends continue and second that they don't. Then you write two scenarios: one in which all the trends continue to some terrible cacotopia, and the other where none of them continue, but are reversed, also leading, of course, to some terrible cacotopia. So what emerges is a euphoric version of continuing trends, written into "scenarios" and given a certain "shock" value and a certain happiness quotient, even if it is the moral happiness of knowing if we do not change our ways, we'll all go to hell in a plastic basket.

Now, how do you detect a trend? It turns out that detecting trends is very simple: if there is immense resistance to an idea, it must be a trend. If there is a great rush toward an idea (sometimes to the same idea, a few years earlier or later) that too must be a trend. After all, I remember when culture and personality was a trend and I remember when there was a trend to say it was passe. In the middle 1930s there was a trend toward studying culture change that so exercised the members of this association that they appointed a committee of three eminent anthropologists- Redfield, Herskovits, and Linton- to discover whether it was a proper trend for anthropologists (the committee, fortunately for itself, I think, decided that it was).

What are the trends today? In order to be sensible about a question like that, and not merely trendy, one must start with the fact that anthropologists have long made an issue of ripping some cultural bit or another out of its context; we are against that, for all that most of us do it some of the time and a few of us do it all the time. That exercise made me realize that I was looking for the context of anthropology in the year 2000, and that in order to make a jab at that, I had to look at the history of the social context in which anthropology has thrived.

Tonight I am not talking about the long-term future of humankind in millions of years, but rather about the future of anthropology in decades. In that sphere, to go to the year 2000 seems quite adventurous.

THE PAST AS HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

To examine the future sensibly, we have to look at the past as its base. Anthropology itself, it turns out, has not been singularly interested in examining its own historical context. Only recently has even its history been deemed important. The consideration of the



510 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [82, 1980

context in which anthropology has developed and prospered is even more esoteric. Yet, in order to do projections, it is necessary to study historical trends and situations in their contexts.

Anthropology emerged in a context of worldwide colonialism. It was, indeed, a child of colonialism. As early as 1856, in an apology for The Ethnological Society, which had been founded in London some years earlier, it was written:

Ethnology is now generally recognized as having the strongest claims on our attention, not merely as it tends to gratify the curiosity of those who love to look into Nature's works, but also as being of great practical importance, especially in this country, whose numerous colonies and extensive commerce bring it into contact with so many varieties of the human species differing in their physical and moral qualities both from each other and from ourselves [Brodie 1856:294-295, quoted in Reining 1962]. All this positioning of anthropology was done decades before Tylor wrote his magnum

opus, now largely remembered for its first sentence- the classical definition of culture. Anthropology, at least cultural anthropology, was thus born in Britain with a practical

turn-what today would be called applied anthropology. But an even more important point emerges: anthropology was rooted in Britain in a general concern about colonialism. It was the presence of the colonial empire, in an era of fascination with natural history, that gave anthropology its claim to serious attention in Britain. The Ethnological Society, as Reining tells us, was also split over the slavery issue. And there you have it: the slavery issue and the presence of colonialism, which itself would not become an "issue" in the same sense for almost a century. These were the important dimensions of the context in which anthropology emerged in the English-speaking world.

One caveat is in order, however: those were the days before Boas wrote Race, Language and Culture. The distinction between race and culture had not been clearly formulated, in spite of Wundt, and therefore the confusion (as it would appear today) was immense. Racism was a different thing then from what it is now, but it nevertheless was behind the whole concern.

In the United States, the issues alive in the social context of anthropology were approx- imately the same: the slavery issue, the presence of internal colonialism in dealing with Native Americans, and a concern with manifest destiny. The "issue" of race was more overtly present in the United States than it was in England, although racism and reac- tions to it underlay the entire development everywhere.

At the same time, there was another seemingly quite different element in the context of anthropology. In both countries, there was an overt tradition of liberalism. Classical liberalism in England goes back to the 17th century--a movement that grew out of dises- tablishmentarianism and was set to assure individual rights and constitutional security. What one authority calls "a second theme of classical liberalism" was economic freedom (Smith 1968:278). But it was not until Bentham and Mill that genuine liberalism emerged: the idea of "the greatest good for the greatest number," still based nevertheless on the idea of the free market. American liberalism was built into the documents of our founding. The German immigrants of the 1840s gave it a new turn. The events that preceded and accompanied the Civil War then put it on the track. It blossomed in the New Deal.

The stance of liberalism changed immensely after World War II; but the importance of allowing the individual to achieve physical, moral, and cultural development up to capacity did not cease to be important; it simply took other forms: forms dictated by such movements as the civil rights movement, the self-actualization surge of the 1960s, and the feminist movement of the 1970s.

In the years after World War II, both colonialism and the traditional forms of liberalism disappeared, and disappeared together, because after all they were an impor-




tant dyad, held together by a dialectic. Without one, you do not need the other, or perhaps we had better expand that and say that without some sort of egregious hegemony of one racial or cultural group by another, liberalism ceases to be meaningful.

I have twice watched individualist liberalism die, or, perhaps better, twice sicken and once die. The first time was in Great Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The country was then involved in what it called the "devolution of power" in the empire, which meant that the empire was dying. The Suez crisis in 1956 amply demonstrated that it was in fact dead. With the more or less abrupt disappearance of colonialism, liberalism withered; actually, even the common people realized that liberalism was part of the problem. British anthropology had been turfed out of the cranny where it had prospered.

The second time individualist liberalism died was in our own country, in the late 1960s, in the furnace of the Vietnam War. But in the United States, there was con- siderable racial tension and even ample colonial hegemony left. The break was not as clean. The liberal stance did not totally perish in our country because it was still useful for some purposes. But it did become theoretically rootless. We had the experience dur- ing the late 1960s of even old-line liberals calling themselves radicals for a few years. Americans today use the tired word liberal to mean somebody who is not conservative. U.S. anthropology was squeezed and had to do some fancy adapting but it was not totally displaced from its cranny.

In Europe, things were different. The French empire disappeared, of course, at the same time that the British empire did. But there were important differences both in the French type of colonialism and certainly in French liberalism. French anthropology encountered a different fate. Always more closely tied to philosophy, it found a powerful figure whose whole array of dialectic and mystical ideas could be thrust into the breach. Levi-Strauss provided an alternative. Perhaps even more telling, when the colonialism- liberalism dialectic rusted, a headlong search for another dialectic led European social scientists instantly to Marx. At whatever price to the basic traditional concerns of anthropology, it at least nuzzled into a ready-made dialectic niche.

Some effort was made, with only small success, to transplant Levi-Strauss's very French idiom into British anthropology. An even less successful effort was made to transplant it to the United States. A few American anthropologists studied with the master, and some others read him thoroughly. But it seems to me that the American milieu is not very receptive. We transmogrified the point, if not the ideas, into the study of symbolism which has at least half a dozen honorable histories. Perhaps better said, symbolic anthropology in this country latched onto Chomsky and semiotics, to become merely another speciality, heavily influenced by the French, rather than becoming the mainstream of anthropology. Similarly, Marxist anthropology has seen interesting developments, but it has not become the mainstream.

I connect all this with the fact that American internal colonialism did not die in the same sense as colonialism died in England or in France. But the position of American anthropology in its cranny between colonialism or racism and liberalism was seriously weakened. And anthropology, even American anthropology, was increasingly left in the years following 1950 or so with no place to stand--at least, not the place it had tradi- tionally stood because that place had been eroded by the tides of history. Anthropology had reached a place in this country where it couldn't do nothing. Something had to be done.

Some effort has been made to put neocolonialism in the place of colonialism. Indeed, in Africa and many other parts of the world, neocolonialism is a potent force, as one people within a new nation lords it over other peoples. But an anthropological turn to neocolonialism did not catch on. I do not want to overstate this point, because I realize that the cleavage between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots is still with




us and is growing more stark. Across this rift, there is much room for traditional anthropological fieldwork and traditional helping roles. But I am reminded that Arnold Schoenberg once said that there is a lot of beautiful music still to be written in the key of C major. Be that as it may, a revolution has occurred and everybody knows it.

The various subfields of anthropology have not been equally influenced by this revolution. Some of them did highly constructive things. Physical anthropology lost its primary concern with race-just in the nick of time, it would seem. Almost without noticing, it turned to blood, bones, genetics, and nonhuman primates. Anthropological linguistics found Chomsky and the computer. Archaeology found the rest of anthropology, as ar- chaeologists themselves put it, and they also found historical sites and the physical and biological sciences. Today they are more firmly ensconced than any of the rest of us in the cultural resources management game.

But what has happened to social and cultural anthropology? Whatever happened to ethnology? Surely our salvation lies in altering our view of ourselves in relation to the new context of our professional activities.

The situation I am talking about is what C. H. Waddington (1977) described in terms of what he calls catastrophes in an epigenetic landscape. An epigenetic landscape, as the term implies, is one that changes and moves because of the very activity that goes on within it. It is comparable in some ways to topology, which has been called geometry on a rubber sheet. A catastrophe occurs when the epigenetic landscape is altered sufficiently that one of its valleys, in which social action has been flowing, is blocked or diverted to new courses. These topographical valleys Waddington called chreods. People can no longer go the way they had been going. The epigenetic landscape has been altered, and we have been forced to change with it. Context determines action, at least in part, even when purpose and morality are unchanged.

Cultural anthropologists have been forced into a new chreod, and have not yet ad- justed to the new structures and the new teleonomy. Sometimes being forced out of one's old valley and into a new one by such topographical catastrophes seems like progress. That is what happened in French anthropology. Many French anthropologists were discommoded by the shift, but there was a well-defined direction. The catastrophe in British anthropology was immense. And American anthropology's is the most poignant, because the new valley looks so much like the old one that many of us do not recognize the fact that we are in utterly new terrain.

The play of historical forces has diverted us into new chreods. In just this kind of flux, we can't do nothing. If we continue to do the same old thing, we get more and more out of touch with the hills that define the valleys where our subject must prosper if it is to prosper at all. Anthropology, or any other subject, cannot avoid the context in which it is done. And we cannot afford to be out of touch with our times.

SOME PROJECTIONS

Before I make any specific suggestions, however, I want to let you in on my projections and my scenarios, through which I came to some of my views of our new epigenetic landscape. I began in a terribly traditional way; after all, we have to get through the traditional ways to see whether they work before we know whether we have to improvise new ways. I turned to the four traditional megaquestions of cultural anthropology: family and kinship, ecology and economic adaptation, power and politics, and religion-cum- ideology or world view--the big four, as every cultural anthropology textbook asserts either overtly or by example. I then did what futurists do: I projected the present situation into the future and made one statement about what might happen if the situation continued, and another about what might happen if it did not.




Politics

Let us first assume that there has been a continuation and expansion of the drive toward ethnic pluralism that Americans have finally come to realize has been the essence of their history since the 1840s- the seeds going back to Jamestown (there were a couple of Poles and a lot of Irishmen at Jamestown). To make the point even better, going back to St. Augustine or to Santa Fe. It has become evident to all that Americans do not merely have minorities and a majority. Rather we have a bunch of people of various geographic origins. They have become ethnics of various flavors. Then there are some of northern Europe origin who tell us they are not ethnics at all. That means the word American has two meanings, and we trip up on them: it sometimes means "citizen of the United States of America" and so includes us all. But at other times, it means "long-time WASP" and excludes a lot of Americans. Even the Native Americans got an adjective. The implication is that there are American Americans and non-American Americans.

There would seem to be two ways that this situation can be dealt with: first, and best, we can recognize that all of us practice a split-level culture in which there is a major rift between our public lives and our private lies. In the best of all possible worlds, the public lives of all Americans--dealing with power and money-will be lived by principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence, with the change that those principles really will be applied to all people.

Then, in our private lives--our family, our community, our congregations, and our clubs or cliques--the country will be made safe for diversity. And everybody, I repeat, lives with a two-story culture.

If that scenario does not happen, then second, there will be, of course, an un- precedented struggle for hegemony of one group over others. The WASPs will try to reestablish their pre-1954 position. Spanish-surname people will soon outnumber the WASPs in California and many other states, and they may try to impose their own hegemony.

Now, which of these two things may happen strongly influences the way anthropologists will work and think in the future. If the pluralistic world emerges, and we can take advantage of the "new liberalism," the age of anthropology may have arrived. But if the WASP-or Chicano-hegemonic struggle is successful, we are thrust back into the old colonial box. And it is a situation in which we can't do nothing. Sure, study the situation. But don't pretend that we are outside the struggle.

Ecological and Economic Matters

Surely the most important topic here is the degree to which the many independent na- tions, and other forms of autonomous groups, recognize and concern themselves with what in the last couple of decades has been called the world problematique. This understanding that population, pollution, conservation of resources, and all the rest form a single complex problem and cannot be solved in pieces, or in some places and not in others - that idea can either be victorious or it can be defeated. If it is victorious, then ipso facto there has been a decline in the power of the nation-state, to be replaced by transnational groups organized as SPINs, to use Virginia Hine's word, about which I will talk more in a few minutes. If the decline of the nation-state continues, and if the state is truly replaced by a set of international checks and balances that might be made to occur, then we may get on with solving the world problematique. But if the ethnocentric urges continue- those urges that have hooked the idea of nation to that of state, and then have thrust forward a "me first" attitude--then inter-ethnic conflict will get worse, international conflict will get worse, and the ecological balance of the planet will suffer untold damage. We can't do nothing.




Family

Anthropologists all realize that human beings are banding and familying animals just as cattle are herding animals and fish are schooling animals. We know that familying is structured genetically-we evolved into the family. The question is, are we evolving out of it? Along with a postindustrial age, even a postnuclear age, will our descendants find themselves in a postfamilial age?

It would seem that every single function or task that families perform can be done just as effectively by some other organization or institution. The last hold-out function of the family is child rearing. We still have not found a suitable and widespread substitute for the family in rearing children. A lot of people say they would not choose to live without family, so there shouldn't be a substitute. But the nagging question remains: did the family ever do the job well? Sure, we all know instances in which specific families did pretty well. But surely we all know more instances in which other families did not. And we all know it was worse in the 1700s and the 1800s than it is in the 1900s.

Anthropologists have not been very good on the subject of the family. We have been caught up in the vicissitudes of kinship systems and nonfamilial kinship groups. About that we know a lot. But more of our expertise might well be given over to cross-cultural study of families. For example, one of the things that can be cleared up is the Western il- lusion that the family centers around the husband-wife relationship. All anthropologists know that in most societies, it is parent-child relationships that form the core of the family and of society.

The question is simply this: if the family disappears, will all hell break loose or will the new institutions take over the tasks of the family and perform them as well or better than the family? Can we design a postfamilial kinship system? The greatest catch may well be the way the various functions fit together so as to create what is undoubtedly the most elegant of human institutions. So few people and so many functions create this elegance. But, the functions of the band have disappeared into interest groups; can the functions of the family disappear into service institutions? Can trace-elements of family serve as well as uniform family composition? Anthropologists have neglected the study of the family and its support systems long enough. Today we can't do nothing.

Religion and World View

In the second half of the 20th century, there has been an immense return to religion--not just fundamentalist religion but the worldwide religions as they are differently understood in each specific, changing culture. Zen and Yoga and the Sermon on the Mount. Islam and Judaism. But the context of religion has changed too. Part of the context of the religious revival is the growing distrust of science - and part of that occurs because scientists have not taken much pains to put their teaching into a liberal arts context. Science is one of the liberal arts, except to professional scientists. When the two are put at odds in our universities, and when the scientists are prepared to focus only on training their successors and not on making the scientific viewpoint understood and ap- preciated, the trend away from science will continue. Science, especially biological science, has for more than a century been a challenge to organized religion; now the social sciences have undermined traditional morality. Both have also been rejected as un- thinking, unfeeling, uncaring. Anthropologists have not risen to the challenge. An- thropology could be as important a foundation for a liberal education as classics were in earlier centuries - and for the same reason: anthropology gives you a place to stand when you examine the world immediately around you. But anthropologists, like most other




scientists, want to train their successors, instead of improving the teaching of their subject as one of the liberal arts. That is a shortsighted mistake, and we can't do nothing.

The point of worldview is, surely, that human beings must provide for themselves, one way or another, some kind of security against the anxiety of not knowing the rules of the universe. Science as a world view has the flaw that it does not deal with the uncertainties of human life. It offers no comfort: we cannot regress, via the road of science, into an earlier period of safety so that we can then, with our egos repaired, again come up to the present and face it bravely and sensibly. That is precisely the strength of religion. The future of religion and of science is intimately tied up with the future context of anthropology.

SCENARIOS

Now, let us do a scenario about anthropology in the kind of futures that are implied by projections of some of these points. In one possible world of the future, we have come to terms politically with pluralism and there is political and economic equality among the ethnic groups, at the same time that there is a developed and prized variation in family, household, neighborhood, food, congregation, and recreation. The world political organization is stable enough that we can make inroads into the solution of the world problematique and do it universally. The family is provided with adequate backup institutions so that those people who opt for the family can be assured of support at the same time that there is no pressure on those who do not opt for the family. Religion and world view are such that there is immense variation, but also great tolerance. The ideals of anthropology have taken root.

Now, what about the cacotopia? Pluralism fails and we are faced with hegemonic struggles so that none of us can get on with our lives: family is declared the only way to live and all of us are, like the early Puritans, required to live in family households. The world political organization has seen the continued development of the nation state without checks and balances and hence confrontation and struggle are universal. Science has failed in its task to educate people, and religion has necessarily turned aggressive and shrill in order to fill the gap.

Looking forward, structured either way, just whom do cultural anthropologists study? Remember, we have been booked into the Caprice Ballroom. And remember that I have read the presidential addresses of the past - and that I have access to all the presidential addresses of the future. By the middle 21st century, the hunting and gathering peoples were gone. As early as 2030 the remaining Bushmen were working in the computer industry in Capetown. The South African government finally admitted they were not Bantu, so they must be Coloured, which meant they were no longer allowed to hunt or gather. They first took over an interesting econiche of coding for computer some long-range weather information gathered from minute observation of desert plants. They soon branched out and took over the computer industry in Capetown, except for top management, where they are still struggling for access. The Australian Aborigines have taken over the sheep-ranching industries, which the white Australians abandoned with the discovery of a man-made fiber that is more absorbent than wool, twice as good an insulator as wool, and even a better insulator than cotton. It hit the market in 1998; however, since the discovery 15 years later that the new fiber was the cause of the immense jump in the rate of cancer deaths, the Aborigines in control of the sheep ranches have been prospering mightily.

Tribal peoples are now rare, so rare, in fact, that in Sol Tax's new statement on urgent anthropology, his major concern is with peasants, who are not merely peripheral but are




suffering unduly from the disappearance of their marketing organizations; they are half- societies, forgotten by the other half. So, they must be studied soon before they disappear. The first project is underway. Harvard hooked the remaining peasants onto a big project to study the world's alloprimates, and peasant life is the closest extant human example to primate life-styles.

The study of the social organization of these alloprimates has, moreover, prospered. The game preserves have increased the population of apes and monkeys at the expense of local human inhabitants. The Gombe Reserve now covers over half of Tanzania. There are huge preserves in Cameroun, Zaire, India, China, Japan, Malaya, and Brazil. The Soviets introduced a primate preserve into Armenia, which was one of the actions that created the immense exodus of persecuted Armenians to Turkey in the year 2033. Many of them are now successful business people in California. Cayo Santiago has been en- larged to include the island of Vieques, while the establishment at La Parguera runs north almost to San German; the Puerto Ricans in the area were all moved to New York City so that the restaurants could keep going. The ubiquitous anthropological joke of the year 2020 was that a rhesus band is made up of a volatile central hierarchy of males, a more stable hierarchy of females and two middle-aged anthropologists whose hierarchal position has not yet been established because both are still bucking for assistant professor.

The state of California has been bilingual since the year 2001; it was followed by New Mexico the next year, which insisted that it had never ceased to be bilingual, Arizona, Florida, and Texas a year later, and New York City in 2010. Bilingualism has led to the approved goal of biculturalism. However, Anglo minorities are looking toward the past and not toward the future. They are creating problems in the schools and everywhere else. The universities have established quotas for Anglos and are carrying out extensive publicity to try to persuade these people that not being bicultural and bilingual is a sign of backwardness. The Chicanos are concerned because they are afraid that if they let in too many of these conservative, backward-looking Anglos, the high standards of the universities will be sacrificed. Each university in California and Arizona has established a Centro de Estudios Anglos, to study and to deal with this backward group. The 2045 presidential by Dr. Margaret Hofmyer-Garcia details these shifts beautifully.

The presidential of the next year, by Dr. Cora Gluon-McQuark, details that cultural anthropologists long ago turned to studying up, as Laura Nader advised in the 1970s. Nader's vision has been fully vindicated, but not for the reasons that she educed in her original article. There was, Gluon-McQuark found, by 2035, nobody further down on the totem pole than the cultural anthropologists, and they had to study up to study at all.

By the year 2000, systems thinking finally conquered all. Anthropologists learned by then that human social groups and the cell are, from the systems standpoint, not merely like each other but work by precisely the same principles of flow--with the minor difference that one is chemical and the other is cultural. Indeed, cultural anthropology almost perished in the 1980s because a trend of the 1970s became even more noticeable: cultural anthropologists got completely out of touch with the disciplines in which the major contributions to cultural theory were taking place. Hindsight shows that the major discipline ceased to be cultural anthropology some time in the 1960s, with the coming of age of management science and systems theory as well as those pursuits that more and more since the 1970s called themselves the policy sciences. Anthropologists in the 1970s were either unaware of these vast advances or they were busy fighting a rearguard action trying not just to preserve, but to make everybody accept, what they themselves still called in those days "the concept of culture." Those who had gone into social feedback systems, the study of information flow which has since been recognized as the essential of all systems, like blood in vertebrates, and even those who went into the intricacies of neuroanthropology were systematically told that they were not anthropologists and that




what they were doing was not anthropology. Anthropology, in fact, had for so many years been a donor discipline - to put it into the terms of the early acculturation scholars- that it could not or would not get used to the idea that its turn had come to be a receiver discipline. Anyone who joined the new disciplines was called a "defector." And it turned out, only a couple of decades later, that those who did not defect withered on the vine.

In the presidential for the year 2275, Dr. Ernestine McQuark-Gbogboese, the new reigning daughter of Cora Gluon-McQuark, rediscovered the works of Robert Graves. She noted that his novel Seven Days in New Crete had postulated that the anthropologists had taken over running the world by that date, and that they had established villages throughout the British Isles, each village with different customs. At the age of 17, every citizen had taken a grand tour of the villages, had found that set of customs best suited to his own personality and had settled down there. McQuark-Gbogboese could not help being sad that when the experiment had been tried, it didn't in fact work because the anthropologists could not agree on just exactly how the customs ought to be fitted together into wholes, and the efforts languished. She did note, however, that the community of New Anthropos had thrived for several decades before it finally came to grief and broke up over a dispute about the genetic basis of religion.

Thinkers in the management sciences as early as the late 1970s were turning fully to process and getting rid of the fossils of social morphology. Here is the first sentence of Erich Jantsch's 1975 book, Design for Evolution: Human life is movement (p. 5). And the second sentence reads: It is movement not by and for itself, but within a dynamic world, within movements of a higher order (p. 5).

Jantsch's first formulations were crude. Indeed, the book might be better called Zen and the Art of Corporation Maintenance. But they were in the idiom of flow - the flow of a powerful stream or tao, with the pressures of the dialectics that keep the stream moving and determine its course, and with which we must cooperate before we perish by fruitless attempts to control it.

Here is another example of the way things were going behind the backs of anthropologists in the 1970s, this one from 1976:

Human systems are not only contrivances for processing information and making decisions. Hu- mans live their lives through human systems, shape them through their individual aspirations . . . creating a set of systems aspirations . .. which could be quite different from and independent of the individual ones. Humans are, in turn, continuously being shaped by these self-organized entities, their spatial arrangement evolving through a succession of orderly but temporary structures. Human purposeful action and.., interaction . . . are irreducible to behavior [Zeleny and Pierre 1976:163, emphasis in original].

It was seen as early as 2017 by President Frederica von Interferon that no anthropologist in 1976 could have said that without using the word "culture" at least four times and referring back to Tylor's original defintion and footnoting Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952. It wasn't until about 1990 that some anthropologists began to recognize that all sorts of people understand the notion of culture and that they are not changing the subject when they talk as they do, but merely trying to get everybody's thinking forward. Anthropologists did not recognize that they had won that battle. "Culture" had escaped the terminology of anthropology and the hegemony of the anthropologists, just as fieldwork had done in the years immediately after World War II. It was no longer their very own concept. It belonged to the worldl

President von Interferon noted that the trouble back in those days, the 1970s, was that anthropologists wanted people to see it-- and say it--their way. When Dawkins, in a book called The Selfish Gene (1976), made the suggestion that he had "discovered" that there are, or may be, units of meaning that he called memes that are analogous to genes as car-




riers of information, every contemporary anthropologist's reaction was some mixture of "ho-hum" and rage. Had the man never heard of culture and culture traits? Did he choose to forget it? Was he slighting anthropology? Should anthropologists have done a better job of communicating with nonanthropologists? She noted that the point should have been that he did think of it! The work of anthropologists was in the air, the very air that even Dawkins breathed, along with the anthropologists.

In the same way, a great biologist named Jonas Salk wrote a book called The Survival of the Wisest (1973). He reinvented culture under the term metabiology. Anthropologists were more angry than pleased. Only decades later did they see it represented a victory for anthropological concerns.

From reading these future presidentials, it is evident that 20th-century anthropologists did not recognize the immense impact they had had on 20th-century thinking, merely because when the echo came back the words were changed. They did not realize that the impact of social science on history is far different from the impact of physical sciences or biological sciences on history. Physical sciences have their impact on the historical pro- cesses by changing technology and thus affecting the power structure. Biological sciences have their major impact on history by changing ideology, particularly of religion and magic, thus affecting the human self-image. From both of these situations, it is possible to look back and create a viable history. It is not difficult to reconstruct what life was like before the steam engine or before evolution or DNA were understood. Indeed, some even want to go back to those times.

But it was exactly in this regard that the social sciences turned out to be different - and difficult. Social sciences have their impact by challenging and altering, often un- consciously, the values associated with the most fundamental dimensions of human interaction, particularly the way people view people - the basic stuff of love, kinship, work, and loyalty. Or, to put it into anthropological terms: family, economy, polity, and religion. What things were like before Mead went to Samoa and discovered what she did about adolescence is difficult to reconstruct; it seems not outmoded, but stupid. What things were like before Boas's disentangled race, language and culture needs an active surge of historical imagination to understand. What things were like earlier do not seem like history; they become superstitious or silly. The changes that result from social science leave only social history, and everybody who has ever tried to write it or even to read it knows that social history is far and away the most difficult kind of history to write or to understand. Anthropology had a tremendous impact on the 20th-century, but 20th- century anthropologists did not recognize it. Instead, they kept complaining that nobody ever listened to them, when in fact Dr. Spock could not have existed without Margaret Mead, and Rachel Carson could not have worked the miracles of Silent Spring without the awareness that anthropologists along with others had brought to our understanding of the feedback between culture and environment. The list is immense if anybody wants to continue it.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE PRESENT . ..

But enough of these games. I am now stepping back into the present--the end of the 8th decade of the 20th century--to look around us, to see what we can indeed discover about the context of anthropology today. What are the challenges and opportunities within our discipline today, and what can we do about proceeding to fit that into the possible future contexts of the subject?

I was struck, in reading E. O. Wilson's On Human Nature, that he not only claims that the social sciences are far more interesting and complex than biology, but that he also




tells us that sociobiology is the antidiscipline to anthropology. Note, by the way, the search for dialectic.

Here is Wilson's discussion (1978:7) ". .. biology stands today as the antidiscipline of the social sciences. By the word 'antidiscipline' I wish to emphasize the special adversary relation that often exists when fields of study at adjacent levels of organization first begin to interact." Thus social sciences--and, he notes elsewhere, anthropology in particular - are adjacent to biology in a kind of epigenetic hierarchy of the sciences. Scarcely a new idea. But what is new, to me at any rate, is the idea that an adversary relationship necessarily exists across that border. At this point, it seems to me, Wilson says something we must pay particularly close attention to: "By today's standards a broad scientist can be defined as one who is a student of three subjects: his discipline . . . the lower antidiscipline . . . and the subject to which his specialty stands as antidiscipline" (Wilson 1978:8).

I am not, in this talk, telling us to accept all of Wilson, certainly not without a careful evaluation of his critics, be they anthropologists, biologists, or other. What I am saying is that his statement about the adversary relationship in the early days &f confrontation between biology in a new key, and anthropology with the same old 12 tone row and hence no key, is interesting.

And it makes me ask: what discipline is anthropology antidiscipline to? I reject the humanities as a candidate for that dubious honor. Wilson, in fact, claimed that biology was antidiscipline to both social science and the humanities, and I think him wrong. The humanities, by and large, are in a completely different realm of discourse from the social sciences- the insights of one can often illuminate the other, and the data of one can be used as fodder for the other. But that is not the point. They are not in any sort of epigenetic relationship. It is like anthropology and psychoanalysis; they are about much the same thing, but they are separated by their methods, premises, and purposes. It is even like society and culture; they, too, are about the same subject matter, but they aren't on the same wavelength.

So, just who are we antidiscipline to? Just who are we about to infringe on, to upset their chreod?

In the light of history and my little escapade in futurology, it seems possible to see that the discipline of cultural anthropology is entering the 9th decade of the 20th century with a new set of problems. In spite of the fact that there are, as we said, many, many magnifi- cent tunes still to be written in the key of C major, nevertheless we have fallen out of our old cranny- the econiche where we prospered for so long, between the pressures of racism and colonialism and those of liberalism. And we have fallen, unknowingly, and without any choice in the matter, into another cranny- that between sociobiology on the one hand and the policy sciences on the other.

The initial reaction of too many anthropologists has been to reject both the policy sciences and sociobiology. But that would be tantamount to closing inquiry on information about the way that genetic systems prepare the human substrate for cultural systems to work on, and hence to produce the end that we know as human life, and, on the other hand, to reject serious consideration of the emerging sciences of decisions, and the results of decisions. It is tantamount, to put it into the terms of a psychoanalyst like Rollo May (1969), to choosing to remain innocent and powerless rather than to understand and master the ways in which we are powerful and can indeed change things and make a difference.

I am not talking here about applied anthropology. Applied anthropology has been turned into a specialty with its special professional association which has, to some degree, isolated it from "academic" anthropology--so-called only because the two are intellec- tually separable. I am myself convinced that applied anthropology should come back to




the center, and will when a few more applied anthropologists can finally step out of the colonialism-liberalism niche to provide leadership toward the policy sciences. Applied anthropology is not so far a policy science, and perhaps it should be. When that day comes, we will be to the policy sciences what sociobiology is to us, making us both totally reconstruct and rethink our world, whether or not we as individuals choose to reject the ideas of policy science.

The link between anthropology and the policy sciences would seem to be in the developing field of evaluation: the point is to look clearly at what people claim they want to do, and then to see whether what they are doing in fact leads to the desired goal. The anthropological presence here would seem to be essential if we are to reduce the difficulty of cross-cultural communications (Goodenough 1976; Carlos 1979). Evaluation is surely at the heart of policy sciences, and it is about processl

The notion of policy is presented in an anthropologically congenial way by Erich Jantsch (1975:6): "A policy is a set of principles laid out for the purpose of regulating simultaneously and in a viable mode a multitude of interacting relationships pertaining to many qualities and dimensions of human life-in short, a theme underlying a life." Who says that anthropology has not pervaded everything around it? The irony is very heavy: our views are being taken up the very while we are still, often by our own demands, thrust into the study of primitive peoples. It's time we stopped accepting their stereotypes of us.

Vickers (1973) has claimed what Jantsch hinted: that it is the human capacity to deal simultaneously with many relationships that is the real core point. I would agree; the notion of multiple membership is the core problem of anthropology for the next few years.

Evans-Pritchard has looked at multiple membership in the simple context of the Nuer lineage system, where he sees that one's identity changes with the context. So, again, there is nothing new. The only thing new would seem to be that today many of us feel that the many statuses that we fill are somehow or another out of phase with, in contradiction to, one another. No Nuer ever felt a contradiction between being in a large lineage and also in one of the smaller lineages that it contained.

Today, things are different: multiple membership not merely means different contexts, but dissociated contexts. The result is that those networks, of which we as individuals are the nodes, take on far greater significance in our lives. Every Nuer is a node in several networks. But Nuer's networks have great intensity, density, and integration. The other members of his networks tend to overlap: that is, in one sense, the essence of peasant or tribal community.

Today, multiple memberships confuse us all. Is my first loyalty to my professional association? my family? my employer? my ethnic group? my country? my moral convic- tions? the city I live in? the causes I concern myself with? And the obverse questions: who helps me paint my house? who loans me money? who holds my hand? who mourns with me? who exalts and celebrates with me? and who will bury me?

To put it so - and to call on Karl Polanyi's imagery- today all of us belong to a dozen or more special-purpose communities. The general-purpose community which came into existence with the agricultural revolution is about gone. Just as the band disappeared into the peasant community and its urban versions, so the peasant community is disappearing into the kind of multispecial-purpose-communities-cum-network social structure we have moved into. I often hear people whine about the absence of community--the psychological yearning for community - instead of getting down to understanding how to live in the world that is based on new social principles altogether, built around these special-purpose communities and multiple membership.

There are a few insights into the new situation, some of the most interesting resulting from the work of anthropologists such as Maruyama, Alvin Wolfe, and Gerlach. I'm go-




ing to pick out just one to show us something about the way we live now and will continue to live tomorrow, when we or our children have got over yearning for the good old peasant community, the good old tribe.

I am referring to Virginia Hine's work, and I take as my text her article (1977) of a couple of years ago, published by The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. It is difficult to summarize Hine more efficiently than she herself has done, but as I read it, her main points are these: hierarchal organizations, based on an organism model and run by a bureaucracy that can be analogized to the central nervous system, are taking secon- dary place in the modern world; what is emerging is what she calls a SPIN--that is an acronym for a Segmented, Polycephalous, Idea-based Network. These networks are com- posed of cells of social organization, each cell organized differently - it makes no matter. The leaders of this decentralized network are in touch, but there is no hierarchy and they have no authority. It is like leadership among the Plains Indians: in a given situation, the leadership is associated with ability and persuasiveness, not with a status or office. There is no bureaucracy, no one is "responsible" (as the colonial officials used to say when they encountered this kind of situation and immediately undertook to find or make someone responsible). The idea is what holds it all together - the narrow range of issues on which all the members of all the cells of the network agree passionately, and then, as a control, the checks and balances of the vast differences of opinion among them on all other issues. These SPINS are held together by ritual activities-"rallies, demonstrations, marches, conferences, revival meetings, joint activities of one sort or another" (Hine 1977:20). When the idea which gives life to the network loses its power-either because the point has been won, or lost, or because it has merely grown obsolete or the members have rushed off toward some newer SPIN- then the SPIN either changes or it disappears. The new social structure is a sort of bubbling up of such SPINs most of which are short-lived, leaving at most an achievement, but no organization to worry about. Nobody loses a job or anything; the activity and with it the SPIN just disappear. This is the way the new global village works--the new "decentralized" community.

A perfect example of SPINs at work is to be found in the report (Carter 1979) in Science of the antinuclear rally in Washington on May 6 of this year: "People and groups in many parts of the country are forming an effective communications network useful in pooling resources and increasing political clout." These people have nothing in common except their objection to nuclear power; they are spatially separated; their leadership is ad hoc. There is nothing like an hierarchal organization. This was an effective SPIN-- the participants in the rally were from 150 organizations with many forms of social organization. They had no formal leadership, but they were all passionately moved by the idea that set them to work. After the rally, they all went home.

Here is another example: anthropologists working in many Third World countries today are collaborating closely with anthropologists or other scientists from those countries. These people are interested in the same topic, and they form SPINs. When their job is finished, they may retain friendships and contacts, and they may not. The constant is not the group, but the activity, the flow.

Evidence of the emerging importance of the SPIN turns up in many places. For example, on October 25, the Los Angeles Times carried a story about the difficulties created by single-issue lobbyists:

Whether it is banning abortion or protecting firearms, killing off nuclear power or building up national defense, saving the whales, preserving the Alaska wilds or even salvaging the nation's avocado industry, the "single-issue" approach to politics has proliferated dramatically in the last few years, throwing old political coalitions and traditional ways of doing the public's business into confusion and disarray [Randolph 1979].




This particular journalist then goes on to analyze the situation as the "me decade" getting mixed up in politics, thwarting the old liberal arrangement of compromise to get the greatest good for the greatest number. The vice-president of Common Cause is quoted as saying, "The sum of the parts of this political system has become much greater than the whole." Exactly said. It sounds to me just like the American Anthropological Association.

Moreover, there are SPINs within bureaucracies that may, in fact, enable the clumsy bureaucracy to work. I, a government worker, call up my opposite number in the DOE and the DOD and the DOA and we decide where the most advantageous policy lies, in- cluding a subrosa evolution of our own positions and our own futures. I then write a memorandum, send it through channels of the bureaucracy, and it becomes official policy.

So, there is nothing new about SPINs; they have been here all the time. But the position they are assuming in our social life is new and different, and the time and energy we spend with them has vastly increased at the expense of all other social forms. SPINs come at every level, for example, the support groups whose study has become so active since they were first pointed out by Gerald Caplan (1974) and later taken up by some medical anthropologists and lots of other people. There are international SPINs like the Club of Rome, the ecology movement, the Red Cross, OPEC, and even the interlocking direc- torates of transnational corporations.

The fascinating thing about SPINs is that they are very powerful because of the power of the idea. It is an ideological base. But SPINs can't be captured; you can't even fight them, because they disappear into a surrounding populace, something like the revolu- tionaries in guerrilla warfare. But their power is immense, and it is growing and it will continue to grow.

Now, what kind of ideology emerges in a situation of this sort, comparable to the way liberalism emerged in a situation of colonialism? We have been living with it for some time now - living with it and either relishing it or complaining that all the old-fashioned virtues are going to hell, or both. It is the sort of thing that Tom Wolfe and others have called the "me decade" and which Christopher Lasch (1978) has dubbed the narcissistic culture. People are interested in themselves, but not merely selfishly. Sure, there is an attitude of "I'm gonna get mine," but there always was, in Western society at least. Rather, what we see here is to be found in Maslow's search for self-realization, and at the same time in a search for security in a new type of social organization. The supreme task is not to find independence but to find ways of relating that nevertheless allow the autonomous individual to prosper.

The ethic of autonomy is the name of the new ideology: I shall make my own choices, and I shall pay the piper. The only "oughts" are the prices for my behavior. The only cultural pressure is that which I choose to bear. The gravest danger is that autonomy may imply autarchy, as socialization weakens and the crime rate soars.

The difficulties with this ethic of autonomy, thus, are simple: I may not choose to be moral or "responsible." But--and it is a very important but-if I do not, then nobody will support me, and the cost will rise immensely. The price is loneliness and learning to deal with loneliness, just as the difficulties in the tribal or peasant community center around exploitation of the self by congeners. In the new situation, there is no security to be had from static social groups. Rather, the only security lies in learning to manipulate one's world by pulling the SPINs - they cannot be pushed - and to activate them in one's behalf. Of course, family and kinship will be left; groups of people who work together will be left; the major hierarchal organizations like government will be left. But their overall, comparative importance will recede. Even neighborhoods will be left: people will continue to know some of the people who live around them as long as children do not drive automobiles, and some people will continue to make the most of their relationships among those close by.




To sum up quickly, what is the context of anthropology to which we must adjust? We are now in a field that lies between sociogenetics on the one hand and policy-ology on the other. And that field is set into a terrain of new forms of social organization based on the SPIN or something like it and autonomous citizens who have learned to overcome loneliness and to be active in many networks, for many purposes, with a few intimates and an immense range of acquaintances to draw on and to serve.

You will be right when you tell me that the blue-collar workers and the ethnics are not as much into SPINs as the middle class, that power elites have been SPINs for a long time. But every Saturday night honky-tonk--every bar--is a SPIN; there are SPINs within the Polish Society or the Lithuanian Lodge. Everybody's turn is coming, for in the postindustrial world, that is what it is going to look like: what it looks like right now.

It is as exciting a revolution as the agricultural revolution, with the difference, it seems to me, that it's going to be a lot more fun to be a postindustrial type than it ever was to be a peasant.

When I first took office in this association, I thought that anthropology was in danger of flying apart at the seams, and by that, I meant or thought I meant that it would break at the seams of the major subdisciplines. I no longer think so. Anthropology is a SPIN made up of SPINs. We have a small executive office that gives us the appearance of a hierarchy, but we are not a hierarchy. We are held together by a limited but passionate concern for our subject and the enduring values anthropology stands for: the rights and interests of the human species-all of it, through space and time and cultural variety. In everything else, we vary widely, and on anything else it is impossible within our association to get a quorum, which makes it frustrating in the executive offices. It makes us feel as if you can't do nothing-never, no time.

However, we anthropologists are held together by an immense force. What we can and do do when we can't do nothing is stated simply and beautifully by Charles Hockett in the September issue (1979:640) of our journal: "Those who claim the privilege of calling their work anthropology thereby also assume the responsibility of caring for the whole discipline, not just their favorite segment of it" [emphasis in original].

REFERENCES CITED

Brodie, Sir B. C. 1856 Address. Journal of the Ethnological Society 4. (Quoted in Reining 1962).

Caplan, Gerald 1974 Support Systems and Community Mental Health. New York: Behavioral Publications.

Carlos, Manuel 1979 Large-Scale Development Project Assessment, Agency Initiated Contract Research, and

the Role of Anthropology. Paper presented at Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied An- thropology, Philadelphia, March 14-17, 1979.

Carter, Luther J. 1979 Antinuclear Rally Surveyed. Science 206:885.

Dawkins, Richard 1976 The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goodenough, Ward 1976 Intercultural Expertise and Public Policy. In Anthropology and the Public Interest. P.

Sanday, ed. New York: Academic Press. Hine, Virginia

1977 The Basic Paradigm of a Future Socio-Cultural System. World Issues II(2):19-22. Hockett, Charles F.

1979 Forgotten Goals and Unfinished Business in Anthropology. American Anthropologist 81(3):640-643.




Jantsch, Erich 1975 Design for Evolution. New York: Braziller.

Kroeber, A. L., and Clyde Kluckhohn 1952 Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. Cambridge: Harvard University

Peabody Museum Papers, Vol. 47, No. 1. Lasch, Christopher

1978 The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton.

May, Rollo 1969 Love and Will. New York: Norton.

Mead, Margaret 1961 Anthropology Among the Sciences. American Anthropologist 63(3):475-482.

Randolph, Eleanor 1979 Single-Issue Lobbyists Upsetting U.S. Politics. Los Angeles Times, 25 October, pp. 1-2.

Reining, Conrad C. 1962 A Lost Period of Applied Anthropology. American Anthropologist 64:593-600.

Salk, Jonas 1973 The Survival of the Wisest. New York: Harper and Row.

Smith, David G. 1968 Liberalism. Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 9:276-282.

Vickers, Geoffrey 1973 Making Institutions Work. New York: Halstead Press.

Waddington, C. H. 1977 Tools for Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Wilson, E. O. 1978 On Human Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Zeleny, Miland, and Norbert A. Pierre 1976 Simulation of Self-Renewing Systems. In Evolution and Consciousness. Erich Jantsch and

C. H. Waddington, eds. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

Received 20 February 1980



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