The Social Animal

Nor is it as if the issue is so difficult to resolve because of the distance in time and space between twentieth-century professors of anthropology and eighteenth-century Hawaiians or Englishmen. So it can be in any sociological enquiry, as much within a single society as between one society and another, or between the same society then and now. Sociologists can and do make mistakes about the roles of fellow-members of their own society no less than about those remote from them. Sometimes, indeed, an observer from a different society will do a better job than a native one. No American sociologist has ever written as perceptively about American society as did the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America, published in 1835, remains to this day an inexhaustibly valuable source of insights into American modes of behaviour and thought. No better account of the state of English society at the end of the Napoleonic wars has been written than by the French historian Elie Halévy, whose England in 1815 was published in 1912. For a sociologist to be a fellow-member of the same group, community, institution or society as he or she has chosen to study is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of getting it right. What matters is, as in all branches of science, whether the conclusions which the reader is invited to accept can be checked by, and with, other observers of evidence which is there for all to see.

Besides, there’s no point in exaggerating the difficulties. There is no society anywhere in the world whose members’ behaviour is literally incomprehensible to the members of another. You can read writings by philosophers, including Wittgenstein himself, in which they devise imaginary examples of peculiar people who appear to attribute meaning to propositions which violate any rules of meaning known to ‘us’. In an article by the British philosopher John Skorupski, the reader is asked to imagine a society whose members believe that the drawing-pins which they carry about with them in matchboxes are identical with the Empire State Building.7 But no anthropologist has ever come back from anywhere in the world having found people who believe any such thing, any more than any anthropologist has ever found a people whose language proved impossible to learn. It may be difficult to establish exactly what meaning they attach to certain of their beliefs and the concepts in which they are expressed. But so it is back home. I have never read about an alien society whose religion struck me as any more bizarre than the Christian religion I was ostensibly reared in myself (Genesis, Incarnation, Resurrection, a God who is both Three and One, both Omnipotent and Benevolent, etc.). But I have no more difficulty in conducting meaningful social relationships with fellow-members of my own society who are serious, paid-up Christians than did the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard with the Azande of the Northern Sudan, whose beliefs about magic, oracles and witchcraft were totally alien to him. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard is on record as saying that ‘I found it strange at first to live among Azande and listen to native explanations of misfortunes which, to our minds, have apparent causes, but after a while I learned the idiom of their thought and applied notions of witchcraft as spontaneously as themselves in situations where the concept was relevant’; and what is more, ‘I always kept a supply of poison for the use of my household and neighbours and we regulated our affairs in accordance with the oracles’ decisions. I may remark that I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of.’8

So: however difficult it may be to establish what a fellow human being is ‘really’ thinking and therefore doing, it is always possible to identify not only the traits characteristic of an alien culture but the practices defining the roles by which institutions and societies remote in both time and place are constituted. There is, for example, no problem in equating the ‘brothers-in-arms’ whom we find swearing allegiance to each other in late medieval England9 with the male hetairoi (‘companions’) who associated together with the same common objective of martial glory and lucrative plunder in archaic Greece many centuries earlier and miles away: in status-conscious, warlike, agrarian societies, young men without land of their own or a powerful patron have an evident incentive to join together in this way, whatever may be the other differences in both their cultural and their social environment. Likewise, when the French historian Fernand Braudel, in his magisterial study of the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century, reports the way in which the Spaniards treated the fellow-members of their society who were of Muslim descent, he himself equates it with the treatment of blacks by poor whites in the southern states of America; and there is no difficulty in identifying cases from a wide range of places and times where a dominant ethnic or religious group discriminates against a subordinate one in the same immediately recognizable way.10

No less easy to find are cases where the same pattern of social behaviour can be observed in two different societies but with a difference in the function which it performs in each. If you look at ancient Roman society during its expansion by conquest in the first and second centuries BC, you will find free men fighting in the legions and slaves cultivating the large agricultural estates; but if you look at some no less warlike Islamic societies of the Middle East a few centuries later, you will find free men cultivating the land and armies made up of slaves. This, admittedly, gives scope for some unproductive argument over the precise definition of ‘slavery’. Is the role of a slave soldier in an Islamic infantry regiment ‘really’ to be equated with that of a purchased chattel-slave in a Roman chain-gang? But, as always with such comparisons, the answer is not to quibble about the terms but to look at the practices which define the role. When you do – and the evidence is, in this instance, both abundant and reliable enough for the purpose – you will find that the institutional rules are such as in both cases to deny unequivocally to the ‘slave’ the power over his own person which attaches to the roles of the men who are institutionally defined as ‘free’. And from comparisons like these there emerges the distinction, as important in sociology as in biology, between homologues (similarities of form) and analogues (similarities of function). The Roman slave is the homologue of the Islamic soldier and the analogue of the Islamic cultivator; the Islamic slave is the homologue of the Roman cultivator and the analogue of the Roman soldier. If this prompts you to ask: but what about combining the functions in a single role?, the answer is: yes, there are some of those too. In societies as far apart in time and place as seventh-century T’ang China, medieval Saxony, fourteenth-century Prussia under the ‘Teutonic Knights’, seventeenth-century Sweden, and eighteenth-century Russia you will find ‘farmer-soldier’ roles, in which the practices of smallholding and militia service were combined. And this illustrates another point common to biological and sociological theory: evolution can come about through recombination, as well as mutation, of the units of selection.

Anyone observing a human society, including the observer’s own, will not only be curious about some more than other aspects of the social behaviour of its members, but curious about one level of social behaviour rather than another. If you have chosen to study work-groups in a factory, or schoolchildren in a classroom, or doctors and their patients in a hospital you will be engaging in a different sort of project from what you will be doing if you want to study a society’s institutions as such – its economy, or its type of government, or its form of organized religion. But not totally different. You can’t study groups, however small, without taking account of the institutional context of the behaviour you are studying, and you can’t study institutions, however large, without taking account of the behaviour of individual incumbents of specific roles. The leading British sociologist David Lockwood pointed out in an influential article published in 1964 that ‘system’ integration – i.e., stability in the relations between institutions – is quite different from ‘social’ integration – i.e., stability in the relations between groups.11 You may very well find that in the society you are studying there is much more of one than of the other: in societies as far apart as, for example, nineteenth-century Haiti and Egypt under the Mamluks, consistently high levels of inter-group hostility and violence were maintained within a largely unchanged set of economic, ideological and political institutions.12 But you can’t prise the two apart. You are always looking at the behaviour of people in roles; and there is not, and never will be, a society in which it is impossible to identify those roles or to trace their relations to each other at both the group and the institutional level.

Once, however, you have identified the society’s constituent roles, you may want to proceed in either of two very different directions. You may, on the one hand, want to go on to ask ‘why are these roles as they are?’ (a question which itself, as we shall see in a moment, can be interpreted in several different ways). Or you may, on the other hand, want to ask ‘what is it like to be one of the people occupying and performing one of these roles?’ This second question, obviously, is one which doesn’t arise at all in physics or chemistry. Not that it only arises in the study of the behaviour of human beings: some of the most remarkable recent research into the social behaviour of primates is directed precisely to establishing how far they do or don’t attribute to each other minds like their own.13 But this book is about the social behaviour of humans, and therefore organisms with minds which have the inborn capacity for all the richness and subtlety of language as spoken only by us. And it is this which gives the question ‘what is it like to be a whatever-you-are?’ not only its perennial interest but also its peculiar difficulties.

Unconvinced readers, fresh perhaps from ‘postmodernist’ texts, may protest that since I have already conceded the difficulty of establishing beyond argument what somebody else is ‘really’ thinking, I am hardly entitled to claim that even the most experienced sociologist can ever test an account of what is going on inside other people’s heads in the way that an explanatory hypothesis about the externally visible influences on other people’s externally visible behaviour can be tested if the requisite evidence is there. But there are two answers to this. First, the way to test a description of someone else’s subjective experience is to try it out on that person; unless that person is deliberately seeking to mislead, as one or more of those teenage Samoan girls appear to have deliberately deceived the gullible Margaret Mead, the observer’s description can be progressively expanded and refined to accord with what the person is willing to confirm as authentic. Second, in explanation just as much as in description, there comes a point at which, to borrow a metaphor from Wittgenstein, the spade is turned; children quickly discover that if they respond to every answer to a question ‘why?’ with another ‘why?’, the adult interlocutor is soon helpless. No sociologist – or psychologist – claims to be able literally to recreate the mental state of one person inside the mind of another. No heterosexual lover who has ever interrogated a partner about exactly what it feels like at the moment of orgasm will need to be told that empathy has a limit. But it would be absurd to conclude that different people can convey nothing to each other about the nature of their different subjective experiences. Indeed, it is sometimes the very incommensurability of subjective experience which can be deployed to good rhetorical effect. If a friend who has recently been bereaved says to you, ‘My sense of desolation was more all-consumingly painful than you can possibly imagine’, this may help you to understand the experience – understand it, that is, in the empathic, descriptive sense – better than any other words your friend might have chosen instead.

But however conducted, the exercise is a quite different one from the formulation of an explanatory hypothesis with which to account for the behaviour in question. It not only employs different techniques, but appeals to different standards, is open to different criticisms, and follows different rules. What’s more, the description of a pattern of social behaviour as experienced by those whose behaviour it is may be not only at variance from, but in flat contradiction with, the hypothesis which turns out to explain it correctly. Nor is there anything to be surprised at in this, since, as any psychologist will tell you, all of us are likely to be mistaken about the causes of our own behaviour. Not totally, perhaps, and not always. But often enough for the disjunction between why we do what we do and what it is like for us to do it to be as important a feature of our social lives as any of the large-scale crises and upheavals for which sociologists studying our behaviour may be lying in wait at the institutional or societal level.

Descriptions of subjective experience, particularly at the cultural level, have traditionally been the domain of anthropologists rather than sociologists. But the division of labour between the two is largely conventional. Anthropologists tend to study alien cultures by living in them for a year or two and then reporting to their uninitiated compatriots on the curious habits and customs of the Azande, !Kung San, Eskimos, Hopi Indians, or whoever it may be. Nothing prevents them from doing the same back home. You can do fieldwork in Totnes as well as Tahiti. But as the range of such studies has broadened and their methods been refined, so has there increased the volume of debate on the same dilemma as arises from the travels of Herodotus or the arrival in Hawaii of Captain Cook. ‘They’ see the world very differently from the way in which ‘we’ do, and believe very different things about it. So what are the right terms for ‘us’ to use in describing ‘them’? Ours or theirs?

If the question is put that way, the answer has to be ‘theirs’. But it’s a mistake to put it that way. It’s true that anyone studying a society remote in either place or time from their own is likely to have to grasp ideas and beliefs very different from the culture in which they themselves were reared. But the measure of their success is precisely their ability to translate them back, as Evans-Pritchard and many other anthropologists have done, into terms comprehensible to ‘us’; and the fact that it can be done is a conclusive demonstration that ‘we’ and ‘they’ are both variants of that same universal human nature acknowledged by Herodotus within which we and they are neither more nor less peculiar than each other. When, therefore, the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz enjoins his fellow-anthropologists in a much-quoted article to ‘hawk the anomalous’ and ‘peddle the strange’,14 he is denying the very presupposition which legitimates his own professional practice. Who’s more exotic, Professor? You or them? What makes those Balinese cockfights you’re telling us about15 any more anomalous or strange than those baseball games at the Yankee Stadium? And while you’re about it, perhaps you can help us to understand an anomalous society like yours in which the topmost political role can be occupied by a former Grade B movie actor of limited intelligence called ‘Ron’ whose schedule is arranged for him by his wife under the guidance of an astrologer, and a strange culture like yours whose inherited complex of myths and symbols includes a pervasive totemic cult of an anthropomorphized duck called ‘Donald’ and an anthropomorphized mouse called ‘Mickey’.

Geertz’s article is called ‘Anti-anti-relativism’ because his perfectly legitimate concern is to emphasize how very different from one another different cultures and societies are. But the title is a pity all the same since relativism is a problem in philosophy – or, more strictly, in epistemology – rather than anthropology and sociology. The reason is simple. Any practising anthropologist or sociologist who takes epistemological relativism seriously has no option but to quit work. It’s one thing to recognize that ‘our’ beliefs and values are not inherently privileged over ‘theirs’, but quite another to conclude that ‘we’ can therefore never make meaningful judgements of any kind about ‘them’. What’s the point of going out to do fieldwork among either the Balinese or the North Americans if all you’re going to be able to come back with is an arbitrary description in untranslatable terms of their unreachable ideas about their illusory culture? If there is any pay-off from ‘anti-anti-relativism’, it is that it re-emphasizes the precept that since the results of anthropological, as of any other, research are a function not only of the evidence but of the assumptions with which the researcher approaches it, you had better be careful not to take your assumptions for granted. The dictum that ‘the point of view creates the object’ – which it does in natural and social science alike – may not have much immediate impact on the research of, say, a demographer who just wants to know by how much the Chinese birth-rate is going up or down or a political scientist who just wants to know how many female American voters have voted for one presidential candidate rather than another. It’s obviously more relevant where the research is of the kind which can be vitiated by the unexamined assumptions of observers like those white men who didn’t think to ask the Ashanti about the role of their Queen Mother. But to point that out is not to undermine the status of anthropology as a serious academic discipline. On the contrary: it’s all part of encouraging the next generation of anthropologists to get the cultures they choose to study more nearly right.

What, then, is the difference between getting it right in the explanatory (‘why?’) and the descriptive (‘what is it like?’) sense? Imagine yourself first to be a sociologist or anthropologist, whether in Totnes or Tahiti, trying to clinch the validity of a powerful-seeming explanatory hypothesis about ‘their’ behaviour which has dawned on you, and then to be the same sociologist or anthropologist trying to make sure that a convincing-looking description of it which you have put together from your field-notes is truly authentic. As the first, you will be looking, ideally, for a decisive piece of evidence – an artefact, a document, a set of statistics, an observed pattern or sequence of behaviour – which will rule out alternative explanations but accord with your own. But as the second, you will be collecting a whole range of ancillary observations which will cumulatively reinforce the impression of ‘what it was like’ which you want to convey to your readers. If one of Professor Geertz’s students were to say to him, ‘I’ve read your article, but I still can’t imagine taking cockfights as seriously as the Balinese do’, Geertz’s best tactic would be to load the student up with further details, other firsthand accounts, apposite metaphors or similies, and parallels from the student’s own culture – including, perhaps, a baseball game at the Yankee Stadium – until the message finally gets home.

There’s another revealing symptom of the difference, too. Explanation typically involves spotting a presumptively causal connection – without agriculture no feudalism, or whenever capitalism then democracy, or the Second World War because previously the First World War. But description typically involves what Wittgenstein calls ‘seeing as’.16 I cited Wittgenstein earlier as a philosopher whose fanciful examples of social behaviour, useful as they may be to philosophers concerned with the meaning of meaning, are useless if not positively misleading for practising sociologists or anthropologists. But on the mental process of ‘seeing as’, as he expounds it in his Philosophical Investigations, what he has to say is directly to the point. As an example (mine, not his), imagine yourself looking at a bulky, upright Remington typewriter of about the year 1900, and trying to see it as it would have been seen in the year in which it was made – as, that is, a piece of exciting, novel, up-to-the-minute, state-of-the-art technology. Can you do it? Try as I may, I’m not sure that I can. But the imaginative exercise required is the same as when an anthropologist tries to see a totem pole or a rain dance or an animal sacrifice or a Disney cartoon as ‘they’ see them. You don’t do it by tracing the sequence of causes and effects which has made the objects of your curiosity what they are. You do it by bringing to bear your knowledge of the cultural context in which they occur and the language employed by the native informants whom you have interrogated about their significance to ‘them’. And, once again, it’s no different for a Balinese anthropologist trying to understand (in the emphatic, descriptive, ‘what-is-it-like?’ sense) a baseball game at the Yankee Stadium than for Professor Geertz trying to understand a Balinese cockfight.

Suppose, however, that seeing things as ‘they’ see them entails acceptance of beliefs which ‘we’ know to be false (or at any rate think we know to be false – the point stands even if we later decide that we were wrong). Let’s go back to Evans-Pritchard among the Azande. He finds it quite easy to behave as if he shared their beliefs. But he can’t and therefore doesn’t actually share them, and he therefore can’t, whatever further enquiries he makes, see the poison oracle as they do, any more than I can see the wafer in the hand of the Catholic priest as the body of Christ. Does it matter? No, it doesn’t – not for the purposes of sociology. We don’t have to share their beliefs in order to grasp their meaning to them and convey it to you, our readers. You don’t, I assume, share any more than Herodotus did the belief of his Scythian informants that every member of the Neurian tribe is a once-a-year werewolf. But you can still grasp the concept (and enjoy the movie, too, if you don’t find it too scary). Indeed, think what would happen if sociologists and anthropologists did all come to share the beliefs of the people whose patterns of behaviour they had been studying. They could only explain the behaviour correctly if the correct explanation had already been arrived at by those whose behaviour it was. And how often would that be?

What’s more, this applies as much if not more when the beliefs in question are those of rulers, activists and decision-makers as when they are those of sociology professors. Rulers, activists and decision-makers all have explanations of their own of why the societies to which they belong are as they are as well as prescriptions of their own about how their societies ought to be changed for what they consider to be the better. But their memoirs are notorious for their unreliability. Only the most unsophisticated reader will be any more disposed to take them at face value than Evans-Pritchard to agree with his Zande informants that their misfortunes are due to the fact that one or more of their neighbours is a witch. But as you read the selective and tendentious reminiscences of important people, from Julius Caesar and before to Winston Churchill and since, and contrast them in your mind with the accounts of the same events given by uninvolved observers who have sought to test alternative possible explanations against one another, don’t you at the same time find the disjunction between the two entirely comprehensible? As a species, we are not only a compulsively social but a compulsively self-justifying animal, and the autobiographies of politicians need to be checked for their veracity and lack of misleading insinuations and omissions no less carefully than those of philosophers do (Bertrand Russell’s is a classic in this regard).17 But the disjunction between what it felt like to the autobiographer at the time, and how it is going to be explained by revisionist professors fifty years after the autobiographer’s death, is not a reason to question that that was what it felt like. The sociologist studying the societies in which the Great and Good (or Bad) occupied and performed their political roles may be as curious about the one as about the other, and increasingly struck by the irony inherent in the discrepancy between the two. But the discrepancy doesn’t of itself make it any more difficult to arrive at an authentic description or a valid explanation – or both. On the contrary, understanding the delusions of grandeur that led to the downfall of Croesus or Louis Napoleon or Margaret Thatcher may make the causes of it all the easier to see.