BiosocialB ecomingsIntegrating Social anclBiologicalAnthropology

Edited byTIM INGOLDDepartrnent ofAnthropology,University ofAberdeen

and

GISLI PALSSONDepartment ofAnthropology,University oficeland

CAMBRID SEUNIVERSITY PRESS

viii Preface

We would like to thank the EASA and the organizers at Maynoothwho offered us a platform for the lively discussions that took place. Wealso thank Cambridge University Press and their anonymous reviewers T I M I N G 0 L D

who warmly embraced the concept we promised. Finally, we thank ouruniversities for financial support.

i

Tim Ingold and Gisli PalssonAberdeen and Reykjavik Prospect

DEATH OF A PARADIGM

Neo-Darwinism is dead. The paradigin that has long dictated the terms ofaccommodation between the sciences of life, mmd, society and culturehas been brought down by the weight ofits own internal contradictions,by the manifest circularity ofits explanations, and by the steadfast refusalof human and other organisms to conform to the straitjacket that itsarchitects had created for them. This is not to deny mat it continues toenjoy massive public, political and financial support Its leading protagonists are among the biggest ‘names’ in science. In a market-driven environment, they have become celebrities and their doctrines have becomebrands. They have run a propaganda machine ffiat has been adroit inplaying to popular stereotypes and ruthless in the suppression ofclissenting voices, variously dismissed as ifi-informed, politically motivated ortemperamentally hostile to science. Some adherents of the neoDarwinian creed have feigned puzzlement as to why so many scholarsin the social sciences and the humanities refuse to sign up to it. This hasbeen attributed, variously, to disciplinary myopia, sheer prejudice, or meallure of such fads and fashions as post-modernism, relativism and socialconstructionism (Perry and Mace 2010). The one possibffitythat adherentscannot countenance, however, is mat their critics - many of whom aremore widely read in the histories and philosophies ofscience and societyman they are, and have thought long and hard about the conditions andpossibilities oflcnowing and being in the one world we all inliabit - mighthave good reasons to find the paradigm wanting. To admit as muchwould, after all, be to question the veiy foundations of their own belief.

Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social aud Biological Anthropology, eds T. Ingold aud G. Palsson.

Published by Cambridge University Press. © Cambridge University Press 2013.

2 Tini Ingold

Rather than seeking to counter the critical arguments that have beenlevelled against it, their strategy throughout has been to question theintelligence, competence and integrity ofthose who articulate thein. Thisstrategy marks the paradigm out as a form not of science but offundamentalism.

In a nutshell, neo-Darwinjsm rests on the claim that variationunder natural selecdon is both necessary and sufficient to explain theevolution of living things. This is not, as its advocates never tire ofreminding us, a claim of genetic determinisni. It does not presupposethat the units that are transmitted from generation to generation, andwhose mutation, recombinatjon and differential propagation are supposed to account for evolutionary change, are genes. The only conditionsare that these units should be replicable and should encode information.When it comes to humans, for whom so much ofwhat they do and knowis ostensibly learned rather than innate, and to a lesser extent perhaps formany non-hurnan creatures as well, it would appear that much informadon is transrnitted cross-generadonajiy by means other than geneticreplication. Those who would integrate the human sciences into theneo-Darwinian fold have co-opted the notion of culture to refer to thisinformational component, arguing that its transmission attests to a second track of inheritance, running in parallel to the first track ofgeneticinherjtance (Levinson 2009, Ellen 2010; see Palsson, Chapter 12, thisvolume). By analogy to genes, the replicating units of the second trackhave been christened ‘memes’. Neo-Darwjnjans are themselves dlividedon the issue ofprecisely how these tracks intersect, ifat all. Sonie, writingunder the banner of evolutionary psychology, would say that the innatearchitecture ofthe human mmd, shaped through the natural selection ofgenetically prescribed attributes under enviromnental conditionsencountered by our most remote ancestors, strongly constrains thekinds of informatjon that can be received, processed and passed on, andtherefore imposes strict limits on the forrns oftransmitted culture (Toobyand Cosmides 1992, Sperber 1996). Others, keen to establish a new fleld of‘memetics’, argue that memes can take over the mmd much as a parasitecan take over its host, and that they will be differentiaJ.ly represented in aculture to the extent that they cause the infected host to behave in waysconducive to infecting everyone else (Blackmore 2000). Either way, thereappear to be two processes of evolution taking place at once, biologicaland cultural, by way ofthe variatjon and selection of, respectively, genesand memes (Durham 1991, Richerson and Boyd 2008).

This is the view ofbiology and culture, and oftheir co-evolution,that upholders of the neo-Darwiniarj paradigm like to present as on

Prospectthe cutting edge ofscience For them, it offers the promjse ofa unifiedapproach that would accommodate the endre spectrum ofthe humansciences under one roof. A symposium staged in London in june 2010,entjtled Culture Evolves, purported to crown it with the unqualjfiedapproval of the scientjfic establishment The meeting was one of aseries ofevents celebrating 350 years since the founding ofthe RoyalSociety, and was co-sponsored by the Society and the British Academy.It would be hard to iniagine a more high-profjie or prestigious platform for launching what modern science has to say about culture andits evolutjon. The synopsis for the meeting read as follows:

The capacity for culture is a product ofbiologjcal evolution — yet cultureitselfcan also evolve, generating cuJ.turai phylogenies. This highlyinterdisciplinaiy joint meeting will address new discoverjes andcontroversjes illuminating these phenomena, from the roots ofculturein the animal kingdom to human, cultural evolutionary trees and thecognitjve adaptatioru shaping our special cultural nature.’

It is perhaps no accident that among the distingujshed speakers, whoincluded psychologists, ethologjsts primatologists archaeologists andbiological anthropolog-jsts, mere was not a single representative fromsocial or cultural anthropology. For the language in which this synopsisis couched - including the divisions between biology and culture andbetween innate capacity and acquired content, the notion ofevolutjonas a designer and shaper of products, and the idea (implicit in theconcepts of cultural phylogeny and cognitive adaptation) mat thethoughts and actions of living beings are orchestrated and controlledby programs assembled from particles oftransn-ütted information carned around in their heads - is one that belongs, in the annals ofthediscip]jne, to a bygone era. Indeed it has long since been exposed as asham by critical anthropologjsts who have drawn attentjon to thepolitics ofknowledge mat sets modern science and enhightened scientists over and above evolved culture and its supposedly traditjonalcarniers. If the purveyors of this language were to take a taste of theirown medicine, by treating their science as an evolved cognitive adaptation and its histoiy as a line ofphylogenetjc descent, what possiblecredence could we attach to it?

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Indeed the very first sentence ofthe synopsis for Culture Evolves, thoughadvanced as a proposition whose truth is seif-evident and beyondquestion, is manifestly false on three counts. First, the notion matthere exists an evolved ‘capacity for culture’, universally present inhumans in advance ofthe diverse content with which it is subsequentlyfihled, is a classic example of what the phiosopher Whitehead (1926)called ‘rnisplaced concreteness’ — an essentialism that fallaciouslyassigns a material presence, in human bodies and minds, to abstractions bom of our own analytic attempts to establish a basehine ofcommensurability mat would render all humans comparable interms of similarities and differences. Under the guise of this capacity,evolutionary science projects onto our prehistoric forbears an idealized image of our present selves, crediting mem with me potentials todo everytbing we can do today, such mat the whole ofhistory appearsas but a naturally preordained ascent towards meir reahization inmodemity. This is hardly a new view, having already been articulatedin strikingly similar terms in the eighteenth century by minkers oftheEnlightenment whose project contemporary evolutionary psychologists, ignorant of the history of their own science, appear unwittinglyto be recapitulating. Secondly, the opposition between me biologicaland me cultiiral is incoherent. It effectively reduces the biological tome innate, by contraposition to cultural forms allegedly acquired bynon-genetic means, thus excluding from ‘biology’ the entire gamut ofontogenetic or developmental processes by which humans and otheranimals become skilled in the conduct ofparticular forms oflife, whiletreating these skilis, in so far as mey vary between populations, as nomore man me outward expressions of an informational supplementsupphied by transmitted culture. Thirdly, and foilowing froin this, thenotion of cultural phylogenies rests on an obsolete model of transmission. Linked as it is to a genealogical model mat separates meacquisition of knowledge-as-inforination from its practical enactment,it is iii suited to describe the ways in which humans and non-humansordinarily come to know what they do, which, as many studies haveconfirmed, is rather through a process of growth and guidedrediscovery.

What, ffien, is culture? Does culture evolve? On me first score, wewould say that culture is me name ofa question, but it is not the answer.The question is: why does hife, especially human life, take such manifold forms? To answer mat these forms are due to culture is patently

Prospect

circular. The neo-Darwinjan paradigrn, applied to cultural as to biological evolution, is locked in this circularity. Despite much vauntedclaims to me contrary, mose who work within the paradigm have comeup with absolutely nothing by way of an answer to me question ofculture. Their procedure is ramer to re-describe complex and multifaceted, ‘phenotypic’ outcomes in crudely one-diinensjonal terms byexcluding all contextually specific or so-cahled ‘proximal’ aspects matcould potentially contrjbute to an answer, such as intentions, sensibjlities, the affordances of the environment, socio-hjstorjcal conditions,and the dynamics of ontogenetic development. The idea is to come upwith a model ofobserved behaviour, a ‘cuhture-type’ (strictly analogousto the ‘genotype’ ofbiohogy), mat is entirely context-independent It ismen supposed mat this model is pre-installed inside the heads ofindividual carriers whence it is ahleged to generate the described outcomes under me particular environmental or contextuah conditjonsthey happen to encounter. Thus, in effect, is culture ‘ultimately’explained by culture. And the logical operator by which descriptionsare converted into explanations, or behavioural outcomes into cognitive dispositions, is none omer than variatjon under natural selection,here apphied to culturally ramer man genetically transmitted particiesofinformation, memes rather man genes. Of course mere is no denying that signs, words and ideas proliferate in me niilieu whereinhuman hives are carried on, just as the hengths of DNA comprising thegenome prollferate in the multicelhuhar matrix within which organicforms germinate and grow. The logic of natural selection, however,requires mat these signs, words and ideas, like segments of megenome, come pre-encoded with information which specifies the practices or attributes mat contrjbute to their prohiferatjon. This is themove mat cioses the hoop of Darwiniari explanation. Yet mere is noknown mechanism by which meaning can jump into minds or molecules in advance ofthejr instfflatjon into me life process.

Neo-Darwinjan meotists have three ways of covering up meehision of explanans and explanandum entailed in this hogic. One is toprevaricate over the meaning of evolution itself. At one moment itrefers to changes in m~ relative frequencies with which ahlegedly selfreplicating entities such as genes or memes are represented in a population; at me next to changes in manifest forms of hife. Thus by asleight ofhand, it is made to appear as ifhaving exphained me one, youhave explained the omer. Anomer way is to confiate, under the conceptof the ‘gene’ or ‘meme’, materiah instantiations (whemer genomic orneural) with ehements of a formal character description, commonhy

DOES CULTUR~ EVOLVE?

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known as ‘traits’ (Moss 2003). It is this confiation that supports theillusjon that segments of DNA, or their neural equivalents, encode apriori for particular practices or attributes, such mat genes or memescan be said to be for this or that. A third way is to partition the questionofhow things evolve from the question ofhow they grow or develop, asthough ontogenesis were an entirely tangential spin-offfrorn the evolutionary process itseif. Thus it appears mat biological evolution isactually the evolution of the genotype, and cultural evolution theevolution of the ‘culture-type’. Yet in the real world mere are nogenotypes and no ‘culture-types’. They are models built up afterthe fact, constructs of retrospective analysis. It follows mat neitherbiological nor cultural evolution - as understood within me neoDarwinian paradigm — can occur in the world mat organisms or persons actually inhabit. Such evolution can only occur in me space ofabstract representations.

wim tbis conclusion in niind, we can return to me second ofthetwo questions posed above: ‘Does culture evolve?’Clearly, in me realworld, mere is no such entity as ‘culture’ which could conceivably besaid to evolve, let alone to be a product of evolution. Yet in so far asforms and practices change, over longer or shorter periods of time,mere is no doubt mat evolution, ofa kind, does go on in this world. Wecould even argue mat in me dynamics ofthis evolutionaryprocess, andin me forms mat anse wimin it, we can find possible answers to mequestion of culture: ‘why does human life take 50 many, and suchvaried forms?’ However this means minking quite differently notonly about culture, but also about evolution.

ON HUMAN BECOMINGS

Evolution, in our view, does not lie in me mutation, recombination,replication and selection oftransmissible traits. It is ramer a life process. And at me heart of this process is ontogenesis. The failure toaccount for the ontogenetic emergence of phenotypic form is meAchilles heel of me entire neo-Darwinian paradigm. For it has proceeded as if me form were already mere, prefigured in me virtualspace of me genotype or its cultural equivalent. The work of ontogenesis, men, is reduced to one ofmere transcription, ofthe prefiguredform or design into me material substrate of organic matter, or whatused to be called ‘protoplasm’. This way ofminldng about me creationof mings, whemer living or artefactual, has been wim us ever sinceAristotle, in DeAnima, introduced his distinction between form (morphe)

and matter (hyle), arguing mat me thing itself is a result of the combination ofme two. This so-called ‘hylomorphic’ model of creation is forexample invoked, for me most part quite unreflectively, wheneverbiologists declare mat the organism is me product of an interactionbetween ‘genes’ and ‘enviromnent’. The genes are introduced into theequation as carriers of received information, which is supposed toorder and arrange me formiess, ‘plasmic’ material ofme environmentin the acmalization ofme phenotypic product. Applied to culture, thelogic is just the same, and just as deep-seated in the western intellectualtradlition. The only difference is mat me information is carried in mevirtual space of memes rather than genes — mat is, in a space of ideasmat are imagined somehow to have entered into people’s heads, withmefr meanings already attached, independently and in advance ofanypractical involvement in the world ofmaterials. Whemer wim genes ormemes, the fallacy of this way of thinking lies in supposing me formmiraculously precedes the processes that give rise to it (Oyama 1985).And me way to overcome the fallacy is simply to reverse me order, so asto give primacy to me processes ofontogenesis - to me fluxes and fiowsofmaterials entailed in making and growing - over me forms mat ansewitbin mem. Though the solution may be simple, however, me implications are profound.

We are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as ‘human beings’.The term, however, hides a paradox mat is apparent as soon as we stopto ask why we do not also speak of ‘elephant beings’ or ‘mouse beings’.Are not elephants just elephants and mice just mice? By the sametoken, as individuals of the species Homo sapiens, are not humans justhumans? The catch is mat humans (and elephants, and mice) canappear as such only to a mmd that has already set itself on apedestal, over and above me natural world mat appears to unfold likea tapestry beneath its sovereign purview. What such a mmd sees,among other things, are human beings. And yet in me assumption ofthis sovereign position, unattainable to elephants and mice, is held toreside me essence of what it means to be human. It is on me basis of aclaim to universal humanity, defined in me first place by me possession of reason and conscience, mat science authorizes its conception ofhuman beings as comprising just another — albeit ramer remarkable -

species of nature. The notion of culture, men, emerges as a compromise, as me condition of beings mat, while mey have broken mebounds ofnature, nevertheless remain encapsulated, in meir thoughtand practice, within me constraints of received tradition. Betweenspecies of organisms and the scientists who study mem, between

i 1111 Å1Å5tJÅ~L

nature and reason, human cultures figure as a middlle der in the overallscheme ofthings, above the former and below the latter. The very concept ofte human, then, is fundamentally duplicitous: the product of an‘anthropological machine’ (Agamben 2004) that relentlessly drives US

apart, in our capacity for self-knowledge, from the continuum oforganiclife within which our existence is encompassed, and leaving the majoritystranded in an impasse. To break out ofte impasse, we contend, calls fornothing less than a dismantling of the machine. And the first step indoing so is to tbink ofhumans, and indeed ofcreatures ofall other kinds,in terms not ofwhat they are, bUt ofwhat they do.

Another way of putting this, which lies at the foundations ofwhat we attempt in this book, is to think of ourselves not as beingsbUt as becomings — that is, not as discrete and pre-formed entities but astrajectories of movement and growth. Humanity, we argue, does notcome with the territory, from the mere fact of species membership orfrom having been bom into a particular culture or society. It is rathersomething we have continually to work at, and for which, therefore,we bear the responsibility (Ingold 2011: 7). Life is a task, and it is one inwhich we have, perpetually, never-endingly and collaboratively, to becreating ourselves. Each of Us ~5 instantiated in the world along acertain way of life or ‘line of becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004:323), understood not as a COrpUS ofreceived tradition but as a pat to befollowed, along which one can keep on going, and which oters willfollow in their turn. ThUS unlike te incongruous hybrids of biologyand culture created by te anthropological machine and conventionally known as human beings, hUman becomings continually forgeteir ways, and guide te ways of consociates, in the crucible of theircommon life. In so doing, they weave a kind of tapestry. But like lifeitself, te tapestry is never complete, never finished. It is always workin progress. Within it, we may recognize patterns, rhythms and regularities, and perhaps we might use te term ‘culture’ to refer to these.This is to acknowledge, however, tat cultural forms anse within theweave of life, in conjoint activity. And evolution? This can only beunderstood topologically, as te unfolding ofte endre tapestry — ofte all-embracing matnix of relationships wherein te manifold formsof life tat we cali ‘cultural’ emerge and are held in place. Witin thismatrix, the becoming of every constituent bot conditions and is conditioned by te becomings of other constituents to which ti relates.These mutually conditioning relations togeter comprise what we cancall an ontogenetic or developmental system. Forms of life then, areneither genetically nor culturally preconfigured but emerge as

properties ofdynamic self-organization of developmental systems. Andevolution is teir derivational history.

That life unfolds as a tapestry of mutually conditioning relationsmay be summed up in a single word, social. All life, in this sense, issocial. Yet all life, too, is biological, in te sense that it entails processesof organic growth and decomposition, metabolism and respiration,brought about through fiuxes and exchanges of materials across themembranous surfaces of its emergent forms. It follows that everytrajectory of becoming issues fort within a field tat is intrinsicallysocial and biological, or in short, biosocial. That is why we speak ofhumans, in this volume, not as species beings but as biosocial becomings. We admit tat the terminological compression of ‘social’ and‘biological’ into ‘biosocial’ is far from ideal, since te word remainstainted by connotations ofhybridity and mixture, as tough one couldforge te human by taking a given quantum ofbiology and addling to tia complement devolved from a superior source in society. It has longbeen argued, by social and biological theonists alike, tat humans —

perhaps uniquely among animals - have a split-level constitution, partbiological, part social, and tat only by putting te two parts togetercan we arrive at a comprehensive account of te whole. What weintend wit the ‘biosocial’, however, is precisely te reverse. Ourclaim is not tat the biological and te social are complementary, ortat tey pertain respectively to te level of discrete individuals and totat ofte wider groupings into which tey are incorporated, but tatthere is no division between tem. The domains of’ the social and thebiological are one and the same. But nor is tis a reductionist claim. Weare not reducing te social to te biological, or vice versa. The life of abecorning (which is also, of course, te becorning of a life) could becompared to a hempen rope, twisted from multiple strands, temselves twisted from multiple fibres, each in turn twisted from itscellular and molecular constituents. It could, in principle, be examinedclose up or from afar, microscopically or macroscopically. But at everylevel ofresolution we find te same complexity, te same intertwiningoftreads, te same metabolic exchange. Like te rope, te becomingis biological all te way up, and social ali te way down.

TOwARDSAGENERALTHEORYOFEVOLUTION

The scale of the retinking we are calling for here can scarcely beoverestiwated. It is not a matter of tinkering around te edges, or ofadding a few more varieties of selection or tracks of inheritance, to

?rospect

complicate the standard neo-Darwinian picture. It is to rebuild ourunderstanding of life and its evolution, and of our human selves, onentirely different ontological foundations. Without wishing to attachtoo much weight to the analogy, it is akin to the replacement ofciassical mechanics by the general theory of relativity. For most mundane purposes, Newton’s laws of motion work well enough, since anydifferences between the results obtained from the application oftheselaws and from the principles established by Einstein would be vanishingly small. Likewise we can observe, as Darwin did (1872: 403), ffiatwhile the planets have carried on in their revolutions around the sunjust as Newton decreed they should, so - through the process ffiatDarwin called ‘descent with modification’ - the most varied and wonderful forms have continued to evolve. But if this is to disregard thecurvature of time and space brought about through gravitational mass,it is also to proceed as though every organism were a discrete entity,destined to act and react in a virtual space-time continuum in accordwith its received attributes. Where for Newton the universe was a giantclock, for Darwin natural selection was a maker of watches, albeitwithout the intention to do so (Dawkins 1986). This mechanical conception of a clockwork world suffices as a rough approximation, solong as we keep our thinking selves well out of it. But once it isrecognized that we too, in body and mmd, are of the same flesh asthe world, that there is no way of thinking or knowing that is not, inthat sense, directed from within that which we seek to know, and thatthis knowing, in the practice of our science, is part and parcel of theprocess of becoming that makes us who we are and shapes our veryhumanity, this approximation is immediately exposed as the artifice itis. It is not enough to have one theory (ofknowledge) for humanity andanother (ofbeing) for the rest ofliving nature. We need an evolutionaryequivalent of the general theory of relativity that would allow ourhuman trajectories ofgrowth and becoming - including those ofgrowing and becoming knowledgeable - to be re-woven into the fabric oforganic life.

What follows are just some ofthe things that would have to be atthe heart of any such theory. First, we can no longer think of theorganism, human or otherwise, as a discrete, bounded entity, set overagainst an environment. It is rather a locus of growth within a field ofrelations traced out in flows of materials. As such, it has no ‘inside’ or‘outside’. It is perhaps better imagined topologically, as a knot or tangleof interwoven lines, each of which reaches onward to where it willtangle with other knots. This means, too, that we have either to change

our understanding of the environment or to drop the concept altogether. Literally, an environment is mat which surrounds. But howcan a thing mat knows no boundaries, that continually takes themedium into itseif as it spifis into the medium - or more simply, matbreathes in and out - be surrounded? Indeed what we are accustomedto thinking ofas an environment might better be understood as a zoneof interpenetration. Within this zone, organisms grow to take on theforms they do, incorporating into themselves the lifelines of otherorganisms as they do so. Every organism is a site of infestation, a vastecosystem in itself, and humans - about 90% ofwhose celis are actuallybacteria or other micro-organisms - perhaps more man most. But meforms oforganisms, as we have seen, are not already prefigured withinthe genome, nor are mey simply transcribed into me plasmic materialsof life. The only ‘reading’ of the genome is the process of ontogeneticdevelopment itseif. In so far as the forms oforganisms anse within thisprocess, it may be described as evolutionary. The implication, however,is mat the conventional divisjon between ontogenesis and phylogenesis, or between within-generational changes mat anse in the course ofgrowth and maturadon and between-generational changes in the representatjon of heritable attributes, can no longer be sustained. Ourcontention, to me contrary, is mat me evolutionary process is carriedforward in the life-histories of organisms memselves, along meir linesof becoming.

This is to deny neither me existence of the genome, nor ffiatdifferential reproduction in a space of finite resources is likely to leadto population-level changes in its composition. In this limited sense,variation under natural selection is still going on within me process ofevolution. It is neimer necessary nor sufficient, however, to explain theprocess. In a sense, me problem of explanation is me precise reverse ofwhat it has conventionally been taken to be. It is not a question ofexplaining why forms change, despite being pegged down to a fixedgenetic template whose constituent units are copied wim remarkablefidelity across generations. It is rather one of explaining how formsremain the same, from generation to generation, in the absence ofanysuch pegs. The more we know about the genome, the more improbableit seems mat it could serve as an anchor for stability. Indeed it is hard tosee how the reproducibility of organic form could be attributed toanything as fluid, as liable to getting itself ded up in knots, as proneto alteration by retro-transposition, and as susceptible to me transfer ofbits and pieces back and forffi with the organism’s multiple and heterogeneous microbial symbionts, as me genome (Charney 2012). It is

- rrospect

moreover evident that evolution can occur without reference togenetic change at all (whether or not such change has actuallyoccurred), through cumulative transformations wrought through theactions ofthe organisms thernselves on the condlitions ofdevelopmentunder which they and their successors grow to maturity. We areentirely famillar with such evolution in the field of human relations.Ifwe do not recognize it as such, it is only because we are used to callingit history! It has been conventional to attribute evolution and history,respectively, to the two sides ofhumanity represented by human beingsand being human: as human beings, individuals of the species Homosapiens, we are said to have evolved; but in being human we are supposed to have embarked upon a process ofhistory that has set us everfurther from our biological origins. This divisjon between evolutionand history, in short, is just one more product of the anthropologicalmachine. To dismantle the machine, as we propose, is to do away withthe divisjon, and to install in its place a general theory ofthe evolutionofbiosocial becomings.

A BIO5OCIAL 5YNTHE SIS

We — the editors and contributing authors of this volume - areanthropologists. Most of US are what would conventionally be called‘social’ or ‘cultural’ anthropologists, though among our ranks arealso anthropologists of a ‘biological’ and even ‘philosophical’ stripe.All of us, though, would prefer to be rid of these tiresome labels. Asa discipline, anthropology has for the best part of a century beenriven by internal divisions mat have run along the fault linebetween the natural sciences and the humanities. Practitioners ofphysical or biological anthropology find themselves on one side;practitioners of social and cultural anthropology on the other. Forsone it has been too much. Academic departments have split; journals once committed to representing the entire spectrum of whatwas once conceived as an all-embracing science of humanity havenarrowed their remit more or less exclusively to the biophysical orme sociocultural. This fragmentation, we believe, is unfortunate. Ithas severely weakened the discipline, and diminished its voice. Curconcern is to counteract it, and to put forward a case for anthropology in the round. This is not a matter, however, of gluing the piecesback together. Our aim is rather to undo the logic that led to theirdivisjon in the first place. This is the logic, as we have seen, of theanthropological machine, a machine that drove the definition of

humanity as Homo duplex, a compound of the bio-psychological mdividual and the socio-cultural person. The first cracks in the complementarity mesis - namely, that by joining me individual and theperson you can recreate the whole - began to appear sone decadesago, with a number of studies in social anthropology that set outto show how the person js best understood relationally: not, mat is, asa predefined position within a social structure, with its attendantrights and responsibilities, which me individual has only to assumeas me actor assumes his role, but rather as a condensatjon of liveslived along with others. The person, according to this account, is not50 much a creature of society as an active and ongoing creator of hisor her own and omers’ selves. In the new language of relationality,mese person-selves are seen as ‘mutually constitutive’ (Ingold2001a).

No longer, then, could me social persona be regarded as a complementary ‘add on’ to the individual self. Rather, selves came to beunderstood as iinmanently social, in meir very constitution. They are,as Gisli Palsson puts it (Chapter 2), atter Marx, ‘ensembles of socialrelations’. This insight, however, is not confined to social meorists. Itis, as Palsson shows, amply bom out in me knowledge and practices ofindigenous peoples in many parts of the world, including meTsimshian, Inuit and Yup’ik peoples of me northwest Pacific andArctic coasts of North America. Noming belongs more closely to aparticular individual, or is more indexical ofhis or her identity, than aname. Yet among these peoples, as elsewhere, every name is itselfindicative ofa relation ofone kind or another. The ensemble ofnamesthat someone bears corresponds to me ensembie of relations in meunfolding ofwhich they become who they are, with their particularaffections, memories, skills and sensibilities. This kind of relationalmhamng, however, fiies in me face of the ‘population thinlcing’ mathas always defined me neo-Darwinian project, according to whichevery individual is a discrete, bounded and enumerable entity, oneof a population of such entities, and relating to other such entitiesalong lines of contact that leave its internally specified nature unaffected. Thus the advent of relational thinking replaced me complementarity mesis with an unstable compromise: not between two pai-tsof the human being, respectively social and biological, but betweentwo completely different ontologies of the human, respectively relational and populational. How could both be right? The sheer incommensurability of mese ontologies is largely responsible for mecurrent deadlock in negotiations between social and biological

anthropologists. To break the deadlock, we argue in this volume for aradically alternative biology. If only we could regard the organism,like the person, as an ensemble ofrelations - ifonly we could extendto biology some of the insights that have come from contemporarysocial anthropology - then we could open up a new synthesis in thestudy of biosocial relations infinitely more powerful than anythingmat has gone before.

To be fair to biology and to biological anthropology, the positionis not as polarized as the above account would suggest. Neo-Darwinismmay have caught the limelight, but it by no means commands universalassent. Manybiologists and even some biological anthropologists are asadamantiy opposed to its programrne as we are, and for very similarreasons. This is important to emphasize because the debate is oftenmisrepresentecj as for and against ‘science’. Our hostility, however, isto scientism. Science and scientism are quite different. The former is arich patchwork ofknowledge which comes in an astonishing variety ofdifferent forms. The latter is a doctrine, or a system ofbeliefs, foundedon the assertion mat scientiflc knowledge takes only one form, andmat this form has an unrivafled and universal claim to truth. Oneinstance ofscientism is the dogma mat natural selection alone explainsthe evolution oflife. Anyone who disputes this dogma is dismissed, byits more fùndamentalist adherents, as anti-scientific. Yet numberedamong these heretics are probably more practitioners of biologicalscience man scholars in the humanities. Thus within me discipline ofanthropology itselt me debate is not between biological anthropologists committed to science and social anthropologists who reject it; it israther between the cult of scientism and those who are prepared toadopt a more open-ended and less complacent approach to scientiflcinquiry. Agustin Fuentes (Chapter 3), by training and profession a biological anthropologist, offers a shining example ofhow current thinking in biology is opening up ways of thinking mat could expand upon,if not dispiace, neo-Darwinjan orthodoxy. He focuses on two in particular: niche constructjon and multiple inheritance theoiy. And in Chapter 4,Eugenia Ranlirez-coicoechea takes this further with her focus on epigenesis, me complex, sel&regulating process of life-in-me-makingwherein genomic materials have the effects they do. Bom aumorsshow how particular conditions, whether organisinic or environrnental, may be carried on or re-produced across generations wimoutrequiring mat mey be ‘pegged’ genetically, and how mese conditionsmay in turn be transformed mrough me situated activities of meorganisms memselves.

INTERMINGLING LIVE5

Å LLJaFICLL

Ramirez-Goicoechea’s emphasis on Iife as a process of making, ramerthan as a realization or expression of the ready-made, is key to ourconception of human and omer organisms as becoiuings. It implies,however, mat metaphors of inheritance and transmission have to betreated wiffi considerable caution. These metaphors are so deeplyentrenched in me biological imagination ffiat mey are hard to shakeoff. Clearly, in a loose sense we can speak of conditions being ‘passedon’: skilis, for example, may be produced anew in generation aftergeneration of craftsmen, and farmers may continue to work the fleidsthat mek ancestors once cleared from the forest. However, in describing the former as a form of ‘behavioural inheritance’ (Jablonka andLamb 2005), or me latter as a form of ‘ecological inheritance’ (OdilingSmee, Laland and Feldman 2003), we run me risk ofdisconnecting medevolution of bom s].dlls and environzments from me life-process, asmough skill-sets were deposited ready-made into the minds and bodiesofnovices, whence they have only to be acted out in life, or as thoughfleids were but items of immoveable property rather than what meymaterially are: matrices of earth and crops which, if they are to bearfruit, call for continuing care on me part of mose who toil in mem.Thus what are often presented in the literature as parallel tracks ofinheritance are, in trum, parallel and overlapping lives wbich, as meycarry on through time, orperdure, also respond to one anomer. Parallellives, we could say, are lived not so much in interactjon as in correspondence (Ingold 2013). A fhrther point of capital importance followsfrom mis. To say mat the capacities ofhuman and omer organisms aredeveloped in and mrough me life process is not, as many critics argue,to give primacy to me environment in me determination ofphenotypicoutcomes, instead of to me genes. On the contrary, it is to treat thegenome as an active player in me process rather man as a passivevector for me transcription of information. Togemer wim all meother components ofme developmental system, me genome is caughtup in me ongoing correspondences of life-in-me-making.

In Chapter 5, Aglaia Chatjouli offers a compelling demonstrationofthis point. Thalassaemia is known from a biomedical perspective as amonogenic disease which impedes me normal production of haemoglobin in th~ blood, leading to severe anaemia and attendant healmproblems. No differently from everyone else, however, people diagnosed with this condition are faced wim the task of keeping lifegoing, as well as accepting me inevitabiity of meir eventual deam,

amidst all the complexities and contingencies of everyday existence.For them, as Chatjouli found in her study of thalassaeniics in Greece,the disease is siniply a normal part ofwhat one has to live with, as givento them as is the ground we walk and the air we breathe to US.Depending on their particular circumstances, there are myriad waysof getting by, with equally diverse outcomes mat def~r ready ciassification in terms of accepted biomedical categories. Yet these categories,belonging as they do to a strongly geneticized discourse, can directlyimpact on patients’ life chances in so far as they affect the beneflts towhich they may be entitled. The thalassaemjc genotype, for sufferers,is no mere abstraction: it has become part of the instituted and regulatory environment with which they have to deal. Noa Vaisman, inChapter 6, shows likewise how it is possible, and even mandatory, tomove beyond the received dichotomy between nature and nurturetowards a ‘third ontology’, of becoming rather than being, in whichwho we are - our identity and humanity - is continually producedthrough our own actions and pronouncements. The story Vaismanteils concerns the tussle, played out in an Argentine CoUrt, between aman’s regard for the parents who raised him and the claims ofhis birthparents, and their km, from whom he was forcibly abducted in infancy.She describes how dissenting judges in the case sought to erase thedivisjon between ‘social’ and ‘biological’ parentage by bringing themtogether into a single perspective — precisely mat which, in this volume, we are calling ‘biosocial becoming’. In this perspective, bom setsof parentS would be recognized as having contribUted in care andsubstance, albeit at different times and in different ways, to theongoing formation of the person.

The picture is complicated, however, by another factor, concerning the proofofthe man’s genetic identity. Would it depend on a DNAtest on a blood sample taken from his body (which he retbsed), or couldme test legitimately be done using ‘shed’ DNA from bodily substancesdeposited through contact with his own personal effects, collectedthrough a raid on his house? As noted above, and as mis case vividlydemonstrates, the materials ofliving bodies have a way ofspilling outinto the medium, where they mix and mingle with one another in matzone ofinterpenetratjon we are used to calling the ‘environment’. Thusbodies may become enmeshed with one anomer simply by handlingthe same objects or by breathing the same air - or, as in me case ofthethalassaemjcs described by Chatjouli, sharing me same blood. Thisintermingling of lives — mat is, their sociality — is all-pervasive: ithangs in the air and runs along me ground. As Barbara Götsch observes

in~Ohapter.7~.socialjty is not to be regàrdedas sone of those ‘evolvedcapàcities’ withwhichhumansare supposed (by neo-Darwinian meorists) to coine .pre-equipped;but ramer comprises the very relationalmatrix within which me evolutionary process unfolds. Through herown case study of a week in me life of a team of educationalists working for a non-governmental organization in Morocco, Götsch showshowbothcognitive and technical skills are not so much transmitted as

grownwithin communities ofpractice. She shows how, throughjointattentjon in collaborative activities, team participants are able todevelop a common ground of shared knowledge and experience matenables them, in turn, to follow the trails of each omer’s minds. In sodoing, minds mingle, and ffiefr boundarjes - where one mmd ends andanother begins - become indeterminate. But not only minds mingle;bodies do as well, for in me last resort, mmd and body are indistinguishable. In going in and out of each omer’s minds, participantswould also go in and out of each omer’s bodies: here the ensemble ofsocial relations becomes un cerveau ensembie — a collective brain -

throughout which are distributed the movements of cognition andpractice mat comprise the team’s activity.

WHIRLS OF ORGANISMS

Long ago, the psychologist David Rubin (1988) argued mat mere are, inprinciple, two alternative ways of accounting for me reproduction ofform. One is to adopt a complex structure, simple process model; theother is to adopt its converse, a model ofsimple structure but complexprocess. Though Rubin was speciflcally concerned wim me work ofmemory in me reproduction of knowledge, his argument applies justas well to the reproduction of organic form. The neo-Darwinian appealto DNA as a carrier ofinformation exemplifles the ‘complex structure,simple process’ approach. It is supposed mat me molecule encodes afull structural specification for me range of possible developmentaloutcomes which is copied into me organism at the very moment ofinauguration of its life cycle, mrough a simple process of replication.An analogous argument, as we have seen, is adduced by those whoattribute the reproduction of cultural form to me transmission ofmemetic rather than genetic specifications. Whemer wim genes ormemes, a complex structure already ‘copied in’ to me body or niindhas only to be ‘copied out’ in life. We argue, in this volume, for mealternative, ‘simple structure, complex process’ approach. No material,for example, can be more fundamental to life man water. Like omer

organisms, we humans depend on it, and are largely made up ofit. Onaverage, water accounts for around 60% of our body weight. With itssingle oxygen atom and two atoms of hydrogen, the molecular structure of water could hardly be simpler. Yet the complexity of its fluiddynamics, ofits responses to disturbance, and ofthe forms that anse inand through its flows and circulations, are such as stil to def~r fullunderstanding. We could regard the organism from a complex processperspective as a kind of eddy or ‘whirl’ (Cavell 1976: 52), endlesslycreating itseif in the current of life, just as the water of a stream,without any kind of template or central direction, forms itseif intoripples, droplets and vortices.

It is in just this sense that Gaetano Mangiameli, in Chapter 8,speaks ofthe ‘habits’ ofwater. The people ofthe Kasena chiefdom ofGhana, among whom Mangiameli worked, inhabit a watery world inwhich it is the self-creation of things — their beconiing - that lendsthem an aura of sanctity. The Kasena make no distinction betweenculture and nature. The salient distinction is rather between the beingof ready-made or constructed things and the becoming of the lifeworld.To reach the sacred is to go behind the actuality of what is to discoverthe potentiality ofwhat may be - the potentiality of a world of becoming, where things or ensembies make their presence felt not throughwhat they are but through what they do. It is to bok through the worldof created objects to reveal the more fundamental creative processfrom which they have, so to speak, ‘precipitated out’. Crucially, inthis world of becoming there are no species in the taxonomic sense.For things to be classified as belonging to a species requires that they beexcised from the flows of materials - that is, from the relations - thatmake them what they are. It is to convert these relations into innerattributes ofwhich they are taken to be the effects, or in short, to revertto a world of being. The species concept, employed as a biologicaltaxon, is a product of population thinldng; it can have no purchase inan ontology that is fully relational. As Vito Laterza and his colleaguesshow in Chapter 9, such an ontology forces us to focus not on networksof connection between final objects, but on the meshwork of lines ofmaterial flow. These are the pathways ofbiosocial becoming. For materials, too, are constitutively biosocial, and we need to take them senously. Biosocial life is a meshwork of materials endowed withproperties of vitality and movement. Closely following the passage ofwood through a sawmill in Swaziland, along with the movements andgestures of the men who work there and the machines they operate,Laterza finds an assembly that is throbbing with life precisely because

its components are not perfectly joined up but rather bundled in waysthat are contingent, unpredictable and potentially dangerous, and matcall for continual improvisation by those whose lives are carried onbom in amongst the works and far beyond.

How, ffien, is our humanity to be unclerstood in this world ofbiosocial becomings? Far from being given unconditionally, as a baseline for activity, we have argued mat humanity inheres in activity itseifIt is what we do. Perhaps we should regard ‘to human’ as a verb. Thereare, ffien, many ways ofhumaning: these ane me ways along which wemake ourselves and, collaboratively, one another. Humans, as IstvanPraet puts it in Chapter 10, are work-in-progress. And mis work calls forunremitting effort. It is not a task mat can be taken up or put down atwill, nor can its success or fulfilment ever be guaranteed. AlthoughPraet’s focus is on one particular indigenous group - me Chachi peopleof the Pacific coast of Ecuador - he shows this understanding of mehuman to be widespread among peoples the world over, and particularly among mose who hold to an ontology of animism, mat is, to anunderstanding of life as a creative process in which forms undergocontinual generation, each in relation to the omers. In such an ontology, Praet argues, humanity is bom restricted and open. It is restrictedto those who, through meir efforts, have earned it, but it is notforeclosed — for example — by geneabogical descent. This is the preciseopposite ofme view to which most people in western societies (including neo-Darwinian meorists) are indlined, namely mat human being isrestricted genealogically by species membership, but neverthelessgiven unconditionally rather man achieved. This leaves us, however,with the question of what happens to those who fail in me tasks ofhumaning. In me animic ontology, for Praet, to be beyond me pale ofthe human is to be beyond life itseif. There is only life and non-life, orhuman and non-human, not different kinds of life (omer species) ordifferent kinds ofhuman (omer cultures) underpinned by me conimondenominators of ‘nature’ and ‘humanity’ respectively.

Yet me barnier between human and non-human, or betweenliving and non-living, is never absolute. It can always be crossed. Therisk is ever-present mat one might ‘fall out’ of life, and this is HayderA1-Mohammad’s theme in Chapter 11. He, too, is thinking ofpersons asgrounded in what mey do ramer man what mey are, and is also concerned to stress the sheer precariousness of ‘being-in-the-world’. It isnot unconditionab, and cannot be taken for granted. Drawing on mephenomenobogy of Heidegger, and on his own ethnographic work inme city ofBasra, Iraq, A1-Mohammad considers what it might mean for

rruspec~

a life to fall out ofthe meshwork. To be in the world, he contends, doesnot imply that one is at home in it, let alone comfortably so. It is, on thecontrary, unsettling and insecure. Life and habitation both ravel andunravel, and involve as much ‘falling out’ - manifested in disease,loneliness, despair and ultimately deatli - as skilful coping. To live isto die, to be is not to be, to know is to hide from the known: to be therein the world is never to befi1lly there. We must ever remain enigmas toourselves. The work of humaning, in short, holds no surety of fulfilment: it is indeed for that very reason that it can carry on. If biosocialbecoming is a human predicament, it is far from an easy one!

CONCLUSION

For far too long, attempts to develop a unified approach to understanding the biological and social dimensions of human life have beenfrustrated by the tenacity, in the biological sciences, of a paradigmthat has long since been discredited by work in social and culturalanthropology. It is not only in these subdisciplines of anthropology,however, mat the neo-Darwinian paradigm has been found wanting.There have been parallel critiques in fleids as various as molecularbiology, epigenetics, neuroscience, ecological and developmental psychology, linguistics and the philosophy ofmi. Despite diverse start-ing points, work in all these fleids is beginning to converge on asynthesis — at once processual, developmental and relational - mat isset to shatter the illusion of paradigmatic consensus perpetrated bysuch symposia as Culture Evolves. This work forces us to embark on afundamental revision of what we mean by humanity, evolution, culture and social life, and consequently on a reconfiguration of therelations between biology, psychology and anthropology. It requiresUS to think of humanity not as a fixed and given condition but as arelational achievement. It requires us to think of evolution not aschange along lines of descent but as the developmental unfolding ofthe endre matrix of relations within which forms of life (human andnon-human) emerge and are held in place. And it requires us to mink ofthese forms as neither genetically nor culturally configured but asemergent outcomes ofthe dynamic self-organization ofdevelopmentalsystems. This rethinking, we contend, amounts to a paradigm shift ofaconsequence for the human sciences of the twenty-flrst century equalto or greater man mat which the Darwinian paradigm had for theSciences of me twentieth. The work that underpins this shift is goingon now, and has indeed been going on for some time. Much of it,

however, remains controversial or institutionally marginal to me disciplines in which it is practised, and it has still to be brought together ina way that can transform scholarship and have a signiflcant impact onpublic understanding.

With mis book we intend to contribute to the transformationfrom our vantage point in the discipline of anthropology, and in sodoing, to redefine both anthropology and humanity in a way mat isappropriate for our times. As several of me following chapters show,much recent questioning of the division between biological and socialrealms has been prompted by novel medical and biotechnologicalinterventions. These interventions do not, in memselves, render medivision invalid; for indeed, it never has been valid. They have howeverrendered its artificiality, and institutional efforts to sustain and policeit, more apparent man ever before. They have, in a sense, liberatedbom the biological sciences and me social sciences and humanitiesfrom their old ontological moorings, allowing once divided disciplinesto mix in me same melting pot. No longer does collaboration across thedivide require us to set the clock back to an obsolete language ofinnateuniversals and acquired traits; instead me door is open for contemporary anthropology to move forward in tandem wim groundbreakingdiscoveries in me biological sciences mat are memselves in me throesofa paradigm shift, towards a post-genomic world wherein me rules bywhich neo-Darwinian logic operates no longer apply (Noble 2010,Charney 2012). Not only ffiat, but me peoples among whom we workcan also be drawn into me conversation, as wise and knowledgeableinterlocutors rather man as mere carriers of evolved traditions whoseonly role is to provide grist to me mill ofthe anthropological machine.Finally, and above all, we are in a position to ground our enquirieswithin an ethical commitrnent to, and responsibility for, bom our ownhumanity and me world in which we find ourselves. For when all is saidand done, our ways of knowing are inevitably part and parcel of thegenerous, creative and open-ended process ofbiosocial becoming matis human life itseif.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESSCambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,Singapore, Såo Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City

Cambridge University PressThe Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK

Published in the United States ofAmerica by Cambridge University Press,New York

www.cambridge.org ContentsInformation on this tide: www.cambridge.org/9781107025639

© Cambridge University Press 2013

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exceptionand to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,no reproduction of any part may take place without the writtenpermission of Cambridge University Press. Preface page vii

First published 2013

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by the MPG Boolcs Group1. Prospect

A catalogue record for this publication is availahlefrom the British Library TI M ING 0 LD

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data 2. Ensembles of biosocial relations 22Biosocial becomings : integrating social and biological GIS LI P AL SS ONanthropology / edited by Tim Ingold, Department ofAnthropology, 3. Blurring the biological and social in human becornings 42University ofAberdeen, and Gisli Palsson, Department ofAnthropology,University oflceland. AGUSTIN FUENTES

pages cm 4. Life-in-the-making: epigenesis, biocultural environmentsIncludes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-107-02563-9 and human becomings 591. Ethnology. 2. Physical anthropology. I. Ingold, Tim, 1948- EUGENIA RAMIREZ-GOICOECHEAII. Gisli Palsson, 1949-GN316.B55 2013 5. Thalassaemic lives as stories ofbecoming: mediated306-dc23 biologies and genetic (un)certainties 84

2012047938AGLAIA CHATJOULI

ISBN 978-1-107-02563-9 Hardback 6. Shedding our selves: perspectivism, the bounded subject

Cambridge University Press has no responsibiity for the persistence or and the nature—culture divide 106accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to N 0 A VA IS MANin this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such 7. Reflections on a collective brain at work: one week in thewebsites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

working life of an NGO team in urban Morocco 123

BARBARA GÖTSCH8. The habits ofwater: marginality and the sacralization of

non-humans in North-Eastern Ghana 145

GAETANO MANGIAMELI

9. ‘Bringingwood to life’: lines, flows and materials in a Swazi

sawmill 162VITO LATERZA, BOB FORRESTER AND PATIENCE

MUSUSA

Contents

10. Humanity and life as the perpetual maintenance of specificefforts: a reappraisal of animism 191ISTVAN PRAET

11. Ravelling/unravelling: being-in-the-world and falling-outof-the-world 211HAYDER AL-MOHAMMAD

12. Retrospect 229Preface

References 249Notes on the contributors 273lndex 276 The articles in this book were developed in response to an invited

panel (Human Becomings: Beyond the ‘Biological’ and the ‘Social’) which weorganized at the biennial meeting ofthe European Association ofSocialAnthropologists (EASA) in Maynooth, Ireland, in August 2010. Whenreading subniitted panel abstracts for the biennial meeting and planning the event a few months before it actually took place, the EASAorganizers had been struck by the absence ofany proposal to seriouslyengage with the ‘biological’ and its implications for the discipline ofanthropology. This seemed rather strange in the light of repeatedcritiques in recent years of the nature/society dualism, of the increasing frustration with received theoretical paradigms, and of growingdemands for some form of integration of the social and the biologicalin a variety of fleids and disciplines both in the humanities and socialsciences (social and cultural anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy) and in the life sciences (biological anthropology, humangenetics, evolutionary and developmental biology, environmental science). The need for integration seemed all the more pressing in thecontext of the study of humans, traditionally divided between the tworadically separated subfields of biological-physical and social-culturalanthropology.

As a result, we were invited to organize a panel to address thetheoretical dualism of nature and society and to explore possible newdirections for anthropology and related disciplines. Our panel summary generated extensive interest and we received far more abstractsthan we could cope with, given the time constraints ofthe conference.The panel itselfwas verywell attended and generated keen interest anddiscussions which continue in the form ofa new network that has beenset up under the umbrella ofthe EASA: http://www.easaonline.org/networksfbiosoc/index.shtml.