Conclusion

I have been concerned to examine the oppositions between nature and culture and human and animal, and their role in social theory. One of my main arguments has been that the human sciences have inherited from the Enlightenment a conception of the human as unique, and of culture as qualitatively different from, and superior to, nature; and that these distinctions have continued to command an important place in social theories. In an attempt to preserve their exclusive grip on the study of 'man' the human sciences - by pressing claims for the autonomy of culture and the uniqueness of the human - have maintained these hierarchical relationships between 'man' and nature, nature and culture. Indeed, their retention has led to the development of an equally rigid distinction between instinct and learning. As I argued when discussing the debates on feral children and apes and language, the thesis that humans, unlike animals, exhibit no instincts that underlie behaviour, that human nature is 'infinitely malleable', is one which underpins many culturalistlbehaviourist accounts. Moreover, as I insisted in chapter 1, cultural anthropology was itself founded upon an explicit rejection of instinct theory: learning replaces instinct in the human species; human behaviour is the product of culture and, as such, can only be understood in the terms of culture. One consequence of this position is that, in recoiling so strongly from an approach which seeks to reduce human behaviour to a bundle of biologically determined instincts, many human scientists have turned instead to an equally crude and deterministic mirror opposite. To say that in humans learning does replace instinct, that human behaviour is entirely a product of social relations is to declare 'man' a tabula rasa. Could any creature as complex as a human being be as totally malleable as the tabula rasa metaphor suggests? As Mary Midgley

has written we are, after all, animals, not gods or fairies.! Rigid oppositions between nature and culture, human and animal are dangerous - they obscure more than they reveal. As Peter Reynolds has argued, the opposition between nature and culture 'does not rest on validated differences between humans and other animals but on a hierarchical concept of the relationship between man and nature that owes nothing to the study of primates whatsoever. ,2 If the theory of evolution is to be accepted, he argues, then

the behavioural differences among primates must be explicable as the product of transformation over time. However, the anthropological strategy ... has been to regard these transformations as leading to a level of organization in man that can be explained without recourse to these so-called lower levels: an evolutionary emergent of collective representations, social facts, conventions and institutions. The existence of such phenomena is not in question, but the methodological claim that such phenomena constitute a level of organization that can be understood without reference to psychobiological variables is a very strong claim indeed, and it is not easily reconciled with the findings of natural

So, to declare, as do many anthropologists, that culture i~ a separate level of distinctly human organization in no way vitiates the need to understand what the behavioural differences between humans and other primates are, or what types of evolutionary transformation our prehuman ancestors had to undergo in order to

I . H . 4 evo ve mto omo sapzens. Rather than claiming then, that human behaviour is the product

of different principles from that of other animals, 'it would be more correct to say that it is constituted on additional principles, but these additions can by no means be assumed to invalidate all that has gone before or to exist in a biological vacuum. ,5

Oppositions between nature and culture, human and animal display not only our ignorance of other animal species, but also of ourselves. Certainly some species demonstrate the existence of genetically determined instinctive behaviour, or what should more properly be called 'closed instincts', that is, fixed patterns of behaviour exactly reproduced even in creatures reared in isolation, such as the bees' honey dance, and some types of bird song. But the distinction between instinct and learning, in so far as it is controlled

by the distinction between nature and culture, is not relevant for primates; much primate behaviour, human included, develops through both innate and environmental factors and both are necessary for mature development. Non-human primates raised in isolation develop severely abnormal forms of behaviour quite unlike that of their natural environment. Even language, traditionally seen as the cultural phenomenon par excellence develops through the interaction of both social and biological elements. As the discussion of Genie in chapter four demonstrated, Eric Lenneberg's work suggests that a critical period exists for the normal development of language, after which its acquisition becomes increasingly difficult. Interestingly, the 'critical period' theory developed from research on songbirds. Whereas the call repertoire of most birds is purely instinctual, in songbirds instinct and learning combine to produce a more complex phenomenon. In some species song learning is confined to a critical period when the bird is between ten and fifty days of age; beyond then the learning of a normal song is impossible. Moreover, in some species a specific model is required. A male white-crowned sparrow, if exposed to an adult white-crowned song during the critical period, will develop a normal adult song. If exposed to the song of a different species, however, the bird will develop an abnormal song of the white-crowned type. In some cases the bird will develop the entire song of a foster parent of another species. For example, a male zebra finch imitated the song of a male Bengalese finch. This could happen even if the bird later heard the song of the male of its own species. Reynolds writes

although birds are phylogenetically remote from primates, they are the only other group of vertebrates, with the possible exception of whales and dolphins, known to have developed traditionally transmitted vocal communication. Like in man too, their vocal productions are controlled by one side of the brain. As such, vocal learning in birds cannot be dismissed as too remote from man to permit comparison.6