Taboo, abstraction, and living with animals

The late Mary Douglas had been kind enough to blurb my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. After it's publication in 2001 my editor, Bill Frucht, put my directly in touch with Douglas and we began corresponding on a variety of things. Here's a long note I sent her on June 22, 2001.

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Dear Mary,

I've been reading a bit about the Nuer and their cattle (Evans-Pritchard 1940) and the Huaulu and their taboos (Valeri 2000) and find myself wondering what it would take to argue that abstract thinking emerged in our ancestors as a means of organizing their minds under the pressure of living among animals. Why the need to differentiate ourselves from them?

As long as you think of the mind as the Cartesian instrument of rational thought, the question is unintelligible. The differences between us and them are quite obvious. From that point of view, primitive thought is hopelessly confused.

But, of course, that point of view is wrong. The differentiation required is social and emotional, not perceptual and logical.

Cousin Sue 

First, however, let me tell a story. It is about my cousin Sue. She was born in the city and raised in the suburbs. But in her mid-30s or so she moved to the country and married a veterinarian. She began to raise sheep, not as pets, but as a source of wool to be spun into thread which she would then weave into cloth. When the sheep reached a certain age, she would take them to the butcher and, a day later, she and her husband would stock their freezer with mutton.

Despite the fact that these sheep are not pets, taking them to be butchered was not easy. Nor was their first meal comprised of mutton from sheep they'd raised. I'm told that when Sue and Larry sat down to that meal they were rather glum and sat there in silence, eating nothing. Then Sue said "baaa" in imitation of a sheep, they laughed, and began eating.

It seems to me that that complex of attitudes and behavior is what taboo is about. In making a sheep's call my cousin was both acknowledging an identity with the animal she'd raised and signaling their difference. Once that had been done it became possible to eat the meat.

Wolves to Dogs

So I now find myself wondering just when in our evolutionary history we first found ourselves faced with the problem of living among animals. It's a problem both of how we interact with animals and of the capacity of our neural machinery at the time. At the moment I'm thinking about the domestication of wolves into dogs, which seems to have happened on the order of 130 kya to 150 kya. By that time we were fairly large-brained. Up until then we knew animals as predators and prey. To domesticate wolves we must, in effect, come to know them as children and as subordinate companions and workers. That is, we must take them into our social system.

As Valeri has noted in his remarks on the Huaulu and their dogs (2000, p. 229), from a dog's point of view, the human master is just Top Dog. That is, dogs assimilate humans to their own social system. My point is that the identification goes in the other direction as well. Thus John Morgan (1999, p. 205) notes that "domestication was greatly facilitated because humans and wolves shared similar cooperative hunting behaviors and extended family social structure. Thus wolves and humans were pre-adapted to fit into each other's ecologies and families. Tame wolves and their descendants would have provided an enormous competitive advantage for the human groups that domesticated them.... From the dog's point of view, humans were pack members who brought food to the pups. Human support enabled dogs to have two litters of pups per year instead of the single little in wolves."

Now let's look at a bit of chimpanzee behavior. But not wild chimpanzees, human-raised chimpanzees. These creatures are our close biological relatives and so have emotional and social machinery that is much like ours—that's why we spend so much time and effort studying them. But their social patterns didn't evolve so that they could interact with humans on a routine basis. In that situation their social circuitry leads them to treat humans as chimps, or, if you prefer, leads them to treat themselves as humans.

Vicki

The following three paragraphs are from unpublished notes:

Let us begin with one of those chimpanzees who were raised among humans. As a youngster Vicki was given the task of sorting photographs into two piles, “human” and “animal.” She placed her own photograph in the human pile while her father’s picture went into the animal pile (Linden, 1974, p. 50). Was she expressing aggression against her father? Possibly, but not likely. Her father was a chimpanzee and so she placed his picture in the pile for animals, where it belonged. But why did she think her picture belonged in the pile with humans?

Lucy is another chimpanzee who was raised among humans (Temerlin, 1975). When she reached puberty she made sexual advances toward traveling salesmen and masturbated while looking at pictures of nude men in Playgirl, showing particular interest in their penises. Washoe, raised by Allen and Beatrice Gardner and taught the rudiments of Ameslan (American Sign Language), referred to other chimpanzees as “black bugs” when she first came in contact with conspecifics after years of life among humans (Linden, 1974, p. 10).

These chimpanzees, in a sense, “thought” of themselves as people. They were used to social interaction with human beings, not with other chimpanzees. Thus we might interpret Vicki’s two piles of photographs as “appropriate social other” and “inappropriate social other” rather than as “human” and “animal.” The fact that the physical resemblance between chimpanzee and chimpanzee is greater than that between human and chimpanzee is overridden by the fact that, for these apes, there is no social resemblance between themselves and other chimpanzees while such social resemblance does hold with humans.

Is the situation of proto-humans living with friendly wolves so very different from that of these chimpanzees?

Now, let's step aside for a moment and consider another line of investigation: ethnobiology.  Looking at how preliterate peoples classify plants and animals among themselves—as opposed to how they classify them for incorporation into their lives—ethnobiologists have discovered that diverse cultures use similar methods and thus arrive at taxonomies having similar forms and, at least in the middle range, similar taxonomic classes.  Given that, what is the basis for their classification activities?  Brent Berlin (1992) suggests that it is perceptual.  Plants and animals are placed in a given taxon because they look alike. 

If we assume that Berlin is correct in this, and that our ancestors had perceptual & cognitive systems similar to ours, then I see an opportunity for abstract thought to get started.  Sooner or later the philosopher-poets among our ancestral wolf-raisers would notice that wolves are like us in one sense and different from us in another sense.  How do you reconcile these two judgments?  That's the problem that forced them to abstract reasoning, the dance of Sameness and Difference so important in structuralist analysis.

It's not at all obvious what behavioral form that reasoning would have taken.  I have no trouble imagining our ancestors to have proto-language of some sort (Bickerton 1995), but I doubt they had full-blown language.  However they worked through this instability (for I'd guess that that is the neurodynamics form this problem would have taken, some relatively large-scale instability in mental processes), in the course of a 100,000 years fully human culture had emerged, complete with strange tales of humans descending from animals or being raised by animals, and a plethora of rules for situating plants and animals in the human social order.

I have no idea what it would take to work this out in satisfying detail and it's quite possible I'll change my mind in a day or week or several months—the line of thought it too new to have stabilized.  What I like about this line of reasoning, though, is that it allows us to see primitive thought as a natural solution to the problem of living in the world with animals.  Given a brain like ours, faced with that situation, this is how the only way it could have gone. 

One thing I'd like to get out of this line of reasoning is an account of why trance and possession are a natural way to proceed toward diagnosis of an ailment (presumed to have been) caused by the violation of one of those many rules.  I started thinking about these issues when drafting Beethoven's Anvil, but gave up when I decided it was just too much to deal with in that book.  There does seem to be some kind of symmetry here.  The rules are intended to preserve the coherence of human society, which is ultimately based on interactional synchrony.  Thus, when one of those rules has been violated, it becomes necessary to invoke a particularly potent form of that synchrony.

Then, of course, there's the grid/group issue of why these practices are more important in some societies than others.

But this is quite enough for one note.

Regards,

Bill B

Allman, J. M. (1999). Evolving Brains. New York, Scientific American Library.

Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Bickerton, D. (1995). Language and Human Behavior. Seattle, University of Washington Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940). The Nuer. New York, Oxford University Press.

Linden E. (1974) Apes, Men, and Language. New York: Saturday Review Press, E. P. Dutton.

Temerlin, M. K. (1975). My Daughter Lucy. Psychology Today. 9: 59-103, 103.

Valeri, V. (2000). The Forest of Taboos. Madison, Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press.

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An exercise for the reader: Why have cats taken over the internet. Well, not taken over, but you know what I mean. Cat/kitty memes are all over the place. Why? And why cats, not dogs? What does this have to do with our long-standing and evolved interaction with animals?