The Reluctant Calf

“Capricious irrationality” is how the leading ethnologist Robert Lowie (1883–1957) referred to many aspects of culture in 1918—behaviors that showed the essential nature of culture. Culture is based on arbitrary symboling. Lowie was a Boasian particularist, who generally refused to extrapolate past the boundaries of a particular culture. At an opposite pole in the golden age of ethnology was Leslie White (1900–1975). He was an arch advocate of culture as a universal evolutionary phenomenon, who stressed two fundamental points: 1) culture evolves sui generis, as a self-determining process rather than by the will of individual humans, and 2) culture is abiological in the sense that cultural traits are not based in specific human biological traits.1 In respect to the arbitrary nature of cultural traits, Lowie and White agreed. “Take, for instance, the Chinese loathing for milk,” White said to our 1968 class in ethnological theory. “This cultural trait goes directly against their interests, given the nutritional value of milk.” White used the example, first cited by Lowie 50 years earlier,2 to show a fundamental tenet of his “science of culture” (what he called culturology): humans are one beast worldwide, diversified by culture. We teach that much of human anatomy—traits like thumbs, lack of sharp canines, and upright posture— evolved with or because we had culture, or to enable culture, at the least in the sense of an increasing dependence on manufactured tools. But specific cultural traits, like classificatory kinship, languages, and religions seemed clearly unrelated to anything biological. People of every hue can speak English or be Buddhist. It was the ability to symbol that had evolved biologically, an open-ended ability that freed us from the brutish reliance on muscle and instinct. But then spake borborygmus.