The Determinants of Human Behavior

ONE of the most confusing aspects of anthropology for both student and instructor in the social sciences is a lack of clear discrimination among the most basic and frequently used concepts. In particular, "social" and "cultural" are often employed as though they were close synonyms which might as well be used interchangeably, or replaced simply by "sociocultural" (e.g., Kroeber 1948: 7-10). The fact that "social structure" and "social system" refer in most texts to cultural constructs for group behavior plays no small part in maintaining the confusion. The continued general use of "social" for both concepts, even by some anthropologists, is reenforced by, and adds to, general vagueness. The attempt to be more precise, however, must be more than a mere reification of the historical interests of somewhat artificial departments. Precision should increase both the explanatory power and the objective independence of the categories. In this paper, then, a critical consideration of one of the most recent attempts to distinguish these concepts will be followed by a discussion of a possibly more useful set of distinctions. The distinction between culture and society agreed upon by Kroeber and Parsons (1958) seems currently accepted by many anthropologists. They feel that "culture" should be confined in meaning: ". .. restricting its reference to transmitted and created content and patterns of values, ideas, and other symbolic meaningful systems of factors in the shaping of human behavior and the artifacts produced through behavior." On the other hand they propose: "... society-or more generally, social system-be used to designate the specifically relational system of interaction among individuals or collectivities." But there is more hidden than exposed here. First, this definition includes implicitly the opinion of many sociologists and "structuralists" who see culture as referring only to the ideal patterns of behavior and not to the objective behavior itself (e.g., Williams 1951:33-34); and, secondly, the definition implies that culture is learned, while actual objective behavior is primarily biosocial, instinctive adaptation which, given a few variables, can be universalistically described. In this respect it is significant that Kroeber and Parsons go on to say: "One indication of the independence of the two [culture and society] is the existence of highly organized insect societies with at best a minimal rudimentary component of culture in our present narrower sense." Yet as Count (1958:1051-53, 1073-75) points out, insect societies are not at all of the same nature as vertebrate societies-the first consisting of physiologically defined complementary roles and the other primarily of learned complementary roles. For human beings, physiological differences in role determination seem confined to a rela-