Culture is an emergent phenomenon (II)

Invisible sociological gremlins can be great for self-appointed moral heroism, but not for understanding.

My previous post discussed how culture is an emergent phenomenon utilising various evolved adaptations and mechanisms. It also covered how the prevalence of patriarchy—the presumption that authority is male—across human societies can be readily explained by human reproductive patterns: particularly the transfer of risks away from child-rearing and resources to child-rearing.

Over-reifying culture

Sherry Ortner’s analysis of the origins and persistence of patriarchy is that human societies value culture over nature, associate women with nature due to their role in human reproduction, and so value men over women. While her analysis refers to the physiological realities of human reproduction, it moves very quickly to the cultural realm. Not only does her analysis rely on human societies having strongly patterned senses of having a culture—and of culture as being asserted against nature—culture is seen as having powerful universal patterns and consequences.

https://www.mongolianz.com/post/2023/12/11/mongolian-horse-archery-mastery-unveiling-ancient-techniques-and-cultural-brilliance/

Culture as resting on evolved mechanisms, and as a way of coordinating responses to shared constraints, is not the basis of her analysis. Culture is notoriously difficult to define precisely because it is not a single thing. It is the interactive operation of various evolved mechanisms.

Culture certainly matters. Dr Sarah (“Sally”) Paine’s lecture on why Japan lost the Pacific War is a powerful example of the power of culture. Bushido culture—at least as understood by early-to-mid C20th Japanese admirals, generals, other military and naval officers—explains so much of what seems so odd about Japanese strategic and military decisions during the 1931-1945 period, and particularly the Pacific War. They were not operating to remotely the same logic of military and strategic rationality as their Western opponents. The brute realities of military contestation caught up with them, quite disastrously, but what seemed—then and now—elementary failures of rationality to Westerners reflected a very different set of normative framings.

Bushido culture—as it had been transmitted to C20th Japanese military and naval officers—did not make the decisions of the Japanese admirals and generals any less disastrous. It does make them much more comprehensible.

It is very easy to not grapple with how trapped within your own cognitive framing you might be. Especially if you do not seriously interact with folk who are operating on a different framing. As the above example shows, cultures can vary greatly, even when comparing two contemporary, industrialised societies.

As a review article on the role of culture in the happenstance of human affairs notes:

Although using very different methodologies, the studies all provide evidence leading to the same general conclusion: individuals from different cultural backgrounds make systematically different choices even when faced with the same decision in the same environment. (Emphasis added.)

Ortner is aware there are difficulties with the causal power she gives culture, and specifically to the culture/nature divide. She writes:

Now the categories of “nature” and “culture” are of course conceptual categories – one can find no boundary out in the actual world between the two states or realms of being

It is also striking that her analysis assumes that there is a correct valuation, not only of men and women, but of what they do. So, she writes:

… the great puzzle of why male activities involving the destruction of life (hunting and warfare) are often given more prestige than the female’s ability to give birth, to create life. Within de Beauvoir’s framework, we realize it is not the killing that is the relevant and valued aspect of hunting and warfare; rather, it is the transcendental (social, cultural) nature of these activities, as opposed to the naturalness of the process of birth: “For it is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills” (ibid.).

Human childbirth is unusually risky due to giving birth to large brained infants through bipedal pelvises. Nevertheless, hunting and warfare are risks undertaken as regular—in the case of hunting, daily—events that serve the group as a whole. It is not surprising that they are valorised.

To be surprised by this speaks to an insulated perspective that has not thought through what human societies have had to do to function and what risks they faced. The shifting of Ortner’s analysis to reified abstractions, rather than practicalities, opens her analysis up to this sort of error.

Similarly, Ortner writes:

In this paper I try to expose the underlying logic of cultural thinking that assumes the inferiority of women.

How patriarchal societies are varies widely. How gender-egalitarian they are also varies widely. Presumptions about authority, and views about the general standing of women, are not the same question. They are related to be sure, but are—as we shall see—not identical.

Again:

I would consider it a misguided endeavor to focus only upon women’s actual though culturally unrecognized and unvalued powers in any given society, without first understanding the overarching ideology and deeper assumptions of the culture that render such powers trivial.

The conflation of the specific issue of authority (patriarchy) with the general issue of standing (the status of women) is not a good basis for analysis.

Practicalities of reproduction

That the requirements of human reproduction are both cited and yet elided leads to some very odd formulations:

… woman’s confinement to the domestic family context, a confinement motivated, no doubt, by her lactation processes.

Yes, this is breast feeding. Which requires mothers be fed and protected. Moreover, given child mortality, breast-feeding vulnerable children is a recurring experience, as successful human reproduction is a rolling, almost 20-years-per-child, effort.

Similarly, Ortner writes:

Since the mother’s body goes through its lactation processes in direct relation to a pregnancy with a particular child, the relationship of nursing between mother and child is seen as a natural bond, other feeding arrangements being seen in most cases as unnatural and makeshift. Mothers and their children, according to cultural reasoning, belong together.

Yes, human breastmilk is very much structured to feed human babies, who start off remarkably helpless because bipedal pelvises limit the size of infant heads and so much of human brain growth occurs after birth.

Breastfeeding is natural to human, indeed mammalian, reproduction. One of the factors which affects how a society sees fatherhood is how important in any particular society fathers are—and are expected to be—in provisioning and protecting their children and the mother of their children.

Conforming to natural order

Ortner is trying to give a very general answer to what are quite varied patterns, given that both how strong the presumption that authority is male is, and what the general standing of women in society is, vary greatly. It gets even more complicated when one considers that Rome, Sparta, Eurasian steppe cultures, and various Celtic and Germanic cultures, were all very masculinised cultures with high-status women.

They were all martial cultures where there was a good chance the men would be away. Either living in the barracks (Sparta), away serving the Republic (Rome), or simply away (Steppe, Celtic and Germanic cultures). That left women managing significant resources, which raised their standing. In the case of Germanic, Steppe, and possibly Celtic, cultures, it led to armed women, which also raised their standing. In the case of Steppe cultures, it meant that women owned the homes, the yurts or gers.

If one looks at the world today, their descendant cultures have coped with unilateral control of fertility empowering women rather better than some others—notably than Islam, particularly Islam from Morocco to Pakistan, and East Asian cultures. There can be highly variable lags in cultural responses to changes in constraints, especially if there are structures—such as religious structures—that actively push against the same.

How willing women are to venture beyond their immediate neighbourhood, or even out their front door, is a marker of the standing of women in a society. Muslim visitors to medieval and early modern Christian Europe regularly reported their astonishment at how many women were out and about in public and how respectfully the Christian men treated them.

Much of the modern veiling movement in Islam—which started with educated middle class women who ventured beyond their immediate neighbourhood—is precisely about navigating public spaces via protective social signals in societies with particular cultural and institutional histories and patterns that still show very high levels of social segregation of men and women. Women who don’t veil, send a different signal.

But even Ortner’s notion of culture above nature as some universal looks very shaky. What about the natural law tradition? Yes humans create nomos, the law. Yet, as historical sociologist Ricardo Duchesne observes:

But in truth the Greeks never set up a polar opposition between nomos and nature (or physis) but, in varying ways, believed that human conventions were best when they reflected and sought to perfect, by bringing to fruition, what was potentially already in human nature

The idea that proper order conforms to the inherent nature of things is hardly unique to the Greek natural law tradition. Consider the Egyptian concept of maat or the Chinese concept of dao.

That proper order conforms to the inherent nature of things has obvious appeal to farming cultures stalked by fear of famine from chaotic forces, from disordered nature. Such cultures are naturally going to prize creating order, and creating an order that goes with what is ordering in nature. The order-versus-chaos normative division is older—and more pervasive across historical cultures—than the monotheist good-versus-evil division.

When Ortner writes:

Thus culture (i.e. every culture) at some level of awareness asserts itself to be not only distinct from but superior to nature, and that sense of distinctiveness and superiority rests precisely on the ability to transform – to “socialize” and “culturalize” – nature.

Superior to what generates chaos and disorder, certainly. Superior to nature? Not necessarily. To build something requires close attention to how things work. To hunt successfully, to farm successfully, to build tools that work, all requires attention to, and respect for, the nature of things.

Even where there is a sense of assertion against nature, this did not mean low standing for women. Roman culture was very impressed with their capacity to impose order on nature. Roman culture also had unusually high status women—citizen women, to be sure, but women nevertheless. Ortner is engaged in a universalising reification that does not stand up to the varieties of human culture precisely because she wants culture to have a consistent universal causal power in a way it just does not.

Ortner writes:

These arguments are intended to apply to generalized humanity; they grow out of the human condition, as humanity has experienced and confronted it up to the present day.

But her analysis has moved very quickly away from the practicalities of human societies, of the what human culture seeks to deal with. In particular, that our children are so biologically expensive, human societies have to be structured around the required patterns of risks and provisioning to raise such biologically expensive children.

Ortner makes statements that simply do not stand up to human cultural variety. For instance:

… woman’s nearly universal unquestioning acceptance of her own devaluation.

… woman’s consciousness – her membership, as it were, in culture – is evidenced in part by the very fact that she accepts her own devaluation and takes culture’s point of view.

Hortensia’s famous speech on not taxing the financial activities that were dominated by women, given that they had not participated in the relevant political decisions, hardly squares with such claims.

To take a somewhat grimmer example, secret societies—which were major sources of power and wealth extraction in many complex forager and horticultural societies—could be male only; but they could also be female only; they could include both men and women, but have women restricted to lower roles, or not. There was no single pattern by sex, yet they were major sources of power and wealth, often based on claims of esoteric knowledge.

Yes, child-bearing, having bubs in tow, does restrict what women can do. Ortner writes:

Her own activities are thus circumscribed by the limitations and low levels of her children’s strengths and skills: 6 she is confined to the domestic family group; “woman’s place is in the home.”

6. A situation that often serves to make her more childlike herself.

Judith Brown’s classic 1970 short paper A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex—which examines human sex roles in terms of the demands of child-minding—does not seem to have informed Ortner’s analysis. There was a large difference between horticultural societies, where women tended to dominate farming—as hoe-farming can be done with bubs in tow—even to the extent of women often being the landowners, and plough societies, as ploughing cannot be done with bubs in tow and so landownership is typically male.

It is a general principle of effective action that those taking the risks get a larger say in the decisions. It is such a general principle that it is central to sexual selection within species. That peacocks invest so much in physical ornamentation to appeal to peahens, while peahens are so drab, points to the power of female choice, as the peahens are taking on the risks of reproduction—of laying the egg, sitting on it, feeding the chicks—and so have to be convinced that a particular male gamete contribution is worth the risk.

Firms work on the same general risks-and-decisions principle. The people covering the risks of loss either make the decisions or appoint the people making the decisions.

Being able to pass risk onto others encourages misalignment of action and risk. It is a feature of exploitive parasitism. One of the deep problems of state action is that its coercive power makes it very easy to pass risks onto others, making the state an excellent vehicle for exploitive parasitism.

Human childbirth is so risky, and yet female Homo sapiens have a lot of physiological ornamentation evolved to appeal to human males—such as prominent breasts signaling fertility and more gracile faces. This speaks to how much Homo sapien reproduction has rested on Homo sapien males taking on risks. While Homo sapien males also have physiological ornamentation—larger penises, height, wider shoulders—some of it is clearly structured to also make male-to-male cooperation easier by setting up a quick hierarchy. The patterns of risk affects human physiological ornamentation by sex, but in a complex way.

Because Ortner does not consider constraints and practicalities nearly enough, it becomes easy for a presumption of female inferiority to built into the analysis:

For example, most cultures have initiation rites for adolescents (primarily for boys; I shall return to this point below), the point of which is to move the child ritually from a less than fully human state into full participation in society and culture; many cultures do not hold funeral rites for children who die at early ages, explicitly because they are not yet fully social beings.

As Camille Paglia points out, women menstruate, which is a natural ritual of passage from girlhood to womanhood. Especially as—in many societies before the modern era—few women reached menses before the age of 16. The question of when does a boy become a man is much more fraught, so of course it is typically far more heavily ritualised.

Adulthood is a serious status. It does not mean non-adults are not fully human and it certainly cannot be taken to imply that those who don’t go through the male rituals are not fully human. Indeed, taking on the responsibilities of fatherhood was often, in itself, a mark of higher status for men. The very term feminists are so fond of—patriarchy—means rule by fathers.

As noted in the previous post, the outward orientation of men towards hunting, fighting, interaction with other communities, does readily generate a presumption that authority is male. This is even further reinforced when there is a need to stop women leaking information to their male relatives in a rival community: hence male-only ritual spaces. The basis for male coordination is then even further reinforced.

So (up to a point) yes:

it is hardly contestable that the domestic is always subsumed by the public; domestic units are allied with one another through the enactment of rules that are logically at a higher level than the units themselves; this creates an emergent unit – society – that is logically at a higher level than the domestic units of which it is composed.

Now, since women are associated with, and indeed are more or less confined to, the domestic context, they are identified with this lower order of social/cultural organization.

Again, how much women are confined to a “domestic” context varies wildly. In societies without dwellings, there really is not a physically separate domestic sphere. While Spartiate and elite Roman citizen women had management responsibilities that hardly meant they were “confined” to the domestic sphere, unless we wish to define that very broadly.

Since men lack a “natural” basis (nursing, generalized to child care) for a familial orientation, their sphere of activity is defined at the level of interfamilial relations. And hence, so the cultural reasoning seems to go, men are the “natural” proprietors of religion, ritual, politics, and other realms of cultural thought and action in which universalistic statements of spiritual and social synthesis are made.

Lots of cultures are not universalistic about anything much, having a very particular-to-them view of the world. But the idea that fatherhood is not a key social role in many societies is nonsense on stilts. Cultures typically go to some effort to establish and valorise fatherhood, mostly for quite practical reasons—our children are very biologically expensive and having a protecting and provisioning male specifically committed to them makes their survival to being able to reproduce themselves much more likely.

Again and again, Ortner fails to grapple with the question: what are the practicalities? Instead, she reifies culture far too quickly.

Sometimes, the failure to grapple with the practicalities becomes quite silly:

… that except for nursing newborn infants (and artificial nursing devices can cut even this biological tie), there is no reason why it has to be mother – as opposed to father, or anyone else – who remains identified with child care.

Sorry, this is nonsense. Successful human reproduction is not a “one and done” business. Given high rates of infant and child mortality—and that getting a child to subsistence, let alone reproductive, adulthood was an almost 20-year project—we are talking about a rolling series of almost 20-year projects. Forager, farmer and pastoralist women could thus spend a considerable proportion of their adult lives breast-feeding.

Then there is the question of skills acquisition. It generally made way more sense to train women and girls in the skills you could exercise while minding children—even if you were breast-feeding—but men and boys in the other skills.

Hence women normally trained girls and men normally trained boys. This is a matter of pervasive practicality, not the cultural conspiracy that Ortner implies:

Yet in virtually every society there is a point at which the socialization of boys is transferred to the hands of men. The boys are considered, in one set of terms or another, not yet “really” socialized; their entree into the realm of fully human (social, cultural) status can be accomplished only by men.

There was, over human history, strong selection for males to form effective teams. After the invention of farming and pastoralism, the selection for effective male teamwork became brutal. Of course, training tended to be sex-segregated, just as who did what was sex-segregated. Once again, Judith Brown’s classic 1970 short paper A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex does not seem to have informed the analysis.

This failure—unlike Brown’s classic paper—to grapple sufficiently with the practicalities of human subsistence as socially-embedded physical activities is particularly clear in passages such as:

Thus the pattern replicates that in the area of socialization – women perform lower-level conversions from nature to culture, but when the culture distinguishes a higher level of the same functions, the higher level is restricted to men.

Women do more of the “inner” functions one can do while minding children, men do more of the “outer” functions that one can do when not minding children. Yes, this can be conceptualised as higher and lower, but there is an underlying practicality. Indeed, noticing the underlying practicality makes any more general pattern much more explicable.

Then we get into what looks a lot more like portentous word salad:

The culture/nature distinction is itself a product of culture, culture being minimally defined as the transcendence, by means of systems of thought and technology, of the natural givens of existence. This of course is an analytic definition, but I argued that at some level every culture incorporates this notion in one form or other, if only through the performance of ritual as an assertion of the human ability to manipulate those givens.

Transcendence? Really? These are societies where most people lived lives at, near, sometimes below, subsistence. The practicalities dominated their concerns, any theologising of the same came later.

Often, cultures theologise to make something functional—human sacrifice, for instance. Take the problem—such as a lack of domesticated herbivores—away, and the theologising specific to it disappears.

Horticultural (hoe-farming) societies that lack domesticated herbivores tend to engage in cannibalism. (Plough-farming societies have domesticated herbivores.)

In the case of the urban civilisations of Mesoamerica—the only urban civilisations in human history without domesticated herbivores—they intensely theologised and ritualised their human sacrifices. Those human sacrifices were generally eaten and no human society can persist if everyone considers everyone else as potential dinner. Hence the elaborate theologised ritual to separate out who was sacrificed, and so eaten.

Then the Spanish introduced pigs, goats, sheep, cattle, chickens. A millennia or more of theologised human sacrifice evaporated like snow in the sun.

Yes, it is hard to define culture, but Ortner offers a silly definition that seems to be designed to support her thesis rather than synthesise how and why human cultures exist:

The culture/nature distinction is itself a product of culture, culture being minimally defined as the transcendence, by means of systems of thought and technology, of the natural givens of existence.

Cultures have indeed come with theologies of various forms, but both the cultures and the theologies grappled with constraints societies faced. You get such wide variances across human cultures because cultures both respond to different circumstances and are path dependent in their evolutions. Cultures evolve, often because the constraints they are dealing with—and the possibilities of social and physical technology—themselves change. But transcendence over-states.

The constraints human cultures evolved to deal with a serious constraints: as in, they can kill you constraints:

In virtually every culture her permissible sexual activities are more closely circumscribed than man’s, she is offered a much smaller range of role choices, and she is afforded direct access to a far more limited range of its social institutions. Further, she is almost universally socialized to have a narrower and generally more conservative set of attitudes and views than man, and the limited social contexts of her adult life reinforce this situation. This socially engendered conservatism and traditionalism of woman’s thinking is another – perhaps the worst, certainly the most insidious – mode of social restriction, and would clearly be related to her traditional function of producing well-socialized members of the group.

Yes, societies regularly valorised long-term mating (marriage) while stigmatising short-term mating (casual sex) because it was an obvious advantage to human reproduction to tie a particular male to particular children, to the extent that our emotional architecture itself encourages that.

Such valorising and stigmatising was often much more restrictive for women than men. As contemporary Western societies demonstrate, change the constraints and the sexual mores change.

The question analysis should always confront is: what problem(s) are being solved, what constraints are being dealt with? If you do not ask that question of practicality, of the requirements (and purpose) of—yes, human-created and maintained—social order, you are left drifting off into unmoored motivations. In the case of the above quote, into structural maleficence.

There can be a certain moral grandeur in seeing oneself as fighting against such structural maleficence:

The result is a (sadly) efficient feedback system: various aspects of woman’s situation (physical, social, psychological) contribute to her being seen as closer to nature, while the view of her as closer to nature is in turn embodied in institutional forms that reproduce her situation. The implications for social change are similarly circular: a different cultural view can only grow out of a different social actuality; a different social actuality can only grow out of a different cultural view.

It is clear, then, that the situation must be attacked from both sides. Efforts directed solely at changing the social institutions – through setting quotas on hiring, for example, or through passing equal-pay-for-equal-work laws – cannot have far-reaching effects if cultural language and imagery continue to purvey a relatively devalued view of women. But at the same time efforts directed solely at changing cultural assumptions – through male and female consciousness-raising groups, for example, or through revision of educational materials and mass-media imagery cannot be successful unless the institutional base of the society is changed to support and reinforce the changed cultural view. Ultimately, both men and women can and must be equally involved in projects of creativity and transcendence. Only then will women be seen as aligned with culture, in culture’s ongoing dialectic with nature.

Alternatively different solutions to the practical problems being solved can be offered because something crucial has changed. For instance, the technologies (both physical and social) can change. When technologies expand human capacities, they can also expand social possibilities.

Something that is common to every legal advance women have benefited from across the last two centuries: men voted for them, every single one of them. Men voted for them because, yes, the case was made. But the case could be successfully made because the massive expansion in productive technologies that we call ‘the Industrial Revolution’ changed circumstances. Often, the legislative action was as much as about ratifying already changing social circumstances as in changing the same.

If you do not grapple with the functionality, with problems being solved, with change in possibilities that technological change let loose, you are left with this reification of culture and alleged motivations and delusions that must be (apparently) endlessly struggled against.

If one grounds one’s analysis in constraints and possibilities, if one notices that men voted for getting rid of legal restrictions on women, if one notices that people in general were responding to the changes in ways positive for women, then a much more relaxed view of the general citizenry—and therefore the possibilities of freedom—follows naturally.

If, however, there is this reified realm called culture where maleficent ideas flourish and women can be deluded into following them, then, of course, you need the experts in Theory to identify these maleficent sociological gremlins that are otherwise invisible to the benighted masses.

One can see the attraction of such views to academics in particular, and the professional-managerial class more widely. That makes it an attractively self-serving view. It does not make it an analytically sound one.

It also helps to explain why Ortner has to read patriarchy as devaluing women, and so cannot separate presumptions about authority from general social standing. For there can’t be any good reasons for societies to be patriarchal. It can’t be because of functional reasons. Nor can it be a problem soluble through engagement with the changes in those constraints and opportunities.

The appeal of maleficent delusion over practicality and persuasion goes with how Ortner reasons from culture to consequences, and so grapples poorly with the social dynamics operating from constraints to culture.

When one examines the patterns of constraints past human societies had to deal with, it becomes utterly unsurprising that the presumption that authority was male was so common across human societies. What is much more revealing is how variable the strength of that presumption was and even more, how variable the standing of women was across human societies.

We cannot fully grapple with these revealing patterns unless we grapple with the way culture is an emergent phenomenon, how it is moulded by the constraints different societies have dealt with, and how available technology affected responses.

Sherry Ortner’s ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’ is not a good guide for that analytical journey.

References

Aliaksandr Birukou, Enrico Blanzieri, Paolo Giorgini, and Fausto Giunchiglia, ‘A Formal Definition of Culture,’ in, Sycara, K., Gelfand, M., Abbe, A. (eds) Models for Intercultural Collaboration and Negotiation, Advances in Group Decision and Negotiation, vol 6, Springer, Dordrecht, 1-26. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/30531324_A_Formal_Definition_of_Culture

Judith K. Brown, ‘A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex,’ American Anthropologist, Vol.72, Issue 5, October 1970, 1073-1078. https://www.jstor.org/stable/671420

Jean-Paul Carvalho, ‘Veiling,’ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 128, Issue 1, February 2013, 337–370, https://www.eief.it/files/2010/10/carvalho.pdf

Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, Yale University Press, [1995] 2001.

Ricardo Duchesne, ‘The Greek-Roman Invention Of Civic Identity Versus The Current Demotion Of European Ethnicity,’ The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 3, Fall 2015, 37-71. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282156990_THE_GREEK-ROMAN_INVENTION_OF_CIVIC_IDENTITY_VERSUS_THE_CURRENT_DEMOTION_OF_EUROPEAN_ETHNICITY

Bryan Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and the Origins of Social Complexity, Cambridge University Press, [2018] 2020.

Monika Karmin, et al., ‘A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture,’ Genome Resources, 2015 Apr;25(4):459-66. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4381518/

Nathan Nunn, ‘Culture And The Historical Process,’ NBER Working Paper 17869, February 2012. http://www.nber.org/papers/w17869

Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Is female to male as nature is to culture?’ in M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, culture, and society, Stanford University Press, 1974, 68-87. https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/sv/sai/SOSANT1600/v12/Ortner_Is_female_to_male.pdf