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STEPS TO AN ECOLOGY OF MIND: COLLECTED ESSAYS IN ANTHROPOLOGY, PSYCHIATRY, EVOLUTION AND EPISTEMOLOGY |
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Part II: Form and Pattern in Anthropology Culture Contact and Schismogenesis [1] The Memorandum written by a Committee of the Social Sciences Research Council (Man, 1935, 162) has stimulated me to put forward a point of view which differs considerably from theirs; and, though the beginning of this article may appear to be critical of their Memorandum, I wish to make it clear from the outset that I regard as a real contribution any serious attempt to devise categories for the study of culture contact. Moreover, since there are several passages in the Memorandum (among them the Definition) which I do not perfectly understand, my criticisms are offered with some hesitation, and are directed not so much against the Committee as against certain errors prevalent among anthropologists.
Experiments in Thinking about Observed Ethnological Material [7] As I understand it, you have asked me for an honest, introspective—personal— account of how I think about anthropological material, and if I am to be honest and personal about my thinking, then I must be impersonal about the results of that thinking. Even if I can banish both pride and shame for half an hour, honesty will still be difficult. Let me try to build up. a picture of how I think by giving you an autobiographical account of how I have acquired my kit of conceptual tools and intellectual habits. I do not mean an academic biography or a list of what subjects I have studied, but something more significant than that—a list rather of the motifs of thought in various scientific subjects which left so deep an impression on my mind that when I came to work on anthropological material, I naturally used those borrowed motifs to guide my approach to this new material. I owe the greatest part of this kit of tools to my father, William Bateson, who was a geneticist. In schools and universities they do very little to give one an idea of the basic principles of scientific thinking, and what I learned of this came in very large measure from my father’s conversation and perhaps especially from the overtones of his talk. He himself was inarticulate about philosophy and mathematics and logic, and he was articulately distrustful of such subjects, but still, in spite of himself, I think, he passed on to me something of these matters. The attitudes which I got from him were especially those which he had denied in himself. In his early—and as I think he knew—his best work he posed the problems of animal symmetry, segmentation, serial repetition of parts, patterns, etc. Later he turned away from this field into Mendelism, to which he devoted the remainder of his life. But he had always a hankering after the problems of pattern and symmetry, and it was this hankering and the mysticism that in-spired it that I picked up and which, for better or worse, I called “science.” I picked up a vague mystical feeling that we must look for the same sort of processes in all fields of natural phenomena—that we might expect to find the same sort of laws at work in the structure of a crystal as in the structure of society, or that the segmentation of an earthworm might really be comparable to the process by which basalt pillars are formed. I should not preach this mystical faith in quite those terms today but would say rather that I believe that the types of mental operation which are useful in analyzing one field may be equally useful in another—that the framework (the eidos) of science, rather than the framework of Nature, is the same in all fields. But the more mystical phrasing of the matter was what I vaguely learnt, and it was of paramount importance. It lent a certain dignity to any scientific investigation, implying that when I was analyzing the pat-terns of partridges’ feathers, I might really get an answer or a bit of an answer to the whole puzzling business of pattern and regularity in nature. And further, this bit of mysticism was important because it gave me freedom to use my scientific background, the ways of thought that I had picked up in biology and elementary physics and chemistry; it encouraged me to expect these ways of thought to fit in with very different fields of observation. It enabled me to regard all my training as potentially useful rather than utterly irrelevant to anthropology. When I came into anthropology there was a considerable reaction taking place against the use of loose analogies, especially against the Spencerian analogy between the Organism and Society. Thanks to this mystical belief in the pervading unity of the phenomena of the world, I avoided a great deal of intellectual waste. I never had any doubt that this analogy was fundamentally sound; since to doubt would have been emotionally expensive. Nowadays, of course, the emphasis has shifted. Few would seriously doubt that the ways of analysis which have been found useful in analyzing one complex functioning system are likely to be of use in analyzing any other similar system. But the mystical prop was useful then, though its phrasing was bad. There is another way, too, in which that mysticism has helped—a way which is especially relevant to my thesis. I want to emphasize that whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition; when-ever we start insisting too hard upon “operationalism” or symbolic logic or any other of these very essential systems of tramlines, we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science. My mystical view of phenomena contributed specifically to build up this double habit of mind—it led me into wild “hunches” and, at the same time, compelled more formal thinking about those hunches. It encouraged looseness of thought and then immediately insisted that that looseness be measured up against a rigid concreteness. The point is that the first hunch from analogy is wild, and then, the moment I begin to work out the analogy, I am brought up against the rigid formulations which have been devised in the field from which I borrow the analogy. Perhaps it is worth giving an example of this; it was a matter of formulating the social organization of a New Guinea tribe,—the Iatmul. The Iatmul social system differs from ours in one very essential point. Their society completely lacks any sort of chieftainship, and I phrased this matter loosely by saying that the control of the individual was achieved by what I called “lateral” sanctions rather than by “sanctions from above.” Going over my material, I found further that in general the subdivisions of the society—the clans, moieties, etc.—had virtually no means of punishing their own members. I had a case in which a ceremonial house owned by a particular junior age grade had been defiled, and though the other members of the grade were very angry with the defiler, they could do nothing about it. I asked whether they would kill one of his pigs or take any of his property, and they replied “No, of course not. He is a member of their own initiatory grade.” If the same thing had happened in the big senior ceremonial house which belongs to several grades, then the defiler would be punished. His own grade would defend him but the others would start a brawl. [8] I then began looking for more concrete cases which could be compared with the contrast between this system and our own. I said, “It’s like the difference between the radially symmetrical animals (jellyfish, sea anemones, etc.) and the animals which have transverse segmentation (earthworms, lobsters, man, etc.).” Now in the field of animal segmentation we know very little about the mechanisms concerned, but at least the problems are more concrete than in the social field. When we compare a social problem with a problem of animal differentiation, we are at once provided with a visual diagram, in terms of which we may be able to talk a little more precisely. And for the transversely segmented animals, at least, we have something more than a merely anatomical diagram. Thanks to the work that has been done on experimental embryology and axial gradients, we have some idea of the dynamics of the system. We know that some sort of asymmetrical relation obtains between the successive segments, that each segment would, if it could (I speak loosely) form a head, but that the next anterior segment prevents this. Further, this dynamic asymmetry in the relations between successive segments is reflected morphologically; we find in most such animals a serial difference—what is called metameric differentiation—between the. successive segments. Their appendages, though they can be shown to conform to a single basic structure, differ one from another as we go down the series. (The legs of the lobster provide a familiar example of the sort of thing I mean.) In contrast with this, in the radially symmetrical animals, the segments, arranged around the center like sectors of a circle, are usually all alike. As I say, we do not know much about the segmentation of animals, but at least here was enough for me to take back to the problem of Iatmul social organization. My “hunch” had provided me with a set of stricter words and diagrams, in terms of which I could try to be more precise in my thinking about the Iatmul problem. I could now look again at the Iatmul material to determine whether the relationship between the clans was really in some sense symmetrical and to determine whether there was anything that could be compared with the lack of metameric differentiation. I found that the “hunch” worked. I found that so far as opposition, control, etc. between the clans was concerned, the relations between them were reasonably symmetrical, and further, as to the question of differentiation between them, it could be shown that, though there were considerable differences, these followed no serial pattern. Additionally, I found that there was a strong tendency for clans to imitate each other, to steal bits of each other’s mythological history and to incorporate these into their own past—a sort of fraudulent heraldry, each clan copying the others so that the whole system tended to diminish the differentiation between them. (The system perhaps also contained tendencies in an opposite direction, but this question I need not discuss now.) I followed up the analogy in another direction. Impressed by the phenomena of metameric differentiation, I made the point that in our society with its hierarchical systems (comparable to the earthworm or the lobster), when a group secedes from the parent society, it is usual to find that the line of fission, the division between the new group and the old, marks a differentiation of mores. The Pilgrim Fathers wander off in order to be different. But among the Iatmul, when two groups in a village quarrel, and one half goes off and founds a new community, the mores of the two groups remain identical. In our society, fission tends to be heretical (a following after other doctrines or mores), but in Iatmul, fission is rather schismatic (a following after other leaders without change of dogma). You will note that. here I overrode my analogy at one point and that this matter is still not perfectly clear. When a transverse fission or a lateral budding occurs in a transversely segmented animal, the products of that bud or fission are identical, the posterior half which was held in check by the anterior is relieved of this control and develops into a normal, complete animal. I am therefore not in step with my analogy when I regard the differentiation which accompanies fission in a hierarchical society as comparable with that which exists before fission in a transversely segmented animal. This divergence from the analogy will surely be worth investigation; it will take us into a more precise study of the asymmetrical relations which obtain between the units in the two cases and raise questions about the reactions of the subordinate member to its position in the asymmetry. This aspect of the matter I have not yet examined. Having got some sort of conceptual frame within which to describe the interrelations between clans, I went on from this to consider the interrelations between the various age grades in terms of this same frame. Here, if anywhere, where age might be expected to provide a basis for serial differentiation, we ought to expect to find some analogue of the transverse segmentation with asymmetrical relations between the successive grades—and to a certain extent the age-grade system fitted this picture. Each grade has its ceremonies and its secrets of initiation into that grade; and in these ceremonies and secrets it was perfectly easy to trace a metameric differentiation. Ceremonies which are fully developed at the top of the system are still recognizable in their basic form in the lower levels—but more rudimentary at each level as we go down the series. But the initiatory system contains one very interesting element which was brought into sharp relief when my point of view was defined in terms of animal segmentation. The grades alternate, so that the whole system consists of two opposed groups, one group made up of grades 3, 5, 7, etc. (the odd numbers), and the other made up of 2, 4, 6, etc.; and these two groups maintain the type of relationship which I had already described as “symmetrical”—each providing sanctions by quarreling with the other when their rights are infringed. Thus even where we might expect the most definite hierarchy, the Iatmul have substituted for it a headless system in which one side is symmetrically opposed to the other. From this conclusion my enquiry, influenced by many other types of material, will go on to look at the matter from other points of view—especially the psychological problems of whether a preference for symmetrical rather than asymmetrical relationships can be implanted in the individual, and what the mechanisms of such character formation may be. But we need not go into that now. Enough has been said to bring out the methodological theme—that a vague “hunch” derived from some other science leads into the precise formulations of that other science in terms of which it is possible to think more fruit-fully about our own material. You will have noticed that the form in which I used the biological findings was really rather different from that in which a zoologist would talk about his material. Where the zoologist might talk of axial gradients, I talked about “asymmetrical relationships between successive segments,” and in my phrasing I was prepared to attach to the word “successive” two simultaneous meanings—in referring to the animal material it meant a morphological series in a three-dimensional concrete organism, while in referring to the anthropological material the word “successive” meant some abstracted property of a hierarchy. I think it would be fair to say that I use the analogies in some curiously abstract form—that, as for “axial gradients” I substitute “asymmetrical relationships,” so also I endow the word “successive” with some abstract meaning which makes it applicable to both sorts of cases. This brings us to another very important motif in my thinking—a habit of constructing abstractions which refer to terms of comparison between entities; and to illustrate this I can clearly remember the first occasion on which I was guilty of such an abstraction. It was in my Zoological Tripos examination at Cambridge, and the examiner had tried to compel me to answer at least one question on each branch of the subject. Comparative anatomy I had always regarded as a waste of time, but I found myself face to face with it in the examnation and had not the necessary detailed knowledge. I was asked to compare the urinogenital system of the amphibia with that of the mammalia, and I did not know much about it. Necessity was the mother of invention. I decided that I ought to be able to defend the position that comparative anatomy was a muddled waste of time, and so I set to work to attack the whole emphasis on homology in zoological theory. As you probably will know, zoologists conventionally deal in two sorts of comparability between organs—homology and analogy. Organs are said to be “homologous” when it can be shown that they have similar structure or bear similar structural relations to other organs, e.g., the trunk of the elephant is homologous with the nose and lip of a man be-cause it has the same formal relation to other parts—eyes, etc.; but the trunk of an elephant is analogous to the hand of a man because both have the same uses. Fifteen years ago comparative anatomy revolved endlessly around these two sorts of comparability, which incidentally are good examples of what I mean by “abstractions which define the terms of a comparison between entities.” My attack on the system was to suggest that there might be other sorts of comparability and that these would con-fuse the issue to such a degree that mere morphological analysis would not suffice. I argued that the bilateral fins of a fish would conventionally be regarded as homologous with the bilateral limbs of a mammal, but that the tail of a fish, a median organ, would conventionally be regarded a “different from” or at most only “analogous to” the fins. But what about the double-tailed Japanese goldfish? In this animal the factors causing an anomaly of the tail also cause the same anomaly in the bilateral fins; therefore there was here another sort of comparability, an equivalence in terms of processes and laws of growth. Well, I don’t know what mark I got for my answer. I found out much later that, as a matter of fact, the lateral fins of the goldfish are scarcely, if at all, affected by the factors which cause the anomaly in the tail, but I doubt if the examiner caught me in my bluff; and I found also that, curiously, Haekel in 1854 had actually coined the word “homonomy” for the very type of equivalence that I was inventing. The word is, so far as I know, obsolete, and was obsolete when I wrote my answer. So far as I was concerned, however, the idea was new and I had thought of it myself. I felt that I had discovered how to think. That was in 1926, and this same old clue—recipe, if you like—has remained with me ever since. I did not realize that I had a recipe; and it was not until ten years later that I fully grasped the significance of this analogyhomology-homonomy business. Perhaps it will be of interest to recount in some detail my various brushes with these concepts and the recipe which they contained. Soon after the examination to which I have referred, I went into anthropology and for some time stopped thinking—wondering rather what could be made of this subject, but not getting anything clear except a repudiation of most of the conventional approaches which, to me, seemed meaningless. I wrote a little skit on the concept of totemism in 1930, first proving that the totemism of the Iatmul is true totemism because it contains a “high percentage” of characteristics of totemism listed in “Notes and Queries on Anthropology” issued more or less ex cathedra by the Royal Anthropological Institute, and then going on to the question, what sort of equivalence we thought we were referring to when we equate some bits of Iatmul culture with the totem-ism of North America, and dragging in homology-homonomy, etc. In this discussion of “true” totemism I still had the homonomy-homology abstractions perfectly clear and was using the concepts with a clean (though inarticulate) understanding of what sort of abstractions they were—but it is interesting that I afterwards made some other comparable abstractions for the analysis of latmul material and muddled the issues through forgetting this very thing. I was especially interested in studying what I called the “feel” of culture, and I was bored with the conventional study of the more formal details. I went out to New Guinea with that much vaguely clear—and in one of my first letters home I complained of the hopelessness of putting any sort of salt on the tail of such an imponderable concept as the “feel” of culture. I had been watching a casual group of natives chewing betel, spitting, laughing, joking, etc., and I felt acutely the tantalizing impossibility of what I wanted to do. A year later, still in New Guinea, I read Arabia Deserta and recognized with a thrill that Doughty had in a sense done what I wanted to do. He had put salt on the tail of the very bird that I was hunting. But I realized also—sadly -- that he had used the wrong kind of salt. I was not interested in achieving a literary or artistic representation of the “feel” of the culture; I was interested in a scientific analysis of it. On the whole I think that Doughty was an encouragement to me, and the greatest encouragement I got from him was due to a fallacious bit of thinking which he prompted. It appeared to me that it was impossible to understand the behavior of his Arabs apart from the “feel” of their culture, and from this it seemed to follow that the “feel” of the culture was in some way causative in shaping native behavior. This encouraged me to go on thinking that I was trying after something that was important—so far so good. But it also guided me into regarding the “feel” of the culture as much more concrete and causally active than I had any right to do. This false concreteness was reinforced later by an accident of language. Radcliffe- Brown called to my attention the old word “ethos” and told me that that was what I was trying to study. Words are dangerous things, and it so hap-pens that “ethos” is in some ways a very bad word. If I had been compelled to make up my own word for what I wanted to say, I might have done better and saved myself a great deal of confusion. I would, I hope, have put forward something like “ethonomy,” which would have reminded me that I was referring to an abstraction of the same order as homology or homonomy. The trouble with the word “ethos” is just this—that it is too short. It is a unit word, a single Greek substantive, and as such helped me to go on thinking that it referred to a unit something which I could still regard as causative. I handled the word as if it were a category of behavior or a sort of factor which shaped behavior. We are all familiar with this loose use of words in such phrases as: “the causes of war are economic,” “economic behavior,” “he was influenced by his emotions,” “his symptoms are the result of conflict between his superego and his id.” (I am not sure how many of these fallacies are contained in that last example; at a rough count, there seem to be five with a possible sixth, but there may be more. Psychoanalysis has erred sadly in using words that are too short and there-fore appear more concrete than they are.) I was guilty of just this sort of shoddy thinking in my handling of the word “ethos,” and you must excuse me if I have gathered moral support for this confession by a digression to show that at any rate others have committed the same crime. Let us examine the stages by which I got into the fallacy and the way in which I got out of it. I think the first step toward an escape from sin was to multiply offenses—and there is a good deal to be said for this method. Vice is after all a dull business whether it be physical or intellectual, and an effective cure can sometimes be achieved by indulgence to the point at which the patient realizes this. It is a way of proving that a given line of thought or conduct will not do, by experimentally extrapolating it to infinity, when its absurdities become evident. I multiplied my offenses by creating several more concepts of about the same degree of abstraction as “ethos”—I had “eidos,” “cultural structure,” “sociology”— and all these I handled as though they were concrete entities. I pictured the relations between ethos and cultural structure as being like the relation between a river and its banks—”The river molds the banks and the banks guide the river. Similarly, the ethos molds the cultural structure and is guided by it.” I was still looking for physical analogies, but now the position was not quite the same as when I was looking for analogies in order to get concepts which I could use in analyzing observed material. I was looking now for physical analogies which I could use in analyzing my own concepts, and that is a very much less satisfactory business. I do not mean, of course, that the other sciences can give one no help in the attempt to straighten out one’s thoughts; they surely can. For example, the theory of Dimensions in physics may be of enormous help in this field. What I mean is that when one is seeking an analogy for the elucidation of material of one sort, it is good to look at the way analogous material has been analyzed. But when one is seeking an elucidation of one’s own concepts, then one must look for analogies on an equally abstract level. However, these similes about rivers and their banks seemed pretty to me and I treated them quite seriously. Here I must digress for a moment to describe a trick of thought and speech, which I have found useful. When I am faced with a vague concept and feel that the time is not yet ripe to bring that concept into strict expression, I coin some loose expression for referring to this concept and do not want to prejudge the issue by giving the concept too meaningful a term. I therefore dub it hastily with some brief concrete colloquial term—generally Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin—I will speak of the “stuff” of culture, or “bits” of culture, or the “feel” of culture. These brief Anglo- Saxon terms have for me a definite feeling tone which reminds me all the time that the concepts behind them are vague and await analysis. It is a trick like tying a knot in a handkerchief—but has the advantage that it still permits me, if I may so express it, to go on using the handkerchief for other purposes. I can go on using the vague concept in the valuable process of loose thinking—still continually reminded that my thoughts are loose. But these similes about ethos being the river and the formulations of culture or “cultural structure” being its banks were not Anglo-Saxon reminders that I was leaving some-thing for analysis at a later date. They were, as I thought, the real thing—a real contribution to our understanding of how culture works. I thought that there was one sort of phenomenon which I could call “ethos” and another sort which I could call “cultural structure” and that these two worked together—had mutual effect one on the other. All that remained for me to do was to discriminate clearly between these various sorts of phenomena so that other people could perform the same sort of analysis that I was doing. This effort of discrimination I postponed, feeling perhaps that the problem was not quite ripe—and I went on with the cultural analysis. And did what I still think was good work. I want to emphasize this last point—that, as a matter of fact, considerable contributions to science can be made with very blunt and crooked concepts. We may joke about the way misplaced concreteness abounds in every word of psycho-analytic writing—but in spite of all the muddled thinking that Freud started, psychoanalysis remains as the outstanding contribution, almost the only contribution to our understanding of the family—a monument to the importance and value of loose thinking. Finally I had completed my book on Iatmul culture, with the exception of the last chapter, the writing of which was to be the final testing and review of my various theoretical concepts and contributions. I planned that this chapter should contain some attempt to discriminate between the sort of thing that I called “ethos” and the sort of thing that I called “eidos,” etc. I was in a state approximating that panic in the examination room which formerly produced the concept of homonomy. I was due to sail for my next field trip— my book had to be finished before I sailed—the book could not stand without some clear statement about the interrelations of these concepts of mine. Here I will quote what finally appeared in the book in this last chapter: “I began to doubt the validity of my own categories, and performed an experiment. I chose three bits of culture: (a) a wau (mother’s brother) giving food to a laua (sister’s son); a pragmatic bit, (b) a man scolding his wife; an ethological bit, and (c) a man marrying his father’s sister’s daughter; a structural bit. Then I drew a lattice of nine squares on a large piece of paper, three rows of squares with three squares in each row. I labeled the horizontal rows with my bits of culture and the vertical columns with my categories. Then I forced myself to see each bit as conceivably belonging to each category. I found that it could be done. “I found that I could think of each bit of culture structurally; I could see it as in accordance with a consistent set of rules or formulations. Equally, I could see each bit as `pragmatic,’ either as satisfying the needs of individuals or as contributing to the integration of society. Again, I could see each bit ethologically, as an expression of emotion. “This experiment may seem puerile, but to me it was very important, and I have recounted it at length because there may be some among my readers who tend to regard such concepts as `structure’ as concrete parts which `interact’ in culture, and who find, as I did, a difficulty in thinking of these concepts as labels merely for points of view adopted either by the scientist or by the natives. It is instructive to perform the same experiment with such concepts as economics, etc.” [9] In fact, “ethos” and the rest were finally reduced to abstractions of the same general order as “homology,” “homonomy,” etc.; they were labels for points of view voluntarily adopted by the investigator. I was, as you may imagine, enormously excited at getting this tangle straightened out—but I was also worried because I thought I should be compelled to rewrite the whole book. But I found that this was not so. I had to tune up the definitions, check through to see that each time the technical term appeared I could substitute the new definition for it, mark the more egregious pieces of nonsense with footnotes warning the reader that these passages might be taken as a warning of how not to say things—and so on. But the body of the book was sound enough—all that it needed was new castors on its legs. So far I have spoken of my own personal experiences with strict and loose thinking, but I think actually the story which I have narrated is typical of the whole fluctuating business of the advance of science. In my case, which is a small one and comparatively insignificant in the whole advance of science, you can see both elements of the alternating process—first the loose thinking and the building up of a structure on unsound foundations and then the correction to stricter thinking and the substitution of a new underpinning beneath the already constructed mass. And that, I believe, is a pretty fair picture of how science advances, with this exception, that usually the edifice is larger and the individuals who finally contribute the new underpinning are different people from those who did the initial loose thinking. Sometimes, as in physics, we find centuries between the first building of the edifice and the later correction of the foundations—but the process is basically the same. And if you ask me for a recipe for speeding up this process, I would say first that we ought to accept and enjoy this dual nature of scientific thought and be willing to value the way in which the two processes work together to give us advances in understanding of the world. We ought not to frown too much on either process, or at least to frown equally on either process when it is unsupplemented by the other. There is, I think, a delay in science when we start to specialize for too long either in strict or in loose thinking. I suspect, for example, that the Freudian edifice has been al-lowed to grow too big before the corrective of strict thought is applied to it—and now when investigators start rephrasing the Freudian dogmas in new stricter terms there may be a lot of ill feeling, which is wasteful. (At this point I might perhaps throw out a word of comfort to the orthodox in psychoanalysis. When the formulators begin rooting about among the most basic of analytic premises and questioning the concrete reality of such concepts as the “ego” or “wishes” or the “id” or the “libido”—as indeed they are already be-ginning to root—there is no need to get alarmed and to start having terror dreams of chaos and storms at sea. It is certain that most of the old fabric of analysis will still be left standing after the new underpinning has been inserted. And when the concepts, postulates, and premises have been straightened out, analysts will be able to embark upon a new and still more fruitful orgy of loose thinking, until they reach a stage at which again the results of their thinking must be strictly conceptualized. I think that they ought to enjoy this alternating quality in the progress of science and not delay the progress of science by a refusal to accept this dualism.) Further than this, besides simply not hindering progress, I think we might do something to hasten matters, and I have suggested two ways in which this might be done. One is to train scientists to look among the older sciences for wild analogies to their own material, so that their wild hunches about their own problems will land them among the strict formulations. The second method is to train them to tie knots in their handkerchiefs whenever they leave some mat-ter unformulated—to be willing to leave the matter so for years, but still leave a warning sign in the very terminology they use, such that these terms will forever stand, not as fences hiding the unknown from future investigators, but rather as signposts which read: “UNEXPLORED BEYOND THIS POINT.” Morale and National Character [10] We shall proceed as follows: (1) We shall examine some of the criticisms which can be urged against our entertaining any concept of “national character.” (2) This examination will enable us to state certain conceptual limits within which the phrase “national character” is likely to be valid. (3) We shall then go on, within these limits, to outline what orders of difference we may expect to find among Western nations, trying, by way of illustration, to guess more concretely at some of these differences. (4) Lastly, we shall consider how the problems of morale and international relations are affected by differences of this order. Barriers to Any Concept of “National Character” Scientific enquiry has been diverted from questions of this type by a number of trains of thought which lead scientists to regard all such questions as unprofitable or unsound. Be-fore we hazard any constructive opinion as to the order of differences to be expected among European populations, therefore, these diverting trains of thought must be examined. It is, in the first place, argued that not the people but rather the circumstances under which they live differ from one community to another; that we have to deal with differences either in historical background or in current conditions, and that these factors are sufficient to account for all differences in behavior without our invoking any differences of character in the individuals concerned. Essentially this argument is an appeal to Occam’s Razor—an assertion that we ought not to multiply entities beyond necessity. The argument is that, where observable differences in circumstance exist, we ought to invoke those rather than mere inferred differences in character, which we cannot observe. The argument may be met in part by quoting experimental data, such as Lewin’s experiments (unpublished material), which showed that there are great differences in the way in which Germans and Americans respond to failure in an experimental setting. The Americans treated failure as a challenge to increase effort; the Germans responded to the same failure with discouragement. But those who argue for the effectiveness of conditions rather than character can still reply that the experimental conditions are not, in fact, the same for both groups; that the stimulus value of any circumstance depends upon how that circumstance stands out against the background of other circumstances in the life of the subject, and that this contrast cannot be the same for both groups. It is possible, in fact, to argue that since the same circumstances never occur for individuals of different cultural back-ground, it is therefore unnecessary to invoke such abstractions as national character. This argument breaks down, I believe, when it is pointed out that, in stressing circumstance rather than character, we would be ignoring the known facts about learning. Perhaps the best documented generalization in the field of psychology is that, at any given moment, the behavioral characteristics of any mammal, and especially of man, depend upon the previous experience and behavior of that individual. Thus in presuming that character, as well as circumstance, must be taken into account, we are not multiplying entities beyond necessity; we know of the significance of learned character from other types of data, and it is this knowledge which compels us to consider the additional “entity.” A second barrier to any acceptance of the notion of “national character” arises after the first has been negotiated. Those who grant that character must be considered can still doubt whether any uniformity or regularity is likely to obtain within such. a sample of human beings as constitutes a nation. Let us grant at once that uniformity obviously does not occur, and let us proceed to consider what sorts of regularity may be expected. The criticism which we are trying to meet is likely to take five forms. (1) The critic may point to the occurrence of subcultural differentiation, to differences between the sexes, or between classes, or between occupational groups within the community. (2) He may point to the extreme heterogeneity and confusion of cultural norms which can be observed in “melting-pot” communities. (3) He may point to the accidental deviant, the individual who has undergone some “accidental” traumatic experience, not usual among those in his social environment. (4) He may point to the phenomena of cultural change, and especially to the sort of differentiation which results when one part of the community lags behind some other in rate of change. (5) Lastly, he may point to the arbitrary nature of national boundaries. These objections are closely interrelated, and the replies to them all derive ultimately from two postulates: first, that the individual, whether from a physiological or a psycho-logical point of view, is a single organized entity, such that all its “parts” or “aspects” are mutually modifiable and mutually interacting; and second, that a community is like-wise organized in this sense. If we look at social differentiation in a stable community—say, at sex differentiation in a New Guinea tribe [11]—we find that it is not enough to say that the habit system or the character structure of one sex is different from that of another. The significant point is that the habit system of each sex cogs into the habit system of the other; that the behavior of each promotes the habits of the other. [12] We find, for example, between the sexes, such complementary patterns as spectatorship-exhibitionism, dominance-submission, and succoring-dependence, or mixtures of these. Never do we find mutual irrelevance between such groups. Although it is unfortunately true that we know very little about the terms of habit differentiation between classes, sexes, occupational groups, etc., in Western nations, there is, I think, no danger in applying this general conclusion to all cases of stable differentiation between groups which are living in mutual contact. It is, to me, inconceivable that two differing groups could exist side by side in a community with- out some sort of mutual relevance between the special characteristics of one group and those of the other. Such an occurrence would be contrary to the postulate that a community is an organized unit. We shall, therefore, presume that this generalization applies to all stable social differentiation. Now, all that we know of the mechanics of character formation—especially the processes of projection, reaction formation, compensation, and the like—forces us to regard these bipolar patterns as unitary within the individual. If we know that an individual is trained in overt expression of one-half of one of these patterns, e.g., in dominance behavior, we can predict with certainty (though not in precise language) that the seeds of the other half—submission—are simultaneously sown. in his personality. We have to think of the individual, in fact, as trained in dominance-submission, not in either dominance or submission. From this it follows that where we are dealing with stable differentiation within a community, we are justified in ascribing common character to the members of that community, provided we take the precaution of describing that common character in terms of the motifs of relationship between the differentiated sections of the community. The same sort of considerations will guide us in dealing with our second criticism—the extremes of heterogeneity, such as occur in modern “melting-pot” communities. Suppose we attempted to analyze out all the motifs of relationship between individuals and groups in such a community as New York City; if we did not end in the madhouse long before we had completed our study, we should arrive at a picture of common character that would be almost infinitely complex—certainly that would contain more fine differentiations than the human psyche is capable of resolving within itself. At this point, then, both we and the individuals whom we are studying are forced to take a short cut: to treat heterogeneity as a positive characteristic of the common environment, sui generis. When, with such an hypothesis, we begin to look for common motifs of behavior, we note the very clear tendencies toward glorying in heterogeneity for its own sake (as in the Robinson Latouche “Ballad for Americans”) and toward regarding the world as made up of an infinity of disconnected quiz-bits (like Ripley’s “Believe It or Not”). The third objection, the case of the individual deviant, falls in the same frame of reference as that of the differentiation of stable groups. The boy on whom an English public-school education does not take, even though the original roots of his deviance were laid in some “accidental” traumatic incident, is reacting to the public-school system. The behavioral habits which he acquires may not follow the norms which the school intends to implant, but they are acquired in reaction to those very norms. He may (and often does) acquire patterns the exact opposite of the normal; but he cannot conceivably acquire irrelevant patterns. He may become a “bad” public-school Englishman, he may become insane, but still his deviant characteristics will be systematically related to the norms which he is resisting. We may describe his character, indeed, by saying that it is as systematically related to the standard public-school character as the character of Iatmul natives of one sex is systematically related to the character of the other sex. His character is oriented to the motifs and patterns of relationship in the society in which he lives. The same frame of reference applies to the fourth consideration, that of changing communities and the sort of differentiation which occurs when one section of a community lags behind another in change. Since the direction in which a change occurs will necessarily be conditioned by the, status quo ante, the new patterns, being reactions to the old, will be systematically related to the old. As long as we confine ourselves to the terms and themes of this systematic relationship, therefore, we are entitled to expect regularity of character in the individuals. Furthermore, the expectation and experience of change may, in some cases, be so important as to become a common character-determining factor [13] sui generis, in the same sort of way that “heterogeneity” may have positive effects. Lastly, we may consider cases of shifting national boundaries, our fifth criticism. Here, of course, we cannot expect that a diplomat’s signature on a treaty will immediately modify the characters of the individuals whose national allegiance is thereby changed. It may even happen—for example, in cases where a preliterate native population is brought for the first time in contact with Europeans—that, for some time after the shift, the two parties to such a situation will behave in an exploratory or almost random manner, each retaining its own norms and not yet developing any special adjustments to the situation of contact. During this period, we should still not expect any generalizations to apply to both groups. Very soon, however, we know that each side does develop special patterns of behavior to use in its contacts with the other. [14]At this point, it becomes meaningful to ask what systematic terms of relationship will describe the common character of the two groups; and from this point on, the degree of common character structure will increase until the two groups become related to each other just as two classes or two sexes in a stable, differentiated society. [15] In sum, to those who argue that human communities show too great internal differentiation or contain too great a random element for any notion of common character to apply, our reply would be that we expect such an approach to be useful (a) provided we describe common character in terms of the themes of relationship between groups and individuals within the community, and (b) provided that we allow sufficient time to elapse for the community to reach some degree of equilibrium or to accept either change or heterogeneity as a characteristic of their human environment. Differences Which We May Expect Between National Groups The above examination of “straw men” in the case against “national character” has very stringently limited the scope of this concept. But the conclusions from this examination are by no means simply negative. To limit the scope of a concept is almost synonymous with defining it. We have added one very important tool to our equipment —the technique of describing the common character (or the “highest common factor” of character) of individuals in a human community in terms of bipolar adjectives. Instead of despairing in face of the fact that nations are highly differentiated, we shall take the dimensions of that differentiation as our clues to the national character. No longer content to say, “Germans are submissive,” or “Englishmen are aloof,” we shall use such phrases as “dominant-submissive” when relationships of this sort can be shown to occur. Similarly, we shall not refer to “the paranoidal element in German character,” unless we can show that by “paranoidal” we mean some bipolar characteristic of German-German or German-foreign relationships. We shall not describe varieties of character by defining a given character in terms of its position on a continuum between extreme dominance and extreme submissiveness, but we shall, instead, try to use for our descriptions some such continua as “degree of interest in, or orientation toward, dominance-submission.” So far, we have mentioned only a very short list of bipolar characteristics: dominance-submission, succoring-dependence, and exhibitionism-spectatorship. One criticism will certainly be uppermost in the reader’s mind, that, in short, all three of these characteristics are clearly present in all West-ern cultures. Before our method becomes useful, therefore, we must try to expand it to give us sufficient scope and discriminatory power to differentiate one Western culture from another. As this conceptual frame develops, no doubt, many further expansions and discriminations will be introduced. The present paper will deal with only three such types of expansion. When we invoked bipolarity as a means of handling differentiation within society without foregoing some notion of common character structure, we considered only the possibility of simple bipolar differentiation. Certainly this pattern is very common in Western cultures; take, for instance, Republican- Democrat, political Right-Left, sex differentiation, God and the devil, and so on. These peoples even try to impose a binary pattern upon phenomena which are not dual in nature—youth versus age, labor versus capital, mind versus matter—and, in general, lack the organizational devices for handling triangular systems; the inception of any “third” party is always regarded, for example, as a threat to our political organization. This clear tendency toward dual systems ought not, however, to blind us to the occurrence of other patterns. [16] There is, for example, a very interesting tendency in English communities toward the formation of ternary systems, such as parents-nurse-child, king-ministers-people, officers-N.C.O.’s-privates. [17]While the precise motifs of relationship in these ternary systems remain to be investigated, it is important to note that these systems, to which I refer as “ternary,” are neither “simple hierarchies” nor “triangles.” By a pure hierarchy, I should mean a serial system in which face-to-face relations do not occur between members when they are separated by some intervening member; in other words, systems in which the only communication between A and C passes through B. By a triangle I should mean a threefold system with no serial properties. The ternary system, parent-nurse-child, on the other hand, is very different from either of these other forms. It contains serial elements, but face-to-face contact does occur between the first and the third members. Essentially, the function of the middle member is to instruct and discipline the third member in the forms of behavior which he should adopt in his contacts with the first. The nurse teaches the child how to behave toward its parents, just as the N.C.O. teaches and disciplines the private in how he should behave toward officers. In psychoanalytic terminology, the process of introjection is done indirectly, not by direct impact of the parental personality upon the child. [18] The face-to-face contacts between the first and third members are, however, very important. We may refer, in this connection, to the vital daily ritual in the British Army, in which the officer of the day asks the assembled privates and N.C.O.’s whether there are any complaints. Certainly, any full discussion of English character ought to allow for ternary, as well as bipolar patterns. So far, we have considered only what we have called “complementary” patterns of relationship, in which the behavior patterns at one end of the relationship are different from, but fit in with, the behavior patterns at the other end (dominance-submission, etc.). There exists, however, a whole category of human interpersonal behavior which does not conform to this description. In addition to the contrasting complementary patterns, we have to recognize the existence of a series of symmetrical patterns, in which people respond to what others are doing by themselves doing something similar. In particular, we have to consider those competitive [19] pat-terns in which individual or group A is stimulated to more of any type of behavior by perceiving more of that same type of behavior (or greater success in that type of behavior) in individual or group B. There is a very profound contrast between such competitive systems of behavior and complementary dominance-submission systems—a highly significant contrast for any discussion of national character. In complementary striving, the stimulus which prompts A to greater efforts is the relative weakness in B; if we want to make A subside or submit, we ought to show him that B is stronger than he is. In fact, the complementary character structure may be summarized by the phrase “bully-coward,” implying the combination of these characteristics in the personality. The symmetrical competitive systems, on the other hand, are an almost precise functional opposite of the complementary. Here the stimulus which evokes greater striving in A is the vision of greater strength or greater striving in B; and, inversely, if we demonstrate to A that B is really weak, A will relax his efforts. It is probable that these two contrasting patterns are alike available as potentialities in all human beings; but clearly, any individual who behaves in both ways at once will risk internal confusion and conflict. In the various national groups, consequently, different methods of resolving this discrepancy have developed. In England and in America, where children and adults are subjected to an almost continuous barrage of disapproval whenever they exhibit the complementary patterns, they inevitably come to accept the ethics of “fair play.” Responding to the challenge of difficulties, they cannot, without guilt, kick the underdog. [20] For British morale Dunkirk was a stimulus, not a depressant. In Germany, on the other hand, the same cliches are apparently lacking, and the community is chiefly organized on the basis of a complementary hierarchy in terms of dominance-submission. The dominance behavior is sharply and clearly developed; yet the picture is not perfectly clear and needs further investigation. Whether a pure dominance-submission hierarchy could ever exist as a stable system is doubtful. It seems that in the case of Germany, the submission end of the pattern is masked, so that overt submissive behavior is almost as strongly tabooed as it is in America or England. In place of submission, we find a sort of parade-ground impassivity. A hint as to the process by which the submissive role is modified and rendered tolerable comes to us out of the inter-views in a recently begun study of German life histories. [21] One German subject described how different was the treatment which he, as a boy, received in his South German home, from that which his sister received. He said that much more was demanded of him; that his sister was allowed to evade discipline; that whereas he was always expected to click his heels and obey with precision, his sister was allowed much more freedom. The interviewer at once began to look for intersex sibling jealousy, but the subject declared that it was a greater honor for the boy to obey. “One doesn’t expect too much of girls,” he said. “What one felt they (boys) should accomplish and do was very serious, because they had to be prepared for life.” An interesting inversion of noblesse oblige. Among the complementary motifs, we have mentioned only three—dominancesubmission, exhibitionism-spectatorship, and succorance-dependence—but these three will suffice to illustrate the sort of verifiable hypotheses at which we can arrive by describing national character in this hyphenated terminology. [22] Since, clearly, all three of these motifs occur in all Western cultures, the possibilities for international difference are limited to the proportions and ways in which the motifs are combined. The proportions are likely to be very difficult to detect, except where the differences are very large. We may be sure ourselves that Germans are more oriented toward dominance-submission than are Americans, but to demonstrate this certainty is likely to be difficult. To estimate differences in the degree of development of exhibitionism-spectatorship or succorance-dependence in the various nations will, indeed, probably be quite impossible. If, however, we consider the possible ways in which these motifs may be combined together, we find sharp qualitative differences which are susceptible of easy verification. Let us assume that all three of these motifs are developed in all relationships in all Western cultures, and from this assumption go on to consider which individual plays which role. It is logically possible that in one cultural environment A will be dominant and exhibitionist, while B is submissive and spectator; while in another culture X may be dominant and spectator, while Y is submissive and exhibitionist. Examples of this sort of contrast rather easily come to mind. Thus we may note that whereas the dominant Nazis preen themselves before the people, the czar of Russia kept his private ballet, and Stalin emerges from seclusion only to review his troops. We might perhaps present the relationship between the Nazi Party and the people thus:
While the czar and his ballet would be represented:
Since these European examples are comparatively unproved, it is worthwhile at this point to demonstrate the occurrence of such differences by describing a rather striking ethnographic difference which has been documented more fully. In Europe, where we tend to associate succoring behavior with social superiority, we construct our parent symbols accordingly. Our God, or our king, is the “father” of his people. In Bali, on the other hand, the gods are the “children” of the people, and when a god speaks through the mouth of a person in trance, he addresses anyone who will listen as “father.” Similarly, the rajah is sajanganga (“spoilt” like a child) by his people. The Balinese, further, are very fond of putting children in the combined roles of god and dancer; in mythology, the perfect prince is polished and narcissistic. Thus the Balinese pattern might be summarized thus:
And this diagram would imply, not only that the Balinese feel dependence and exhibitionism and superior status to go naturally together, but also that a Balinese will not readily combine succoring with exhibitionism (that is, Bali completely lacks the ostentatious gift-giving characteristic of many primitive peoples) or will be embarrassed if forced by the context to attempt such a combination. Although the analogous diagrams for our Western cultures cannot be drawn with the same certainty, it is worthwhile to attempt them for the parent-child relationships in English, American, and German cultures. One extra complication must, however, be faced; when we look at parent-child relationships instead of at relationships between princes and people, we have to make specific allowance for the changes in the pattern which occur as the child grows older. Succorance-dependence is undoubtedly a dominant motif in early childhood, but various mechanisms later modify this extreme dependence, to bring about some degree of psychological independence. The English upper- and middle-class system would be represented diagrammatically thus:
In contrast with this, the analogous American pattern seems to be:
And this pattern differs from the English not only in the reversal of the spectatorship-exhibitionism roles, but also in the content of what is exhibited. The American child is encouraged by his parents to show off his independence. Usually the process of psychological weaning is not accomplished by sending the child away to a boarding school; instead, the child’s exhibitionism is played off against his independence, until the latter is neutralized. Later, from this beginning in the exhibition of independence, the individual may sometimes go on in adult life to show off succorance, his wife and family becoming in some degree his “exhibits.” Though the analogous German pattern probably resembles the American in the arrangement of the paired complementary roles, certainly it differs from the American in that the father’s dominance is much stronger and much more consistent, and especially in that the content of the boy’s exhibitionism is quite different. He is, in fact, dominated into a sort of heel-clicking exhibitionism which takes the place of overt submissive behavior. Thus, while in the American character exhibitionism is encouraged by the parent as a method of psychological weaning, both its function and its content are for the German entirely different. Differences of this order, which may be expected in all European nations, are probably the basis of many of our naive and often unkind international comments. They may, indeed, be of considerable importance in the mechanics of international relations, in as much as an understanding of them might dispel some of our misunderstandings. To an American eye, the English too often appear “arrogant,” whereas to an English eye the American appears to be “boastful.” If we could show precisely how much of truth and how much of distortion is present in these impressions, it might be a real contribution to interallied cooperation. In terms of the diagrams above, the “arrogance” of the Englishman would be due to the combination of dominance and exhibitionism. The Englishman in a performing role (the parent at breakfast, the newspaper editor, the political spokesman, the lecturer, or what not) assumes that he is also in a dominant role—that he can decide in accordance with vague, abstract standards what sort of performance to give —and the audience can “take it or leave it.” His own arrogance he sees either as “natural” or as mitigated by his humility in face of the abstract standards. Quite unaware that his behavior could conceivably be regarded as a comment upon his audience, he is, on the contrary, aware only of be-having in the performer’s role, as he understands that role. But the American does not see it thus. To him, the “arrogant” behavior of the Englishman appears to be directed against the audience, in which case the implicit invocation of some abstract standard appears only to add insult to injury. Similarly, the behavior which an Englishman interprets as “boastful” in an American is not aggressive, although the Englishman may feel that he is being subjected to some sort of invidious comparison. He does not know that, as a matter of fact, Americans will only behave like this to people whom they rather like and respect. According to the hypothesis above, the “boasting” pattern results from the curious linkage whereby exhibition of self-sufficiency and independence is played off against overdependence. The American, when he boasts, is looking for approval of his upstanding independence; but the naive Englishman interprets this behavior as a bid for some sort of dominance or superiority. In this sort of way, we may suppose that the whole flavor of one national culture may differ from that of another, and that such differences may be considerable enough to lead to serious misunderstandings. It is probable, however, that these differences are not so complex in their nature as to be beyond the reach of investigation. Hypotheses of the type which we have advanced could be easily tested, and research on these lines is urgently needed. National Character and American Morale Using the motifs of interpersonal and intergroup relation-ship as our clues to national character, we have been able to indicate certain orders of regular difference which we may expect to find among the peoples who share our Western civilization. Of necessity, our statements have been theoretical rather than empirical; still, from the theoretical structure which we have built up, it is possible to extract certain formulas which may be useful to the builder of morale. All of these formulas are based upon the general assumption that people will respond most energetically when the context is structured to appeal to their habitual patterns of reaction. It is not sensible to encourage a donkey to go up hill by offering him raw meat, nor will a lion respond to grass.
We have to devise a peace treaty (a) such that Americans and British will fight to achieve it, and (b) such that it will bring out the best rather than the worst characteristics of our enemies. If we approach it scientifically, such a problem is by no means beyond our skill. The most conspicuous psychological hurdle to be negotiated, in imagining such a peace treaty, is the contrast between British and American symmetrical patterns and the German complementary pattern, with its taboo on overt sub-missive behavior. The allied nations are not psychologically equipped to enforce a harsh treaty; they might draw up such a treaty, but in six months they would tire of keeping the underdog down. The Germans, on the other hand, if they see their role as “submissive,” will not stay down without harsh treatment. We have seen that these considerations applied even to such a mildly punitive treaty as was devised at Versailles; the allies omitted to enforce it, and the Germans refused to accept it. It is, therefore, useless to dream of such a treaty, and worse than useless to repeat such dreams as a way of raising our morale now, when we are angry with Germany. To do that would only obscure the issues in the final settlement. This incompatibility between complementary and symmetrical motivation means, in fact, that the treaty cannot be organized around simple dominance-submissive motifs; hence we are forced to look for alternative solutions. We must examine, for example, the motif of exhibitionism-spectatorship —what dignified role is each of the various nations best fitted to play?—and that of succoring-dependence— in the starving postwar world, what motivational patterns shall we evoke between those who give and those who receive food? And, alternative to these solutions, we have the possibility of some threefold structure, within which both the allies and Germany would submit, not to each other, but to some abstract principle. Bali: The Value System of a Steady State [23] It would be an oversimplification—it would even be false —to say that science necessarily advances by the construction and empirical testing of successive working hypotheses. Among the physicists and chemists there may be some who really proceed in this oithoclox manner, but among the social scientists there is perhaps not one. Our concepts are loosely defined—a haze of chiaroscuro prefiguring sharper lines still undrawn—and our hypotheses are still so vague that rarely can we imagine any crucial instance whose investigation will test them. The present paper is an attempt to make more precise an idea which I published in 1936 [24] and which has lain fallow since that time. The notion of ethos had proved a useful conceptual tool for me, and with it I had been able to get a sharper understanding of Iatmul culture. But this experience by no means proved that this tool would necessarily be useful in other hands or for the analysis of other cultures. The most general conclusion I could draw was of this order: that my own mental processes had certain characteristics; that the sayings, actions, and organization of the Iatmul had certain characteristics; and that the abstraction, “ethos,” performed some role—catalytic, perhaps—in easing the relation between these two specificities, my mind and the data which I myself had collected. Immediately after completing the manuscript of Naven, I went to Bali with the intention of trying upon Balinese data this tool which had been evolved for the analysis of Iatmul. For one reason or another, however, I did not do this, partly because in Bali Margaret Mead and I were engaged in devising other tools— photographic methods of record and description—and partly because I was learning the techniques of applying genetic psychology to cultural data, but more especially because at some inarticulate level I felt that the tool was unsuitable for this new task. It was not that ethos was in any sense disproved—indeed, a tool or a method can scarcely be proved false. It can only be shown to be not useful, and in this case there was not even a clear demonstration of uselessness. The method remained almost untried, and the most I could say was that, after that surrender to the data which is the first step in all anthropological study, ethological analysis did not seem to be the next thing to do. It is now possible to show with Balinese data what peculiarities of that culture may have influenced me away from ethological analysis, and this demonstration will lead to a greater generalization of the abstraction; ethos. We shall in the process make certain heuristic advances which may guide us to more rigorous descriptive procedures in dealing with other cultures.
The foregoing descriptive generalizations are all partial answers to a negative question—”Why is Balinese society nonschismogenic?”—and from the combination of these generalizations we arrive at a picture of a society differing very markedly from our own, from that of the Iatmul, from those systems of social opposition which Radcliffe-Brown has analyzed, and from any social structure postulated by Marxian analysis. We started with the hypothesis that human beings have a tendency to involve themselves in sequences of cumulative interaction, and this hypothesis is still left virtually intact. Among the Balinese the babies, at least, evidently have such tendencies. But for sociological validity this hypothesis must now be guarded with a parenthetical clause stipulating that these tendencies are operative in the dynamics of society only if the childhood training is not such as to prevent their expression in adult life. We have made an advance in our knowledge of the scope of human character formation in demonstrating that these tendencies toward cumulative interaction are subject to some sort of modification, deconditioning, or inhibition. [38] And this is an important advance. We know how it is that the Balinese are nonschismogenic and we know how their distaste for schismogenic patterns is expressed in various details of the social organization—the rigid hierarchies, the institutions for the handling of quarrels, etc.—but we still know nothing of the positive dynamics of the society. We have answered only the negative question. The next step, therefore, is to ask about Balinese ethos. What actually are the motives and the values which accompany the complex and rich cultural activities of the Balinese? What, if not competitive and other types of cumulative interrelationship, causes the Balinese to carry out the elaborate patterns of their lives?
The Witch, the personification of fear, frequently uses a gesture called kapar, which is described as that of a man falling from a coconut palm on suddenly seeing a snake. In this gesture the arms are raised sideways to a position some-what above the head. The ordinary Balinese term for the period before the coming of the white man is “when the world was steady” (doegas goemine enteg). Applications of the Von Neumannian Game Even this very brief listing of some of the elements in Balinese ethos suffices to indicate theoretical problems of prime importance. Let us consider the matter in abstract terms. One of the hypotheses underlying most sociology is that the dynamics of the social mechanism can be described by assuming that the individuals constituting that mechanism are motivated to maximize certain variables. In conventional economic theory it is assumed that the individuals will maximize value, while in schismogenic theory it was tacitly assumed that the individuals would maximize intangible but still simple variables such as prestige, self-esteem, or even submissiveness. The Balinese, however, do not maximize any such simple variables. In order to define the sort of contrast which exists between the Balinese system and any competitive system, let us start by considering the premisses of a strictly competitive Von Neumannian game and proceed by considering what changes we must make in these premisses in order to approximate more closely to the Balinese system.
In sum it seems that the Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance, and that they generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance. This last point gives us, I believe, a partial answer to the question of why the society not only continues to function but functions rapidly and busily, continually undertaking ceremonial and artistic tasks which are not economically or competitively determined. This steady state is maintained by continual nonprogressive change. Schismogenic System versus the Steady State I have discussed two types of social system in such schematic outline that it is possible to state clearly a contrast between them. Both types of system, so far as they are capable of maintaining themselves without progressive or irreversible change, achieve the steady state. There are, how-ever, profound differences between them in the manner in which the steady state is regulated. The Iatmul system, which is here used as a prototype of schismogenic systems, includes a number of regenerative causal circuits or vicious circles. Each such circuit consists of two or more individuals (or groups of individuals) who participate in potentially cumulative interaction. Each human individual is an energy source or “relay,” such that the energy used in his responses is not derived from the stimuli but from his own metabolic processes. It therefore follows that such a schismogenic system is—unless controlled—liable to excessive increase of those acts which characterize the schismogeneses. The anthropologist who attempts even a qualitative description of. such a system must therefore identify: (1) the individuals and groups involved in schismogenesis and the routes of communication between them; (2) the categories of acts and contexts characteristic of the schismogeneses; (3) the processes whereby the individuals become psychologically apt to perform these acts and/or the nature of the contexts which force these acts upon them; and lastly, (4) he must identify the mechanisms or factors which control the schismogeneses. These controlling factors may be of at least three distinct types: (a) degenerative causal loops may be superposed upon the schismogeneses so that when the latter reach a certain intensity some form of restraint is applied as occurs in Occidental systems when a government intervenes to limit economic competition; (b) there may be, in addition to the schismogeneses already considered, other cumulative interactions acting in an opposite sense and so promoting social integration rather than fission; (c) the increase in schismogenesis may be limited by factors which are internally or externally environmental to the parts of the schismogenic circuit. Such factors which have only small restraining effect at low intensities of schismogenesis may increase with increase of intensity. Friction, fatigue, and limitation of energy supply would be examples of such factors. In contrast with these schismogenic systems, Balinese society is an entirely different type of mechanism, and in de-scribing it the anthropologist must follow entirely different procedures, for which rules cannot as yet be laid down. Since the class of “nonschismogenic” social systems is defined only in negative terms, we cannot assume that members of the class will have common characteristics. In the analysts of the Balinese system, however, the following steps occurred, and it is possible that some at least of these may be applicable in the analysis of other cultures of this class: (1) it was observed that schismogenic sequences are rare in Bali; (2) the exceptional cases in which such sequences occur were investigated; (3) from this investigation it appeared, (a) that in general the contexts which recur in Balinese social life preclude cumulative interaction and ( b) that childhood experience trains the child away from seeking climax in personal interaction; (4) it was shown that certain positive values—related to balance—recur in the culture and are incorporated into the character structure during child-hood, and, further, that these values may be specifically related to the steady state; (5) a more detailed study is now required to arrive at a systematic statement about the self-correcting characteristics of the system. It is evident that the ethos alone is insufficient to maintain the steady state. From time to time the village or some other entity does step in to correct infractions. The nature of these instances of the working of the corrective mechanism must be studied; but it is clear that this intermittent mechanism is very different from the continually acting restraints which must be present in all schismogenic systems. Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art [51] This paper consists of several still-separate attempts to map a theory associated with culture and the nonverbal arts. Since no one of these attempts is completely successful, and since the attempts do not as yet meet in the middle of the territory to be mapped, it. may be useful to state, in non-technical language, what it is I am after. Aldous Huxley used to say that the central problem for humanity is the quest for grace. This word he used in what he thought was the sense in, which it is used in the New Testament. He explained the word, however, in his own terms. He argued—like Walt Whitman—that the communication and behavior of animals has a naivete, a simplicity, which man has lost. Man’s behavior is corrupted by deceit—even self-deceit— by purpose, and by self-consciousness. As Aldous saw the matter, man has lost the “grace” which animals still have. In terms of this contrast, Aldous argued that God resembles the animals rather than man: He is ideally unable to deceive and incapable of internal confusions. In the total scale of beings, therefore, man is as if displaced sideways and lacks that grace which the animals have and which God has. I argue that art is a part of man’s quest for grace; some-times his ecstasy in partial success, sometimes his rage and agony at failure. I argue also that there are many species of grace within the major genus; and also that there are many kinds of failure and frustration and departure from grace. No doubt each culture has its characteristic species of grace toward which its artists strive, and its own species of failure. Some cultures may foster a negative approach to this difficult integration, an avoidance of complexity by crass preference either for total consciousness or total unconsciousness. Their art is unlikely to be “great.” I shall argue that the problem of grace is fundamentally a problem of integration and that what is to be integrated is the diverse parts of the mind—especially those multiple levels of which one extreme is called “consciousness” and the other the “unconscious.” For the attainment of grace, the reasons of the heart must be integrated with the reasons of the reason. Edmund Leach has confronted us, in this conference, with the question: How is it that the art of one culture can have meaning or validity for critics raised in a different culture? My answer would be that, if art is somehow expressive of something like grace or psychic integration, then the success of this expression might well be recognizable across cultural barriers. The physical grace of cats is profoundly different from the physical grace of horses, and yet a man who has the physical grace of neither can evaluate that of both. And even when the subject matter of art is the frustration of integration, cross-cultural recognition of the products of this frustration is not too surprising. The central question is: In what form is information about psychic integration contained or coded in the work of art? They say that “every picture tells a story,” and this generalization holds for most of art if we exclude “mere” geometric ornamentation. But I want precisely to avoid analyzing the “story.” That aspect of the work of art which can most easily be reduced to words—the mythology connected with the subject matter—is not what I want to discuss. I shall not even mention the unconscious mythology of phallic symbol-ism, except at the end. I am concerned with what important psychic information is in the art object quite apart from what it may “represent.” “Le style est l’homme meme” (“The style is the man him-self”) (Buffon). What is implicit in style, materials, composition, rhythm, skill, and so on? Clearly this subject matter will include geometrical ornamentation along with the composition and stylistic aspects of more representational works. The lions in Trafalgar Square could have been eagles or bulldogs and still have carried the same (or similar) messages about empire and about the cultural premises of nineteenth-century England. And yet, how different might their message have been had they been made of wood! But representationalism as such is relevant. The extremely realistic horses and stags of Altamira are surely not about the same cultural premises as the highly conventionalized black outlines of a later period. The code whereby perceived objects or persons (or supernaturals) are transformed into wood or paint is a source of information about the artist and his culture. It is the very rules of transformation that are of interest to me—not the message, but the code. My goal is not instrumental. I do not want to use the transformation rules when discovered to undo the transformation or to “decode” the message. To translate the art object into mythology and then examine the mythology would be only a neat way of dodging or negating the problem of “what is art?” I ask, then, not about the meaning of the encoded message but rather about the meaning of the code chosen. But still that most slippery word “meaning” must be defined. It will be convenient to define meaning in the most general possible way in the first instance. “Meaning” may be regarded as an approximate synonym of pattern, redundancy, information, and “restraint,” within a paradigm of the following sort: Any aggregate of events or objects (e.g., a sequence of phonemes, a painting, or a frog, or a culture) shall be said to contain “redundancy” or “pattern” if the aggregate can be divided in any way by a “slash mark,” such that an observer perceiving only what is on one side of the slash mark can guess, with better than random success, what is on the other side of the slash mark. We may say that what is on one side of the slash contains information or has meaning about what is on the other side. Or, in engineer’s language, the aggregate contains “redundancy.” Or, again, from the point of view of a cybernetic observer, the information available on one side of the slash will restrain (i.e., reduce the probability of) wrong guessing. Examples: The letter T in a given location in a piece of written English prose proposes that the next letter is likely to be an H or an R or a vowel. It is possible to make a better than random guess across a slash which immediately follows the T. English spelling contains redundancy. From a part of an English sentence, delimited by a slash, it is possible to guess at the syntactic structure of the remainder of the sentence. From a tree visible above ground, it is possible to guess at the existence of roots below ground. The top provides information about the bottom. From an arc of a drawn circle, it is possible to guess at the position of other parts of the circumference. (From the diameter of an ideal circle, it is possible to assert the length of the circumference. But this is a matter of truth within a tautological system.) From how the boss acted yesterday, it may be possible to guess how he will act today. From what I say, it may be possible to make predictions about how you will answer. My words contain meaning or information about your reply. Telegraphist A has a written message on his pad and sends this message over wire to B, so that B now gets the same sequence of letters on his message pad. This transaction (or “language game” in Wittgenstein’s phrase) has created a redundant universe for an observer O. If 0 knows what was on A’s pad, he can make a better than random guess at what is on B’s pad. The essence and raison d’etre of communication is the creation of redundancy, meaning, pattern, predictability, information, and/or the reduction of the random by “restraint.” It is, I believe, of prime importance to have a conceptual system which will force us to see the “message” (e.g., the art object) as both itself internally patterned and itself a part of a larger patterned universe—the culture or some part of it. The characteristics of objects of art are believed to be about, or to be partly derived from, or determined by, other characteristics of cultural and psychological systems. Our problem might therefore be oversimply represented by the diagram: [Characteristics of art object/Characteristics of rest of culture] where square brackets enclose the universe of relevance, and where the oblique stroke represents a slash across which some guessing is possible, in one direction or in both. The problem, then, is to spell out what sorts of relationships, correspondences, etc., cross or transcend this oblique stroke. Consider the case in which I say to you, “It’s raining,” and you guess that if you look out the window you will see raindrops. A similar diagram will serve: [Characteristics of “It’s raining”/Perception of raindrops] Notice, however, that this case is by no means simple. Only if you know the language and have some trust in my veracity will you be able to make a guess about the rain-drops. In fact, few people in this situation restrain them-selves from seemingly duplicating their information by looking out of the window. We like to prove that our guesses are right, and that our friends are honest. Still more important, we like to test or verify the correctness of our view of our relationship to others. This last point is nontrivial. It illustrates the necessarily hierarchic structure of all communicational systems: the fact of conformity or nonconformity (or indeed any other relationship) between parts of a patterned whole may itself be informative as part of some still larger whole. The matter may he diagrammed thus: [(“It’s raining”/raindrops)/You-me relationship) where redundancy across the slash mark within the smaller universe enclosed in round brackets proposes (is a message about) a redundancy in the larger universe enclosed in square brackets. But the message “It’s raining” is itself conventionally coded and internally patterned, so that several slash marks could be drawn across the message indicating patterning within the message itself. And the same is true of the rain. It, too, is patterned and structured. From the direction of one drop, I could predict the direction of others. And so on. But the slash marks across the verbal message “It’s raining” will not correspond in any simple way to the slash marks across the raindrops. If, instead of a verbal message, I had given you a picture of the rain, some of the slashes on the picture would have corresponded with slashes on the perceived rain. This difference provides a neat formal criterion to separate the “arbitrary” and digital coding characteristic of the verbal part of language from the iconic coding of depiction. But verbal description is often iconic in its larger structure. A scientist describing an earthworm might start at the head end and work down its length—thus producing a description iconic in its sequence and elongation. Here again we observe a hierarchic structuring, digital or verbal at one level and iconic at another. Levels and Logical Types “Levels” have been mentioned: (a) It was noted that the combination of the message “It’s raining” with the perception of raindrops can itself constitute a message about a universe of personal relations; and (b) that when we change our focus of attention from smaller to larger units of message material, we may discover that a larger unit contains iconic coding though the smaller parts of which it was made are verbal: the verbal description of an earthworm may, as a whole, be elongated. The matter of levels now crops up in another form which is crucial for any epistemology of art: The word “know” is not merely ambiguous in covering both connaitre (to know through the senses, to recognize or perceive) and savoir (to know in the mind), but varies —actively shifts— in meaning for basic systemic reasons. That which we know through the senses can become knowledge in the mind. “I know the way to Cambridge” might mean that I have studied the map and can give you directions. It might mean that I can recall details all along the route. It might mean that when driving that route I recognize many details even though I could recall only a few. It might mean that when driving to Cambridge I can trust to “habit” to make me turn at the right points, without having to think where I am going. And so on. In all cases, we deal with a redundancy or patterning of a quite complex sort: [(“I know…”/my mind)//the road] and the difficulty is to determine the nature of the patterning within the round brackets, or, to put the matter another way: what parts of the mind are redundant with the particular message about “knowing.” Last, there is a special form of “knowing” which is usually regarded as adaptation rather than information. A shark is beautifully shaped for locomotion in water, but the genome of the shark surely does not contain direct information about hydrodynamics. Rather, the genome must be supposed to contain information or instructions which are the complement of hydrodynamics. Not hydrodynamics, but what hydrodynamics requires, has been built up in the shark’s genome. Similarly, a migratory bird perhaps does not know the way to its destination in any of the senses outlined above, but the bird may contain the complementary instructions necessary td cause it to fly right. “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point” (“The heart has its reasons which the reason does not at all perceive”). It is this—the complex layering of consciousness and unconsciousness—that creates difficulty when we try to discuss art or ritual or mythology. The matter of levels of the mind has been discussed from many points of view, at least four of which must be mentioned and woven into any scientific approach to art:
Classical Freudian theory assumed that dreams were a secondary product, created by “dream work.” Material unacceptable to conscious thought was supposedly translated into the metaphoric idiom of primary process to avoid waking the dreamer. And this may be true of those items of information which are held in the unconscious by the process of repression. As we have seen, however, many other sorts of information are inaccessible to conscious inspection, including most of the premises of mammalian interaction. It would seem to me sensible to think of these items as existing primarily in the idiom of primary process, only with difficulty to be translated into “rational” terms. In other words, I believe that much of early Freudian theory was upside down. At that time many thinkers regarded conscious reason as normal and self-explanatory while the unconscious was regarded as mysterious, needing proof, and needing explanation. Repression was the explanation, and the unconscious was filled with thoughts which could have been conscious but which repression and dream work had distorted. Today we think of consciousness as the mysterious, and of the computational methods of the unconscious, e.g., primary process, as continually active, necessary, and all-embracing. These considerations are especially relevant in any at-tempt to derive a theory of art or poetry. Poetry is not a sort of distorted and decorated prose, but rather prose is poetry which has been stripped down and pinned to a Procrustean bed of logic. The computer men who would program the translation of languages sometimes forget this fact about the primary nature of language. To try to construct a machine to translate the art of one culture into the art of another would be equally silly. Allegory, at best a distasteful sort of art, is an inversion of the normal creative process. Typically an abstract relation, e.g., between truth and justice, is first conceived in rational terms. The relationship is then metaphorized and dolled up to look like a product of primary process. The abstractions are personified and made to participate in a pseudomyth, and so on. Much advertising art is allegorical in this sense, that the creative process is inverted. In the cliche system of Anglo-Saxons, it is commonly assumed that it would be somehow better if what is unconscious were made conscious. Freud, even, is said to have said, “Where id was, there ego shall be,” as though such an increase in conscious knowledge and control would be both possible and, of course, an improvement. This view is the product of an almost totally distorted epistemology and a totally distorted view of what sort of thing a man, or any other organism, is. Of the four sorts of unconsciousness listed above, it is very clear that the first three are necessary. Consciousness, for obvious mechanical reasons, [52] must always be limited to a rather small fraction of mental process. If useful at all, it must therefore be husbanded. The unconsciousness associated with habit is an economy both of thought and of consciousness; and the same is true of the inaccessability of the processes of perception. The conscious organism does not require (for pragmatic purposes) to know how it perceives —only to know what it perceives. (To suggest that we might operate without a foundation in primary process would be to suggest that the human brain ought to be differently structured.) Of the four types, only the Freudian cupboard for skeletons is perhaps undesirable and could be obviated. But there may still be advantages in keeping the skeleton off the dining room table. In truth, our life is such that its unconscious components are continuously present in all their multiple forms. It follows that in our relationships we continuously exchange messages about these unconscious materials, and it becomes important also to exchange metamessages by which we tell each other what order and species of unconsciousness (or consciousness) attaches to our messages. In a merely pragmatic way, this is important because the orders of truth are different for different sorts of messages. Insofar as a message is conscious and voluntary, it could be deceitful. I can tell you that the cat is on the mat when in fact she is not there. I can tell you “I love you” when in fact I do not. But discourse about relationship is commonly accompanied by a mass of semivoluntary kinesic and autonomic signals which provide a more trustworthy comment on the verbal message. Similarly with skill, the fact of skill indicates the presence of large unconscious components in the performance. It thus becomes relevant to look at any work of art with the question: What components of this message material had what orders of unconsciousness (or consciousness) for the artist? And this question, I believe, the sensitive critic usually asks, though perhaps not consciously. Art becomes, in this sense, an exercise in communicating about the species of unconsciousness. Or, if you prefer it, a sort of play behavior whose function is, amongst other things, to practice and make more perfect communication of this kind. I am indebted to Dr. Anthony Forge for a quotation from Isadora Duncan: “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Her statement is ambiguous. In terms of the rather vulgar premises of our culture, we would translate the statement to mean: “There would then be no point in dancing it, be-cause I could tell it to you, quicker and with less ambiguity, in words.” This interpretation goes along with the silly idea that it would be a good thing to be conscious of everything of which we are unconscious. But there is another possible meaning of Isadora Duncan’s remark: If the message were the sort of message that could be communicated in words, there would be no point in dancing it, but it is not that sort of message. It is, in fact, precisely the sort of message which would be falsified if communicated in words, because the use of words (other than poetry) would imply that this is a fully conscious and voluntary message, and this would be simply untrue. I believe that what Isadora Duncan or any artist is trying to communicate is more like: “This is a particular sort of partly unconscious message. Let us engage in this particular sort of partly unconscious communication.” Or perhaps: “This is a message about the interface between conscious and unconscious. The message of skill of any sort must always be of this kind. The sensations and qualities of skill can never be put in words, and yet the fact of skill is conscious. The artist’s dilemma is of a peculiar sort. He must practice in order to perform the craft components of his job. But to practice has always a double effect. It makes him, on the one hand, more able to do whatever it is he is attempting; and, on the other hand, by the phenomenon of habit formation, it makes him less aware of how he does it. If his attempt is to communicate about the unconscious components of his performance, then it follows that he is on a sort of moving stairway (or escalator) about whose position he is trying to communicate but whose movement is itself a function of his efforts to communicate. Clearly, his task is impossible, but, as has been remarked, some people do it very prettily. “The heart has its reasons which the reason does not at all perceive.” Among Anglo-Saxons, it is rather usual to think of the “reasons” of the heart or of the unconscious as inchoate forces or pushes or heavings—what Freud called Trieben. To Pascal, a Frenchman, the matter was rather different, and he no doubt thought of the reasons of the heart as a body of logic or computation as precise and complex as the reasons of consciousness. (I have noticed that Anglo-Saxon anthropologists some-times misunderstand the writings of Claude Levi-Strauss for precisely this reason. They say he emphasizes too much the intellect and ignores the “feelings.” The truth is that he assumes that the heart has precise algorithms.) These algorithms of the heart, or, as they say, of the unconscious, are, however, coded and organized in a manner totally different from the algorithms of language. And since a great deal of conscious thought is structured in terms of the logics of language, the algorithms of the unconscious are doubly inaccessible. It is not only that the conscious mind has poor access to this material, but also the fact that when such access is achieved, e.g., in dreams, art, poetry, religion, intoxication, and the like, there is still a formidable problem of translation. This is usually expressed in Freudian language by saying that the operations of the unconscious are structured in terms of primary process, while the thoughts of consciousness (especially verbalized thoughts) are expressed in secondary process. Nobody, to my knowledge, knows anything about secondary process. But it is ordinarily assumed that everybody knows all about it, so I shall not attempt to describe secondary process in any detail, assuming that you know as much about it as I. Primary process is characterized (e.g., by Fenichel) as lacking negatives, lacking tense, lacking in any identification of linguistic mood (i.e., no identification of indicative, subjunctive, optative, etc.) and metaphoric. These characterizations are based upon the experience of psychoanalysts, who must interpret dreams and the patterns of free association. It is also true that the subject matter of primary-process discourse is different from the subject matter of language and consciousness. Consciousness talks about things or persons, and attaches predicates to the specific things or persons which have been mentioned. In primary process the things or persons are usually not identified, and the focus of the discourse is upon the relationships which are asserted to obtain between them. This is really only another way of saying that the discourse of primary process is metaphoric. A metaphor retains unchanged the relationship which it “illustrates” while substituting other things or persons for the relata. In a simile, the fact that a metaphor is being used is marked by the insertion of the words “as if” or “like.” In primary process (as in art) there are no markers to indicate to the conscious mind that the message material is metaphoric. (For a schizophrenic, it is a major step towards a more conventional sanity when he can frame his schizophrenic utterances or the comments of his voices in an “as if” terminology.) The focus of “relationship” is, however, somewhat more narrow than would be indicated merely by saying that primary-process material is metaphoric and does not identify the specific relata. The subject matter of dream and other primary-process material is, in fact, relationship in the more narrow sense of relationship between self and other persons or between self and the environment. Anglo-Saxons who are uncomfortable with the idea that feelings and emotions are the outward signs of precise and complex algorithms usually have to be told that these matters, the relationship between self and others, and the relationship between self and environment, are, in fact, the subject matter of what are called “feelings”— love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names, which are usually handled in ways that assume that the “feelings” are mainly characterized by quantity rather than by precise pattern. This is one of the nonsensical contributions of psychology to a distorted epistemology. Be all that as it may, for our present purposes it is important to note that the characteristics of primary process as described above are the inevitable characteristics of any communicational system between organisms who must use only iconic communication. This same limitation is characteristic of the artist and of the dreamer and of the prehuman mammal or bird. (The communication of insects is, perhaps, another matter.) In iconic communication, there is no tense, no simple negative, no modal marker. The absence of simple negatives is of especial interest be-cause it often forces organisms into saying the opposite of what they mean in order to get across the proposition. that they mean the opposite of what they say. Two dogs approach each other and need to exchange the message: “We are not going to fight.” But the only way in which fight can be mentioned in iconic communication is by the showing of fangs. It is then necessary for the dogs to discover that this mention of fight was, in fact, only exploratory. They must, therefore, explore what the showing of fangs means. They therefore engage in a brawl; discover that neither ultimately intends to kill the other; and, after that, they can be friends. (Consider the peace-making ceremonials of the Andaman Islanders. Consider also the functions of inverted statement or sarcasm, and other sorts of humor in dream, art, and mythology.) In general, the discourse of animals is concerned with relationship either between self and other or self and environment. In neither case is it necessary to identify the relata. Animal A tells B about his relationship with B and he tells C about his relationship with C. Animal A does not have to tell animal C about his relationship with B. Always the relata are perceptibly present to illustrate the discourse, and always the discourse is iconic in the sense of being composed of part actions (“intention movements”) which mention the whole action which is being mentioned. Even when the cat asks you for milk, she cannot mention the object which she wants (unless it be perceptibly present). She says, “Mama, mama,” and you are supposed from this invocation of de-pendency to guess that it is milk that she requires. All this indicates that primary-process thoughts and the communication of such thoughts to others are, in an evolutionary sense, more archaic than the more conscious operations of language, etc. This has implications for the whole economics and dynamic structure of the mind. Samuel Butler was perhaps first to point out that that which we know best is that of which we are least conscious, i.e., that the process of habit formation is a sinking of knowledge down to less conscious and more archaic levels. The unconscious contains not only the painful matters which consciousness prefers to not inspect, but also many matters which are so familiar that we do not need to inspect them. Habit, therefore, is a major economy of conscious thought. We can do things without consciously thinking about them. The skill of an artist, or rather his demonstration of a skill, becomes a message about these parts of his unconsciousness. (But not perhaps a message from the unconscious.) But the matter is not quite so simple. Some types of knowledge can conveniently be sunk to unconscious levels, but other types must be kept on the surface. Broadly, we can afford to sink those sorts of knowledge which continue to be true regardless of changes in the environment, but we must maintain in an accessible place all those controls of behavior which must be modified for every instance. The lion can sink into his unconscious the proposition that zebras are his natural prey, but in dealing with any particular zebra he must be able to modify the movements of his attack to fit with the particular terrain and the particular evasive tactics of the particular zebra. The economics of the system, in fact, pushes organisms toward sinking into the unconscious those generalities of relationship which remain permanently true and toward keeping within the conscious the pragmatics of particular instances. The premises may, economically, be sunk, but particular conclusions must be conscious. But the “sinking,” though economical, is still done at a price—the price of inaccessibility. Since the level to which things are sunk is characterized by iconic algorithms and metaphor, it becomes difficult for the organism to examine the matrix out or which his conscious conclusions spring. Conversely, we may note that what is common to a particular statement and a corresponding metaphor is of a generality appropriate for sinking. Quantitative Limits of Consciousness A very brief consideration of the problem shows that it is not conceivably possible for any system to be totally conscious. Suppose that on the screen of consciousness there are reports from many parts of the total mind, and consider the addition to consciousness of those reports necessary to cover what is, at a given stage of evolution, not already covered. This addition will involve a very great increase in the circuit structure of the brain but still will not achieve total coverage. The next step will be to cover the processes and events occurring in the circuit structure which we have just added. And so on. Clearly, the problem is insoluble, and every next step in the approach to total consciousness will involve a great in-crease in the circuitry required. It follows that all organisms must be content with rather little consciousness, and that if consciousness has any useful functions whatever (which has never been demonstrated but is probably true), then economy in consciousness will be of the first importance. No organism can afford to be conscious of matters with which it could deal at unconscious levels. This is the economy achieved by habit formation. Qualitative Limits of Consciousness It is, of course, true for the TV set that a satisfactory picture on the screen is an indication that many parts of the machine are working as they should; and similar considerations apply to the “screen” of consciousness. But what is provided is only a very indirect report of the working of all those parts. If the TV suffers from a blown tube, or the man from a stroke, effects of this pathology may be evident enough on the screen or to consciousness, but diagnosis must still be done by an expert. This matter has bearings upon the nature of art. The TV which gives a distorted or otherwise imperfect picture is, in a sense, communicating about its unconscious pathologies—exhibiting its symptoms; and one may ask whether some artists are not doing something similar. But this still won’t do. It is sometimes said that the distortions of art (say, van Gogh’s “Chair”) are directly representative of what the artist “sees.” If such statements refer to “seeing” in the simplest physical sense (e.g., remediable with spectacles), I presume that they are nonsense. If van Gogh could only see the chair in that wild way, his eyes would not serve properly to guide him in the very accurate placing of paint on canvas. And, conversely, a photographically accurate representation of the chair on the canvas would also be seen by van Gogh in the wild way. Re would see no need to distort the painting. But suppose we say that the artist is painting today what he saw yesterday—or that he is painting what he somehow knows that he might see. “I see as well as you do—but do you realize that this other way of seeing a chair exists as a human potentiality? And that that potentiality is always in you and in me?” Is he exhibiting symptoms which he might have, because the whole spectrum of psychopathology is possible for us all? Intoxication by alcohol or drugs may help us to see a distorted world, and these distortions may be fascinating in that we recognize the distortions as ours. In vino pars veritatis. We can be humbled or aggrandized by realizing that this, too, is a part of the human self, a part of Truth. But intoxication does not increase skill—at best it may release skill previously acquired. Without skill is no art. Consider the case of the man who goes to the blackboard —or to the side of his cave—and draws, freehand, a perfect reindeer in its posture of threat. He cannot tell you about the drawing of the reindeer (“If he could, there would be no point in drawing it”). “Do you know that his perfect way of seeing—and drawing—a reindeer exists as a human potentiality?” The consummate skill of the draftsman validates the artist’s message about his relationship to the animal—his empathy. (They say the Altamira things were made for sympathetic hunting magic. But magic only needs the crudest sort of representations. The scrawled arrows which deface the beautiful reindeer may have been magical—perhaps a vulgar attempt to murder the artist, like moustaches scrawled on the Mona Lisa.) It was noted above that consciousness is necessarily selective and partial, i.e., that the content of consciousness is, at best, a small part of truth about the self. But if this part be selected in any systematic manner, it is certain that the partial truths of consciousness will be, in aggregate, a distortion of the truth of some larger whole. In the case of an iceberg, we may guess, from what is above surface, what sort of stuff is below; but we cannot make the same sort of extrapolation from the content of consciousness. It is not merely the selectivity of preference, whereby the skeletons accumulate in the Freudian unconscious, that makes such extrapolation unsound. Such a selection by preference would only promote optimism. What is serious is the crosscutting of the circuitry of the mind. If, as we must believe, the total mind is an integrated network (of propositions, images, processes, neural pathology, or what have you—according to what scientific language you prefer to use), and if the content of consciousness is only a sampling of different parts and localities in this net-work; then, inevitably, the conscious view of the network as a whole is a monstrous denial of the integration of that whole. From the cutting of consciousness, what appears above the surface is arcs of circuits instead of either the complete circuits or the larger complete circuits of circuits. What the unaided consciousness (unaided by art, dreams, and the like) can never appreciate is the systemic nature of mind. This notion can conveniently be illustrated by an analogy: the living human body is a complex, cybernetically integrated system. This system has been studied by scientists—mostly medical men—for many years. What they now know about the body may aptly be compared with what the unaided consciousness knows about the mind. Being doctors, they had purposes: to cure this and that. Their research efforts were therefore focused (as attention focuses the consciousness) upon those short trains of causality which they could manipulate, by means of drugs or other intervention, to correct more or less specific and identifiable states or symptoms. Whenever they discovered an effective “cure” for something, research in that area ceased and attention was directed elsewhere. We can now prevent polio, but nobody knows much more about the systemic aspects of that fascinating disease. Research on it has ceased or is, at best, confined to improving the vaccines. But a bag of tricks for curing or preventing a list of specified diseases provides no overall wisdom. The ecology and population dynamics of the species has been disrupted; parasites have been made immune to antibiotics; the relationship between mother and neonate has been almost destroyed; and so on. Characteristically, errors occur wherever the altered causal chain is part of some large or small circuit structure of system. And the remainder of our technology (of which medical science is only a part) bids fair to disrupt the rest of our ecology. The point, however, which I am trying to make in this paper is not an attack on medical science but a demonstration of an inevitable fact: that mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and that its virulence springs specifically from the circumstance that life depends upon interlocking circuits of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct. In a word, the unaided consciousness must always involve man in the sort of stupidity of which evolution was guilty when she urged upon the dinosaurs the common-sense values of an armaments race. She inevitably realized her mistake a million years later and wiped them out. Unaided consciousness must always tend toward hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when his hardheaded policies re-turn to plague the inventor. If you use DDT to kill insects, you may succeed in reducing the insect population so far that the insectivores will starve. You will then have to use more DDT than before to kill the insects which the birds no longer eat. More probably, you will kill off the birds in the first round when they eat the poisoned insects. If the DDT kills off the dogs, you will have to have more police to keep down the burglars. The burglars will become better armed and more cunning… and so on. That is the sort of world we live in—a world of circuit structures—and love can survive only if wisdom (i.e., a sense or recognition of the fact of circuitry) has an effective voice. What has been said so far proposes questions about any particular work of art somewhat different from those which have been conventionally asked by anthropologists. The “culture and personality school,” for example, has traditionally used pieces of art or ritual as samples or probes to reveal particular psychological themes or states. The question has been: Does the art tell us about what sort of person made it? But if art, as suggested above, has a positive function in maintaining what I called “wisdom,” i.e., in correcting a too purposive view of life and making the view more systemic, then the question to be asked of the given work of art becomes: What sorts of correction in the direction of wisdom would be achieved by creating or viewing this work of art? The question becomes dynamic rather than static. Turning now from the consideration of epistemology to a specific art style, we note first what is most general and most obvious. With almost no exceptions, the behaviors called art or their products (also called art) have two characteristics: they require or exhibit skill, and they contain redundancy or pattern. But those two characteristics are not separate: the skill is first in maintaining and then in modulating the redundancies. The matter is perhaps most clear where the skill is that of the journeyman and the redundancy is of comparatively low order. For example, in the Balinese painting by Ida Bagus Djati Sura of the village of Batuan, 1937 and in almost all painting of the Batuan school, skill of a certain elementary but highly disciplined sort was exercised or practiced in the background of foliage. The redundancies to be achieved involve rather uniform and rhythmical repetition of leaf forms, but this redundancy is, so to speak, fragile. It would be broken or interrupted by smudges or irregularities of size or tone in the painting of the successive leaves. When a Batuan artist looks at the work of another, one of the first things he examines is the technique of the leafy background. The leaves are first drawn, in free outline in pencil; then each outline is tightly redefined with pen and black ink. When this has been done for all the leaves, the artist begins to paint with brush and Chinese ink. Each leaf is covered with a pale wash. When these washes are dry, each leaf receives a smaller concentric wash and after this another still smaller, and so on. The final result is a leaf with an al-most white rim inside the inked outline, and successive steps of darker and darker color toward the center of the leaf. A “good” picture has up to five or six such successive washes on every leaf. (This particular painting is not very “good” in this sense. The leaves are done in only three or four steps.) The skill and the patterning so far discussed depend upon muscular rote and muscular accuracy—achieving the perhaps not negligible artistic level of a well-laid out field of turnips. I was watching a very gifted American carpenter-architect at work on the woodwork of a house he had designed. I commented on the sureness and accuracy of each step. He said, “Oh, that. That’s only like using a typewriter. You have to be able to do that without thinking.” But on top of this level of redundancy is another. The uniformity of the lowerlevel redundancy must be modulated to give higher orders of redundancy. The leaves in one area must be different from the leaves in another area, and these differences must be in some way mutually redundant: they must be part of a larger pattern. Indeed, the function and necessity of the first-level control is precisely to make the second level possible. The perceiver of the work of art must receive information that the artist can paint a uniform area of leaves because without this information he will not be able to accept as significant the variations in that uniformity. Only the violinist who can control the quality of his notes can use variations of that quality for musical purposes. This principle is basic and accounts, I suggest, for the almost universal linkage in aesthetics between skill and pattern. The exceptions—e.g., the cult of natural landscapes, “found objects,” inkblots, scattergrams, and the works of Jackson Pollock—seem to exemplify the same rule in reverse. In these cases, a larger patterning seems to propose the illusion that the details must have been controlled. Inter-mediate cases also occur: e.g., in Balinese carving, the natural grain of the wood is rather frequently used to suggest de-tails of the form or surface of the subject. In these cases, the skill lies not in the draftsmanship of the details, but in the artist’s placement of his design within the three-dimensional structure of the wood. A special “effect” is achieved, not by the mere representationalism, but by the perceiver’s partial awareness that a physical system other than that of draftsman-ship has contributed to determine his perception. We now turn to more complex matters, still concentrating attention upon the most obvious and elementary.
In terms of this conclusion, I can now attempt an answer to the question posed above: What sorts of correction, in the direction of systemic wisdom, could be achieved by creating or viewing this work of art? In final analysis, the picture can be seen as an affirmation that to choose either turbulence or serenity as a human purpose would be a vulgar error. The conceiving and creating of the picture must have provided an experience which exposed this error. The unity and integration of the picture assert that neither of these contrasting poles can be chosen to the exclusion of the other, because the poles are mutually dependent. This profound and general truth is simultaneously asserted for the fields of sex, social organization, and death. Since World War II, it has been fashionable to engage in “interdisciplinary” research, and this usually means, for example, that an ecologist will need a geologist to tell him about the rocks and soils of the particular terrain which he is investigating. But there is another sense in which scientific work may claim to be interdisciplinary. The man who studies the arrangement of leaves and branches in the growth of a flowering plant may note an analogy between the formal relations between stems, leaves, and buds, and the formal relations that obtain between different sorts of words in a sentence. He will think of a “leaf” not as something flat and green but as something related in a particular way to the stem from which it grows and to the secondary stem (or bud) which is formed in the angle between leaf and primary stem. Similarly the modern linguist thinks of a “noun” not as the “name of a person, place, or thing,” but as a member of a class of words de-fined by their relationship in sentence structure to “verbs” and other parts. Those who think first of the “things” which are related (the “relata”) will dismiss any analogy between grammar and the anatomy of plants as far-fetched. After all, a leaf and a noun do not at all resemble each other in outward appearance. But if we think first of the relationships and consider the relata as defined solely by their relationships, then we begin to wonder. Is there a profound analogy between grammar and anatomy? Is there an interdisciplinary science which should concern itself with such analogies? What would such a science claim as its subject matter? And why should we expect such far-flung analogies to have significance? In dealing with any analogy, it is important to define exactly what is claimed when we say that the analogy is meaningful. In the present example, it is not claimed that a noun should look like a leaf. It is not even claimed that the relation between leaf and stem is the same as the relation between noun and verb. What is claimed is, first, that in both anatomy and grammar the parts are to be classified according to the relations between them. In both fields, the relations are to be thought of as somehow primary, the relata as secondary. Beyond this, it is claimed that the relations are of the sort generated by processes of information ex-change. In other words, the mysterious and polymorphic relation between context and content obtains in both anatomy and linguistics; and evolutionists of the nineteenth century, preoccupied with what were called “homologies,” were, in fact, studying precisely the contextual structures of biological development. All of this speculation becomes almost platitude when we realize that both grammar and biological structure are products of communicational and organizational process. The anatomy of the plant is a complex transform of genotypic instructions, and the “language” of the genes, like any other language, must of necessity have contextual structure. More-over, in all communication, there must be a relevance between the contextual structure of the message and some structuring of the recipient. The tissues of the plant could not “read” the genotypic instructions carried in the chromosomes of every cell unless cell and tissue exist, at that given moment, in a contextual structure. What has been said above will serve as sufficient definition of what is here meant by “form and pattern.” The focus of discussion was upon form rather than content, upon context rather than upon what occurs “in” the given con-text, upon relationship rather than upon the related per-sons or phenomena. The essays included range from a discussion of “schismogenesis” (1935) to two essays written after the birth of cybernetics. In 1935, I certainly had not clearly grasped the central importance of “context.” I thought that the processes of schismogenesis were important and nontrivial because in them I seemed to see evolution at work: if interaction between persons could undergo progressive qualitative change as in-tensity increased, then surely this could be the very stuff of cultural evolution. It followed that all directional change, even in biological evolution and phylogeny, might—or must —be due to progressive interaction between organisms. Under natural selection, such change in relationships would favor progressive change in anatomy and physiology. The progressive increase in size and armament of the dinosaurs was, as I saw it, simply an interactive armaments race—a schismogenic process. But I could not then see that the evolution of the horse from Eohip pus was not a one-sided adjustment to life on grassy plains. Surely the grassy plains themselves were evolved pari passe with the evolution of the teeth and hooves of the horses and other ungulates. Turf was the evolving response of the vegetation to the evolution of the horse. It is the context which evolves. The classification of schismogenic process into “symmetrical” and “complementary” was already a classification of con-texts of behavior; and, already in this essay, there is a proposal to exmine the possible combinations of themes in complementary behavior. By 1942, I had completely for-gotten this old proposal, but I attempted to do precisely what I had proposed seven years previously. In 1942 many of us were interested in “national character” and the con-, trast between England and America fortunately brought into focus the fact that “spectatorship” is in England a filial characteristic, linked with dependency and submission, while in America spectatorship is a parental characteristic linked with dominance and succoring. This hypothesis, which I called “end-linkage,” marked a turning point in my thinking. From that time on, I have consciously focused upon the qualitative structure of con-texts rather than upon intensity of interaction. Above all, the phenomena of end-linkage showed that contextual structures could themselves be messages—an important point which is not made in the 1942 article. An Englishman when he is applauding another is indicating or signaling potential submission and/or dependency; when he shows off or demands spectatorship, he is signaling. dominance or superiority; and so on. Every Englishman who writes a book must be guilty of this. For the American, the converse must hold. His boasting is but a bid for quasiparental approval. The notion of context reappears in the essay “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art,” but here the idea of context has evolved to meet the related ideas of “redundancy,” “pattern,” and “meaning.” _______________ Notes: 1. The whole controversy of which this article was a part has been reprinted in Beyond the Frontier, edited by Paul Bohannon and Fred Plog. But the ripples of this controversy have long since died down, and the article is included here only for its positive contributions. It is reprinted, unchanged, from Man, Article 199, Vol. XXXV, 1935, by permission of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 2. In any case it is clear that in a scientific study of processes and natural laws this invocation of free will can have no place. 3. Cf. Malinowski, Sexual Life and Crime and Custom; A. I. Richards, Hunger and Work. This question of the subdivision of a culture into “institutions” is not quite as simple as I have indicated; and, in spite of their own works, I believe that the London School still adheres to a theory that some such division is practicable. It is likely that confusion arises from the fact that certain native peoples—perhaps all, but in any case those of Western Europe—actually think that their culture is so subdivided. Various cultural phenomena also contribute something toward such a subdivision, e.g., (a) the division of labor and differentiation of norms of behavior between different groups of individuals in the same community, and (b) an emphasis, present in certain cultures, upon the subdivisions of place and time upon which behavior is ordered. These phenomena lead to the possibility, in such cultures, of dubbing all behavior which, for example, takes place in church between 11.30 and 12.30 on Sundays as “religious.” But even in the study of such cultures the anthropologist must look with some suspicion upon his classification of traits into institutions and must expect to find a great deal of over-lapping between various institutions. An analogous fallacy occurs in psychology, and consists in regarding behavior as classifiable according to the impulses which inspire it, e.g., into such categories as self-protective, assertive, sexual, acquisitive, etc. Here, too, confusion results from the fact that not only the psychologist, but also the individual studied, is prone to think in terms of these categories. The psychologists would do well to accept the probability that every bit of behavior is—at least in a well-integrated individual —simultaneously relevant to all these abstractions. 4. The present scheme is oriented toward the study of social rather than psychological processes, but a closely analogous scheme might be constructed for the study of psychopathology. Here the idea of “contact” would be studied, especially in the contexts of the molding of the individual, and the processes of schismogenesis would be seen to play an important part not only in accentuating the maladjustments of the deviant, but also in assimilating the normal individual to his group. 5. Cf. Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament, 1935. Of the communities described in this book, the Arapesh and the Mundugumor have a preponderantly symmetrical relationship between the sexes, while the Chambuli have a complementary relationship. Among the Iatmul, a tribe in the same area, which I have studied, the relationship between the sexes is complementary, but on rather different lines from that of the Chambuli. I hope shortly to publish a book on the Iatmul with sketches of their culture from the points of view a, b, and e out-lined in paragraph 10. (See Bibliography, items 1936 and 1958 B.) 6. In this, as in the other examples given, no attempt is made to consider the schismogenesis from all the points of view outlined in paragraph 10. Thus, inasmuch as the economic aspect of the matter is not here being considered, the effects of the slump upon the schismogenesis are ignored. A complete study would be sub-divided into separate sections, each treating one of the aspects of the phenomena. 7. This paper was given at the Seventh Conference on Methods in Philosophy and the Sciences, held at the New School for Social Research, April 28, 1940. It is here -reprinted from Philosophy of Science, Vol. 8, No. 1, copyright 1941, The Williams & Wilkins Co. Reproduced by permission. 8. For details of this and other similar incidents cfr. Naven, pp. 98-107, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1936. 9. 7 Loc. cit., p. 261. 10. This essay appeared in Civilian Morale, edited by Goodwin Watson, copyright 1942 by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. It is here reprinted by permission of the publisher. Some introductory material has been edited out. 11. Cf. M. Mead (Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, New York, Morrow, 1935), especially Part III, for an analysis of sex differentiation among the Chambuli; also G. Bateson (Naven, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1936) for an analysis of sex differentiation among adults in Iatmul, New Guinea. 12. We are considering here only those cases in which ethological differentiation follows the sex dichotomy. It is also probable that, where the ethos of the two sexes is not sharply differentiated, it would still be correct to say that the ethos of each promotes that of the other, e.g., through such mechanisms as competition and mutual imitation. Cf. M. Mead (op. cit.). 13. For a discussion of the role played by “change” and “heterogeneity” in melting-pot communities, cf. M. Mead (“Educative effects of social environment as disclosed by studies of primitive societies.” Paper read at the Symposium on Environment and Education, University of Chicago, September 22, 1941). Also F. Alexander (“Educative influence of personality factors in the environment.” Paper read at the Symposium on Environment and Education, University of Chicago, September 22, 1941). 14. In the South Seas, those special modes of behavior which Europeans adopt toward native peoples, and those other modes of behavior which the native adopts toward Europeans, are very obvious. Apart from analyses of “pidgin” languages, we have, however, no psychological data on these patterns. For a description of the analogous patterns in Negrowhite relationships, cf. J. Dollard (Caste and Class in a Southern Toivn, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1937), especially Chapter XII, Accommodation Attitudes of Negroes. 15. Cf. G. Bateson, “Culture Contact and Schismogenesis,” Man, 1935, 8: 199. (Reprinted in this volume.) 16. The Balinese social system in the mountain communities is almost entirely devoid of such dualisms. The ethological differentiation of the sexes is rather slight; political factions are completely absent. In the plains, there is a dualism which has resulted from the intrusive Hindoo caste system, those with caste being discriminated from those without caste. At the symbolic level (partly as a result of Hindoo influence) dualisms are much more frequent, however, than they are in the social structure (e.g., Northeast vs. Southwest, Gods vs. demons, symbolic Left vs. Right, symbolic Male vs. Female, etc.). 17. A fourth instance of this threefold pattern occurs in some great public schools (as in Charterhouse), where the authority is divided between the quieter, more polished, intellectual leaders (“monitors”) and the rougher, louder, athletic leaders (captain of football, head of long room, etc.), who have the duty of seeing to it that the “fags” run when the monitor calls. 18. For a general discussion of cultural variants of the Oedipus situation and the related systems of cultural sanctions, cf. M. Mead (“Social change and cultural [incomplete]. 19. The term “cooperation,” which is sometimes used as the opposite of “competition,” covers a very wide variety of patterns, some of them symmetrical and others complementary, some bipolar and others in which the cooperating individuals are chiefly oriented to some personal or impersonal goal. We may expect that some careful analysis of these patterns will give us vocabulary for describing other sorts of national characteristics. Such an analysis cannot be attempted in this paper. 20. It is, however, possible that in certain sections of these nations, complementary patterns occur with some frequency—particularly among groups who have suffered from prolonged insecurity and uncertainty, e.g., racial minorities, depressed areas, the stock exchange, political circles, etc. 21. G. Bateson, unpublished research for the Council on Human Relations. 22. “For a fuller study, we ought to consider such other motifs as aggression-passivity, possessive-possessed, agent-tool, etc. And all of these motifs will require somewhat more critical definition than can be attempted in this paper. 23. This essay appeared in Social Structure: Studies Presented to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, edited by Meyer Fortes, 1949. It is reprinted by permission of the Clarendon Press. Preparation of the essay was aided by a Guggenheim Fellowship. 24. G. Bateson, Naven, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1936. 25. Naven, p. 118. 26. The terms “regenerative” and “degenerative” are borrowed from communications engineering. A regenerative or “vicious” circle is a chain of variables of the general type: increase in A causes increase in B; increase in B causes increase in C; .. increase in N causes increase in A. Such a system, if provided with the necessary energy sources and if external factors permit, will clearly operate at a greater and greater rate or intensity. A “degenerative” or “self-corrective” circle differs from a re-generative circle in containing at least one link of the type: “increase in N causes decrease in M.” The house thermostat or the steam engine with a governor are examples of such self-correcting systems. It will be noted that in many instances the same material circuit may be either regenerative or degenerative according to the amount of loading, frequency of impulses transmitted around the path, and time characteristics of the total path. 27. L. F. Richardson, “Generalized Foreign Politics,” British Journal of Psychology, Monograph Supplement xxiii, 1939. 28. Naven, p. 173. 29. E. H. Homburger, “Configurations in Play: Psycho-logical Notes,” Psychoanalytical Quarterly, 1937, vi: 138-214. This paper, one of the most important in the literature seeking to state psychoanalytic hypotheses in more rigorous terms, deals with the “modes” appropriate to the various erogenous zones—intrusion, incorporation, retention, and the like—and shows how these modes may be transferred from one zone to another. This leads the writer to a chart of the possible permutations and combinations of such transferred modalities. This chart provides precise means of describing the course of the development of a large variety of different types of character structure (e.g., as met with in different cultures). 30. Naven, p. 197. 31. Op. cit., 1939. 32. See especially G. Bateson and M. Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis. Since this photo-graphic record is available, no photographs are included in the present paper. 33. Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, pl. 47, and pp. 32-6. 34. lbid., pls. 49, 52, 53, and 69-72. 35. See Colin McPhee, “The Absolute Music of Bali,” Modern Music, 1935; and A House in Bali, London, Gollancz, 1947. 36. See G. Bateson, “An Old Temple and a New Myth,” Djawa, xvii, Batavia, 1937. 37. See M. Mead, “Public Opinion Mechanisms among Primitive Peoples,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 1937, is 5-16. 38. As is usual in anthropology, the data are not sufficiently precise to give us any clue as to the nature of the learning processes involved. Anthropology, at best, is only able to raise problems of this order. The next step must be left for laboratory experimentation. 39. Bateson and Mead, op. cit., p1. 5. 40. Cf. Naven, pp. 250 if., where it was suggested that we must expect to find that some peoples of the world would relate their actions to the sociological frame. 41. The word dadi is also used as a copula referring to changes in social status. I Anoe dadi Koebajan means “So-and-so has become a village official.” 42. Mead, “Public Opinion Mechanisms among Primitive Peoples,” loc. cit., 1937. 43. Bateson and Mead, op. cit., pls. 17, 67, and 79. 44. Ibid., pls. 10-14. 45. Ibid., p1. 45. 46. Ibid., p1. 10, fig. 3. 47. At present it is not possible to make such a statement in sharply defined quantitative terms, the available judgments being subjective and Occidental. 48. Alternatively, we might handle the analogy in another way. A social system is, as Von Neumann and Morgenstern point out, comparable to a non-zero sum game in which one or more coalitions of people play against each other and against nature. The non-zero sum characteristic is based on the fact that value is continually extracted from the natural environment. Inasmuch as Balinese society exploits nature, the total entity, including both environment and people, is clearly comparable to a game requiring coalition between people. It is possible, however, that that subdivision of the total game comprising the people only might be such that the formation of coalitions within it would not be essential—that is, Balinese society may differ from most other societies in that the “rules” of the relationship between people de-fine a “game” of the type Von Neumann would call “non-essential.” This possibility is not here examined. (See Von Neumann and Morgenstern, op. cit.) 49. L. K. Frank, “The Cost of Competition,” Plan Age, 1940, vi : 314-24. 50. W. R. Ashby, “Effect of Controls on Stability,” Nature, clv, no. 3930, February 24, 1945, 242-43. 51. This essay was a position paper for the Wenner-Gren Conference on Primitive Art, 1967. It is here reprinted from A Study of Primitive Art, edited by Dr. Anthony Forge, to be published by Oxford University Press, by permission of the publisher. 52. Consider the impossibility of constructing a television set which would report upon its screen all the workings of its component parts, including especially those parts concerned in this reporting.
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