Cross-Cultural Research

Cross-Cultural Research http://ccr.sagepub.com Cultural Adaptations After Progressionism Lauren W. McCall Cross-Cultural Research 2009; 43; 62 DOI: 10.1177/1069397108328613 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ccr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/43/1/62 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: Society for Cross-Cultural Research Additional services and information for Cross-Cultural Research can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ccr.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ccr.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations http://ccr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/43/1/62 Downloaded from http://ccr.sagepub.com at DUKE UNIV on January 9, 2009 Cross-Cultural Research Volume 43 Number 1 February 2009 62-85 © 2009 Sage Publications Cultural Adaptations After 10.1177/1069397108328613 http://ccr.sagepub.com hosted at Progressionism http://online.sagepub.com Lauren W. McCall National Evolutionary Synthesis Center How should behavioral scientists interpret apparently progressive stages of cultural history? Adaptive progress in biology is thought to only occur locally, relative to local conditions. Just as evolutionary theory offers physical anthropologists an appreciation of global human diversity through local adaptation, so the metaphor of adaptation offers behavioral scientists an appreciation of cultural diversity through analogous mechanisms. Analyses reported here test for cultural adaptation in both biotic and abiotic environments. Testing cultural adaptation to the human-made environment, the culture’s pre-existing technical complexity is shown to be a predictive fac- tor. Then testing cultural adaptation to the physical environment, this article corroborates Divale’s (1999) finding that counting systems are adaptations to unstable environments, and expands the model to include other environ- mental indices and cultural traits. Interpreting divergent and convergent behaviors as due to differences and similarities of local environments repre- sents an enlightened, post-progressionist research program for the investiga- tion of cultural adaptations. Keywords: complexity; counting; cross-cultural; cultural evolution; number; number systems; progressionism he assumption that history equals progress is as deep seated and T deceptive as the sun’s apparent rise and fall. Evolutionary theory helped 19th-century anthropologists unlearn this assumption and brought an appreciation of diversity to the study of human histories. Indigenous human cultures of the past and present were no longer seen as steps on Author’s Note: I wish to thank Gunther Eble for helpful statistical advice. This research was begun at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies and is currently supported by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), NSF EF-042364. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Defining Social Complexity symposium in the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, UK, in 2005. 62 Downloaded from http://ccr.sagepub.com at DUKE UNIV on January 9, 2009 McCall / Cultural Adaptations After Progressionism 63 a single ladder of global social progress reminiscent of Aristotle’s Scala Naturae. However, the unlearning was incomplete. Anthropologists abandoned universal claims but preserved their progressionist arguments by hypothe- sizing that societies each pass through a parallel series of successive stages from savagery to civilization. Archeological progressions like the stone, bronze, and iron ages reflected a moral judgment on the social classes at home and colonies abroad: Morgan’s (1871) savage, barbaric, and civilized ethnical periods; Tyler’s (1871) stages of upward development; and later, Sahlins’ (1976) and Service’s (1962, 1975) band, tribe, chiefdom, and state sequence. These typological stages were eventually reformulated in less moralistic terms, by inferring an intrinsic drive toward complexity (e.g., Carneiro, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1973; Naroll, 1970, 1973; Naroll & Divale, 1976). Despite the framing of anthropological questions in more neutral language, anthropology still harbored a skewed view of the biological theory of evolution a century after Darwin’s publications. An evolutionary perspective makes clear why the ethical progress, for example, made in many cultures in recent centuries toward greater urban infrastructure and civil rights, increased longevity, diminished child mortal- ity, and the specialization of scientific and technological skills should not be confused with any objective standard of progress. In evolutionary terms, adaptive progress can only be judged relative to local conditions as reflected in number of offspring. Part of the problem is that evolutionary processes are too often confused by the persistence of a transformational model of evolution (after Spencer, 1862) in place of the variational theory initiated by Darwin (Lewontin, 1983). For example, the demographic transition associ- ated with urbanization is often referred to as the developmental transition. This conceptual error is ubiquitous, from the world development reports of the World Bank to the millennium development goals of the United Nations. Current terminology continues to endorse an analogy of cultural histories with organismal development and with a predetermined, progressive advance- ment through unfolding, transformational stages. Ecologically Informed Approaches to Assessing Cross-Cultural Regularities Human cultural traditions are not infinitely variable but are based on plesiomorphies, the retained traits shared with other primates, and apomor- phies, the traits uniquely derived in humans (e.g. Brown, 1991; Henshilwood Downloaded from http://ccr.sagepub.com at DUKE UNIV on January 9, 2009 64 Cross-Cultural Research & Marean, 2003). They are then further shaped by resource availability, learning, and other forms of acclimation into convergent behavioral polymorphisms, called polyethisms (West-Eberhard, 2003). Statistical methods of comparing cultural adaptations provide an established frame- work for identifying convergent human behaviors (Ember & Ember, 2001). Ideally, conclusions about historical processes should be drawn exclusively from diachronic data. However, synchronic analysis has become common in the reconstruction and explanation of evolutionary histories (Krebs & Davies, 1993; Pianka, 1999). In either method of doing evolutionary analysis, it is important to address indigenous cultures of preferably long descent in a single location due to the expected adaptive lag between the rate at which an organism adapts to its environment and to the rate of environmen- tal change. For this reason, evolutionary ecologists often consider extant phenotypes to correspond not with current adaptive problems but those encountered ancestrally, in the so-called environment of evolutionary adaptedness (the EEA; see Foley, 1996). In the analyses to follow, apparently progressive historical stages are considered to reflect key innovations in tool use around that related cultural states cluster because technical traditions functionally mediate the expression of other cultural traits. To test this, cultural traits that reflect a higher degree of tool use are predicted to correlate more strongly than nontechnical cultural traits within a given society. Following this initial analysis are further conceptual and analytical explorations of the place of culture in the human ecological niche. The concept of the ecosystem suggests a dynamic equilibrium or degree of stability among a population’s ecological resources. Cultural traits should exhibit a functionally stabilizing relationship with other cultural traits and ecological resources, if together they make up an integrated socioeco- logical system. For instance, Divale (1999) explained the variability in tradi- tional counting systems by their interaction with local ecological constraints. He proposed that societies that live in areas of climatic instability tend to have periodic starvation and famine, which in turn stimulates societies to store and preserve food, along with the use of higher numbers to accurately estimate food storage requirements. Here, this correlation is corroborated and expanded to include further indicators of external instability, such as geological fault activity as well as additional cultural traits pertaining to number. Sources of Cultural Data Cultural data were found using the ethnographic human relations area files (HRAF) search engine, or else were deduced or inferred directly from Downloaded from http://ccr.sagepub.com at DUKE UNIV on January 9, 2009 McCall / Cultural Adaptations After Progressionism 65 Figure 1 Data Points Representing Cultures in Analysis descriptions in the literature. Socioeconomic data were then included from the Ethnographic Atlas (Gray, 1999; Murdock, 1962-1980). For the remaining, incomplete cases, the cultural groups’ synonyms as listed by Gray (1999) or The Ethnologue (Grimes & Grimes, 2002) provided additional data. Descriptions of the groups’ physical environment were found using a geographic information systems database from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS, 2003). In total, the indigenous cultural traits of 97 linguistic groups of varying size, geographical scope (see Figure 1), and linguistic/ genealogical origin (see Table 1) were considered sufficiently informative out of the many hundreds of modern and archeological human cultures

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