Human Origins
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HUMAN ORIGINS Methodology and History in Anthropology Series Editors: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford David Gellner, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford Volume 1 Volume 17 Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches Edited by Wendy James and N.J. Allen Edited by David Berliner and Ramon Sarró Volume 2 Volume 18 Franz Baerman Steiner: Selected Writings Ways of Knowing: New Approaches in the Anthropology of Volume I: Taboo, Truth and Religion. Knowledge and Learning Franz B. Steiner Edited by Mark Harris Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Volume 19 Volume 3 Difficult Folk? A Political History of Social Anthropology Franz Baerman Steiner. Selected Writings By David Mills Volume II: Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilisation. Volume 20 Franz B. Steiner Human Nature as Capacity: Transcending Discourse and Edited by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon Classification Volume 4 Edited by Nigel Rapport The Problem of Context Volume 21 Edited by Roy Dilley The Life of Property: House, Family and Inheritance in Volume 5 Béarn, South-West France Religion in English Everyday Life By Timothy Jenkins By Timothy Jenkins Volume 22 Volume 6 Out of the Study and Into the Field: Ethnographic Theory Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Practice in French Anthropology and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s Edited by Robert Parkin and Anna de Sales Edited by Michael O’Hanlon and Robert L. Welsh Volume 23 Volume 7 The Scope of Anthropology: Maurice Godelier’s Work in Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Context Research Edited by Laurent Dousset and Serge Tcherkézoff Edited by Paul Dresch, Wendy James, and David Parkin Volume 24 Volume 8 Anyone: The Cosmopolitan Subject of Anthropology Categories and Classifications: Maussian Reflections on By Nigel Rapport the Social Volume 25 By N.J. Allen Up Close and Personal: On Peripheral Perspectives and the Volume 9 Production of Anthropological Knowledge Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition Edited by Cris Shore and Susanna Trnka By Robert Parkin Volume 26 Volume 10 Understanding Cultural Transmission in Anthropology: Categories of Self: Louis Dumont’s Theory of the Individual A Critical Synthesis By André Celtel Edited by Roy Ellen, Stephen J. Lycett, and Volume 11 Sarah E. Johns Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies and Effects Volume 27 By Michael Jackson Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of The Volume 12 Elementary Forms of Religious Life An Introduction to Two Theories of Social Anthropology Edited by Sondra L. Hausner By Louis Dumont Volume 28 Volume 13 Extraordinary Encounters: Authenticity and the Interview Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Edited by Katherine Smith, James Staples, and Nigel Guinea-Bissau Rapport By Henrik E. Vigh Volume 29 Volume 14 Regimes of Ignorance: Anthropological Perspectives on the The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and Practice Production and Reproduction of Non-Knowledge Edited by Jacqueline Solway Edited by Roy M. Dilley and Thomas G. Kirsch Volume 15 Volume 30 A History of Oxford Anthropology Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology Edited by Peter Riviére Edited by Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Hilary Callan Volume 16 Holistic Anthropology: Emergence and Convergence Edited by David Parkin and Stanley Ulijaszek HUMAN ORIGINS Contributions from Social Anthropology Edited by Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Hilary Callan berghahn N E W Y O R K • O X F O R D www.berghahnbooks.com First published in 2017 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2017 Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Hilary Callan All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed on acid-free paper ISBN 978-1-78533-378-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-78533-426-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-78533-379-8 (ebook) CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Introduction 1 Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Hilary Callan Chapter 1. Forty Years On: Biosocial Anthropology Revisited 35 Hilary Callan Chapter 2. Rethinking the Relationship between Studies of Ethnobiological Knowledge and the Evolution of Human Cultural Cognition 59 Roy Ellen Chapter 3. Towards a Theory of Everything 84 Chris Knight and Jerome Lewis Chapter 4. Sexual Insult and Female Militancy 103 Shirley G. Ardener Chapter 5. Who Sees the Elephant? Sexual Egalitarianism in Social Anthropology’s Room 130 Morna Finnegan Chapter 6. From Metaphor to Symbols and Grammar: The Cumulative Cultural Evolution of Language 153 Andrew D.M. Smith and Stefan Hoefler Chapter 7. Reconstructing a Source Cosmology for African Hunter-gatherers 180 Camilla Power Chapter 8. Sounds in the Night: Ritual Bells, Therianthropes and Eland Relations among the Hadza 204 Thea Skaanes vi Contents Chapter 9. Human Physiology, San Shamanic Healing and the ‘Cognitive Revolution’ 224 Chris Low Chapter 10. Rain Serpents in Northern Australia and Southern Africa: a Common Ancestry? 248 Ian Watts Chapter 11. Bedouin Matrilineality Revisited 272 Suzanne E. Joseph Chapter 12. ‘From Lucy to Language: The Archaeology of the Social Brain’. An Open Invitation for Social Anthropology to Join the Evolutionary Debate 293 Wendy James Afterword 319 Alan Barnard Index 337 ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 1.1 These book cover designs speak volumes about the public representation of ‘human sociobiology’, in works by its supporters and its critics, during the mid- to late 1970s. 48 6.1 Drawings representing ‘computer monitor’ become increasingly arbitrary over repeated interactions. 166 8.1 Bells and other epeme objects are stored inside the hut. 210 9.1 Three San hunters. Note the way they tilt their heads and lean into the bow. San hunters all over the Kalahari adopt very similar positions when using their bows. 233 10.1 Rhino Cave, Botswana. Carved rock panel on the south wall in afternoon light. 264 12.1 ‘Hey, did you see that?’ ‘Take care! They’re watching us’. 307 Tables 0.1 Timeline showing species dispersals, and major shifts in technology and culture. 4 7.1 Grauer’s list of traits of a ‘Hypothetical baseline culture’ of ancestral African hunter-gatherers, compared with the Hadza. 183 INTRODUCTION Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Hilary Callan A rift runs through anthropology. Year on year we explain to our students that anthropology is the overarching study of what it means to be human; and yet our discipline is fragmented. We can, we explain, study humans as biological beings, understanding the anatomical, physiological and life-history differences between ourselves and the other great apes, or the Neanderthals. Or we can study humans within their own communities as cultural beings, analysing the rituals they perform and the stories they tell. What defines us asHomo sapiens compared with other hominins appears a tractable scientific area of enquiry. Interpretations of cultural voices, values and meanings feel by contrast negotiable and contested, throwing into question the prospect of scientific objectivity. On each side of this divide data takes different forms and is collected quite differently; theory and hypothesis are applied with hypothetico-deductive method, inductively or not at all; and epistemologies are radically opposed. As detailed in Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), the human body forms a basis of universal shared experiences, structures of cognition and mutual understandings. Yet the body and its reproduction generate a multiplicity of folk models, with highly variable ideas about sex, kinship and shared substance each able to operate with perfect, or at least practical logic in its own cultural setting. Social and cultural anthropologists glory in the contrariness of these folk models to the scientifically accumulated ‘facts’ of how human bodies work and reproduce. Fundamentally it is ‘fictions’ which are the business of social anthropologists – fictions about kinship, about gods and spirits, in our rules and games, fictions on our tongues as we speak and in taxonomies as we carve up the world. Given that we are fiction-sharing and game-playing apes, do shared fictions and games matter for the understanding of our origins? 2 Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan and Hilary Callan Darwinism, the coherent and unifying theory that powers all investigation of living beings, has itself been named a fiction, the origins myth that fitted the newly emergent world of high Victorian capitalism. As we enter ‘a period in which evolutionary theory is being applied to every conceivable domain of enquiry’ (Aunger 2000: 1), including economics, moral philosophy, psychology, linguistics, law, medicine and beyond, social anthropology could be respected for holding out, swimming against this powerful tide, maintaining its critical faculties in solidarity with the humanities. Or it could be viewed as insular and idealist, obfuscating and jealously guarding its domain of ideology from unwelcome intrusion (cf Bloch 2000: 202). In Engaging Anthropology, Thomas Eriksen (2006: 23) certainly sees social anthropology