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Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship: Compatibility Between Cultural and Biological Approaches / Maximilian P London School of Economics and Political Science SOCIAL BONDING & NURTURE KINSHIP compatibility between cultural and biological approaches (UNABRIDGED DOCTORAL THESIS EDITION) Maximilian Holland Copyright © 2004 Maximilian P. Holland Copyright © 2012 Maximilian P. Holland All rights reserved. First Edition published 2004 in the UK: Senate House Library, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU This edition is essentially an unabridged version of the originally published doctoral thesis, reformatted, with typographic corrections and a new preface. An online version of this text available under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license; it can be accessed through various online holdings, including the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 British Library Cataloguing Data A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. British Library Persistent ID: uk.bl.ethos.411642 Publication Type: Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of London, 2004. Awarding Body: London School of Economics and Political Science LSE Persistent ID: etheses.lse.ac.uk/465/ Holland, Maximilian P. Social bonding and nurture kinship: compatibility between cultural and biological approaches / Maximilian P. Holland Library of Congress subject classification: H Social Sciences > HM Sociology 332 pages. Includes table of contents and bibliographic references. ISBN-13: 9781480182004 ISBN-10: 1480182001 ii SOCIAL BONDING & NURTURE KINSHIP compatibility between cultural and biological approaches [This page blank] iv PREFACE TO THE 2012 EDITION This book contains the first widely available print edition of the doctoral thesis Social bonding and nurture kinship, completed at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2004. The thesis has previously existed solely in manuscript format in the LSE library archives, and has more recently become available in digital format from that same institution and also from the British library. Why is this work only now available in book format? At the time, the thesis examiners (Elliott Sober and Christina Toren) were quick to suggest that it should be of considerable interest to scholars and academic publishers alike, with likely just a re-hash of the introduction and conclusion to broaden its appeal. But having successfully completed the research, and about to commence a teaching post, the last thing I felt like doing at the time was to immediately plunge back into rewriting two or more chapters. I wanted to let my hair down and have a change of mental scenery, and to enjoy the more tangible satisfactions of engaging students with ideas and critical enquiry, the potential for which had been one of my prime motivations in undertaking the PhD. Another factor in putting the work to one side in 2004 was my disappointment with some of the levels of scholarship in the fields I had spent four years investigating. In retrospect, part of that disappointment was in fact with myself, for having fallen into an attraction to and engagement with certain areas of biological anthropology that appeared to promise a rigorous foundation upon which to understand the human condition. I had been exposed to the British educational system, with its training in the positivist tradition, trust in hard sciences, tendency towards reductionism, and neglect of the role of culture, relativism, and even modest aspects of postmodernism. Coming from this background, although there was the potential to engage with the latter ideas during undergraduate studies at the LSE, I was ignorant of their contribution and did not seek them out. Thus my initial attraction to and faith in the tools and frames of reference of areas of biological anthropology. For a young scholar there is of course also a great emotional appeal in a perspective that promises a rigorous and formal handle on a complex world, that makes it feel more v predictable, and less threatening. On a more conciliatory note I would maintain, both then and now, that a perspective on humans grounded in our ontogeny as part of the biological world is both well supported beyond the frailty of any single paradigm, perhaps logically unavoidable (it is hard to define ‗human‘ for purposes of study without repeal to at least some biology) and increasingly urgent as we necessarily collectively re-examine our relationship with natural environments and our long term trajectory. There are thus a priori reasons why rigorous insights from biology (if they can be arrived at) may enable a more nuanced understanding of the human condition. In practice however academic disciplines often suffer from training their members in a narrow tradition, suffer from cultural divisions, and compartmentalisation. These problems sometimes amplify into territorial disputes with other disciplines, mutual misunderstanding and sometimes mistrust, defensiveness and parochialism. Interdisciplinary scholarship, though much lauded, is seldom encouraged. The narrow disciplinary path, if unchecked, can lead towards dogmatism around methods, core assumptions (beliefs) and even data. Having carefully worked through the theories and evidence around social behaviour and kinship during the research it has been hard to avoid the conclusion, then and now, that at least a small number of areas of biological anthropology (some parts of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology) may have suffered from these difficulties. That‘s not to say that some colleagues across the metaphorical corridor in cultural anthropology and other social sciences could not have more constructively engaged with the apparent gaps, though it is hard to do this when your entire body of data (ethnography) is disregarded and your approach is supposedly threatened with colonisation and reductionism! The current synthesis outlines a more constructive resolution. What lessons might be drawn from this impasse and its eventual resolution? I would first look to narrow disciplinarity as the root of the problem. Then towards the general lack of awareness of the importance of culture (despite over a hundred years since Boas); both in how disciplinary culture affects vi our own openness as scientists (making potentially complimentary frameworks seem foreign and unwelcome); and especially in the human sciences, in how our inherited societal culture often constrains those of us tinkering with ideas about human nature to unwittingly derive our models from a culturally particular perspective which we then (and necessarily unsuccessfully) attempt to generalise to all humans. It is tempting to attribute these shortcomings to biologists, but note that cultural anthropologists themselves had only begun to deconstruct their own narrowly derived models of human kinship in the period between the late 1960s through the early 1980s (chapters 1, 3 and 8). In a historical sense then, it was this unfortunate timing that created the initial clash and subsequent impasse. Cultural anthropologists were changing their theoretical position on kinship around the time that biologists were starting to draw upon the kinship data that anthropologists had largely produced under the increasingly discredited ‗old model‘. The work in this book inevitably had to wade through such debates, but precisely by engaging seriously with the theories and evidence of several approaches, it has produced a robust general framework for their resolution in this particular area of study (social bonding, social behaviour and kinship). Readers will justifiably question how much of the original thesis remains valid and relevant in 2012, whilst research in the areas under study has not stood still. Two points should be made: Firstly, the thesis builds its synthesis largely around the identification of a logical error common to sociobiological accounts, and supports this critique (and proposes a more parsimonious position) on the basis of both argument and wide ranging evidence. Here the fundamentals are unchanged. On the one hand, the same common error remains dominant in evolutionary psychology accounts; research continues to be regularly published which attempts to describe the extent to which the expression of human social behaviour is biased towards identifying and favouring genetic relatives, based on the mistaken assumption that this is a prediction of the fundamental biological theory. On the other hand, the broad pattern of the surrounding evidence drawn upon in the thesis has not been reversed by recent findings, just more detail added. vii Secondly, debates around the robustness of inclusive fitness theory have arisen in recent years, specifically its relative parsimony compared to a natural selection approach as an accounting method for analysing multi-level selection. The language and framework of inclusive fitness theory forms the central thread of the biological account in the thesis (see mainly chapter 2), because this has long been the dominant theory and remains the lingua franca in biology. The thesis employs a broad definition of inclusive fitness, identifying the later developments of Price (1970), Hamilton (1975), Grafen (1985), Queller (1992) and Frank (1997) as being more accurate than Hamilton‘s commonly referenced 1960s papers. The thesis also deliberately distinguishes inclusive fitness theory from the narrower kin selection theory (cf. Hamilton 1975). In doing so, and in specifying the generality of inclusive fitness theory regarding levels of selection analysis, the thesis is largely neutral in respect of these recent debates. Further, an important aspect of the
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