Ahead of His Time
By Barry R. Bainton, Ph.D. MIM
“Eliot D Chapple has been selected by the
Forum of Presidents of the American Anthropological Association to present the
Distinguished Lecture at the Association's upcoming annual meeting in
Cincinnati. Titled 'The Unbounded Reaches of Anthropology as a Research Science
and Some |Working Hypotheses,' the lecture will explore the central position
anthropology occupies for pursuing research on human organization that
integrates the biological, psychological, and cultural components of behavior.
Chapple's long and noted career, is carved at the interface between basic and
applied research demonstrates the wide range of theory and applications yielded
by the generalist perspective, characteristic of anthropology.”[i] (Anthropology News Letter, October 1979,
Vol.20, No.8).
I walked in to the auditorium of
the convention hotel in Cincinnati, OH to hear the Distinguished Lecture. It
was with the awe of a new PhD and as a young applied anthropologist. I looked
forward to Chapple’s speech, after all he was one of the founders of the
Society for Applied Anthropology. Based on the title, I assumed he would
address the linkages between basic (or academic) research and applied
anthropology. I was aware of Chapple’s four-field approach to anthropology as a
science, and his innovative methodologies. I hoped that he would be sharing his
insights with us – especially to a younger generation facing a very difficult
employment market as the 1980s began.
Later, after his Lecture, I felt both rewarded and
disappointed. Rewarded by the width and depth of the net that Chapple cast
around the field, and by his unorthodox incorporation of concepts and
perspectives he addressed beyond traditional anthropology to push for an
applied science of man. Chapple was far ahead of his time in
the way he perceived the problems that an applied anthropology must address.
The four fields meant just that – four fields to be treated as aspects of a
singular whole that makes up human behavior.
But I was also disappointed. I was disappointed by the man
who was presenting the lecture and his delivery.[ii] Not
to be too pedantic, the speech, while
informative, was too long, over an hour. It seemed to begin where the author,
not the audience, was. Years later, after I had enrolled in Toastmasters, I
learned the principles of public speaking. As I reread his paper, and reflected
upon those days, I understood why I had been disappointed. It was not Chapple,
per se, but the method he chose. The delivery quality of the reading an academic
paper is designed for reading and not to be delivered orally. Writing and
speaking are two very different media. One can expect that a reader will be
drawn to the subject by self-selection. The oral presentation is more complex –
it is “selling” an idea to an audience. Chapple was trying to sell his ideas to
a very mixed audience.
What are those four
fields Chapple was attempting to sell ?
For Chapple, Anthropology’s
four fields represented “methods” for addressing the problem of humankind as
both a biological animal and thinking social animal. To understand humans one
must begin with the animal body – how it develops and how the emerging
specialized organs and structures integrate with one another in a manner that produces
a functioning biological organism. The story of human-kind is the story of
nature and evolution. The processes of integration of the biological elements
are, from Chapple’s perspective, also the processes of human organization as
social animals.
Chapple s’
conclusion states:
“For us, however, recognition that the
primary language of the CNS [Central Nervous System] enables us to build a
science on the hierarchical systems of rhythms of interaction, ... , [It] also
means that our inquiries over time and space are unbounded. We do not have to
halt at a series of academic walls, each one of which wishes to exclude the
free-trader in ideas from seeking his uniformities wherever the data suggest he
should look.” (1980: 756)
What
struck me, re-reading the Lecture, is how anthropology today and its
organization are building these walls taller and thicker. While we may plumb
our subject deeper, we do so from an ever-narrower perspective. In response to
the practical competitive demands of academic employment, we find that we must
create a “unique” space for ourselves. In turn, the focus on specialization and
their encapsulation in separate professional associations has surrendered the control
of their science and discipline to special interest groups at the expense of
the unifying Science of Mankind [Humanity].
Chapple
continued,
“If you read widely in all those
fields in which perceptive individuals, over centuries, have tried to formulate
their views of the human condition - ... – you will find across culture and
across history an encouraging yield of insights about uniformities the writers
had become aware of. They may appear buried in writers within them. Yes, it
requires little effort to translate them into the language of biological
rhythms of human being.” (1980:766)
Chapple’s Anthropology as a Science:
Chapple’s work goes back to the 1930s.
The scientific management, based on Fredrick Taylor’s time and motion studies, strongly
influenced his approach to anthropology. Later, in the 1940’s, together with
John Provinse and others, Chapple became a major force in the creation and
growth of the Society of Applied Anthropology (SfAA). Despite an emphasis on
anthropology, the SfAA shared Chapple’s openness to the application social
science as a whole. The early SfAA and its journal, Applied Anthropology, reflected
this sense of holism that Chapple felt the anthropological paradigm implied.
Chapple wrote only two books during a career
that began in 1933 and ended in 2000. Most famous of these is Principles
of anthropology (1942), which he wrote with the physical
anthropologist, Carleton Coon. It was here in the Principles book that he initially
presented his concept of a behavioral anthropology.
In his second book in 1970, The
Biological Foundations of Individuality and Culture (1980/1970), (re-titled
from Culture
and Biological Man (1970)), Chapple presented the results of his
“behavioral anthropology” research which is reflected in his subtitled, “Explorations in Behavioral Anthropology“. Here he outlined “a framework within which anthropology can be understood as providing
a systematic and general science of the human condition,” rooted in biogenetic
givens of human nature (Chapple 1970:v).[iii]
Chapple’s approach deviated from mainstream
anthropology by being “cultureless.” Where
American anthropology under Kroeber and White tended to view “culture” as a
super-organic concept to which the individual and society surrendered, Chapple
saw human biological and social behavior as the source and mediator of what we
term “culture.”
As I re-read his Distinguished Lecture, I
came to understood why Chapple’s views fail to catch on. As Kehoe and Weil
observed, “The year 1970 should have been a high point in Eliot Chapple’s career.”[iv] But
instead, “By 1970 Chapple was willing to
conform to disciplinary standards and used the [culture] term; he may have
realized that his earlier, relentlessly scientific, cultureless chronograph
method threw out the baby with the bathwater.” By surrendering
the behaviorist approach, Chapple was effectively turning his back on nearly 40
years of work. In 1979, I feel that Chapple felt he had a chance to make a new
pitch for his behaviorist perspective. After all, biology, genetics, and neuroscience
had made considerable progress since the 1940’s.
Why I found the Lecture exciting:
Today as I re-read the Lecture, I also contemplated
what excited me. It was the way Chapple’ concept of “behavioral anthropology” integration
the physical and social and provided a holistic theory of anthropology. As an
applied anthropologist, trained in a four-field approach, I was looking for
such a model of reality. A holistic theory would enable me, as a professional,
to look at a situation in terms of its physical, material, social and cultural
dimension, and these how these affected an individual and corporate organism’s
performance. These four fields, from the
Chapple perspective, define the situation. Or, from the applied perspective,
“the problem.”
A problem or situation has physical, biological
and collective psychological interactive functions. Problem also has antecedent
and resulting conditions or a history. These frame the human interactions that
take place. In human terms, a “situation” is to be understood in terms of a
dramatic arch (e.g. a story) or a cycle (e.g. a life). To understand human
situations, one must understand the underlying biological and psychological forces
that create human behavior. To understand the nature of the situation and its
component parts is to have a basis for understanding and balancing the forces
that promote situational change or stability in the situational conditions.
By the
1970’s the “culture” concept that had dominated American anthropology for a
century was under attack from many sides. The question within academic
anthropology focused on the question, ”What is culture”?
Meanwhile,
the employment situation,
along with the reorganization of American Anthropological Association, pointed
toward a very personality and competitive dominated situation. Later, as Phil Salzeman points out[v],
Insights about historical progression, or opinions parading as
insights, sometimes come upon us not purposely, the fruits of directed and
informed research, but serendipitously, as revelation burst forth from
accumulated experience. It is about the recent development of academic
anthropological theory, from the mid-1960s to the present, and its relation to
academic life in university departments, that I have had unexpected and ungratifying revelations. … We
anthropologists seem to change allegiances and our views almost as quickly and
repeatedly as Little Richard switches between gay rock star and Baptist
preacher.”
So what is Chappel’s Problem:
Eric Wolf is often cited as saying, “Anthropology
is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.” Chapple spent his career attempting to unify
the social sciences and humanities. But to do so, he went to an extreme by
arguing against the concept of “culture.” As a veteran of Toastmasters and
veteran applied anthropologist, I looked at the lecture in a different light. I
saw it as a major speech designed by its author as a last chance to “sell” a
point of view, and as a summation of almost 50 years of work. If we examine the
lecture, there are several points that stand out.
First, the speech was over an hour. It was
too long. In its written form, it is 17 pages long, almost 11,000 words. This
is a long time to keep the public’s attention speech on any subject and
especially one as complex as this one.
Second, the subject is extremely complex
for a mixed audience made up of a cross section of specialists. If ever there
were a general rule for the applied anthropologist, I would look to Charles
Erasmus, and the idea of “felt need.” The presenter’s position, i.e. Chapple’s,
assumed that the individuals in the audience would or could understand how his
perspective and their specialty connected.
Third, Chapple began the Lecture as if he were
writing a research paper. He begins with a few basic biological assumptions and
builds these up to an ending that links the neurobiology he began with to the
emergence of the “cultural” nature of music and dance as the biological expression
of group solidarity. A more effective strategy would have been to reverse the
order of his presentation.
Here I have to admit that after a deep
reading of the paper, and remembering how I felt 40 years ago, I can see that
Chapple’s unique approach articulated thoughts that I have had but could not
express verbally. Chapple is explaining that patterned behavior is the result
how a personal experiences a situation. Behavioral patterns arise in a
situational context resulting from the emotional response to the elements in
the situation. This response becomes the “situational language” which we call, “culture.”
A “situational language” is shared and taught just as a spoken language is.
A “situational
language” is not rational; it is emotional. When an individual attaches a
meaning and value to their emotional experience, the experience becomes
rational. Culture is an emergent phenomena based on situational language. What
Chapple was suggesting here is that culture is a result of the individual’s
rationalized behavior in a situational context, not the other way around.
Unlike, Spencer, Kroeber, and Leslie White
who conceptualize “culture” as a force independent of biology, i.e. as
Super-organic, Chapple’s argument is that what we find as “cultural” is merely
the extension of a neurobiological evolution of a biological organism. Chapple’s lecture was one last attempt to
explain and justify his position.
Chapple failed, I feel, because of egotism
and by not knowing or understanding his audience. If one were to reverse the
argument as it is presented, Chapple would have started with the audience on
his side and he could lead them to his conclusion. This is what a good teacher
does. Chapple suffered from the fact he was TOO much the researcher and to some
respects a non-conforming humanist.
Where Chapple represents one branch that
evolved as applied anthropology evolved in the Twentieth Century, there others.
[i]
Anthropology News Letter,
October 1979, Vol.20, No.8)
[ii] One can read
the speech on Anthrosource (American
Anthropologist, v82 n4 (198012): 741-758).
[iii] Kehoe, Alice Beck, et al. Expanding
American Anthropology, 1945-1980: A Generation Reflects. 1 ed. The
University of Alabama Press, 2012. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/13809.
[iv] Chapter 11 Eliot Chapple’s Long and Lonely Road , Alice Beck Kehoe
and Jim Weil
[v] Salzeman, Philip “Fads
and Fashions”, Anthropology Newsletter May 1988
pp. 1,32
