Ahead of His Time

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.

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[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