86 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
Native American life before the arrival
of the Europeans was delusional. Native
American life was being lived right now,
in an evolving mixture of pre-Columbian
customs and twentieth-century Amer-
ican ways of life.
But Benedict was looking for pat-
terns. In “The Chrysanthemum and the
Sword,” she wrote, “I started from the
premise that the most isolated bits of
behavior have some systemic relation to
each other.” And from this premise she
undertakes to explain “what makes Japan
a nation of Japanese.” Japanese-ness is
a rock, washed over by waves of history.
And what is gained from swapping
out “racial difference” for “cultural differ-
ence”? As the South African anthro-
pologist Adam Kuper has pointed out,
cultural differences between blacks and
whites were used to justify apartheid.
Making the differences cultural enables
people to say, “I’m not a racist—I just
want to preserve our respective ways of
life. I don’t want to be replaced.”
But all these criticisms of the prem-
ises of Boasian cultural anthropology
(and there were others) had less im-
pact than the direct attack made by
the anthropologist Derek Freeman, a
New Zealander, on “Coming of Age
in Samoa.” Mead’s controversial find-
ing in that work was that Samoan teen-
agers engage in full sexual relations be-
fore marriage, with multiple partners,
and largely without shame or guilt or
even jealousy. She gave this as one of
the reasons that Samoan adolescents
didn’t exhibit the angst and the rebel-
liousness that American teen-agers did.
The point was that adolescence is a cul-
turally determined phase of life, not a
biologically determined one.
In two books published after Mead’s
death, “Margaret Mead and Samoa: The
Making and Unmaking of an Anthro-
pological Myth” (1983) and “The Fate-
ful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead” (1998),
Freeman claimed that Mead had been
tricked by her native informants, and
that Samoan sex life was far more fraught
than she represented it. Freeman’s books
kicked off a wave of reconsideration.
King consigns the entire controversy
to an endnote, as he does later chal-
lenges to the reliability of Boas’s find-
ings in his 1911 study of the bodily forms
of the children of immigrants. He does
this because subsequent investigations
suggest that the accusers were wrong
and that Mead and Boas were both sub-
stantially correct. But he therefore misses
the significance of those episodes. For
what was under assault was the whole
culturalist account of human behavior,
and what the disputes symptomized
was a swing back toward biology.
T
he new biologists are not like the
scientists Boas did battle with in
the early twentieth century. They agree
with Boas that “man is one.” But they
think this means that there exists a sin-
gle “human nature,” and that the suc-
cess or failure of different forms of social
organization depends on how faithful
they are to this species essence.
This has become almost the default
mode of analysis among social and po-
litical commentators, who like to cite
work by cognitive scientists, endocri-
nologists, and evolutionary psycholo-
gists. In the most reductive version of
the new biologism, life is programmed,
and culture is simply the interface. Even
the social science that is most popular,
like behavioral economics, is human-
nature-based. Nurture is out.
And yet the issues on which Boas
and Mead made their interventions, is-
sues around race and gender, are now
at the center of public life, and they
bring all the nature-nurture confusion
back with them. The focus of the con-
versation today is identity, and identity
seems to be a concept that lies beyond
both culture and biology. Is identity in-
nate, or is it socially constructed? Is it
fated, or can it be chosen or performed?
Are our identities defined by the exist-
ing state of social relations, or do we
carry them with us wherever we go?
These questions suggest that the na-
ture-culture debate was always miscon-
ceived. As Geertz pointed out years ago,
it is human nature to have culture. Other
species are programmed to “know” how
to cope with the world, but our biolog-
ical endowment evolved to allow us to
choose how to respond to our environ-
ment. We can’t rely on our instincts; we
need an instruction manual. And cul-
ture is the manual.
Only we can tell us how to live. There
is nothing that prevents us from decid-
ing that the goal of life should be to be
as unnatural as possible. “Human na-
ture” is just another looking glass.
Our latest
enthusiasms.
Weekly, in
your in-box.
Our writers share their
latest recommendations
of books, music, podcasts,
movies, TV, and more.
Sign up at newyorker.com/
recommendsnewsletter
The Recommends Newsletter
