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Foreword Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin The struggle between biological and social explanations of human life is nowhere more pronounced than in anthropology. Indeed, the disciplinary distinction between biological anthropology and cultural anthropology, which manifests itself in departmental factions, in separate academic programs , and sometimes in residence in separate buildings, is a mirror of a fundamental epistemological disagreement. It is obvious to everyone that human beings are biological objects, distinguishable from other species in an immense array ofanatomical, physiological, and behavioral manifestations , and that genetic differences between us and even our closest relatives among the primates are somehow involved in that manifest divergence. No chimpanzees will ever form a Department of Human Studies. On the other hand it is equally obvious, even to the most obdurate biological determinist, that the differences in food, dress, daily activity, language, rules of proper behavior, and unfounded beliefs between the Tupi-Monde of the Amazon and the anthropologists who study them are not explicitly coded in their different genes, but are a consequence of their different historical experiences. So how are we to bring together the biological and the social in our understanding and explanation of what it is to be human? Biological reductionists argue that we are "basically" articulate chimpanzees . Then, the more ancient an evolutionary origin, the more "fundamental " it is. Anything that has happened since the Pliocene is a veneer of socialization painted over the deep, dark, and ultimately determining forces of the hypothalamus. Cultural determinists, preoccupied with an opposition to vulgar biological determinism, urge that the development of symbolic language inserts us into a new universe where our biological heritage is merely an origin story of no relevance to our current state because it has been overruled by culture. A more liberal approach allows for both biology and society and then tries to assign numerical weights to the biological and the social. A more sophisticated interactionism abandons Xll Foreword weighing of the relative contributions of the two domains because they obviously interact with each other on some third ground while each causal pathway remains distinct. It is not possible to understand the ongoing struggles over the explanation ofthe nature of human beings without asking what work the explanations are supposed to do. The evolutionist's question ofhow Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes diverged from a common ancestor and what difference has accumulated between them in the ensuing five to ten million years is a question to which a genetic answer can be given. But it is naive to suppose that the evolutionary question is what really motivates the struggle between biological and cultural determinism. The real issues are political: Could human life be other than it is? If so, are some social organizations more in accord with "human nature" than others? If so, can we get there from here? Is bourgeois society the final completion of a human historical trajectory, embodying the best that human biology allows? The confrontation between biological and social explanations and their various hybrids is, at bottom, a question of constraints and enablements. It should not surprise us that conservatives speak only of constraints while the liberals celebrate flexibility and the openness of possibilities. Either we are Richard Dawkin's "lumbering robots, created by our genes, body and mind" or we are, in Simone de Beauvoir's clever conundrum, "l'etre dont l'etre est de n'etre pas," the being whose essence is in not having an essence. Yet, whether affirming or denying the importance of the biologicalor social, both sides accept the separate existence ofthese categories as distinguishable causal chains, differing only in what weight is to be assigned to them. We, and the contributors to this book, begin by rejecting the categories themselves. But we are trapped by language into manipulating the very entities whose separate existence we reject. Our solution is to think in terms of the interpenetration of these categories, of the transformation of one by another, circling back in our analysis to find that the categories have become so transformed as to be something quite different than they were at the beginning. Such a view is more than simply a static interactionism . The most sophisticated developmental biology accounts for each organism as a unique outcome of a historical process of the transcription of particular genes at particular times in particular environments. But that answer is not helpful. First, it leaves entirely without specification what the array of outcomes of different genes in different environments may be, except to say, "it...

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