Cat Culture: The Social World Of A Cat Shelter

7. Culture and Self in the Domestic Cat

7 Culture and Self in the Domestic Cat MARIAN STAMP DAWKINS,l and most other biologically trained scientists, strongly believe in Occam's Razor, also referred to as the principle of parsimony. This principle basically states, "We should always start with the simplest explanation and only when this has been shown to be quite inadequate should we move on to a more complex one:'2The problem is that many scientists do not move on, no matter what the evidence, leading to a strong reductionist preference in science. This has been especially true in the study of animals , where many scientists still cling to behaviorism in spite of almost 20 years of research undermining their position. Sociologists, from the beginning, have been no friends of parsimony. Instead they have argued in favor of the principle of emergence. No one articulated this more cogently than Emile Durkheim, who saw social and cultural forces as creating a level of analysis and explanation distinct from biological and psychological forces: To be sure, it is ... true that society has no other active forces than individuals; but individuals by 184 Copyrighted Material Culture and Self in the Domestic Cat 185 combining form a psychical existence of a new species, which consequently has its own manner of thinking and feeling. Of course the elementary qualities of which the social fact consists are present in germ in individual minds. But the social fact emerges from them only when they have been transformed by association since it is only then that it appears. Association itself is also an active factor productive of special effects. In itself it is therefore something new. When the consciousness of individuals, instead of remaining isolated, becomes grouped and combined, something in the world has been altered.3 Thus, social phenomena are no mere metaphors reducible to biological or psychological entities. Rather, they have explanatory powers in their own right, as Durkheim demonstrates for the case ofsuicide in his famous work ofthat name. Durkheim's view remains dominant among sociologists even though sociobiology has been mainstreamed to some extent judging by its inclusion in theory textbooks and even in some introductory sociology texts. Many sociologists, nevertheless , see the ideas ofsociobiologists as supporting ultraconservative stances on major social issues: This approach met with enormous hostility from some sociologists and, indeed, continues to do so, largely because it appears to legitimate aspects of human societies that people wish to reform and to set limits on how far you can change ... people. ... They argue that Wilson, for example, is a product of an alienated culture and his own class prejudices, and he "joins a long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of Copyrighted Material 186 Chapter Seven their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems?' The question of what is biologically ... based becomes especially controversial in the context of discussions of gender roles and the origin of differences between men and women; homosexuality .. . and the extent to which intelligence is inherited or the product of upbringing.4 Sociologists, then, generally continue to see humans as largely shaped by social and cultural factors, with biology playing a limited role in providing a context within which society and culture vary. Even those social and cultural factors are not determinative for symbolic interactionists who argue that humans are guided not only by norms and rules from their culture but also by their own goals and the immediate situation in which action takes place. This means that the courses of action chosen by social actors are negotiated and variable. Small groups may differ from the whole on this basis, and individuals may differ from the group as well.5 Thus, sociologists have historically been hostile to reductionism , arguing that social phenomena can only be explained in terms of other social phenomena and not in terms of biological or psychological variables. Further, they have rejected efforts to find any single variable or limited set of variables even on the social and cultural levels that can explain social facts that are instead seen as complex and multicausal. Hence, in our approach to the study ofthe social relationships of animals we are likely to be more skeptical ofthe value ofparsimony than our colleagues in biology. We believe our skepticism has been borne out by the research on animals accomplished in the last 15 to 20 years. These works include all those cited in Chapter 4...