About the Book
When evolutionary biology stretched out a tentacle called socio-biology and began to probe human behaviour back in the 1970s, there was no room for neutrality. Advocates of the new science hailed the dawn of a new era in our understanding of human behaviour, while opponents wrung their hands with concern over the new field's potential to transform and even destroy anthropology and other social and behavioural sciences. Twenty years later, little has changed. Anthropology and its sister disciplines are still intact and thriving, though they seldom make use of insights from evolutionary biology. Cultural anthropology in particular has recoiled from the biological threat by moving away from the sciences and toward the humanities. During that same time, a new generation of scholars in biological anthropology, psychology, and other fields has made great progress by using evolutionary theory to understand human behaviour, applying it to everything from mating and parenting to the study of mental illness. The success of this research program is threatened, however, by its lack of a serious role for the concept of culture. That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human behaviour is an effort to develop a scientific study of human behaviour that is at once evolutionary and cultural. In a lively, readable style, it deals with such serious, scholarly issues as how to best define culture, the question of whether culture is present in other species, human universals and human diversity, the relationship between culture and behaviour, and cultural and moral relativism. It covers existing models of the relationship between cultural and biological evolution, including the concept of the meme and the new science of memetics, as well as the author's own work on the role of culture in human communications that draws upon the study of animal signals.
Table of Contents:
Preface, Righting Culture, Culture Wars, Mr. Tylor's Science, Words and Deeds, Baby Versus Bath water, Such Stuff as Chairs Are Made Of, Memes and Milk Bottles, Natural Kinds, The Gethenians, Imagining Diversity, Timeless Misconceptions, Ethnographic Hyperspace, Human Universals, The Great Attractor, Gethenian Nature Versus Human Nature, Family Resemblances, Behavioral Diversity Without Cultural Diversity, Human(izing) Nature, The Blob, A Frightening Prospect, What Is Science?, Types of Science, Waiting to Be Normal, Making Connections, Culture Emergent, Forming Texts, Connectionism, Reductionism, and Unity, First Contact, Pigeons and Goats, Evolution's Groupies, Mousehunt, People Who Make People, Alarming Nepotism, A Fractious Topic, The Utility of lt All, An Infectious Idea, Just Forget It, Teach Your Children Well, Off-Track, A Parallel Track, Sneaking Groups in the Back Door, Of Missionaries and Mud, Unstung, Back to the Beginning, Engineering Culture, Muddying the Waters, Communication and Culture, Why We're So Smart, Why We're So Moral, And Why We Talk So Much, Looking for a Suaboya in All the Wrong Places, All in the Family, Rashomon in the Bush, Gardening Tips, Tolerating the Intolerable, Absolutist Alternatives, Finding a Middle Ground, Sperm Banks and Shotgun Pellets, When Things Were Really Rotten, Lonesome No More?, Notes, References, Index
About the Author :
Lee Cronk is associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. He is the author of That Complex Whole (Westview Press, 1999).
