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       - Alex Shoumatoff
 
 

Cultivating Culture: Emergence or emergency?

Introduction

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In 1994 I spent several months in Mali, West Africa. It is a country with a rich and ancient cultural heritage where more than a dozen local languages are spoken. At first the unfamiliar social customs and elaborate interpersonal protocols made even the simplest interactions perplexing. I was dazed by the alien culture and the sub-Saharan heat. What jumped out of the blur of new experience and what I often found most arresting were oddly de-contextualized glimpses of the familiar. 

For most people who live in the capitol, Bamako, the courtyard is the place for group domestic activity. It serves for washing and cooking and eating and playing and drinking tea and socializing. When there are important soccer matches, the few who own televisions set them up in courtyards where family and friends crowd in to watch the game. When the national team scores a goal, raucous cheering can be heard all over Bamako. During my stay, on Sunday nights at 9 o’clock a hush would descend on the city as groups gathered in courtyards to watch reruns of Dynasty dubbed in French.

I got to know a musician of the traditional griot caste, Toumani Diabate, who plays the cora, a 21-stringed African harp. He is a descendant of seventy generations of cora players. He knows songs and stories that his family has preserved for more than a thousand years. In the courtyard where locals and foreigners come to him for lessons, I met a group of neighborhood kids who wanted to know if it was true that Michael Jackson was the richest boy in the world. 

Beyond the city limits, long straight two-lane blacktop roads connect the major towns and villages. Traffic is generally light -- people traveling on foot sometimes following herds of curly-horned cattle, carts pulled by ox or donkeys, a few bicycles and motorbikes. Trucks, buses, cars pass infrequently. Every 100 kilometers or so there is a sturdy billboard supported by stout steel pipes bearing the familiar full-color image of the Marlboro Man in his white cowboy hat, cigarette tucked rakishly in the corner of his mouth. I suspect that at the time, this was one of very few Western images that many people encountered on a regular basis.

In fact, the spread of Western technology and culture seemed moderate. While the state religion is Islam, there are still ethnic groups who adhere proudly to their animist heritage and beliefs. The radio was completely free of American music though the broadcast fare indicated that some local musicians were undergoing an unfortunate fascination with the electronic beat-box. Most of the limited television schedule was local. Most people dressed in brilliantly colored local fashions. Yet for some reason there was a proliferation of Chicago Bulls merchandise -- t-shirts and caps. There was also a proliferation of blue plastic shopping bags which blew through the ancient dusty streets like tumbleweed, past the weavers at their looms and the shoeshine boys with their wooden boxes, who can clean or mend any shoe, including a rubber flip-flop, while you wait.
 

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Individual living things seem precariously balanced in a state of temporary dynamic equilibrium that at any moment threatens to succumb to the forces of entropy, moving the organization of the molecules towards a state of disorder, inertia, death. A small variation in the environment can precipitate a catastrophic effect. A few bacteria can bring down an elephant. Or a few grams of lead. Yet on a global scale, life is remarkable in its dynamic resilience, its adaptability and ingenuity, its unity and diversity. Dead elephant molecules are quickly reorganized as bacteria molecules.
 
 

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A scientific definition of “species” that tries to encompass the characteristic properties of natural biological groupings is remarkably hard to pin down. Whether on the basis of reproductive isolation, morphological differentiation and stability, or statistical genetic relationship, all the definitions present gray areas. In bacteria, the most populous creatures on earth, where gene transfer can be lateral, between living individuals, the notion of species nearly dissolves entirely. 
 

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In these pages I wish to present some thoughts on biology and culture, on how organisms get along together, and on human attempts to manage the dynamic relationships we have evolved with other species and within our own.

The ideas that I bring forward are assembled from many sources. In Being About, Ellie Epp sets out a detailed picture of biological and neural knowing, how a simple life-form can know, how knowing evolves in creatures that possess nervous systems, and how all knowing is physical, structural. Being About, with its insistence on seeing organisms as whole bodies in material locations, has been a major inspiration to me affording an entirely new perspective on life and human being. In her work towards achieving an integrated vision of planetary processes, geoscientist Lynn Margulis has shown the power of symbiosis as an essential source of evolutionary novelty. Merlin Donald portrays the interwoven evolution of cognition and culture as co-evolution of internal (cognitive) and external (environmental) structure; that is, the world we make in turn makes us. Edwin Hutchins writes about distributed cognition, how we use tools, “material anchors,” to coordinate collective cognitive activity. Michael Pollan’s insightful and entertaining analysis of cultivation from the plant’s point-of-view is a source of fresh thinking about domestication, species interdependence and human cultural practices that affect these interactions.
 

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We are a young species (though trying to pin down exactly how young is the subject of continuous debate). Our special abilities and capacities emerged recently – humans have been writing for only about 5000 years. The Western scientific tradition is but a few hundred years old. Yet we behave as if we are the font and repository of all earthly and heavenly knowledge and wisdom. Our insights have often been hampered by false intuitions about simple causality. (We naturally model our understanding of causal forces on human agency.) Linear, mechanistic explanations for complex, dynamic natural processes have been offered with disappointing and sometimes disastrous results. 

In the long run, will evolutionary forces select for better, more intelligent human institutions? Will errant systems of knowledge and social organization eventually be weeded out, adapt or die? Will ecological and social pressures exert such force that they outweigh the influence of the institutions whose economic needs drive Western cultural change? I believe they will, provided humanity doesn’t commit a fatal blunder first.

While the picture I offer regarding the course of the evolution of human society may seem pessimistic, I find optimism in the remarkable dynamic interactions that emerge in all living systems – including our own. 
 

Cultivating Culture: Emergence or emergency?

Living organisms are tricky. They are unlike inorganic matter. Living things actively change their structure, the organization of their cells and molecules, in close correspondence with regular variations of their immediate environments. Growth, digestion, movement -- all are structural alterations of an organism interacting with the world around it. Even the simplest organism is not passive. An organism is coupled to its surroundings, taking advantage of aspects of the world that it has come to depend on for its continued stability. Being alive is dynamic interaction.

The universe is chaotic but not random. Within the ceaseless flux that surrounds us some features are constant, some relationships fixed, some processes cyclic. We can count on certain kinds of stability in nature: the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the progress of the seasons, the density and persistence of various forms of matter. Water behaves consistently and reliably: freezing temperature, boiling point and specific gravity are physical constants which change systematically relative to contextual conditions like pressure. There are other constants associated with light and gravity. Properties and processes of the world that are stable, regular and change systematically are sometimes referred to as invariants. 

A creature responds to a particular feature of the world by changing itself in a particular way. An organism’s response and the way it co-varies with a particular world-feature is determined in evolution by interactions over many generations. Moment by moment a creature remakes itself with respect to what it is and has available -- its capabilities and environmental footholds or affordances -- and what it needs to continue to survive and propagate. Its current structure is dependent not only on changes that take place during the lifetime of the individual creature but on changes over the course of the evolutionary history of its species and beyond, all the way back to the first self-replicating molecules and the beginnings of life; the continuous dynamic interaction of life with the world of which it is an integral part. 

Regularities in the world are built into the very design of living things. Properties of the way water behaves are embodied in the fins and skin of fish and in the design of living cells which take advantage of such properties of water as its ability to alter or carry some molecules and its ability to pass through certain molecular arrangements and not others. 
 
 
 
 

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