1Almost thirty years ago Dan Sperber wrote:
A spectre haunts the social sciences – the spectre of a natural science of the social. Some wait for the day that the spectre will make itself known, and will at last make the social sciences truly scientific. Others denounce the threat of scientism and reductionism. (Sperber 1996: vi)
2Thus, the spectre of a naturalistic approach to culture both agitates and excites the variegated world of social sciences because, on the one hand, it promises the construction of a “science of society,” while on the other it threatens to diminish their epistemic autonomy.
3In the past thirty years much has been written about themes related to the so-called placement problem – that is, how to combine naturalism and “second nature.” From the now-classic analyses of McDowell (1994) to the proposal of a liberal naturalism by De Caro and Macarthur (2004, 2010, 2022), the limitations of a strictly naturalistic approach have been widely acknowledged. At the same time, scholars like Joseph Rouse (2016, 2022, 2023), Peter Godfrey-Smith (2012), and others (Lewens 2015; Laland 2017) have rightly emphasized the achievements of evolutionary biology, particularly the possibility of recognizing conceptual normativity as a purely natural phenomenon – and indeed “to understand human rationality as a form of niche construction” (Rouse 2016: 29).
4An often-overlooked approach when discussing naturalisms is to adopt a historical-genetic perspective, considering contemporary naturalism not only as a meta-category of philosophical discourse, but also as a culturally and socially situated philosophical event. Explicitly detailing the historical features that have accompanied the construction of the naturalistic discourse allows for demonstrating the contingency of at least some of its motifs, thereby avoiding the kind of conceptual inevitability with which naturalism often presents itself. This is the theoretical gain derived from such a lateral move, and it is this type of approach that I will follow in my paper.
- 1 For a general overview of the American School of Anthropology, see King 2019. Alfred Kroeber devote (...)
5In what follows, I will analyze some key moments that characterized the naturalization of the concept of culture in the early twentieth-century American anthropological debate. As is well known, the “American anthropological school” emerged within the boundaries of a discipline that was institutionally considered part of the social sciences and incorporated references to natural history and Darwinian evolutionary theories.1
6Analyzing the anthropological debate on the placement of culture in the natural world represents a particularly interesting topic, because it allows us to observe firsthand the theoretical tensions experienced by those who, meanwhile, were studying cultural phenomena in the field, such as the organization of clans, the structure of marriage, the issue of incest, and burial rituals. On the one hand, it was obvious for this type of naturalized approach that culture was part of natural evolution. On the other hand, there was a critical discussion about the epistemic gains obtained from a markedly reductionist approach. The idea of reducing cultural normativity to physical and biological principles raised doubts about the existence of “epistemic residues” not amenable to reduction. There was a strong conviction that a nature-culture dialectic could reemerge within a naturalized culture itself - that even starting from the assumption of naturalistic principles, one could end up facing an unresolved duality between different orders of reality.
7American cultural anthropology historically developed within this type of theoretical tension, where the placement issue is dominant. Understanding why that generation of anthropologists felt the need to construct a naturalized image of culture, while simultaneously distancing themselves from it, represents the primary focus of this paper. In the following pages, I will attempt to demonstrate the great variety of epistemic strategies applied to the placement problem. Furthermore, I will analyze two of the most intriguing positions: the radically materialistic stance of culturologist Leslie Alvin White and the emergentist position of Alfred Louis Kroeber.
- 2 Bidney’s paper was first published in the journal American Anthropologist (1944). It was then inclu (...)
8A significant theme in early American anthropological debates concerns the epistemic and ontological status of the concept of culture. A paper by David Bidney titled “On the Concept of Culture and Some Cultural Fallacies” (1944) helps us pinpoint some key elements of the discussion.2
9First, the issue of placement:
The problem of the ontological or metaphysical status of culture, it appears, is not one that the practical social scientist can ignore by relegating it to the limbo of philosophical speculation since his basic assumption (especially when held uncritically) has a direct bearing on his methods and results. (Bidney 1944: 41)
10Defining the metaphysical status of culture is not merely a matter of philosophical speculation but represents a problem that is both essential and controversial. It is essential, because the notion of culture is a fundamental premise (and thus often implicit) in the construction of anthropological discourse. It is controversial, because there is significant epistemic disagreement on the issue of its placement in the natural world. Culture is part of nature, but in what way? Is it possible to produce a naturalized theory of cultural processes?
11Bidney’s paper provides us a with a firsthand overview of the major epistemic approaches to the topic. He employs a philosophical classification that first distinguishes between “realist” and “idealist” approaches to culture and then, within this broad distinction, produces finer-grained descriptions that reveal a plurality of intermediate positions. The result is a fluid, finely variegated debate, rich with alternative theoretical options. The main approaches run as follows:
121) First, there is the macro-area of the realist perspective. In this view, culture is defined as a set of attitudes, habits, and customs acquired over time, representing a specific property of human behavior. “Realism” here means holding that the real subject of cultural processes is constituted by individual and social behaviors, as culture “has no independent existence of its own” (Bidney 1944: 31). The latter is to be understood as a secondary nature that supervenes on biological nature: “Human culture is, so to speak, an acquired or secondary nature supervening upon the primary innate potential human nature” (ibid.: 34). A controversial point in this type of approach concerns the weight to be assigned to individual behavioral variations. There is a disagreement between those who would define culture entirely in social terms and those who believe that individual behaviors represent the essential factor in any type of cultural change (Bidney 1953: 24). According to Bidney, this group includes anthropologists like Edward Burnett Tylor, Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead.
132) According to another approach, culture should be defined in terms of “communicable intelligence” and “communication of ideas.” In this case, the emphasis is on the communicability and transmissibility of knowledge. The philosophical label used here is epistemological idealism, as culture is regarded as the transmission of information that transcends the purely material aspects of individual behavior. Ideas have their own way of life, and the mode of dissemination is equally autonomous from the nature of material processes. Representatives of this approach include anthropologists like Robert Ranulph Marett, Robert Redfield, and Cornelius Osgood.
143) The third approach focuses on the notion of “social heritage.” Culture is seen as a cumulative product transmitted from generation to generation and consists of material artifacts as well as of social institutions, habits, and non-material ideals. This is the most controversial approach, as the interpretation of social heritage can lead to different theoretical outcomes. For example, it can lead to a reified notion of culture by considering cultural processes as relatively autonomous from biological laws. This is the path followed by Alfred Kroeber, who argues that social heritage represents the “superorganic” trait of the natural world, meaning that it emerges from a rich complex of historical traditions and is not reducible to an ontology of material processes. Conversely, the idea that cultural heritage constitutes a peculiar entity is also open to a realist and even materialist interpretation. For according to others, technique and the material conditions of life represent the primary determinant factors in the social construction, artifact production and, ultimately, cultural evolution. A leading representative of this address is, for instance, Leslie A. White.
154) A further approach to culture is the “functionalist and pragmatist” one, whose main proponents are Malinowski and Dewey. In this case, the emphasis is placed on the “psychobiological meaning of cultural phenomena,” that is, on the function that culture performs both biologically (to satisfy individual needs) and socially (to stabilize community norms and values). The functionalist approach is fluid because it can fit into the broad category of realism, but also into that of “social heritage” as culture (especially for Malinowski) tends to be characterized as a “reality sui generis.” In general, however, the problem with functionalism is its lack of flexibility, as it tends to lead to an a priori modeling of the culture-society dynamics, devaluing the contingency of cultural processes in favor of universal applicability (Bidney 1953: 226). Needless to say, the reference to Dewey should be developed more extensively than Bidney actually does. While Dewey himself was not an anthropologist, his ideas permeated the intellectual milieu of early 20th century America, influencing how anthropologists conceptualized culture, approached fieldwork, and understood the relationship between nature and culture. It is precisely in the context of the “placement” debate that Dewey’s pragmatism offered a valuable alternative, namely advancing a middle ground model between strict materialism and cultural idealism. His view of culture as an outgrowth of natural processes, yet possessing emergent properties that require their own level of analysis, provides a philosophical bridge to span the gap between idealism and realism described so far. However, Dewey’s position is not actually developed by Bidney.
16To recap, there are two main axes around which the debate revolves: the first is centered on the problem of determining the ultimate subject of cultural processes, and the second on the analysis of their structure and functioning.
17In the first case, it is a matter of analyzing the thin line that separates (but at the same time connects) the psychobiological configuration of the individual with the social dimension of cultural behaviors. In the second case, the point is to determine what we are talking about when we refer to culture. From a certain point of view, all anthropologists are in some way “realists,” because they all take for granted that culture is an objective, empirically describable fact, which is implemented by the production of objects, artifacts, and social institutions. But the point is to understand the epistemic status of social normativity. This also marks the point of convergence between the two theoretical axes described so far. The core problem of the debate is understanding whether there is a normative autonomy of second nature compared to the primary and evolutionary features of biological processes.
- 3 For example, Kroeber and Kluckhohn lament the fact that Dewey does not take into account the work o (...)
18This is also where placement options bifurcate. Within a naturalized framework, one can treat the issue of the nature-culture relationship as a purely epistemic matter, considering cultural dynamics as relatively autonomous from biological facts. However, from a stricter viewpoint, it becomes almost unavoidable to assume that the normative autonomy of culture is somehow a function of concomitant psychobiological processes rooted in a materialist ontology. From this perspective, Dewey’s proposal articulated in Experience and Nature (1925) offered an approach that recognized both the material and epistemological aspects of culture. His view of culture as arising from the “interaction among natural events” (ibid.: 261), yet possessing levels of complexity that require distinct level of analysis, provides a philosophical approach that could potentially reconcile materialist and emergentist views of culture. However, Dewey’s name appears rather infrequently in debates among anthropologists, as there persisted a tendency to consider philosophy and anthropology as epistemically and institutionally separate disciplines (one belonging to the humanities, the other to the natural sciences). For this reason, his position was never, in fact, analytically considered.3
19Be that as it may, philosophical naturalism represents the stone guest of the debate, a sort of “cultural” precondition that links together different placement strategies. Empirically-oriented and data-driven procedures of inquiry coexist with themes that are proper to a naturalistic ontological view, including the physicalist and reductionist stance. It is within the epistemic space of naturalism, thus, that the peculiar normativity of cultural processes is alternatively assessed to be “organic” or “superorganic.”
20A strong physicalist conception of culture is advocated by Leslie Alvin White (1900-1975):
Culture is a kind of behavior. And behavior, whether of man, mule, plant, comet or molecule, may be treated as a manifestation of energy. (White 1943: 335)
- 4 “Culture is an organization of phenomena – material objects, bodily acts, ideas, and sentiments – w (...)
21Civilizing processes or cultural manifestations, White argues, can be regarded as “a form or organization of energy” (ibid.).4 This does not imply that to explain inherently cultural facts, such as the functioning of clans or polyandry, one can overlook social behaviors or group psychology. But one should not make the mistake of assuming that psychology and sociology contain sufficient descriptive resources to provide a fully naturalized explanation of them. White coins a new term, “culturology,” to indicate a new science that not only analyzes culture through the lens of social and psychological categories, but also establishes physical and environmental correlations. Thus, culturology is a kind of discipline that unfolds on a series of integrated levels:
Everything in the cosmos can be interpreted in terms of matter and energy, whether it be a star, atom, cell, or man. All life is, of course, an organization of matter-and-energy. […] Culture is merely the name we give to matter-and-energy in symbolic form. (White 1949: 375)
22Explaining the structure and functioning of a cultural process implies recognizing different epistemic levels (social, psychological, geographical, economic, etc.), all of which, however, are related to an ontology of physical processes. The normative level of manifest behaviors is thus integrated with a strong ontological naturalism. This is the specific goal of culturology as pursued by White, which was also supported by his Ann Arbor colleague Roy Wood Sellars.
23It is interesting to note that one of White’s programmatic papers, entitled “Ethnological Theory,” was hosted in the volume, Philosophy for the Future: The Quest for Modern Materialism, edited by Roy Wood Sellars, Vivian Jerauld McGill, and Marvin Farber in 1949. The partnership with Roy Wood Sellars is not accidental. Sellars wrote in a passage of this manifesto of ontological naturalism:
It will, I believe, interest my readers to find a materialist recognizing the normative as a guiding factor in the moral order intrinsic to group life. […] [Moral principles] are irreducible to non-moral terms. But that does not signify that they are non-natural, for man is, in group life, a moral being. (Sellars 1949: 71)
24Here is the point shared with White. The culturologist, too, must perform a twofold operation as described by Roy Wood Sellars: 1) recognize the normative as a “guiding factor” in the cultural order intrinsic to group life; 2) recognize that the normative factor cannot be considered “non-natural,” and therefore admit that the ground zero of causal explanation is provided by the description of the physical-energetic processes of the natural world.
25Accordingly, White distinguishes between a manifest level and an energetic level in the treatment of cultural phenomena. From the manifest point of view, the definition of culture is as follows:
Culture is the name given to an organization of objects (tools, utensils, etc.), acts (patterns of behavior, customs, codes, institutions, etc.), ideas (belief, knowledge, lore, etc.), and sentiments (attitudes such as aversion for eating pork, “horror of incest,” avoidance of mother-in-law) that is dependent upon the use of symbols. (White 1949: 360)
26Manifest phenomena such as totemism, polyandry, the “mother-in-law taboo” are to be considered specifically cultural phenomena, because there are symbolic forces at work that exceed the mechanics of social interaction and indeed influence it. From the energetic point of view, however, culture is part of a vital process that can be described in purely physicalistic terms:
Culture is a specific and concrete mechanism employed by a particular animal organism in adjusting to its environment. It is the mechanism that articulates man with the earth and cosmos. It is therefore something describable in zoological, material, mechanical terms. (Ibid.)
27Only by achieving this integrated dimension can anthropology effectively account for cultural processes, explaining both their causal genesis and their logical-epistemic autonomy. White’s theses, therefore, are decidedly strong and entirely in line with the project of a Marxist-inspired evolutionary naturalism that represented the scientific core of Roy Wood Sellars’ Philosophy for the Future. Assuming that human beings are organisms with natural needs, White endeavors to trace an energetic description of human activities, taking as his primary elements of analysis the amount of energy consumed by humans, the ways in which labor is produced, and the relationship between human artifacts and harnessed energy (White 1943: 336). In this way, White comes to outline several “laws” of cultural development, such as the following one:
Other things being equal, the degree of cultural development varies directly as the amount of energy per capita per year harnessed and put to work. (Ibid.: 338)
28Or this one:
Other things being equal, the degree of cultural development varies directly as the efficiency of the technological means with which the harnessed energy is put to work. (Ibid.)
29White thus employs a physicalist conception of cultural evolution that relates it to the use of resources in the territory, competition for energy exploitation, the formation of social systems, differentiation of social functions, and so on. In the civilizing process there is a search for better efficiency processes, new energy sources, and increasingly refined development of production tools. From nomadism, to agriculture, to industry, to technology: White interprets these stages of human history as an evolutionary process parallel to that described by Darwin. In both cases, we are referring to material processes that evolve through adaptive strategies linked to the resources of the territory.
30The physicalist conception of culture allows cultural processes to be arranged in absolute continuity with physical and biological processes – because cultural processes are physical processes: they are energy in the form of culture. Retrospectively, the stages of the civilizing process, as well as the logic of its internal development, can be reconstructed. When the possible limit of exploiting a given resource is reached (e.g., in agriculture), the process halts. Something new must then emerge to resume progress (e.g., the discovery of the steam engine or the industrial revolution). It is this exploitation processes that dictate the pace of civilization, even from the social and cultural point of view. The history of energy exploitation is also the history of technological evolution. Technology serves as the interface for human energy needs. Thus, another key principle of culturology is defined: “Other things being equal, culture evolves as the productivity of human labor increases” (ibid.: 346)
31To sum up, White presents a materialistic and tendentially Marxist conception of history and cultural processes. Social evolution is a consequence of technological evolution. Social changes are dictated by crises related to the shortage of energy supplies: “The key to the future, in any event, lies in the energy situation” (ibid.: 350).
32Another point that White strongly supports concerns the line of continuity he perceives between his theses and those advanced in the recent past by Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) and Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). The reference to these authors is not accidental, for White deplores the success that other anthropological approaches have had in recent decades. In his view, these approaches have betrayed the distinctly ethnological and materialistic line advocated by Morgan and Tylor. The naturalization of culture represents, in White’s eyes, a goal only apparently shared by the American anthropological school. After a promising start, it regressed with the introduction of elements hardly compatible with a fully naturalized conception of the discipline. White has something to say about everyone and everything: his attacks target Margaret Mead and her extensive use of the doctrine of “free will,” as well as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Robert Harry Lowie, for emphasizing the autonomy of cultural phenomena through a heavy reliance on terms not causally reducible. He also attacks Bidney, who advocates a spiritualist conception of human beings (White 1949: 358-9). But in general, it is the “Boasian school” that is his main polemical target, because it has produced a false naturalization of culture, by ultimately breaking the parallelism between natural and cultural evolution. In their hands, culture and civilization have become scientifically incommensurable entities, completely autonomous and no longer relatable to quantifiable indicators such as those of energy exploitation or technological development (ibid.: 369-70).
33It goes without saying that the accusation of anti-evolutionism was particularly damaging, and it is therefore not surprising that some of Boas’s best students responded to these arguments, either by defending the stance of a non-reductionist naturalism (Kroeber 1948), or by distinguishing between Darwin and the various possible interpretations of Darwinism (Lowie 1946). For the purposes of this paper, Alfred Louis Kroeber’s rebuttal is particularly interesting to analyze due to his peculiar reformulation of the placement issue.
34Referring to Kroeber simply as a “student of Boas” is unfair. Even White acknowledges his intellectual achievements, suggesting that Kroeber’s emergentist theory can, on the whole, be reconciled with a naturalized conception of cultural processes. Kroeber, in fact, was not only an anthropologist who conducted field work, but he was perhaps the pupil of Boas with the most pronounced philosophical aptitude. His reflections on the concept of culture represent perhaps the pinnacle of the entire American anthropological school. His textbooks and monographs, such as Anthropology (1923), Configurations of Culture Growth (1944), The Nature of Culture (1952, with Clyde Kluckhohn) are widely acknowledged as fundamental landmarks in the discipline.
- 5 Of course, there is also the functionalist option, which, however, we will not consider here, partl (...)
35But beyond intellectual credits, what interests us here is the particular type of naturalism advocated by Kroeber. We have seen that the theme of placement is articulated through a plurality of alternative strategies, and that at its essence there are two rival options: 1) those who believe that the normative autonomy of cultural processes is integrable with biological principles and reducible to a physicalist perspective (position à la White); 2) those who emphasize the surplus of cultural heritage over the materiality of environmental conditions (a range of distinct positions, among which Boas and his school stand out).5
36Kroeber’s position is intriguing because in the early stages of his career he tended to emphasize the autonomy of cultural phenomena, adopting a strong emergentist stance that sought to separate the domain of nature from that of culture. However, in his later years, he transitioned to a position we might now term “liberal naturalism.” While he continued to defend the autonomy of cultural processes, he moderated the extremes of his earlier stance and acknowledged the need for a stronger correlation between nature and culture. Of interest to our discussion is a 1948 paper in which Kroeber analytically discusses White’s position and critically revisits his own youthful stance, explaining to the reader the reasons that drove him towards emergentism. Towards the end of this paper, Kroeber (1948: 413) writes:
Looking back thirty years on my essay called “The Superorganic,” I am struck by the sense that pervades it of a great need for freeing cultural phenomena from the oppression of biological thinking.
37This reference to “the oppression of biological thinking” gives us a clear understanding of the cultural pressure that naturalism exerted on the social sciences in early 20th-century America. Sociologist William Fielding Ogburn, in his 1922 book Social Change, recounts how the publication of On the Origin of Species profoundly impressed American anthropologists and sociologists. The idea of explaining social processes through selection, inheritance, and adaptation had become, he says, a sort of collective scientific obsession. For years, there was a frantic search for the biological laws of society, resulting in numerous hypotheses regarding causal factors such as geographical location, climate, migration, group conflict, ethnic abilities, and the evolution of mental faculties. Ogburn concludes that for more than half a century there was a significant proliferation of such studies, only to recognize that the results obtained did not meet the expected standards.
38It is against this obsession that Kroeber protests in 1917, denouncing the “sweeping applications of the principles of organic development to the facts of cultural growth” (Kroeber 1917: 164). While not criticizing Darwin, Kroeber openly opposes those who draw a close analogy between natural and cultural processes, conflating different etiological domains. From these premises, he derives a fundamental emergentist thesis: “Tradition is something superadded to the organisms that bear it, imposed upon them, external to them” (ibid.: 178).
39Only in the human world is there history. Culture and civilization are specifically social processes, not reducible (or only partially reducible) to organic factors: genetic inheritance does not transmit cultural traits. “Civilization and heredity are two things that operate in entirely separate ways” (ibid.: 184).
40Kroeber, who was unaware of the theory of dual inheritance, takes issue with the clumsy attempts of a certain kind of social Darwinism. He argues for the necessity of breaking the link between nature and culture to avoid falling into the cauldron of eugenic movements of the time (which theorized the superiority of one race over another) or the trap of colonialism (which proclaimed the right of more developed countries to rule over less developed ones).
41In 1948, however, after being criticized by both Boas and Benedict, he critically reworks his position. He does not suddenly become a physicalist or wholeheartedly embrace a biological account of cultural processes. Instead, he better articulates his pluralistic attitude through engagement with the physicalist program of culturology. Reductionism, he argues, fascinates by its epistemic simplicity, but in pursuing the dream of a unified theory, it necessarily neglects the problem of “irreducible residues” (Kroeber 1948: 406). At every level of the layered world events appear that, in principle, can be reduced to their causes, but the reduction of which does not yield epistemically satisfactory results.
- 6 A similar argument is found in Sperber (1996: 18-23). Sperber notes that the vocabulary of anthropo (...)
42Kroeber takes jealousy, an eminently psychological phenomenon, as an example. He notes that the outcome of a jealous attack can result in aggression towards the rival, aggression towards the loved one, or even none of these outcomes. It is only the complete psychological situation of the individual, his or her entire personal history (including the history of interpersonal and cultural factors), that provides the psychologist with an interpretive tool suitable for the situation (ibid.). It is not that physiological or biochemical reductionism does not work, but what matters to the psychologist is an interpretive approach that manages to account for those “irreducible residues” that the reduction process neglects.6 We know, says Kroeber in another passage, what determines sexual impulse, but we do not know why there are over 500 different forms of marriage, as well as countless forms of extramarital sexual behavior. For this reason, “our fullest understanding of the world may well continue to be in pluralistic terms” (Kroeber 1948: 407).
43However, emergentism is no longer a good solution for Kroeber either (at least in its strongest versions), as it tends to produce a dualism of opposite sign. If one insists too much on considering some characteristics of the higher cultural level as non-functional, one unduly weakens the correlation with the natural world, and ends up construing parallel ontic domains. Kroeber acknowledges that he has being “ambiguous” on this point and that he was carried away by excessive zeal. “I would now say that culture was primarily intelligible in terms of itself, not only in terms of itself” (ibid.: 408).
44The key point, he now argues, is to achieve a proper balance of explanatory factors: culture consists of an epistemic, and not ontic, domain; and it is relatively, not absolutely, autonomous. To analyze the reasons for cultural processes, one must proceed case by case, without disavowing physicalism, but establishing on a case-by-case basis which causal reductions are epistemically relevant, and which should be discarded. From this perspective, the question of placement should also be deflated, because if the issue of placing cultural events in the natural world becomes obsessive, one ends up getting entangled in a circuit of theoretically intriguing yet pragmatically irrelevant questions:
To the investigator of culture, as long as he remains merely such, it seems irrelevant for the time being where culture resides, or whether it exists autonomously or not, as long as he has genuinely cultural data to operate with and is free to operate upon them with the methods he finds most productive. The locus and reality of culture are irrelevant in the sense that they do not affect his specific cultural problem nor his specific method of dealing therewith. (Ibid.: 410)
45Cultural phenomena such as marriage, patriarchy, taboos, or magical practices, must be accepted in their intrinsic manifestative character: this is their way of being.
46Once again, Kroeber does not want to deny the validity of the reductionist principle, nor does he consider culture as a world apart. In this argumentative context, he makes an interesting move by proposing to reconsider Aristotle’s doctrine of the four kinds of causes. When we talk about cultural processes, we can refer to the efficient cause (identifiable in individuals implementing actions), or to material causes (related to neurobiological dispositions), or even to the forms of cultural processes, namely to the manifest patterns of their configuration (ibid.: 411). The formal description of culture cannot be fully achieved solely by recourse to efficient or material causes, because what truly matters here is a type of description that establishes a correlation between distinct cultural facts, contexts, or values:
Every anthropologist or historian concerned with culture realizes that cultural situations make more sense, reveal more meaning, in proportion as we know more of their cultural antecedents, or, generically, more total cultural context. In other words, cultural forms or patterns gain in intelligibility as they are set in relation to other cultural patterns. This interrelating of forms is evidently like the consideration of Aristotelian formal causes. (Ibid.)
47When it comes to forms, therefore, the primacy of the “pattern” as a relational principle of intelligibility must be accepted. It is not that the path of efficient causes is wrong, but in some contexts it is simply the poorest in information.
48And so we come to the conclusion. What Kroeber hopes for is a resemantization of the concept of science in pluralistic terms. His idea is that the distinction between epistemic levels of scientific discourse should not count as a hierarchization of knowledge, but rather as “the concession of a difference” (ibid.: 412).
- 7 In Art as Experience (1934), Dewey claims that culture is “the product not of efforts of men put fo (...)
49In many ways, Kroeber thus anticipates many of the characteristic theses of today’s liberal naturalism and his intuitions align with many of the insights advanced by Dewey in the same period. Indeed, the idea that cultural norms and values, while emerging from natural processes, develop a contextual autonomy in shaping human experience and behavior is typically Deweyan – and it is unfortunate that Kroeber does not analytically discuss this concept. Equally Deweyan is the idea that this autonomy is not absolute or disconnected from nature, but rather represents a functional independence within the broader natural context. Culture, in this view, is neither purely material nor wholly autonomous, but an emergent phenomenon with its own level of complexity and normative force, while still being continuous with natural processes.7 Needless to say, both Kroeber and Dewey maintain that anthropologists are called to accept a naturalized horizon of discourse: the causal closure of the physical world, the validity of evolutionary principles, the very idea of a layered world and the reductionist principle itself. However, they do not believe that physicalism is always and necessarily the best approach to the matter, nor do they think that we should always opt for the path of ontological reduction. What truly matters is to stipulate that manifest events sometimes invoke different levels of explanation: this is the principle of epistemic pluralism. And for this very reason, they lean towards a kind of pragmatic, pluralistic, and situated conception of knowledge.
50The manifest image possesses reducible elements and normatively residual elements. Reductionism cannot become a dogma; it has to remain a heuristically useful epistemic tool. What pragmatically matters in the study of cultural processes is the quality of the principles that allow us to grasp the specific differences of the empirical facts and the situated variations of the analyzed phenomena – not the claim of some vaguely defined common denominators.
51The American anthropological school flourished in a cultural climate dominated by naturalism. The naturalization of culture, i.e. the very idea of treating culture scientifically as if it were an empirical object, presupposed this dominant cultural climate. While there might had been divisions in the details of executing the project, or distinguishing various forms of naturalism, the continuity line between nature and culture was largely considered uncontroversial.
52A final question could be the following: how does the “culture of naturalization” coexist with the specific project of “a naturalizion of culture”? The issue of the relationship between a naturalized culture and the naturalization of culture, that is, the relationship between a contingently occurring historical event (the American naturalized culture of early twentieth century) and a theoretical project that aims to apply independently of historical contingency (the naturalization of culture), brings us to the heart of the issues analyzed so far.
53From White’s perspective, culture and civilization are defined through an osmotic relationship with nature, as the forms of social interactions are ultimately related to the exploitation of environmental resources, the search for new forms of energy, the advancement of technology, and so forth. There is no doubt that, for White, the advent of a naturalized culture represents the last stage in the history of human civilizations. But can his analysis be reflexively applied to the scientific core of this culture? Can naturalism, regarded as a scientific-philosophical stance and not only as a cultural phenomenon, accept to be reflexively considered as a transitional stage in the grand scheme of things? In other words, are we really justified in considering the naturalization of culture only as the historical function of a naturalized culture, and thus as something that is destined to be overcome in the future stages of civilization?
54This is a very difficult question to answer, mainly because of the ambiguities inherent in the very concept of “naturalism.” It goes without saying that if by “naturalism” we mean not only a specific epistemic position, but also a broader way of conceiving society, religion, politics, etc., then we cannot overlook the historical reasons that make it a situated and, at least partially, contingent event. Yet, naturalisms, in general, struggle to recognize themselves in this kind of situated image. And this is a principled difficulty. One of the paradoxes of naturalism, in fact, consists in having sponsored the expression “cultural relativism” (Ruth Benedict), while refusing to present itself as a relative culture – for naturalism presents itself more as an absolute philosophical position than a culturally situated model. A naturalism that relativized itself would lose its culturally distinctive traits.
55But what about Kroeber? Arguably, his more markedly contingent and autonomous interpretation of cultures would give him some advantage. From his point of view, the attitude towards naturalization represents an event rooted in both the nature and the history of humankind. The advent of a naturalized culture and the project of naturalizing culture are events that slowly take root in the West. However, for Kroeber, cultures follow inherently non-linear dynamics. If we accept that the expression “culture of naturalization” makes sense, then this sense for Kroeber would be contingent, or to put it better, its intimate development will remain unpredictable. A Kroeberian line of response would thus emphasize not only the scientific, and quasi-metaphysical stance, but also the inherently historical and geographical features of naturalism, namely those manifest characteristics that made it, at least on Western soil, what it actually was. Kroeber would recognize that naturalism is both a philosophical-scientific position and a historically situated cultural event. He would have no trouble accepting the idea of further cultural developments, precisely for the sake of his pluralism.
56This Kroeber-inspired idea of considering naturalism not only from the perspective of its philosophical self-narrative, but also from the point of view of its cultural positioning, seems to me particularly interesting and in line with the approach I have tried to adopt in this paper. Indeed, acknowledging the cultural dimension of naturalism does not seem to me to diminish its actual epistemic significance, but rather helps to deflate its quintessential rhetoric, as well as the sense of its metaphysical unavoidability.