Plenary debate: Humans have no nature, what they have is history. IUAES2013

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the three plenary debates that will take place through the Congress I'm delighted that Dame Professor Maryland's return live president of the ESA has agreed to to chair this one thing I have to listen to my voice anymore but we have a really distinguished group of speakers if anthropology is about the meaning of being human then we are going to discuss some of the most fundamental issues in in answering that question so I'm going to go down there and enjoy in continuing to welcome you to the conference I also want to welcome you to an innovation for the organization itself namely this format of debate the debate though itself has a template and it has a template in an invention that took place in Manchester in 1988 instigated in fact by the our proposer but none of you should take any notice of that it gives him no advantage whatsoever in the debate that's to follow this is a debate I shall name the speakers but I shall not further introduce them because it's not themselves who matter it's the arguments that they make we have on the one side a proposer and a seconder to the proposition and on the other side we haven't we have our opposer and a seconder to the opposition the speakers will each speak for approximately 15 minutes we shall then open up the floors in the plural to debate at the end of that each speaker will then very briefly come to the point of the argument and make a brief final presentation and we then have a vote and the vote is that the vote is actually vote is actually very important as you'll see when we when we come to it but in the meanwhile we should get on because we have no time the motion that is being proposed by two distinguished proposers Professor Tim Ingold of Aberdeen University professor Pina das of John Johns Hopkins their proposition is humans have no nature what they have is history and that will be opposed by professor Ruth mace from University College London and professor who she yumo guay WA from Kyoto University we shall go straight into the debate and I call on the proposer of the motion people differ the world over and the study of these differences has always been the special province of anthropology but it's difference superimposed upon a baseline of characteristics that all human beings have in common is there such a thing as human nature you might think it obvious that human nature exists I will argue that it does not now this might seem an odd contention after all we surely know another human being when we see one people might differ a lot but not so much that we ever have any problem in drawing the line between human beings and creatures of other kinds it is clear to me that all of you assembled here are fellow humans and that there are no chimpanzees in the audience I can recognize a family resemblance but if I search for an essence a substrate that remains after all difference has been accounted for I will not find it consider the following each of us has a protuberance in the center of the face with two holes that allow the inhalation and exhalation of air we call it the nose yet look around and you will not find too nosey of exactly the same size and shape not only does the form of the nose differ from one individual to another they're also seen to be significant differences between populations should we suppose then that the underlying architecture of the nose is identically keyed into all humans as part of their innate make up to which inter populational differences and individual idiosyncrasies are added by virtue of environmental experience anyone conversant with modern biology would have to say no did not Charles Darwin and his epochal making work on the Origin of Species refute once and for all the essentialist doctrine that for every species there exists a pre-existing template or design it is not attributional identity Darwin insisted but genealogical proximity that unites the individuals of a species all of us have noses and the more closely related we are geologically the more alike they may look but there is no such thing as the universal nose indeed as Darwin showed if there were not for if it were not for the intrinsic differences among individuals of common descent natural selection could not occur and if natural selection had not occurred then neither Homo sapiens nor any other species could have evolved is it not strange then that as soon as we turn from morphology to behavior or from what human beings look like to the ways they act think and feel we find that many contemporary biologists and psychologists have resorted to a picture completely at odds with the principles of the Darwinian tradition with which they claim to work there is they insist a universal architecture underwriting human mentality and conduct in 1978 the founder of sociobiology eeo Wilson published an influential book entitled human nature in which he claimed that the entire course of history could be understood as a preordained outgrowth of behavioral predispositions common to all humans encoded in what he called the genetic capital of the species and psychologists were quick to pick up on the same in their manifesto for an evolutionary psychology john tooby and later cosmides insisted that all human newborns come into the world endowed with identical genetically prescribed capacities regardless of how they might be expressed if at all in their subsequent development although not yet walking they all have the capacity for bipedal locomotion although not yet talking they all have the capacity for language now it's true of course that the vast majority of humans do end up walking and talking and yet they do so in an astonishing variety of different ways the body techniques of human locomotion as Marcel most famously showed are as varied as the languages and dialects of the world and yet these variations we are told are but culturally specific particulars added on in the lifetime of the individual through the effects of training and experience to a basic Constitution that is already in place from the start so why do biologists and psychologists persist in their appeal to such alleged universals as bipedalism and language while attributing their evolution to a theory of variation under natural selection that only works because the individuals of the species are endlessly variable and to find the answer we can return to the humble nose as the organ of what has long been regarded in the Western tradition as the inferior sense of smell a sense shared by most quadrupedal mammals and often more developed in the latter the nose is not implicated in the establishment of the human condition comparing the noses of different creatures entails crossing no ontological thresholds but with bipedalism and language it is quite different from classical antiquity through to the natural ists of the 18th and 19th centuries and to the evolutionists of the 20th Western thinkers have repeatedly insisted that there is more to bipedalism than a certain way of getting around and more to language than a compendium of communicative gestures they have speculated on her the ability to stand and walk on two feet must have freed the hands from the function of supporting the body allowing their co-option as the instruments of an intellect increasingly liberated from its moorings in the material world and if the hands were seen as the instruments of reason then language what its armature for it was precisely in their reference to concepts rather than objects to the domain of ideal representations rather than material manifestations or in short to mind and not nature that words were said to exceed the nonverbal gestures of non-human animals head held high cognitively equipped for language and tool use and exercising his superior sense of sight universal man for this was a strongly gendered discourse was alleged to straddle the world the master of all he surveyed so in laying claim to the universality of bipedalism and language biologists and psychologists are not in truth announcing a new evidence-based discovery of what all human beings have been found to possess in common they are rather retelling a very old story for which since it rests on metaphysical foundations no evidence could possibly be adduced at all and the story serves in effect as a quasi mythical Charter for the practice of their own science establishing a baseline for what it means to be human of which the very idea of human nature is of course a corollary the great Swedish naturalist carolus linnaeus must surely have been aware of this when almost three centuries ago he struggled to find a set of anatomical descriptors that would distinguish individuals of the genesis he had christened homo from the Apes eventually he settled for a word of advice nosce te ipsum no for yourself do you want to know what a human being really is the answer for Linnaeus and for his fellow philosophers of the Enlightenment is light in the fact that you ask the question it is not one that nonhumans ask of themselves to be truly human then is to look into the mirror of nature and know ourselves for we really are nor was the mirror cracked by the controversies that followed a century and a half later in the wake of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection for then as still today in the principle of natural selection science saw the perfect reflection of its own reason Darwin himself never wavered from the mainstream view that it was man's possession of the Faculty of reason that allowed him to rise above and exercise dominion over the world of nature where he differed from most though not all of his predecessors was in climbing that the possession of reason or the lack of it was not an all-or-nothing affair so in evolutionary terms he thought reason advanced by gradual by a gradual ascent and not by a quantum leap but this implied to that in not all human populations with reason equally advanced and indeed that in some it had scarcely advanced beyond the level manifested in the most intelligent of apes well after a shaky start Darwin stock grew throughout the 20th century to the point of which it he had become a virtual Saint among scientists and yet the history of anthropologists flirtation with Darwinism has been far from glorious up until the outbreak of the Second World War prominent physical anthropologists drawing chapter and verse from Darwin's account of human evolution in the descent of man were continuing to maintain that what were known as civilized and savage traces of man differed in hereditary powers of reason in just the same way as the latter differed from Apes and that interracial conflict would inevitably drive up intelligence by weeding out the less well endowed groups but the second war in a century to break out among the supposedly civilized races of Europe itself fueled by xenophobic hatred put paid to such ideas in the wake of the Holocaust what was self-evident to Darwin and most of his contemporaries namely that human populations differed in brainpower on a scale from the primitive to the civilized gave way in mainstream science to a strong moral and ethical commitment to the idea that all humans past present and future are equally endowed at least so far as their moral and intellectual capacities that were concerned all human beings at article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states all human beings are endowed with reason and conscience but this left the Darwinian with a dilemma because how is the doctrine of evolutionary continuity to be reconciled with a newfound commitment to universal human rights if humans are alike in their possession of reason and model conscience then they must differ in kind from all other beings which cannot somewhere along the line our ancestors must have made a breakthrough from one condition to the other from nature to humanity and faced with this problem there was only one way for modern science to go that is back to the 18th century indeed the majority of contemporary commentators on human evolution appear to be vigorously reproducing the Enlightenment paradigm in all its essentials there's one process of evolution leading from our ape-like ancestors to beings that are recognisably of the same kind as ourselves and another process of culture or history leading from humanity's primitive hunter-gatherer past to modern science and civilization taken together these two axes of change established by their intersection a unique point of origin without precedence in the evolution of life at which our ancestors are deemed to have crossed the threshold of humanity and embarked upon the course of history so the dilemma remains the only way humans can be made to appear different in degree and not kind from their evolutionary antecedents is by attributing the movement of history to a process of culture that differs in kind and not degree from biological evolution the division between nature and reason is still there the former epitomizing the now but now shifted on to that between the exotic hunter-gatherer and the Western scientist the former epitomizing a view of humanity in the state of nature the at the press triumph of human reason over nature so where does this human nature lie how come that these capacities with which we are all supposed to be innately endowed have been faithfully faithfully handed down over tens of thousands of years apparently immune to the vagaries of history and for most contemporary students of human evolution the answer is simple because they are in the genes now this response is palpable nonsense and should be treated with the ridicule it deserves rather than paraded as one of the great scientific insights of the 20th century Gene's play a synth critical role in the synthesis of proteins which are the principal materials from which organisms are made but they do not program the construction of an organism of a certain kind organisms grow a process technically known as ontogenetic development and whatever capacities people might have they are generated in the course of development and what whatever stage in the life cycle we may choose to identify a capacity of process of development already lies behind it or more importantly people do not live their lives in a vacuum but in a world where they are surrounded by other people and things both living and nonliving together making up what is usually known as the environment growing up in an environment largely shaped through the activities of predecessors people play their part along with everyone and everything else in fashioning the conditions of development for their successors this is what we call history so there is I contend no human nature lurking inside us that has somehow escaped the current of history of course we all carry our complement of genes but these don't set us up with a constitution all in place ready to interact with the outside world as all sensible biologists have long recognized the dichotomy between nature and nurture is incoherent genes do not interact with the environment to produce the organism they do not interact with the environment period they interact with other constituents in the cell which interacts with other cells in the organism which are the interacts with other organisms into the in the world and it's out of this multi-layered process that the capacities of living beings including human beings emerge the contemporary appeals to universal human nature in the name of evolutionary biology is as I've shown a defensive reaction to the legacy of racist science left by Darwin's account in the Descent of Man the evolution of the moral and intellectual sorry and the descent of man of the evolution of the moral and intellectual faculties but it is an appeal fraught with contradictions while insisting on the continuity of the evolutionary process it also reinstates the twin distinctions between biology and culture and between evolution and history setting an upper limit to the world of nature that humans alone appear to have breached moreover the racism that modern biology claims to have left behind is never far beneath the surface the potentially explosive combination of genealogical categorization and essentialist thinking is still there so far from dispensing with the concept of race science has settled on the idea that all extant humans comprise a single race or subspecies homo sapiens sapiens to the surfer moomin unity under the rubric of a single subspecies is to do so in terms that celebrate the historical triumphs of Western civilization so it's not hard to recognize in the suite of capacities with which all humans are said to be innately endowed the central values and aspirations of modernity a brightness intelligence technological superiority artistic prowess and so on and so we are inclined to project an idealized image of our present selves on to our prehistoric forebears crediting them with the capacities to do everything we can do and ever have done so the whole of history appears as a naturally preordained ascent towards pinnacle upon which we soused and so my argument is that there is no standard universal form of the men being underlying the variations that are so apparent to all of us in their dispositions and capacities to some extent even in their morphology the humans of today are different not only from one another but from their prehistoric forebears this is because these characteristics are not fixed genetically but emerge within processes of development and because the conditions of development today cumulative should be human disease needs shaped through previous activities are so very different from those of the past thank you very much anybody that like I'll just remind you of the motion humans have no nature what they have is history and I'm not opposing it okay a bloody glove because that means the bait is already successfully opposed the reason you're laughing ah well there's lots of reasons you're probably laughing but I mean one of the reasons this is a painting by Banksy is one of Britain's more famous contemporary artists and it just sort of the reason you laughs one of the reasons you laugh when you look at it is because chimpanzees don't debate chimpanzees don't you can't even as Sara Hurley pointed out in the introduction to her recent book mothers and others you can't even put this many chimpanzees into an enclosed space without causing complete chaos they don't think about these things they don't talk they don't do all sorts of things and they're not a particularly social being so in terms of one of the definitions of human nature which is something that's distinctly characteristic of the way humans are which is different from the way our nearest relatives are in terms of other species is that we are different we know that instinctively as Tim already said although you could possibly take the view that the reason we are different is because chimpanzees had different environmental exposure and if you gave them the same kind of upbringing as a human then maybe they could learn to talk or maybe they could learn to socialize or maybe they could do all these things this is NIM who is the one of many in a long line of unfortunate chimpanzees and other great apes who have been raised by humans and tried to teach to speak teach to pave like a human and all sorts of things all of which were sink especially in the 70s there was a fashion for this which was singularly unsuccessful and many of the chimpanzees concerned ended up sort of biting their ears off their person that was trying to train them on such things they got so frustrated anyway that's probably the broader definition so there is a broader characteristics of humans that we don't seem to see in other species even our nearest relatives but there's another interpretation of the whole nature-nurture debate which Tim also touched on which is not is there something about humans which is different from other species which there clearly is but also given that there is variation between humans how much of that can be attributed to nature versus nurture or culture whatever want to describe a chance now this motion was a quote from Ortega but actually it got this thinking about this obviously goes way back beyond that probably one of the most famous protagonists of this view is the Philosopher's 17th century philosopher John Locke who talked about the tabula rasa he talked about the mind is a blank slate all sensory experience postnatally determines an individual's characteristics personalities etc etc that's a more recent variation on that theme might come from 20th century psychology movement known as behaviorism which dominated especially American psychology from the 1920s to the 1960s now as we've already talked about that was obviously a time in history where there were other eugenic views going on in the world and this was a rather appealing view not least because it promised change potential from improvement it fitted with the American Dream and you know where you get one extreme on one side you might often get an extreme view appearing on the other side and by extreme I mean total as in the nature of this debate that everything is determined by him their behavior so this character is somebody called John Watson who started the movement give me the child and let me control the total environment in which he's raised and I will turn him into whatever I wish I think Jesuit said something rather similar and then there was skin are famous for the Skinner box in which he trained rats to do all sorts of things and was convinced that you could train almost anything to do almost anything that photo is him with putting his daughter in a skinner box which is probably one of the main reasons why he became famous because everybody was so by that anyway so what elements of the variation in our nature might be to do with our genes or physiology or makeup on our nature or the way we're brought up well the trouble with the behaviorist view is there any extreme view just to cut a long story short we now know that this is almost a bit of a non debate because we know that everything is influenced in some measure through environment and in some measure through Gene's virtually everything that's ever been looked at in this in this sort of domain of behavior and let's take the example of gender and one obvious question so for example most of us from a fairly young age have a reasonable idea of whether we prefer to have sex with men or women now this is a story of somebody called a paper written by somebody called John money in 1972 which is a very sad story of a boy called David Remo who was born in 1963 and after a badly botched circumcision the doctor treating him I think was John money decided that the best thing to do was surgically remove what was left of the penis castrate him and feed him estrogen and turned him into a girl and he reported nine years later that this had been an entirely successful operation and David now renamed Brenda was happy as a girl and this became medical war unfortunately this wasn't true as he can probably well imagine once people actually looked at what had happened to David someone called Milton diamond wrote up the case David Raymond never felt comfortable as a female he rebelled at 14 when he was pressurised to complete his sex change operations he eventually had a sex reversal to male and married a woman eventually but it wasn't very successful and in 2004 he committed suicide so it's not helpful to actually have a simplistic view of these things now gender might be a special case but it's not there's all sorts of other areas where there is all sorts of evidence I don't agree that it's not possible to throw evidence on this here's a paper that was published in science in 2003 on genetic determinants of depression so there are most of us have two versions of this particular allele which are called the long and short version of the 5-htt dan is always over interesting names for their bits of DNA and this study followed eight about eight hundred and fifty children in New Zealand from infancy and monitored incidence of depression now we know that this 5-htt gene is associated with regulating serotonin now the interesting thing so Tim just said that genes and environment don't interact of course they interact and in fact it's one of the most interesting areas of genetics at the moment is how these two things interact and it's such a huge area that you know it's it's it's it's but it's also one of them because they interact it's one of the reasons why people have difficulty grasping this debate journalists certainly have difficulty grasping this debate there you know lots of people have difficulty applying multiple causation but let me give you this example here so if you have this short allele version of HT tune you can probably go and get yourself tested you are more prone to depression than average members of the population if you have the long version you're less prone but it's not as simple as that so this followed these eight hundred and fifty children and those of them that we also know that there are environmental causes of depression so if you experience traumatic life events bereavement being a big one you're very much much more likely to get depressed so amongst children that didn't experience any traumatic major traumas in their young life about 30% of them were depressed but their genetic makeup didn't make any difference but amongst those that have had either some or severe trauma during their first 26 years then those were the wrong copy of the short allele were more likely to get depressed and those with too copies of the short allele were even more likely to get depressed and the more severe the trauma the more likely they were to get depressed so here is a picture right here of genes and environment interacting so nature-nurture is in a way it's a little bit of a non sorry because the answer is always the same with the product of both genes and environment and there's not a lot more to say than that so genes and this is a quote from Sapolsky genes don't cause behavior sometimes they influence them so I'm really just going to summarize the two main points that I've made so humans I think this motion is quite easy to oppose because it's an absolutist motion and as I've already said everything is a little bit of both and so if you don't believe that humans have any specific nature relative to the apes then you're taking us like the unusual position because including amongst other things obviously the ability to speak and a far greater capacity to learn are somewhat unique human adaptations compared to any of our evolutionary ancestors so ironically our capacity for culture is indeed one of the things that makes us human and makes anthropology so interesting but other species do not have that capacity for culture they do not have the genetic adaptations that enable them to do the things that we do and if you want to take the other interpretation of human nature which is that humans do have a specific nature relative to other people that's something to do with their biology and not just to do with their history then well actually as I mentioned for all behaviors ever studied seem to have both some level of genetic and environmental determinants in varying quantities even if you just take it right back to having the genetic capacity to learn from others but more importantly this idea that training can somehow remove those differences or make us the same in some way or make us other than we are without taking any note of the fact that individuals might have genetic capacities is ignoring quite a lot of the evidence to the contrary some of which I just gave you okay madam chairperson and members of the audience I'm honored to be here and to second the motion so ably proposed my colleague professor Ingold I have to start by saying I had to remind myself what the motion was because my worthy opponent in a very eloquent manner managed to make it into a motion on nature versus nurture and I'm going to argue that the question of nature and history is not really reducible to the question of nature and nurture as Professor Ingold argued not only is it difficult to detect a universal nose among the delightful variety of noses visible here in the audience but that the whole picture that makes us assume that there is a fundamental human nature to which culture is later added is to be blunt simply bad metaphysics let me take a different route to this question consider the motion humans have no nature what they have is history we are being asked to consider three concepts here nature history and humans my honorable opponent has assumed that these concepts are transparent and that what is at stake is only one question namely whether humans are formed by nature or nurture I will argue instead that once we try to unravel each of these concepts we see that the very form of my opponent's argument is evidence that the lure of thinking in universalistic terms that is not in terms of the specificities of histories through which human forms of life are created but in terms of some kind of picture or myth of the universal given lies in the power of illusions to which scientific thought has been particularly susceptible precisely because it cannot bear the indeterminancy and uncertainty of human forms of life or life humans make it to be and perhaps on a minor register to the use of power points those instruments for so called reduction of any complex thought to some very simple propositions and pictures one stand of the criticism that ran in my honourable opponents criticism of the motion was that it would reduce everything to some kind of constructivist fantasy in which humans are free to do anything completely unrestrained by the features of the world and the particular example of a sex operation by which the gender of a boy was changed to a girl and the conclusion that he was never very happy with that particular change I suggest that if we actually had the voting right now 80% of people would probably say that they were uncomfortable with their genders or the ronk and uncomfortable with their marriages though hopefully they will not end up by committing suicide so it's not particularly useful it seems to me to take one particular example of a discomfort with a gender change and then assume that somehow gender is ingrained in nature now I want to be emphatic that we are not proposing the tidal dichotomies of realism versus constructivism objective versus subjective nature versus nature but we are asking that we take the contributions of anthropologists towards their realisation in recent years that we must entertain the possibility of multiple worlds seriously not simply possible worlds I submit but actual words and asked what does this serious ontological possibility do to our notions of nature one of the serious dilemmas around the problem of existence that anthropologists faced but they were not alone to have faced these issues was the act of asking how could they relate to statements which seemed to be true for their respondents when they were in their but that could not be rendered as true statements within the logical space of reasons within which their own professional writings were to be received while an earlier generation of anthropologists solve this problem by making such true statements into symbolic ones a later generation has asked if this was a form of epistemic violence in the felicitous phrasing of the followers of perspectivism or animism might we rephrase the nature culture dichotomy by asking not if humans have one nature in many cultures but do they have one culture and many nature's the issue of diversity is then moved from simply different glosses over a single nature to the issues of what if there is no neutral world which can act as an arbiter of these many worlds but I can see immediately that this question will race for many the issue is ontology being used here to smuggle in a constructivist idea of nature or as the famous debated Manchester some years ago tabled in the issue till 2008 is the ontology another name for culture so let me revisit this question through yet another route much of the discussion on the ontological turn in anthropology has been seen as the new analytical move to overcome what many anthropologists regard as an overemphasis on epistemological issues of representation in anthropology they will argue that what the example of Amerindian myths reveals is not that there is one nature and many ways of representing it but rather that the ways in which Jaguars and bird nesters appear to think of themselves as humans with animal bodies is a way of making a world rather than representing it now one might fault these theories for having driven too large a wedge between epistemology and ontology but one cannot overlook the fact that the political Flames Steak were about the epistle McMullen's of Western theorists who claim that their ways of thinking about nature were the only legitimate ways nature could be conceived first and foremost then there was a crisis of well making in which colonial art authorities could prosecute people for believing in witches as was evident in Africa or subject them for trafficking with the devil in the guise of animals while at the same time that anthropologists were claiming that we know witches do not exist allah evans-pritchard the claim to have an access to the real by anthropologists was nullified in the courts in which people were tried for being witches so on the one hand the anthropologists were taking for granted that witches do not exist but the courts were actually at the same time trying people for being witches the point is that there was no secure route to knowing what was real and what was fictitious and the colonized had to pay a huge price for the certainties with questions of what was natural to humans was imposed by Western countries on others for society is driven to near extinction by colonial rules the disappearance of the world was not purely a matter of representations there are arguments that certain ways of thinking about nature or rather natures were real was the claim that they could still retain some access to the real I think that the claims that the world disclosed in myths were ways of world making and not representing a pre given reality must be understood then in relation to an understanding of reality that was under threat of extension from that perspective it is imperative that we recognize that neither the idea of human nor indeed of nature is pre given if we are to speak of humans having nature it cannot be a nature but many nature's nature's here refers to both external external nature out the human and also to nature as a property of the humans and in either case may we speak in the singular let me turn to a second way in which attempts have been made to preserve the idea of human nature this time not in a binary opposition to culture but as conjoined with culture I refer to the theory of second nature as propounded in Aristotle and then resurrected on contemporary philosophy to solve what is the problem that arises specifically with the idea of nature as disenchanted unlike the medieval conception of nature as a book that could be decoded for its meanings the procedures of modern science have tried to make the real as synonymous with that which is given in nature revealed through the stance of detachment of modern science one consequence of viewing the human from this perspective is that human action is placed in the space of impersonal laws as distinct from the space of reasons that would explain or justify why one is doing what one is in this view the human finds a foothold in nature by virtue of the fact of its affinity with animals but then the human is also distance from its animal nature in these theories through the fact of rationality an idea of nature that pervades modern scientific thinking is that of a disenchanted space of laws a kind of attuning to the world that does not demand that we provide reasons or justifications for our actions if something is held to be natural to the human being then it is seen to demand no further moral justification we have decades of anthropological research have shown that the limits of what is the human body human reason or human emotions are not given in advance if then one often hears judges or physicians of preachers pronounce with confidence that something is deplorable or punishable because it is again human nature homosexuality aggressive women clever women you can take your pick we should immediately go to the alert mode esteem in gold has argued else when hear the appeals to an essentialist human nature is nothing more than a defensive reaction against the legacy of a racialized science that's the concept of second nature then get us out of the conundrum that some have found humans to be fundamentally good by Nature others have found them to be fundamentally bad by Nature the philosopher John McDowell argues quote our nature is largely second nature and a second nature is the way it is not just because of the potentialities we were born with but also because of our up Graham because of our bringing our building given the notion of second nature we can say that the way our lives are shaped by reason is natural even as we deny that the structure of the space of reasons can be integrated into the space of laws this he says is the partial reenactment of nature in this formulation then what anthropologists would call culture is now called second nature because the crisis that is sought to be resolved is that of the disenchantment of nature and the task of the philosopher is seen to be that of reconciliation between what seems to be given in the forms of laws of nature and the human in terms of the capacity for spontaneity and exercise of freedom I suggest though that the crisis here is not so much a crisis of the human but of Western cosmology other similarly have faced the crisis in earlier times and even now of the disappearance of their worlds not because science acted to show nature to be impersonal but because it was aligned with colonialism with colonialism and brought certain worlds near to extinction seem from the perspective of anthropology one might say they what we are seeing here is the work of history on the way in which different kinds of words have been remade or even destroyed madam chairperson and honorable members of the audience my opponents would like to exercise these histories by the more neutral idea of the impersonal nature that humans possess nevertheless I honor them for being transparent in their formulations are there more insidious forms of argument are circulating in the world today they take recourse to concepts of nature under the guise that biology has changed the very nature of a being and that what is at stake now is the unity of something they see as life in the abstract versus the forces of history that have acted to make some lives valuables and others dispensable I urge you members of the House that to talk about the humanity united by the possession of a common nature that will propel us towards the good so that we can make the specific forms of suffering and inequality and injustice disappear will be to disown what is so special to anthropology its attention to the detail the specificity may I say the daring of human forms of life in the face of formidable efforts to reduce those who are not being heard to mere abstractions fallen out of history of China out of time just as if the tenacious will of the marginalized we still claim that their worlds will be recognized and whatever theoretical faults we may find in such words as ontology epistemology being we must be able to recognize the desperate efforts by anthropologist to not collaborate in wishing away these words so supporting the motion today asks for political courage in the face of the power of neuroscientists global health specialists biosecurity experts evolutionary psychologists to persuade us that the idea of a single human nature can be directed to make the ills of history disappear I strongly urge you to resist this lore of an objectified view of the human and ask you to support the motion in large numbers hi everybody I'm partly in agreement the diction of ultra-high cassette man has no nature but he has its history he said man goes on accumulating being the past with historical reasons actually the past experience inevitably influences man's decisions on what to do and how to act in the present and in the future he also said man is impossible without imagination without the capacity to invent for himself a conception of life to iterate idh the the character he is going to be yes I can imagine himself as who he was who he is and who he will be however I do not agree with the first friends now has no nature instead I propose that man is still traveling between nature and history or culture and that non-human animals also have a history in a society we can find norms were precepts belonging to both nature and culture both forming the human family a good example Claude lévi-strauss the famous and supporters stated that man since he emerged from his animal state has not enjoyed a single basic form of social organization although area society in its fundamental principle would not be essentially different from our own he emphasized that if social organization had the beginning this could only have consisted of the incest pravesh prohibition since as we have seen this prohibition is in fact a kind of grim model of the biological conditions of mating and procreation he regarded the incest prohibition at the step in a passage from nature to culture however he thought there was no such rule in animal life from the beginning of modern planetology in Japan in 1948 just after the Second World War Japanese primatologist have tried to find evidence of social continuity between humans and non-human animals the habituated group of Japanese macaques and recorded the social interactions by naming and identifying each individual they found that each market recognized individual from specifics and change its behavior according to the social relationships such as dominance abroad networking relations the first important findings were pre cultural behavior and incest avoidance washing potatoes with seawater was observed as a newly acquired behavior by Japanese macaques and it was transmitted from a young female to most of group's members on Kozma Island Japan it was regarded as having cultural aspects of transmission without aridity in the 1960s tool-using behavior was discovered in a world population of chimpanzees at conv stream tanzania and traumatology stated started to argue that chimpanzees have cultural spheres or to use insist avoidance was first observed in a mixed group of readers and wrong team attacks total to Japan and subsequently in a provision to that Kojima Japan the most dominant male in both groups were not seen to have sexual interactions with the putative mothers even when these mother's got estrus and cooperated with subordinate males after long term observations were accumulated the tendency of mating avoidance among related individuals from mothers and peers to cousins was confirmed to exist in the material society of macaques moreover recognition of kinship is not an innate ability but acquired after bills through affiliated interactions and related male-female pairs of Japanese macaques having drawn approximate Russian ships were observed to avoid sexual interactions during the mating season in a confined troop of Barbary macaques sexual interactions were observed among paternal relatives linked through paternity identification by DNA analysis as observed between unrelated Tyre why it really occurred between maternal relatives however diet of caretaking males and cared for females website were avoided as maternal relatives male Barbary macaques are known to show intensive care taking of wind individual juveniles Wenzhou juvenile female mature both parrots avoid sexual interactions this observation suggests that accumulated experiences such as history have a great influence on the individual decisions of whether and how to interact with other cons Pacific's I found that mating avoidance acted as a feedback effect on male-female association in a small group of Japanese macaque formation along with affiliate aggression shifts between a female and a male prevent sexual interactions between them and just decreased neural nets and the opportunities for mating this consequently leads to emigration of males or females from the group therefore meeting avoidance may stimulate in the dispersal and constitutes an important factor forming the social structure of non-human primates in contrast to the maternal society of maquettes the great apes form non maternal societies in which females emigrate from their native groups among them only gorillas form cohesive groups who is prolonged association of males and females many gorillas show posited caretaking of in matures from weaning to puberty and young females tend to avoid sexual interactions with putative fathers probably through these creative interactions during immaturity mating avoidance may decrease the opportunity of meeting for maturing females in a small group in which the putative father it's the only adult male and restaurant the immigration there for mating avoidance contributes to the formation of the product appears outside a natal wood as observed for interesting a vision and a journey in human communities infanticide also influences female choice of transfer this has been observed among planet taxa in the wild as a male's reproductive tactics of forcing the resumption of females estrus by killing her securing infant and comparing her to make mate with him and the conditions of frequent infanticide female goal destined to transfer into multi-male groups to seek more protection while maturing males tend to remain in their native groups to share with rated males the opportunities of making such situations promote association and coalition among related males and the formation of multiple groups by contrast the lack of infanticide stimulate female movement within matures between groups and male emigration from to lose this situation promote the separation of mature males and thus the formation of single male rules the occurrence of infanticide may hinder females from voluntary movement and promote the reliability of paternity as observed in mating avoidance infanticide has a potential to modify social structures meeting avoidance and infanticide may have enhanced family information by providing the opportunity of female transfer and by increasing alliances among relatives in the early phase of human evolution let's look at the major ways in which human distinguish themselves from gorillas first in system division is a kind of function established as unknown second the decision of new family formation is not made by individuals but by the group third emigration and transfer females or males into other families it's a form of reciprocal exchange between family groups fourth this first individuals keep often bonds with their relatives and the fifth these strong relationships from strong bond form strong bonds between family groups insisting commission structure rights human society by shaking the natural tendency to adhere to an artificial norm however this modification is also found in its primitive form in non-human primates as registro said society belongs to the realm of culture while the family it's emanation on the social level absorb natural requirements without which there could be no society and indeed no one time the most right striking difference between a human's life and that of an animal is his or her imagination man can make his own story based on his experiences and nourish he can imagine what he is capable of being he can evaluate his past actions from a viewpoint in the present and actually brace himself in the past world such imagination forms his present and future all take a said man goes on accumulating being the past he goes on making for himself a being so he's yet dialectical foul series of experiments this is a direct occur not illogical but precisely of historical reason how the machine such as a robot or computer can make decisions based on accumulating information could we say that a robot also has the history my answer would be no a lot has no ability of imagination and it cannot act result in information it has acquired the past constitute one of the limiting factors of man's view but it is not sufficient man creates a fiction about his being he can imagine what he was even if it is not true and he just makes himself upon his fictions this is the only ability you need to man a certain set nine lives in view of the past he also lives in his own story however it is fictions the ability of imagination derives from empathy and sympathy the discovery of a mirror neuron in the 1990s suggests the existence of empathy in non-human primates Phenom aqaq observes an action of his confessor fix he can feel as if he acts it the visual cue Mexican and Pacific however a macaque is not able to recognize that the other does not know what he knows and he does not show sympathetic action the great the great ape such as granite ins gorillas and chimpanzees have the ability of scaffolding they can recognize that the trans-pacific faced a dangerous raishin due to their lack of knowledge and they occasionally help constructive fix this suggests that greatest may have the ability of sympathy recent studies have also found that graduates the abilities of self recognition and mind-reading of others there is a theory of mind these cognitive abilities are linked to those of humans however great apes had no ability of imagination they never imagined that they will be such their goals in life are ideas who admire any subject lack of visibility is consistent with luck hope teaching in grades they cannot imagine how to assist others to achieve the goal learning man is called a culture omnivore meaning that he keeps from an omnivorous diet with artificial medication of natural foods such modification is observed every four year around us you could hardly live without language clothes and shelter we usually construct an artificial niche with component of culture we live in a community characterized by various norms based on empathy sympathy and identity who easily control and director of biological demands with cultural devices and on the contrary artificial concept or imaginative fictions drive our physical and mental actions social life and the ability of imagination always pushes back and forth between not nature and culture thus man is still traveling between nature and history thank you very much we now have we know how now have a half an hour or so for general discussion so perhaps we could have the have the lights and I hope the microphones are already are already mobile I'll do my best to spot hands as they as they copying for asking questions they speak you can address the speakers in particular if you wish and they may respond but after I shall stop that off for a while and will simply collect the opinions of everybody here and as you know they'll begin to be a vote at the end I think with mace indicated it's it's if you pass it it'll be intolerant it'll be exclusionist it's extremely one-sided and Terra totalitarian and really I don't want an apology to be split any more than it has been already now professor you began with a with the nose this Chris this whole question about human nature doesn't make much sense really in this you're interested in how we became human what does it mean to be human in an evolutionary context and then within that context the focus of interest these days is it's not the nose the nose can't be all that philosophical it's not really cooperative or not cooperative there's not much you can get from the nose but the eyes are a big focus of interest for evolutionary psychologists and and all of us looking at how he became human and central to Sarah Hardy's work she is not an imperious by the way she's a very staunch feminist central term to Thomas Ellis work in Leipzig he's dr. peerless ties as far as I know central is the co-operative I hypothesis so I just want to says really briefly if you look at a gorilla and a doctor in his eyes it's a black iris on a black sclera and on a black face and you can't really detect what it's looking at and the argument is that the human eye is cooperative it's transparent you can see the whites of the eye you can you can refer direction of gaze by looking at the human eye you can kind of work out roughly what that person's thinking and the point about about about it all is that the gorilla the ad hoc really wants to read your mind but it doesn't want you to read its mind it's not just happiness it's not cooperative it's trying to is try to get information without giving it away the human eye is is intrinsically genetically designed for intersubjectivity for reciprocity and people who are making these points they're not they're not just saying Homo sapiens sapiens you know walking upright bipedal lovely intelligent civilized self they're interested me the key features of human sociality human cooperation the eyes are testament to the fact that we evolved in that in an unusually cooperative environment I don't see anything reactionary about that statement goodness I and human eye is a good example for evolution you know if we compare both goodness I have ducks the white areas and it means they can't read the mind moving the others but human eye if a little movement we can make attention that sad and then we can read as as mine so that's evolved that's you know the result of evolution biological evolution I think you took quite a while to discuss about nature and culture we didn't hear much about history and I'd like to to ask you to develop more on history it looks like history was taken as just a passage of time and he's much more than that history is the product of human beings in organized ways so I think that history arts out of this conversation and I would like you to consider that and Camilla power University's London and there is a danger that the proposes of this motion are disallowing us asking the question what makes us human in particular I want to be able to ask a question well what makes us human in comparison to Neanderthals or are the Neanderthals also human beings it seems that some of our forebears mated with and bred with and produced offspring with Neanderthals so what were their shared cultures or histories or what were their capacities that enabled them to do those things then what about home erectus or home I'll again says you know how are we going to ask these questions how are we going to compare these different populations and and in particular if we go back to you know the question of the initial genus Homo and and the great work of Sarah her D which Ruth was referring to mother's and others and in relation to this cooperative I hypothesis that's been discussed and Sarah's proposed a really straight foot very simple argument that what makes that what is special about us as a great ape is is we do babysitting and no other great ape is able to do that partly perhaps as a product of of their histories as as yeah Maggie wit as professor yeah Maggie was telling us and but if if that is an imperialist or sexist kind of science well it's it's pinpointing this is what is so special about our human our special human cultural abilities of child-rearing and perhaps the proposers could comment a little better hi I'm Clara Kramer I'm the third era PhD it's Manchester University and I would like to ask all of you about especially to do it about where do you draw the boundaries of insist that would be my question because there is you know the perspective is and the feminist critique to the insisted below as a transition from nature to culture and this you know I'm just back from from fieldwork in the border village which was fundamental to which assertion organization is fundamental to the development of lives just thinking in one of the things that I'm that fieldwork told me is is it really incest in terms of loyalty and Daaga me which classic anthropology called insist insist that's what it is if people are nowadays marrying for love and they do not consider what they're doing as incest so then my question would be where do you draw the boundaries and then can we apply such a term to two practices but they do not consider as you know in festivals the middle it while sinuous it seems to me that the motion that was argued for against was not proposed one but rather another one which would be humans have no nature what they have is cultures or colleges I think we lost a little bit the history in the process and I think history maybe because human nature was mostly seen as being a scientific notion from a scientific prospect where as seem to me human nature is and was first of all a philosophical theological and legal concept and as such definitely has an history and has to the ontological argument used by professor veena death was a bit surprised because it seemed to me that the internal argument is precisely another historical but rather how historical if not anti is Sarek also in in that case it seems that history mostly appears as something which destroys worlds but not something that makes world so then again I mean what history making worlds and finally it seems to me that the specificity of humans might be that they have in history so in that case I would suggest we frame the motion not as humans human nature has a history but as human nature his history thank you I have a comment rather more than a question my name is Thomas Aledo from University of Oxford which is has to do with in the concept of nature and all sorts of concepts within science that that elucidate so called nature so my comment is is science and nature are in science and nature also socially constructed concepts in effect suggesting that science has or is part of society rather than separate from it thank you go upstairs yes yes please yes please yes I'm very happy to to be here in this conference because this is a long-term project that I ask always my students the first and the day last of class what makes us humans and I usually ask that question whenever I have this opportunity and the best answer that I've gotten already is well the fact that you're asking me this question meaning that perhaps we are the only beings that can reflect upon our own existence in a way that perhaps other animals cannot including Neanderthals and other people so yes the fact that we are able to reflect upon our services took me listening to the two sides that there was a difference in the approach to what constituted or what was the evidence for human nature that on me those speaking in favor of the motion it was assumed that human nature was something that applied equally to all humans whereas culture was diverse whereas those speaking against the motion were emphasizing the diversity of human genetics alongside the diversity of culture and I think of a relevant point to make here was made by Roger Lewin Tim many years ago now that if the whole human species were wiped out except for one small culture I think in the New Guinea Highlands he said ninety percent of human genetic diversity would survive that 90% of human cultural diversity would be lost and that indicates to me that genetic and cultural diversity do not map onto each other and I think if we acknowledge those two facts we would see that the arguments from the two sides put forward from the stage are not in fact mapping directly on to each other but they're talking somewhat across purposes I'm now confused by professor in Bullen professor really I mean I really some of them walk earlier and where I could see that they say that human beings have an issue but now they're denied completely I don't know why but okay let me read professor involves to walk and revolution and dispersal life where he says as in human beings as individual is unique amalgamation opposite genetic elements then he is completely Challenger nicely challenged by root so then father he goes on a saying that human being as possum is a company is a complex of social relationships and this implies to me at least human being service nature and he says completely no I don't know how then to professor thus based on your work and critical events I can see I can read them I mean that all human beings will react and to to me but to any kinds of critical events for a lighter hand let us take happiness and shared in a similar a person and that means human beings will have some kind of nature and also you rightly admit that human beings have nature's donat nature but you say also there is human beings have no nature I'm sorry thank you I'm also in a sense speaking across the two or the debate as promote as proposed I my sense of ideas of human nature is that they are so diverse but at every culture of virtually every culture has an idea of human nature so perhaps the question is not so much nature versus nurture but how do ideas about human nature become so socially efficacious and politically volatile in societies what's why do we have I mean some of them consider human nature to be universal some of them don't so they'll consider the contrast to nature to be significant others don't but in either case the question of what considered unnatural or was considered natural becomes naturalized that is becomes biologist regardless of contradiction by actual biological facts so I guess an example that I often use in class which makes what I'm trying to say perhaps a bit more clear is the case of the Tutsi wherefore is it in gender differential and in differentiation the assumption is that yes men are taller therefore they are weaker therefore they do less of the work and therefore they have political power this goes between men and women just as it obviously goes between ethnic categories in that society that is the shorter farmers do more of the work have less of the political power the very short try are seen as having an almost infinite capacity for physical labor and have very little political power at all why do we want to make these questions of human nature I think because naturalizing them takes them out of the realm of politics although they are highly politicized we take them out of the realm of contestation there are two more people who won't wish to if you could sorry conclude think so just to draw the parallel to ideas of race which were once considered biological facts which are clearly highly politicized but politicized in a way that naturalizes them and that's one source of their power thank you thank you very much yes please seven yes Peter Wade University of Manchester I find myself basically an agreement more in agreement with with Tim and veena than with the the opposes of the notion but I wondered if the effectiveness of your argument particularly Tim depends on a rather essentialist version of human nature that you're you're criticizing because all natural processes all life processes can't be described in an essentialist way I think you know we biologists know that as you because you as you said at the beginning so if you can't find the the essential knows if you can't define the essential knows you can map the variety of noses and come up with certain kinds of tendencies and statistical patterns which can be useful in distinguishing between Neanderthals Homo sapiens chimpanzees and so forth so it seems to me that one can do the same kind of exercise with behavioral traits whether you're talking about walking or talking or tendencies towards depression now we're talking here about statistical stochastic processes not about essential templates or fixed biological models so that's that's one point the second point which is more more general is that I think you are absolutely right to say that the idea of a universal human nature is very strongly linked to the idea of universal human rights so the question is if you get rid of the idea of a universal human nature and you talk about either multiple nature's or multiple histories how do you avoid the threat that those multiple nature's or histories are going to be deemed some of them are going to be deemed superior and others inferior is how would 21st century growing knowledge about two things such as epigenetics on the one hand and what have come to be called neuro atypical syndrome such as autism make your arguments on both sides much more complex than have been stated here thank you very much I wanted to ask Ruth mace what she has to say about all the transgendered people who've had to have been pushed to suicide by doctors who've refused them hormone therapy and sex gender treatment because obviously they were delusional about what their their real gender and that genetic gender was and you know and I wonder about the implications of her very clear transphobia thank you good thank you University of Amsterdam first of all I'd like to thank you for a very interesting debate I have a very general remark about the debate that sort of thing cause what was said here earlier and I think because many of the very specific questions here sort of anchor into a similar debate might be useful questions you get started on seemed to me like the question in the bay was overtaking at some point by a sort of discussion discussion between a certain epistemic all debate where on the right side the opponents were arguing more for a natural scientific view of nature whereas the left side was choosing more of a social scientific view of such for example bringing up examples of the relativistic nature of morals and law in determining how humans interact where's on the right side we saw images of mirror neurons and there was a genetic sort of argument there I was wondering if there's any way to sort of elevate the debate beyond that discussion and draw it back to you perhaps what was mentioned earlier by ms-dos that what we might be dealing with here might be an issue of multiple anthologies rather than multiple estimable jeez I would just be really interested to see and curious also if there would be any sort of head-to-head possibility of no debating that beyond thank you okay I think thank you very much indeed that's alright last question then I thank you properly first of all is there anything called learning about the totality of life which takes all the complexes into account and will this learning possible learning about the totality of life if at all that is will that dissolve nature and history alright thank you thank you very much and for those splendid and in too many cases provocative questions in a moment but not not just it in a moment I'm going to ask each of the speakers than the order in which they first spoke to some up for about five minutes but before they do I want to come back to this question of voting now the point of the debate is not to divide the subject the point of the debate is to gather everybody in this room and make us think about horizons to our subject that we wouldn't otherwise think about so we're together in this myths the point of the point of the exercise but being what we are we sharpen our exercises through our critical faculties and you have finally please if you will to enter into the spirit of the occasion and against all your inclinations for compromise and middle ground and seeing both sides of an argument just think which actually at the end of the road the better argument not position on the discipline not anything to do with the people's careers or indeed to the careers of their own sub-disciplines but what at this moment in this hall was the better argument but first let's hear them sum up yes yes since we started with eyes I would like to start with eyes as well and simply make the point that it is not eyes that see it is people who see they exercise a skill of vision it is their eyes that enable them to do that and eyes change a newborn infant does not see what a grown-up sees an old person doesn't see what a younger person sees eyes changed you can be long sighted short-sighted we all know most of us who are wearing spectacles that eyes are changing throughout high lifetimes our ability to see things is a skill that is learned and different people become develop different skills of vision depending on the kinds of activities in which they're engaged and the kinds of environments in which they find themselves ergo vision is a profoundly historical process this is not to deny that most humans see things differently from the way most gorillas see things or chimpanzees or horses of course animals are different they differ between species they differ among themselves so do humans but that is no excuse for essentializing the human eye or a centralizing human vision vision is a historical process and that process is in many ways a process of social life that is conducted through the eyes and I would like to move from there to the question of history because many commentators remarked I think rightly in a way that history seemed to have got a bit lost in their debate not in the debate now I would point to a statement that my opponent made it was a quote I think from somebody called Sapolsky we are a product of both genes and environment that is a rejection of history because Ginty to say that humans are products and the causative agents that produce these products are on the one hand genes somehow located inside us on the other hand environment somehow outside us leaves us out we are the producers of history we are the products of our own selves as mouths said man makes his own history but not under circumstances of his own choosing but under circumstances bequeathed from the past and so on history is precisely what is left out in the formula that says that humans are simply products of genes and environment and I would challenge our opponents to say what is this environment that you interact with how can you interact with everything we interact with some things and we are the interacting not our genes so that formula is what leaves history out and so to get to the question that was raised that that somehow the people then are myself on on this side of the house are disallowing the question what makes us human no we are not disallowing the question we are saying what makes us human is humans we are what makes us human and we are responsible for what we make of ourselves and we carried that responsibility for the history that we have created and that we are creating for our descendants we are making ourselves what is human is what we make of it and that is our responsibility and that is our case so it has been pointed out quite rightly that the concept of nature has a human has a history and that in a sense human nature is history and our side of the debate was a used the word criticized for for coming up with a very essential iced concept of human nature and I plead guilty to that because in a way if we say that all right human nature can be everything we say history is then I'm quite happy to say that human nature is history but the reason why I am criticizing an essential Eyes demon nature concept of human nature is because that a centralized concept is continually being mobilized above all by evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology in the kinds of arguments they make and I think these arguments are extremely dangerous and that they carry political overtones particularly in separating those who make these arguments from those about whom these arguments are made that instigate introduces into the debate a fundamental power discrepancy between science and what science studies and that is the politics that is pulled in as a number of other contributors mentioned pulled in when we talk about human nature in this kind of way and I okay one moment I just want to ask the person who said who read out something I've written from evolution and social life I wrote that book or in 1983 was published in 1986 it is now 2013 I have changed my mind I cannot longer believe what I wrote then because some people think and decide that what they wrote earlier is is wrong so what happens to human rights is perhaps the most crucial question behind all of that how can we reconcile a commitment to the totality of life to flexibility to diversity to tolerance with a juried ischl notion of human rights and my feeling is that actually the jury ditional notion of human rights has not historically always promoted the kind of tolerance that we in anthropology need to look for this is not an argument for relativism it is an argument for understanding difference and for understanding that difference is what connects us it is not similarity that connects us it's not what we all have in common it is our differences that hold us together and enable us to make a world for ourselves thank you there were so many questions I've tried to write them all down um everything I want to say I think actually been raised already by someone on the floor but I just raised the most important ones I think somebody pointed out that the motion that it was being argued for by my two opponents is not actually the motion that we are debating on the paper and one of the sources of some confusion seems to be this notion of variation in that if humans are variable then it must be something to do with history or the motion must be wrong in some way and some of the things I was trying to say were also raised by someone in the balcony that actually variation exists in both our history our nature our culture and just about everything else and that doesn't really help us answer the question on the ballot paper so I see that as not a particularly relevant argument another case that's been made is that history was somewhat ignored I just won't say that obviously I believe history is extremely important obviously I believe culture is extremely important but again that's not what we're being asked to debate we were being asked to debate this rather one-sided notion that humans have no nature we only have history so I don't think any of us would argue that history and culture are not major determinants of the way humans behave so I think there's a certain the nature of the proposal is somewhat being tackled from all sorts of angles that are not necessarily what's directly being argued by those of us opposing the notion I think the other area of slight confusion so variation is obviously extremely important to everybody everything in anthropology is really about the study of variation and we were really trying to understand where that variation might come from and history and culture are obviously one of the places that it does come from I think the other reason why it's quite difficult to sometimes see if we're actually debating the same thing is that everything quickly moves into a sort of moral dimensioned before people have necessarily sorted out whatever it was the facts that they were arguing about so I think at some point I just tried to note down some of the comments that were made so suddenly I mean as as Tim just pointed out if there are differences then you know does that get take us automatically to start talking about differences in human rights does it start us automatically I think vina said some lives are more valuable and others dispensable and all these kind of things whereas I wouldn't really see that as anything to do with the motor or describing how somebody was unhappy to have their gender reassigned for Sulli means that one is against transsexual so this sort of addition of a moral dimension to arguments that are not being made in that framework I think just to some extent confuses a debate so I just really want to remind you that I think what we actually debating is humans have no nature we only have history it's not saying we don't have history we are just opposing the motion that we only have history because we don't only have history and that's all I want to think thank you for these fantastic comments and questions I'm going to take three basic issues which have come up and I just have to start by saying this is a debate it's not in our hand to change the proposition so you know so there are many ways in which I think precisely this question where the nature itself a form of history was what the burden of my argument was so let me take three the first is on the eye and I think here I'll cite you Collinwood when he said take away twisting signs and you've taken away half or take away Christmas Day characters charity and you have taken away 3/4 of the questions that science asks today so in some ways I think that there's no way in which one can think about the centrality of the eye except thinking in what kind of way was it theologically inherited so that it became such an organ of either tremendous suspicion or an organ around which most scientific enterprise could actually move but you know one could well even argue that something like if you were to privilege not necessarily one picture of the human but the idea that we still do not know what of the limits of the human body and the human senses then I don't think we can define beforehand as to which particular senses will in fact become more important or have been more important I might also say that the eye is not only the organ that sees it's also the organ that weeps and it's also the organ that surveys and so it's not at all accidental that something like the most brutal forms of surveillance were actually modeled on the way in Vista I could keep everybody in you know you could put shoot everybody so to say because you know as the camera shoots things which is in relationship to the manner in which functions the second sets of questions I want to make my position actually clear which is that when I'm talking about multiple ontology and when I'm talking about multiple ways of making the world not simply representing the world I've tried to argue that those whose whatever the philosophical problems we may have with the problems that there are actually many nature's and that when people say Jaguars and bird nesters might be humans in animal bodies we have to understand that in relationship to the very specific histories in which the world in which people in which this made sense the world in which people could imagine Jaguars to be their brothers-in-law at one time were worlds at the point of extinction partly because of the way in which notions about what is proper to human nature and what is it that needs civilizing was in fact precisely being put into operation through through extremely brutal colonial regimes and so it seems to me that simply just because the badge like this is history has not been has not been forwarded it doesn't mean that history in fact has been ignored in the arguments that and that him and I were making my argument was very very specifically a historical one to say that if we think about that in historical terms then we really have to think that there are many nature's and not a single nature this is not an issue of variation in general but the very specific context in which variation has sought to be suppressed the third point which I do sympathise with but I think that we have to be clear righted and strong of heart in actually relating to that argument and this is the fear Express of a certain kind of vertigo if we give up the notion that there is something given with nature does assure us which is not that one thing is given but that there is given us that even if there is variation it's in relationship to that given Ness in life then what will happen to our moral universes and I suggest that moral universes arise not because someone can come to some abstract principles based on the idea of some kind of given Ness to human nature they arise because of friction and in some ways we need to what science is trying to do is to take away that friction from us to argue in some ways that nature in a certain sense we guarantee us something which we as humans are actually you know being there are other bad specimens of God's creation and I'm not going to be able to actually arrive at right and my argument is no it seems to me that this is only in the rough and tumble of historical encounters that some kind of moral visions some kind of ethical notions are arrived at and that simply to argue that there are many nature's and that really humans do not possess nature they don't have nature and so in in some ways it's that that acknowledgment that not only do we have different ways of representing something like a given world but that we live in multiple worlds is something which acknowledges the force of history it also acknowledges the limits of how far we actually know certain things and the fact that when people have reduced certain ideas we're about through which some kind of mediation can happen we can apply those to different kinds of worlds to arbitrate which words are better made and which words are worse made we are actually smuggling in certain kinds of notions of power within ideas of ethics which in fact should depend upon the capacity in some ways engage history in ways that will not be very comfortable but then we know I mean if you read much of Islamic stories you know all my friends in the fields that always saying that when God was going to make human beings you know the Angels went to him and said why do you want to create this disaster in the world and what is supposed to have said well the nature of angels is already given whereas the nature of humans is something which evil and God has to wait to see what will happen to it thank you many things for excellent questions I would like to give answers to two questions and firstly yes graduates participated in rearing winged infants and suckling infants especially gorgeous males usually participate in intensive care taking of infant well how about human and human culture what it function you know human babies wins very early at age you know great apes babies when they wings win they can eat anything what adult eat so this hard food they can eat so there are teeth already permanent peace between age but human babies winning very early and they have infant teeth so they can't eat the food which adult eat so it needs more people participate in wearing infants to give provision them so it is why human cultures support rearing infant by communal breeding you know the big difference between Apes infant and human infant ape infant don't cry as a beginning of birth but human baby crying very loudly very loudly you have a good experience about that so that is this train to insist themselves I am NOT happy the priests care so that is the you know the world to insist more care from the outside so it is because human mother take off human baby their babies on the table on the others hands etc etcetera so many people cooperate for rearing infants in human society it is universal traits so and when infant a crying baby crying people will think to ease comfort babies so there is you know very unique attitude of human mother and human and elder generation in front of crying baby Apes mothers Apes adults don't do that there is big difference and there is you know human culture made it awesome but the toughest is derived from biological traits and the second question the boundary between incest taboo and incest avoidance there is very good question you know why registros put it incest taboo is fish from nature to culture because um you know insist if it occurs between cousins they have no biological problems for example there are many examples in a society cousins get married and produced in fact without any problem but if this know exists then something different can happen so there is our known of society you know registros exchange of females between families occur because of the lack of the proper mates in the families so in festival reduce the lack of proper mate in the families and then to promote exchange between families there is a system of human society but we improved this incest taboo derived incest avoidance such a phenomenon and let me give you an example ok very short in Taiwanese culture there is a system of marriage which calls simple and boys and girls getting together from different countries and earlier together until the age of marriage and then they get married but the rate of divorcement it's very high and miscarriage it's also very high that the result shows this is a real incest avoidance after giving birth they have experienced to live together intimately and then they usually have the tendency to avoid mating but they get together by the system and then they have such a results there is a kind of incest avoidance as also observed in non-human primates that taboo is different things about avoidance though the system is unknown to characterize the human society there is about boundary of incest and incest avoidance I think so you know I totally agree with history makes us human but if we seek a bruisin of humanity we must back to a long time ago and then we will find the the part of a society or a part of our body and deeply embedded in the common features with non-human primates and something in our society is deeply rooted in other animals well I've reckoned that there are about 230 of us in the hall and although I'm not formally going to ask for abstentions I hope very much that when we count your show of hands that we shall be getting something when combined approximately getting up to 230 but we'll see how we go you've heard you've heard the proposal on the second day would you show by your hands please your support for the motion right now could have a show of hands please from those who are against the motion but first of all thank you very much because you've actually participated with more enthusiasm I think than this happened on many occasions in that in the traditional Manchester debates and exciting as those were I declare for the motion 134 votes and against the motion 77
Info
Channel: NomadIT
Views: 7,653
Rating: 4.7176471 out of 5
Keywords: anthropology, IUAES Congress 2013, Plenary debate, Human nature, Biological Anthropology, Social Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology
Id: Gh_fm9BtGT8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 113min 44sec (6824 seconds)
Published: Wed Nov 06 2013
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