Pauketat, p. 2; p. 6; p. 27-8;; p. 28 agency not intentionality; p. 29

see Weber refs

Rick Tillman, The Intellectual Legacy of Thorstein Veblen (Greenwood Press, 1996)


Malafouris and Renfrew, Introduction: The Cognitive Life of Things: Archeology, Material Engagement and the Extended Mind ()


Descola, p. 117-125; "the preconceptions of modernity" (p. 405)

Pauketat, p. 5 (on ontologies, p. 6 [also Descola]; p. 11 on "motivated human agents"; p. 13 on "methodological individualism"; p. 28 on "rational actors"

The effects of power deserve as much scrutiny as the strategies and structures of power.  The "people", for the most part, are neither innocent bystanders nor independent agents, but are, to varying degrees, effects of power.  (The same could also be said of elites.*)

from "'Species-Being' and 'Human Nature' in Marx", by Thomas E. Wartenberg, in Human Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1982), pp. 77-95

Hegel-Marx on species being is only an initial formulation of an historical, sociocultural, cognitive developmental perspective.  And Vygotsky-Bronfenbrenner et. al., in confining themselves to educational issues, leave relatively unexplored what in fact could not really emerge as a problematic until the present, when we are beginning to see things hitherto unimaginable.  (But see Hall, et. al., Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture.)

The dialectical-developmental notion in hegelmarx in its early form has a hopeful, optimistic, progressive ring to it.  It did not understand that power could have the effect of producing a new kind of barbarism (of which the Holocaust is only the tip of the iceberg), and fuse this with archaic, pre-human forces on the one hand (proto-Dorian convention; Wrangham and Wilson "Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees"); while on the other hand produce an explosion of narcissistic desire and disindividuation.  all of this being played out in the perverse theaters of public and private life.  Left for dead in this postmodern rubble of a species gone mad is Bildung.  

*Marx, Capital, vol. III, p. 180.  "Concentration of means of production in few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities. Even if initially they are the private property of capitalists. These are the trustees of bourgeois society, but they pocket all the proceeds of this trusteeship." (emphasis added)

from Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy: The Western Illusion of Human Nature, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values Delivered at The University of Michigan November 4, 2005

[see also Marshall Sahlins, “The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology,” Current Anthropology  Volume 37, Number 3, June 1996]

"The conscious invention of human nature is the ultimate cultural specification."  p. 404, n. 28  Quote 403-404 on this!!!

"Given that biologically we are human beings only in potentia, indeterminate creatures whose inclinations remain to be culturally specified, society might be better conceived as a means of empowering people rather than subduing them." 404  UAW

on language contra Lacan: 404

on conflation of "the origin of society with the origin of state"  405
--------------------------
Tanner Lecture

Here was the dualism that established the natural ground of our metaphysical Tri- angle: the antisocial human nature that equality and hierarchy themselves contend to control.  95

Indeed, the american imperialist project of neoliberal democratization has the same ancient premise. It assumes that the innate practical rationality common to mankind, if it can be relieved of local culture idiosyncrasies, as by employing the kind of force anyone would natu- rally understand, will make other peoples happy and good, just like us.  96

more cynical (and more up to date sociobiologi- cally speaking) is callicas’s complex argument in the Gorgias (482c–484a, 492a–c) that such good order and noble sentiments are merely mystifi- cations of an irrepressible self-interest: merely public right thinking by which the weak vainly attempt to suppress the gainful inclinations of the strong.  [contra Cliff Williams UAW]  96

Beyond the ancient arguments about whether human nature was good or bad and the cultural constructions that could be made of it, the Western tradition has long harbored an alternative conception of order, of the kind anthropologists traditionally studied: kinship community. It is true that in the West this is generally the unremarked human condition, despite that—or perhaps because—family and kindred relations are sources of our deepest sentiments and attachments. Ignoring these, our philosophies of human nature generally come from the larger society, organized on radically different principles. In the occurrence, “human nature” almost always consists of the imagined dispositions of active adult males, to the exclusion of women, children, and old folks and the neglect of the one universal principle of human sociality, kinship. 97

In this condition of mutuality of being, interests are no more confined to the satisfactions of the individual body than selves are to its boundar- ies. ethnographic notices tell rather of “the transpersonal self ” (native americans), of the self as “a locus of shared social relations or shared bi- ographies” (caroline Islands), of the person as “the plural and composite site of the relationships that produced them” (new Guinea Highlands). observations of this kind are easily multiplied, and what they all indicate is a certain disconformity between the self as being and the person as sin- gular agent. on the one hand, the self transcends the person and is present in other persons. People enter into mutual relationships of being by virtue of birth, residence, marriage, common descent, gift exchange, dependence on the same land, feeding and nurturing, or other such means by which kinship is locally established. on the other hand, then, the single person includes the multiple selves with whom he or she is in such communion. Through various kin relationships, others become predicates of one’s own existence.  I do not mean the interchange of standpoints that is a feature of all direct social relationships according to the phenomenologists. I mean the integration of certain relationships, hence of certain others, in one’s own being. We have not to do here with the self-contained, self-loving individuals of the native Western folklore. Indeed, for them, not even ex- perience, that ultimate individual function, is in fact individual. 99-100
 . . . .
Here is the very opposite of bourgeois possessive individualism: in a community of reciprocal being, not even a person’s body is his or her own; it is a social body, the subject of the empa- thy, concern, and responsibility of others. . . .  natural self-interest? For the greater part of humankind, self- interest as we know it has been madness, witchcraft, or some such grounds for ostracism, execution, or at least therapy.100

There is no such “nature” as we know it, and a fortiori no dualism of nature and culture.101



The problem is not whether human nature is good or bad. The many “anti- Hobbists” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who attacked innate egoism on the grounds of natural goodness or natural sociability remained within the same sclerotic framework of a corporeal determination of cultural forms. But beginning in the enlightenment, the idea of the human condition as a culturalized nature appeared within the Western tradition. Thus Adam Ferguson’s observation that individuals do not exist before or apart from society but are constituted therein. In society they are born, and there they remain—capable of all the sentiments on which diverse peoples construct their existence, amity prominent among them and enmity as well. For Marx similarly, the “human essence” exists in and as social relationships, not in some poor bugger squatting outside the universe. Men individualize themselves only in the context of society, as notably in the European society of the eighteenth century, which thus gave rise to the economists’ fantasies (“robinsonades”) of constructing their science from the supposed dispositions of a single isolated adult male. nor did Marx indulge in reading from social formations to innate dispositions, although again one could certainly read from bourgeois society to the mythical Hobbesian war of each against all. Born neither good nor bad, human beings form themselves for better or worse in social activity (praxis) as it unfolds in given historical circumstances. One might suppose that some knowledge of colonized others contributed to this an- thropology.  In any case, with the important proviso that “given cultural orders” replace “given historical circumstances” in the Marxist formulation, in other words that the praxis by which people make themselves is itself culturally informed, this notion of the human condition is an ethno-graphic commonplace.

No ape can tell the difference between holy water and distilled water, Leslie White used to say, because there is no difference chemically—although the meaningful difference makes all the difference for how people value the water, even as, unlike apes, whether or not they are thirsty makes no difference in this regard. That was my brief lesson on what means “sym-bol” and what means “culture.” regarding the implications for human nature, leading a life according to culture means having the ability and knowing the necessity of achieving our natural inclinations symbolically, according to meaningful determinations of ourselves and the objects of our existence. Human culture, it needs be considered, is much older than human nature: culture has been in existence for two million years or more, ten or fifteen times longer than the modern human species, homo sapiens. respectable biological opinion has come around to seeing the human brain as a social organ, evolving in the Pleistocene under the “pressure” of maintaining a relatively extended, complex, and solidary set of social relationships. This is to say that culture, which is the condition of the possibility of this successful social organization, thereby conditioned the possibilities of the human organism, body and soul. The “pressure” was to become a cultural animal, or, more precisely, to culturalize our animality. For two million years, we have evolved biologically under cultural selec- tion.  not that we are or were“ blank slates,”lacking anyinherent biological imperatives, only that what was uniquely selected for in the genus homo was the ability to realize these imperatives in the untold different ways that archaeology, history, and anthropology have demonstrated. Biology became a determined determinant, inasmuch as its necessities were mediated and organized symbolically. We have the equipment to live a thousand different lives, as Clifford Geertz says, although we end up living only one. But this is possible only on the condition that biological imperatives do not specify the objects or modes of their realization.

So who are the realists? Fijians say that young children have “watery souls,” meaning they are indeterminate until they demonstrate their social being by the practice of Fijian relationships. as in many kinship-domi- nated communities, humanity is defined by reciprocity. “The mind (will, awareness),” strathern was told in Hagen, “first becomes visible when a child shows feeling for those related to it, and comes to appreciate the interdependence or reciprocity that characterizes social relationships.”  Although from augustine to Freud the needs and dependencies of infants have been taken as evidence of their egoism—consider how we gratuitously speak of the child’s needs as “demands”—the prevalent interpretation among the anthropological others is simply that the child is incomplete, not yet defined as human by engagement in the cultural praxis of relation- ships. Human nature then becomes a specific cultural kind. so when in Java “the people quite frankly say, ‘To be human is to be Javanese,’” Geertz, who reports it, says they are right—in the sense that “there is no such thing as human nature independent of culture.” again, not that there is no such nature, but that its mode of existence and social efficacy depends on the culture concerned—a mediated and thus determined determinant.

What is most pertinent to the relations between physis and nomos is not (for example) that all cultures have sex but that all sex has culture. sexual drives are variously expressed and repressed according to local de- terminations of appropriate partners, occasions, times, places, and bodily practices. We sublimate our generic sexuality in all kinds of ways—includ- ing its transcendence in favor of the higher values of celibacy, which also proves that in symbolic regimes there are more compelling ways of achiev- ing immortality than the inscrutable mystique of the “selfish gene.” after all, immortality is a thoroughly symbolic phenomenon—what else could it be? (In The Theory of moral sentiments, adam smith observes that men have been known to voluntarily throw away lives to acquire after death a renown that they could no longer enjoy, being content to anticipate in the imagination the fame it would bring them.) Likewise, sexuality is realized in various meaningfully ordered forms. some even do it by telephone. or for another example of conceptual manipulation (pun intended), there is Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sex with that woman.”

As it is for sex, so for other inherent needs, drives, or dispositions: nutritional, aggressive, egoistic, sociable, compassionate—whatever they are, they come under symbolic definition and thus cultural order. In the occurrence, aggression or domination may take the behavioral form of, say, the new Yorker’s response to “Have a nice day”—“don’t tell me what to do!” We war on the playing fields of eton, give battle with swear words and insults, dominate with gifts that cannot be reciprocated, or write scathing book reviews of academic adversaries. eskimos say gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs. But to think that, or to think our prover- bial opposite, that gifts make friends—a saying that like the eskimos’ goes against the grain of the prevailing economy—requires that we are born with “watery souls,” waiting to manifest our humanity for better or worse in the meaningful experiences of a particular way of life. not, however, as in our ancient philosophies and modern sciences, that we are condemned by an irresistible human nature to look to our own advantage at the cost of whomever it may concern and thus become menaces to our own social existence.

It’s all been a huge mistake. my modest conclusion is that Western civi- lization has been largely constructed on a mistaken idea of “human nature.” (sorry, beg your pardon; it was all a mistake.) It is probably true, however, that this mistaken idea of human nature endangers our existence.

---