Pascal Boyer - Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology

HUMAN CULTURES THROUGH THE SCIENTIFIC LENS

Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens

Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology

Pascal Boyer

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2021 Pascal Boyer

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Pascal Boyer, Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0257

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ISBN Paperback: 9781800642065

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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0257

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2021 Pascal Boyer, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0257.01

The essays gathered in this volume were all intended as contributions to what I would like to call a useful and scientific anthropology, two words that may seem a tad presumptuous and require an explanation.

First, the useful part. The essays address specific questions such as the following:

• Why do some social institutions seem natural to many people across different cultures?
• How do people form their views of the economy?
• Why do human beings engage in ritual behaviors, either pathological (in compulsive disorders) or culturally sanctioned (like ceremonies)? What are the common features of these behaviors?
• How do people detect that someone has a mental disorder? Does this differ from one culture to another?
• What motivates conflict between groups?
• Do ethnic conflict and discrimination have an impact on peoples health? If so, how does that happen?
• What explains the differences between religions?
• Why are some political institutions stable and not others?

These are all questions of some social importance. It is not difficult to see that it would be a Good Thing, so to speak, to make progress in addressing such issues. I do not claim that the essays gathered here are more useful than other attempts in the social sciences, but simply that the main motivation here is indeed to be useful, to provide models and findings that help us move closer to a proper explanation of these phenomena. That is the goal, the ambition, if perhaps not the actuality.

What about scientific? In my view, the main way for scholarship to be useful, indeed useable, in these domains, is to proceed in a scientific manner. By using this term, I certainly do not mean to claim or imply that the various statements contained here are true. In fact, making such a claim would be quite the unscientific thing to do. The implication is simpler and more modest, meaning that the models proposed can and should be examined in terms of empirical data, and that they may be found to be false or in serious need of revision on the basis of such data.

In all these essays we adopt the perspective of an integrated social science, that addresses questions about cultures and societies in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history (Morin, 2016; Sperber, 1996; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). This approach is sometimes derided as positivistic and reductionistic, and that is exactly what it is. It is blithely reductionist (explaining what happens at a high level of complexity in terms of the combinations of simpler, lower-level elements) and mostly positivist (if the term simply denotes the scientific aspiration).

To some people, it may seem that this way of describing and explaining social phenomena robs them of much of their substance. The models may be compelling but they miss out the rich texture and detail of actual social interactions. We talk about rituals in general without considering the particular and highly varied social contexts in which they take place; we examine peoples views of economic processes, but we ignore the subtle individual differences in their construction; we consider widespread assumptions about madness, but not how they are modulated in each case to these objections, the proper reply would be: Yes,