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Anthropologies as stories of life
Maximilian Holland
REVIEW OF
Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology
Edited by Tim Ingold and Gisli Palsson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013.
[Draft Version, 2015 March - Please cite from published version]
Biosocial Becomings continues the editors' broader project(s) of overhauling
sociocultural anthropology's conception of its relationship with biology (as broadly 'an
account of all-of-life') whilst rejecting the colonizing moves of reductionist biologisms
(evolutionary psychology and its various genetic relatives). Whilst anthropologies of all
stripes (and social sciences and humanities more generally) are now deconstructing
biology/culture, nature/nurture and related dichotomies that have defined their
disciplines' scope and limits, Ingold and Palsson have been dismantling such borders for
decades (e.g. Ingold 1983). They find allies for their holistic project in a motley crew of
heterodox biologists and philosophers, whose main contention is announced the book's
first sentence "Neo Darwinism is dead." Everything in their project flows from this claim
and its echoes throughout the book, so I herein set out its basis for the uninitiated.
Ingold has long been acutely aware of neo Darwinists' "disregard... for the historical
specificity of their provenance" (Ingold 2000: 2). Darwinism developed in the socio-
historic context of mid 19th century Europe, amid the novel observations of natural
philosophers, and urgent concomitant questions that birthed this radical turn. The
contemporary perspective, subscribed both outside and inside the academy, was of God-
the-creator; a reassuringly simple account of omnipotent control, causal agency and
design, of a fixed world (and all life within it). Darwin and Wallace were both all too
wary of this wider theistic context, and its more detailed elaborations by natural
philosophers (e.g. Owen 1849). It sat uneasily with recent observations of fossils and
apparent extinction, continuity between species, and change in life forms and
environments over time. In their radical account, causal agency and design were now
instead located within a slowly shifting nature as selector of variant life forms, and fixity
was jettisoned. It was a striking recapitulation of the simple omnipotence of the
monotheistic account, a simplicity which lent much to its adoption.
Mendel's later findings were initially thought to challenge Darwinism but both were
reconciled in the Modern Synthesis (Huxley 1942), now more commonly neo Darwinism,
wherein natural selection was reconfirmed in the lead causal role, corresponded to (in
Mendelian-type inheritance) by a 'statistical population' of mutable genes. In a prominent
offshoot of neo Darwinism (the main target of I&P), conflated statistical-and-molecular
genes (Moss 2003) have become tangible entities and, reflecting selection's efficacy
(Gould 2002), are themselves now hustling, strategizing and increasingly hegemonic
(Falk 1991) in their control of life forms. Here then, organisms become merely
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'genetically determined' vehicles, accompanied by statements such as Dawkins' "This is a
truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never
seem to get fully used to it" (1976: ix). This variety of neo Darwinism takes on a
scientistic status for many adherents (detailed in Ingold's chapter), escaping its socio-
historical context, becoming instead a transcendental truth, more aptly standing in the
place of the monotheistic account and its omnipotence.
As the ultimate force acting on these genes, the natural selection concept has become so
central to neo Darwinism's focus as to effectively crowd-out broader perspectives on life.
The Price equation (Price 1970) encapsulates this posture. Its remarkable abstract(ing)
simplicity in describing the statistical essence of selection is achieved by parsimoniously
bracketing off from consideration all other conditions (or contexts) of and for life and its
development. In doing so, it necessarily lacks dynamic sufficiency (Lewontin 1974, Frank
1995).
"In the development of a real science about a real and practical world, it is impossible
and undesirable to search for an exactly sufficient description. The nature of the physical
universe is such that the change of state of every part of it affects the change of state of
every other part, no matter how remote." (Lewontin 1974: 8).
The simplifying perspective so attractive to selectionists is at the same time precisely the
perspective that occludes attention to the plural, messy, contingent, contextual, relational
and distinctive conditions of living organisms and their development. This illustrates the
different explanatory focuses of more reductionist and essentializing accounts of life-
worlds, and more holistic and emergent accounts (Ruse 1989). Meanwhile, since
Darwinism's origins, new observations and different conditions (e.g. the ongoing mass
extinction of life-worlds) have emerged and led to different questions and priorities. In
short, the perspective, the field of view, and the pressing questions have moved. The
narrow selectionist perspective is no longer a satisfying or illuminating account of all-of-
life.
This brief genealogical sketch, elements of which are found throughout the book, of
course resonates with the epistemological stance of (amongst many others) Hegel, Marx,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Ortega y Gasset, Sapir, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Kuhn, Foucault,
and Gibson (let us, approximately refer to it as one of perspectivism, in the Nietzschean
sense). Since this stance also overlaps considerably with philosophical and cultural
relativism, it is one very familiar to sociocultural anthropologists.
Ingold and Palsson's approach then learns from perspectivism(s) and encourages an anti-
essentializing, holistically conceived, emergent, processual and always-already-relational
account of the messy, entangled, co-constructive contexts of developmental systems of
life. It is this that they refer to as Biosocial Becomings. Their approach is consonant with
the epistemology of 'developmental systems theory' (DST), as well as other systems-
inspired approaches (Bateson 1972, Deleuze & Guattari 1987). Oyama (1985, 2001)
reflexively describes DST, as not in fact a theory, but modes of approaches, sets of
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perspectives. In short, an undisciplined motley crew. It is these perspectives that the book
recommends to sociocultural anthropologists to rebut reductionist neo Darwinism.
The common themes of DST (cf. Oyama et al. 2001) correspond to all that has been
occluded: Life processes necessarily go on in and through a context of many interacting
factors, an 'ensemble', all entwined with and co-constructing each other. The continuation
through time of these interacting factors (some of them themselves 'organisms') makes
them part of the inheritances of other organisms developing in the system (inheritance is
not just 'genes'). Since all these factors interact to construct the organism (itself
permeable, entwined and relational), there is effectively 'distributed influence' on
development (thus genes cannot be privileged as the only locus of control). The
distinction between life in developmental flow and life in evolutionary flow breaks down
somewhat; since in both cases it is the total entwined system of life (at once the
developmental system and the 'environmental niche') that moves forward through time.
DST's pluralist account of the various intertwined influences on development that can
usefully be considered as 'inheritances' includes (as well as traditional 'genes');
epigenetics, niche-construction, behavioural, cultural and symbolic factors (e.g. Jablonka
& Lamb 2005, Oyama et al. 2001, current volume); these are glossed as 'multiple
inheritance'. Biology/culture, nature/nurture (and other) essentializing dichotomies
dissolve; all such 'separate' factors are inherently entwined aspects of the developmental
system.
Further, since the 'evolution' of regularly arising developmental capacities ('traits' in
traditional accounts) of organisms can (conceptually) and does (observably) sometimes
occur without any genetic change (e.g. chapters of Ingold, Fuentes, Ramirez); the central
claim of gene-centric neo Darwinists - that genetic change is the necessary correlate of
evolutionary change - is immediately refuted.
What further themes does the book's approach open up that resonate with ongoing
discussions of sociocultural anthropologists? The diverse and fertile chapters contain
several common strands: Rejecting essentialized natures and emphasizing the always-in-
process-interactive-contingent co-construction (development and ontogeny) of organisms'
capacities highlights the processual and relational aspects of becoming human (inspiring
this volume's title). These harmoniously resonate with, for example, accounts of
Amerindian ontologies such as those of Gow, Viveiros de Castro, Descola, and related
discussions of processual becoming, such as nurture kinship (Holland 2012), as well as
broader ontological themes in anthropology (e.g. Viveiros De Castro 2012). Several of
the chapters here explore resonance with Bourdieu's accounts of practice. These
processual and relational themes are most prominently explored in the chapters of Ingold,
Palsson, Praet, Vaisman and Mangiameli.
The de-essentializing of once familiar dichotomies invites comparison and contrast with
the work of Haraway, Franklin, Rabinow, Rose and Strathern (chapters by Palsson,
Chatjouli, Vaisman, Al-Mohammed). Resonance with multispecies ethnography is also
discussed in several chapters (Palsson, Vaisman, Praet). Finally, phenomenological
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questions are productively taken up here especially by Al-Mohammed and Palsson (see
also Ingold 2000, 2001). Several other resonances are explored in the book's diverse
contributions, all of which are innovative and fertile testaments to the productivity and
pluralism of the core approach.
Fuentes and Ramirez's chapters discuss DST's implications for biological anthropology.
As Fuentes notes, stepping from simplifying abstractions into a more holistic approach
"adds an extra layer of complication" (p.50) that may entail new methodological habits
for some biological anthropologists at the same time as it poses new and potentially
productive questions. Fuentes's research has been at the forefront of exploring these
questions in biological anthropology.
For all anthropological traditions, Palsson reiterates that “Such a broad perspective
should not be seen as a fixed baseline or an end in itself but as a starting point for further
work, as a tentative framework inviting novel conceptual and theoretical development
and elaboration.” (p. 248). I have every expectation that such elaborations will prove yet
more fertile as Ingold and Palsson's project moves forwards. Their statement "Neo
Darwinism is dead" should be considered an invitation to life.
References Cited
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