Abstract
Malinowski saw that anthropology needs a non-arbitrary account of what is relevant for comparison, and he looked for it in what matters for living beings. He named those stakes biological needs. He then made the fatal substitution of treating cultural institutions as functional responses to them. Structural functionalism intensified the error by transferring the stakes from living beings to the maintenance of society itself, so that politics, kinship and economy became functional slots to be filled in every case. When functionalism was rejected, social and cultural anthropology also rejected both the institutional mapping and the appeal to vital stakes that had motivated it. The neighbouring subfields that kept the body kept it in one of two forms: as a functional explanation of institutions, or as one pole of a polarity of biological explanation against cultural interpretation. Three cases trace the consequences: Malinowski's needs and institutions, the search for political equivalents in African Political Systems, and the division of eating into nutrition and food. Sleep supplies a test that separates this thesis from a simple story of hostility to biology, because it is a vital stake without an institutional carrier and is absent from the biological, ecological and medical surveys as much as from the cultural ones. Anthropological theory should neither recover biological needs nor functionalism. It should dissolve the nature/culture division on which both sides depended and recover vital stakes as the mesocosmic ground of relevance. Vital stakes constrain living coordination without determining its form.
I. The Question That Has Become Difficult to Ask
At an informal discussion about the future of social anthropology, I said that there are a lot more taboo topics than the discipline wants to admit. One of them is that, if you work in social anthropology, any serious engagement with evolutionary perspectives onto social and cultural issues is frowned upon. The immediate answer, in approximately these words, was: yes, rightly so, because evolutionism is racist. I see this remark as an occasion of reflection: what happened in anthropological theory that made my colleague’s argument even thinkable? What happened that any question about how human beings emerged as living organisms could be moved straight into a condemned history of racism before a single proposition had even been stated?
The puzzle is how a discipline devoted to understanding human beings reached a position in which asking how they emerged as living organisms, what continuities they have with other animals, or why every human being eats and sleeps can still feel theoretically or politically charged. Rehabilitating biological determinism will not answer it, because that would only reverse the polarity. The problem is older and deeper. Anthropology inherited a conceptual division that placed bodily vitality on one side, as nature or biology, and placed meaning, institutions and human variability on the other, as culture or society. Anthropology has been described as alternately seduced and repulsed by great taxonomic projects for cataloguing human difference (Barnard and Spencer 2010b: xii), and the history told here is in part a history of that oscillation.
The argument can be compressed into a sequence. In one of its founding moments anthropology began from vital stakes and redescribed them as biological needs. It derived cultural functions from the needs and located the functions in institutions. It then moved the beneficiary of the functions from the organism to the social system, and on rejecting functionalism it came to suspect any appeal to vital universals at all. Living Value Theory proposes a different sequence. Vital stakes give rise to mesocosmic relevance, relevance organises living coordination, living coordination is variably organised through five mediations, and in some cases the coordination is stabilised in institutions. No bridge between nature and culture is needed, because there are never two ontological domains to bridge.
The thesis has three claims of different scope, and they should not be run together. The first is historical and narrow: a specific theoretical move, from needs to functions to institutions, was made by Malinowski and transferred by Radcliffe-Brown. The second is conceptual and concerns social and cultural anthropology, which the standard survey calls the biggest and most influential area of the discipline (Barnard and Spencer 2010b: xii): after the rejection of functionalism this area lacked a general principle by which any vital stake counts as relevant for comparison. The third is distributional and concerns the neighbouring subfields: where they kept the body, they kept it either as a functional explanation of institutions or on one side of a polarity, and in each case through an institutionally supplied object such as disease, diet, growth or energy. The article makes no claim that anthropologists stopped studying bodies, diets, diseases or ecologies, or that anyone denied that human beings eat and sleep. Its claim concerns what the discipline's general vocabularies can make into an object of comparison, and the claim can fail. Sleep, introduced in section VI and used in section VII, is the test.
What if Malinowski began with a profound intuition about relevance, and anthropology learned exactly the wrong lesson from the failure of his theory? The sections that follow ask this through three cases, the first concerned with needs and institutions, the second with the search for political equivalents in Africa, and the third with food. A section on the rejection of functionalism then explains why the damage deepened, and the last two sections set out what can be recovered.
II. The Relevance Problem: Why Comparison Needs Stakes
Indefinite comparability
Any two things can be compared in indefinitely many respects. A sleeper and a parliament each have a duration, a spatial extension, a number of participants, a legal status, an acoustic output, a carbon content and a vocabulary, and the list can be extended without end. Goodman (1972) pressed this point against the idea that similarity could ground classification. Two things resemble each other in endlessly many respects and differ in endlessly many more, so a claim of similarity is empty until someone has specified the respect and the context in which it matters. Logical comparability therefore cannot settle anthropological relevance, and the question that matters is in what respect comparing two things is relevant, since the possibility of comparing them is never in doubt.
Every comparative discipline meets this problem when it has to justify setting the Nuer beside the Tallensi, or a canoe exchange beside a stock exchange. It is also where the history that follows begins, because functionalism was an attempt, flawed in its execution and serious in its intention, to say what makes a comparison worth making.
There is no view from nowhere on relevance
One tempting reply holds that relevance can be fixed by a formal criterion standing outside living processes, such as a list of universal institutions or a classification of cultural domains. No such criterion exists, and the reason is instructive. A distinction matters because something is at stake. For living beings, relevance arises mesocosmically, through continuation, disturbance, danger, repair, dependency, deprivation, satisfaction, failure and possibility. A difference between two room temperatures becomes relevant when an organism grows cold. A difference between two foods becomes relevant through nourishment, poisoning, hunger, satiety, pleasure, scarcity or access to the table. A difference between two political constitutions has no comparable intrinsic relevance until it becomes consequential within living coordination, for instance in who may eat, shelter, sleep or fight, and under what conditions. Living itself requires differential responsiveness to the world without requiring comparison in the symbolically elaborated sense (see What Even Is a “Comparison”?), and what counts as relevant differs from one animal world to another (see What Is Relevant About Being a Bat?).
This is no subjectivism, and it does not make articulated concern the test of relevance. Most vital relevance operates below articulate concern. A body regulating its temperature, a household settling who sleeps where, and a child learning to swallow solid food are all responding to stakes that nobody has formulated, and the stakes are real whether or not they are ever put into words.
Sleep as the exemplary case
Sleep gives the cleanest example. The claim that all human beings sleep is empirically defeasible, since the discovery of a human population that did not sleep would force its revision. In the absence of such a case the claim carries an unusually strong comparative warrant, because every known human mesocosm has to coordinate sleeping somehow, whatever it believes about sleep and whether or not it has a word for it. Politics lacks that standing. Human beings can be alive while doing no politics: a newborn lives before any recognisable political participation, and a sleeper stays alive while political engagement recedes entirely. Formal political institutions, moreover, vary historically in ways that sleeping does not. None of this makes politics unimportant. It means that the relevance of politics has to be traced back into living stakes and cannot be assumed from the category.
Relevance is not determination
A distinction will govern everything that follows. Vital relevance is not causal determination. Hunger does not cause capitalism, sleep does not cause bedrooms, vulnerability does not cause states, and reproduction does not cause kinship systems. Vital stakes make certain coordinational problems recurrently relevant while radically underdetermining their solutions. A people can answer the stake of nourishment with agriculture, pastoralism, foraging, markets, rationing, hospitality, religious feasting or some combination, and the stake does not choose among them.
This is the conceptual possibility that functionalism failed to maintain. It sensed that comparison needs a ground in what matters for living beings, and it converted that sense of relevance into institutional necessity. The conversion is the fatal substitution of the title, and the next sections trace it.
III. Case Study One: Malinowski and the First Substitution
Malinowski is both the source of the error and the figure closest to recovering from it, and the history has to be told with that double role in view.
The Malinowskian intuition
Begin with what deserves to be kept. Malinowski's ethnographic revolution moved attention to concrete life as people live it. Against those who wanted to represent kinship in formulae and equations, he insisted that kinship is a matter of flesh and blood, the product of passion, maternal affection and long intimate daily life (as quoted in Kuklick 2010c: 437). He was contemptuous of any attempt to remove recognisable human beings from anthropological description (Kuklick 2010c: 437). His fieldwork pointed toward people eating, building, sleeping, travelling, fearing and exchanging, and away from classificatory schemas, and it served his founding aim of grasping the hold which life has on the people studied (see From Meaning to Stakes).
His interest in nutrition, reproduction, bodily comfort and safety belongs to the same impulse. It was an attempt to answer a real methodological question: what matters so much to the people studied that an anthropologist should expect to meet it everywhere? His answer was imperfect, and it was not arbitrary. That is the Malinowski whom Living Value Theory should take seriously.
First mistake: vital stakes become biological needs
In A Scientific Theory of Culture Malinowski set out a table that pairs basic needs of the organism with cultural responses, matching, among others, metabolism with the commissariat, reproduction with kinship, bodily comforts with shelter and safety with protection (Malinowski 1944). The commitment is explicit. Malinowski judged that every society had to develop institutions serving the basic biological needs of self-preservation, and he located innate emotional attitudes in a physiology that preceded social forms (Kuklick 2010c: 439).
The first mistake lies in the starting point. Malinowski had already accepted the division. On one side stands an organism with biological needs, and on the other a cultural apparatus that satisfies them. The picture presupposes a precultural human nature to which culture later supplies solutions. Living Value Theory rejects it. There is no human hunger that first exists in biology and is afterwards culturally coordinated. Eating is from the start embodied, relational, situated and materially coordinated, and in human beings it is also symbolically and technologically elaborated. The same holds for sleep, for infant dependency and for reproduction.
Living Value Theory recovers vital stakes without recovering biological needs.
The word need carries a further assumption. A need is specified as a requirement of an organism taken alone, and a response is then sought for it, so that organism and response are given in two separate steps. A vital stake is specified within living coordination, as what is at stake for the continuation of a coordinated whole in a mesocosm. Even an infant's hunger arises within a dyad that includes a feeding body, a place warm enough to survive in and some means of transfer, and it is relevant in that setting and in no other.
Second mistake: needs become institutional functions
The second mistake is the fatal substitution proper. The chain runs from need to cultural response, from response to function and from function to institution. Metabolism is paired with an economic apparatus, reproduction with kinship, protection with political organisation, growth with education. The correlations are empirically imperfect, and the deeper trouble lies in their logic. A vital stake has no corresponding institution. Eating can involve household organisation, markets, agriculture, religious prohibitions, gender, cooking technologies, hospitality, state regulation, ecological conditions and bodily sensation at once, and none of these is the institutional equivalent of metabolism. Metabolism has no commissariat. It has a tangle of coordinations, some of which are stabilised in institutions in some places and some of which are not.
In the vocabulary of Living Value Theory an institution is an L4 stabilisation, a categorisation or organisation of coordination that is portable across situations and can last beyond the lifetimes of those who first achieved it. Such stabilisations answer to stakes without being identical to them, and once they exist they generate stakes of their own. Functionalism mistook historically variable stabilisations of living coordination for functional equivalents of the stakes that made those coordinations relevant.
Why the mistake was attractive
The substitution solved two problems at once. Biological needs seemed to explain why comparison across societies was warranted, since all human beings have them. Institutions seemed to explain why societies look different, since the responses vary. The bridge between the two was assumed and never demonstrated, and the assumption was easy to make because the vocabulary of function sounded like an explanation. Durkheim had already cautioned that showing how a social fact is useful does not explain why it exists or why it takes the form it does, (Kuklick 2010b: 315), and the caution applies with full force to the pairing of needs and institutions.
Two futures in one man
Malinowski therefore contains two anthropological futures. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific he declared that his interest as a sociologist lay in what people feel as members of a community and not in what they feel as individuals (Kuklick 2010b: 315). Radcliffe-Brown later charged that Malinowski invoked the biological needs of individuals and was therefore not a proper functionalist at all (Kuklick 2010b: 315; Maddock 2010: 589). One tendency stays close to the messiness of eating, building, sleeping, travelling, parenting, fearing, exchanging and dwelling. The other translates those processes into portable institutional categories. British anthropology largely institutionalised the second (for the way his portable classifications outran his ethnography, see From Lived Worlds to Portable Classifications).
IV. From Organisms to the Social Organism: Radcliffe-Brown and the Transfer of Stakes
Structural functionalism did more than modify Malinowski. It changed the bearer of relevance.
The shift in the meaning of function
The hinge can be stated in two sentences. For Malinowski, function referred to the role of social institutions in satisfying the basic needs of individual organisms. For Radcliffe-Brown, it meant the contribution of those institutions to maintaining the conditions of existence of the collective organism (Viveiros de Castro 2010: 652–53). The beneficiary changes. Malinowski asks what the living person requires, and Radcliffe-Brown asks what the social structure requires for its maintenance.
The shift had a Darwinian motive. The school took the group, and not the individual, as its unit, on the reasoning that it was in groups that human beings withstood natural selection, and that the group had to be analysed as a social and not a biological entity. Human adaptation was effected through social organisation, and individuals became derivative creatures of their social orders, practically epiphenomenal as individuals (Kuklick 2010b: 312). Durkheim's insistence that social facts cannot be reduced to psychology or biology supplied the charter for this move (Kuklick 2010b: 314–15). The point of inquiry became the identification of the standardised habits that kept the social organism in dynamic equilibrium (Kuklick 2010b: 312). I use the term functionalism here for this theoretical move and not as a claim about how every scholar named below described himself, since Radcliffe-Brown rejected the label (Maddock 2010: 589).
Society acquires pseudo-vitality
The organism metaphor now does enormous theoretical work. Society can have requirements, maintenance, equilibrium, reproduction, integration, dysfunction and survival. Properties of living continuation migrate into a theoretical stabilisation at L4. Nobody has to declare that society is literally biological for the logic of vitality to have changed hands. It has been transferred from living beings to an abstraction, and the abstraction now carries the stakes.
The persistence of this logic is revealing. Radcliffe-Brown's question about the foundations and modes of permanence of a social form was, in the 1970s, taken up again in Marxist anthropology and modishly rephrased as reproduction (Viveiros de Castro 2010: 653). The vocabulary changed and the structure of the question remained.
Structural functionalism escaped biological reductionism by reassigning vital necessity from organisms to social systems, and it never abandoned the language of necessity.
Comparison changes accordingly
Radcliffe-Brown's model was judged to be a comparative anatomy of societies, better suited to systematic comparison than Malinowski's scheme, which admitted only universal generalisation (Kuklick 2010c: 439, citing Wolf 1964). The phrase is exact. A comparative anatomy compares organs, and the organs here are institutions. Instead of comparing processes of living coordination, anthropology compares social wholes and their constituent parts: society, political system, kinship system, economic system, religious system.
The units were set firmly. The sociological comparative method of the early twentieth century required closed units of analysis, societies or tribes, and functionalist holism then embedded political institutions within those bounded wholes (Vincent 2010: 548). As functionalism came under attack, the differences between Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown came to seem relatively unimportant, since both fostered analysis of the coherence of a society's parts into a whole (Kuklick 2010c: 439). The original source of comparative relevance had receded in both. What mattered for living beings no longer organised the comparison, and what mattered for the maintenance of a bounded whole did.
V. Case Study Two: Fortes, Evans-Pritchard, and the Invention of the Missing Political Institution
The second case shows the comparative consequence of the transfer, and it is the most vivid demonstration of the error because the error became a research programme.
The apparently innocent question
Europe has states, governments, offices and courts. Anthropologists in colonial Africa encountered societies in which those particular arrangements were absent or took other forms. What follows? A structural-functionalist response begins with the question of what the political system is, and leaves aside the question of what coordinations involving danger, conflict, collective action, territory, reciprocal obligation, access to resources and authority are taking place. Politics has already become the tertium comparationis.
The setting matters. The real impetus to political anthropology came when British structural-functionalism confronted large African centralised states functioning as units of indirect rule, and the school operated with a simple dichotomy between states and stateless societies (Vincent 2010: 549). Indirect rule created a requirement for documentation, and the work of anthropologists took its characteristics from the conjunction of indirect rule, the ascendancy of structural functionalism and generous funding from the International African Institute (Fardon 2010: 24). Indirect rule needed institutions through which to govern. The political slot was therefore relevant for administrators before it was relevant for the people studied, and the question of for whom it was relevant was never asked.
The void has to be filled
If recognisable political institutions are absent, something else must be doing their work. In African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940), the something was found in lineages, descent systems, age grades, councils and secret societies. Kinship becomes political because it occupies the functionally equivalent slot. The result was explicit: for the next two decades the taxonomy of African Political Systems was elaborated to include village councils, age grades, secret societies and the like, and attention shifted away from individual initiatives, strategies, processes and struggles for power toward offices, rights, duties and rules (Vincent 2010: 549–50). Critics at the time complained that the book was obsessed with lineage systems and kinship polities (Vincent 2010: 549).
A revealing regional pattern followed. Under colonial conditions anthropologists in New Guinea selected Big Men, in Africa lineages and descent, and in North America war, although Big Men, lineages and war could be said to be found in all three places (Vincent 2010: 549). The categories were governing what was seen, and anthropology has defined politics and its political content so broadly that politics may be found everywhere (Vincent 2010: 546). Politics appears to exist everywhere because the comparison was built so that something has to fill the political slot.
Why this is more than Western bias
The criticism should not be reduced to ethnocentrism. The deeper problem is logical. A category generated from one historically specific configuration of living coordination is treated as a universal functional problem, and phenomena elsewhere are then classified by their supposed equivalence to it. The process runs from a European institutional form to an abstracted function, from the function to a search for a non-European functional equivalent, and from the search to a universal comparative category. The sleight of hand lies in the last step. Once the category is universal, the equivalent must exist, and the ethnographer will find it.
Fortes and the lineage solution
Fortes's work on the Tallensi shows the mechanism at close range. Fortes portrayed Tallensi society as entirely built around the lineage system. A man's rights and responsibilities in worship, marriage, the allocation of work and judicial authority are determined by his position in his patrilineage, and the functions of the lineage are economic and political, although its membership is determined by kinship criteria (Good 2010: 398–99). To manage the combination, Fortes distinguished filiation, which was relevant in domestic contexts, from descent, which was politico-jural, and he treated the vocabulary of kinship as an ideological bridge between the two domains. Unlike Radcliffe-Brown, he placed descent outside kinship proper (Good 2010: 399).
The observations are not false, and the difficulty lies in the portable analytical decomposition imposed on them. A Tallensi lineage takes part in many coordinations. Calling some of them political may serve specific purposes, and it cannot establish politics as the ontological object shared between Tallensi coordination and Westminster. Kinship, as one standard survey opens by observing, deals quite literally with matters of life and death (Good 2010: 396), which is precisely the register in which the lineage matters to those who live in it, and which the political slot left unexplored.
Two decisions locked together
Two questionable decisions were locked together. The first assumed bounded societies. The second assumed functionally equivalent institutional domains within them. One could then compare society against society through politics, economics, kinship and religion (Vincent 2010: 548). The result looked like systematic comparison, and it rested on units that nobody had justified in terms of what mattered for the beings who lived in them.
The reconstruction in Living Value Theory
Living Value Theory proceeds otherwise. It begins by asking what living coordination is taking place and what is at stake in it, and it leaves the question of what Tallensi politics is for later. Safety may be at stake, or conflict, access to land, the continuity of generations, recognition, antagonism, the allocation of resources, responsibility, or coordination with ancestors. Only after the process has been identified does it make sense to examine how it is organised across the five mediations, at which recursive levels, in which temporal rhythms and with which kinds of counterpart, including the ancestors as counterparts of a particular kind. Politics may eventually prove relevant to some of these coordinations, and it cannot be assumed at the outset.
Structural functionalism seeks functional equivalents of institutions, and Living Value Theory seeks comparably relevant living coordinations.
VI. Case Study Three: Food Becomes Nutrition or Culture
The third case is cleaner than another classic theorist would be, because it shows the lasting empirical consequence of the theoretical division.
Return to eating
Eating is exactly where Malinowski began, and it is hard to imagine a more obvious vital stake. Yet modern anthropology divides it. On one side stand nutrition, energy, nutrients, physiology, requirements and adaptation. On the other stand food, meaning, identity, household relations, ritual, classification, exchange and cuisine.
The division in the literature
Adequate nutrition is required for survival and successful reproduction, and human dietary patterns vary greatly. The emergence of nutritional anthropology in the 1970s tended to replicate the two cultures of an anthropology divided methodologically and theoretically into social and biological sciences (Strickland 2010b: 511). The social side was concerned with the social role of foodstuffs and the management of shortages. One of its definitions treated the field as the study of the interrelationship between diet and culture, and in practice this became the application of social data to what were seen as cultural barriers to improved nutrition (Strickland 2010b: 511). The biological side treated food mainly as a vehicle of energy and nutrients. The science of nutrition developed from chemistry and physiology, and social and economic factors, though recognised as influential in access to nutritional resources, were regarded as peripheral to it (Strickland 2010b: 511).
The phrase cultural barriers is revealing. Culture appears as an obstacle between a need and its satisfaction, which is the Malinowskian picture in an applied form. The saying that man is what he eats can be read in two ways, as a statement about the chemical composition of the body and as a statement about dietary choice and social persona (Strickland 2010b: 511). The saying does not divide, and the discipline does.
The historical division has become embedded in the organisation of knowledge itself. Food and nutrition have separate surveys, each written from one side. The survey of food insists that any food system has material, sociocultural and nutritional-medical dimensions that interrelate (Pottier 2010: 302), and the survey of nutrition ends by observing that the relationship between patterns of intrahousehold food distribution and systems of kinship, inheritance and social ideas of responsibility would repay careful interdisciplinary investigation (Strickland 2010b: 513). Each survey points toward the other, and each is written from one side of the line.
Why food versus nutrition is the wrong distinction
Living Value Theory does not bring the two together by saying that food is both biological and cultural. That formulation still grants the division and adds a hyphen to it. Eating is one process of living coordination. Metabolic transformation, sensation, companionship, dwelling, cooking vessels, markets, recipes, classifications and ritual prescriptions are distinguishable mediations within that process, and none belongs to a separate ontological realm.
Studies of the distribution of food within households have helped to explain sex-related patterns of undernutrition and early mortality in the Asian subcontinent (Strickland 2010b: 513). Such a pattern cannot be assigned to nutrition or to culture. Who is fed first, who eats what, and who goes without is a single living coordination, in which the metabolic stake and the relational and symbolic arrangements are one event. What anthropology divided into nutrition and culture was never divided in the eater.
Sleep as the stronger counterexample
Sleep is an even stronger case, because there is no conventional institution of sleep. Perhaps that is exactly why social theory found it hard to see. The handbook that first standardised what travellers were to observe, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, gave sleep no heading (see Notes and Queries in Mesocosmography), and the absence has lasted. The second edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, the standard survey of the field, has no entry on sleep and no index entry for it, although dreams have an entry of their own (Barnard and Spencer 2010b: 202–04). The word occurs about a dozen times in a work of roughly eight hundred pages, all of them in passing, and more than half of those occurrences are in the entries on house and household, where sleeping serves as a criterion of membership. Ethnographers define a household by whether people must sleep there, or eat there, or contribute economically, and the entry reports Goody's distinction between dwelling units defined by sleeping, reproductive units defined by eating and economic units (Sanjek 2010: 359). Kinship, too, is described as being about sleeping together, living together, eating together and dying together (Thomas 2010: 357). Eating and sleeping thus serve as the discipline's working definition of intimacy and membership while remaining unthematised as objects of study.
No religion, economy or political system is required for sleeping to be vitally relevant. The sleeper therefore brings us back to the object that functionalism lost, which is living coordination itself. The silence of the survey is also a datum that the thesis can be tested against, and the next section does so.
VII. How the Rejection of Functionalism Deepened the Damage
This section makes a narrower claim than a causal history, and the claim should be stated precisely. No single line of causation runs from functionalism to Geertz. Three independent pressures each made the appeal to vital need costly for social and cultural anthropology. Durkheimian anti-reductionism gave the discipline an object that biology was said to be unable to explain. The Boasian struggle against race theory made biological explanation of human variety politically suspect. The critique of functionalism tied the vocabulary of need to a discredited theory. Each is sufficient on its own to discourage the appeal, and their convergence overdetermines the outcome. The outcome is also a claim about concepts and not about motives: the general vocabularies available for saying why anything is relevant lost the place that vital stakes had occupied, and what replaced it was either an institutional category or a polarity. The thesis therefore predicts where vital stakes should and should not reappear, and the section ends by testing the prediction.
Anthropology correctly rejected functionalist determinism
The objections were legitimate. The functional unity of a society should not be assumed, and integration is a variable to be measured. Practices can be functional for some members and dysfunctional for others, and some may have no consequences for the society at all. Conflict can be inherent in a social order, and change can arise from within. The habit of explaining every observed practice as indispensable for maintaining the whole was the product of conceptual confusion (Kuklick 2010b: 315). Functionalism also carried an apparently conservative political message, and in the 1980s and 1990s the very idea of a coherent social order, a whole composed of parts, became suspect (Kuklick 2010b: 315–17). Functional equivalents cannot simply be assumed, as the African case showed. These critiques were necessary, and none of them is withdrawn here.
Vital stakes became collateral damage
The unintended consequence concerned what else was discarded. The word need came to be associated with functionalism, and functionalism with biological reductionism, universalism, determinism and naturalisation. Within the school itself the charge that Malinowski reasoned from biological needs had been a mark of inferiority, and Radcliffe-Brown's accusations became received opinion among many anthropologists after the Second World War (Kuklick 2010c: 439). The discipline became increasingly wary of grounding any explanation in evolved, bodily or metabolic conditions, because doing so now sounded like the thing that had been refuted.
The nature/culture polarity survived the critique
This is the crucial step. Choosing culture did not necessarily take anthropology out of the nature/culture split, and it frequently reinforced the split by occupying one side of it. At the foundation of cultural anthropology, Carrithers observes, lies the notion of a great fault line sundering the world of human culture from the rest of the living world, with biology explaining one side of the human constitution and symbols the other (2010: 499). He traces the doctrine to a struggle against attempts to explain human variety by purely natural-scientific means, led by Boas against race theory (2010: 500). It then hardened. For anthropologists who studied culture alone, nature/culture became an unexamined or even dogmatic presupposition, applied as a conceptual Swiss Army knife to purposes far beyond its designers' plans, although it is the product of only a small segment of the societies of the North Atlantic Rim in the twentieth century (Carrithers 2010: 501). In its paired form it is also recent (see When, Exactly, Did Nature Split from Culture?), and it went on organising comparison after the Boasian break (see The Space of Difference). The ensuing conflict between biological and cultural determinism ranged across race, sexuality, gender, aggression, intelligence and nutrition (Carrithers 2010: 501).
Viveiros de Castro makes a parallel observation about structure. American anthropology concentrated on the nature/culture pair, and British anthropology on individual and society (2010: 652–53). The two polarities overlap, and one is often subsumed into the other. The difficulty lay less in privileging culture over nature than in accepting nature/culture as the architecture of the question.
Symbolic anthropology and the elevation of meaning
Symbolic anthropology was never monolithic, and its achievements are real. Culture as symbols and meanings rose through Parsons, Geertz and Schneider, who differed among themselves, and Geertz's essentially semiotic concept of culture, with its claim that analysis is an interpretive search for meaning and not an experimental search for law, became enormously influential (Barnard and Spencer 2010a: 174; Geertz 1973: 5). The hegemony of culture as meaning then gave way to postmodernism and to discourse as the preferred object (Barnard and Spencer 2010a: 174).
Geertz did not deny that human beings eat and sleep. In the same volume he argued that they are unfinished animals who complete themselves through culture (Geertz 1973: 49), which acknowledges the body fully and states the problem exactly: biology supplies the unfinished animal, culture the completion, and the first step has no further interest for interpretation. He did not make eating and sleeping the object of interpretation because his concept of the object gave them no place. On that concept a thing becomes relevant to the anthropologist when it has been signified (for the consequences, see Culture Is Not a Text). As anthropology became more sophisticated about meaning, interpretation, representation and discourse, there was progressively less theoretical language available for saying why eating, sleeping, bodily repair or thermal regulation possess a relevance that does not originate in symbolic classification. In the vocabulary of Living Value Theory, vital relevance operates largely at L1 and L2, where nothing has yet been articulated, and an approach that begins at L3 and L4 has no resources for seeing it (see The Wonder of What Works Well). Anthropology gained a theory of meaning while losing a theory of why some things matter before anyone asks what they mean.
What the neighbouring subfields kept
The strongest objection to the thesis is that vital stakes never left anthropology. Ecological anthropology studies adaptation to environments, medical anthropology studies disease and health, biological anthropology studies growth, nutrition, genetics and evolution, and evolutionary approaches continue in several of them. The objection is right about the facts and mistaken about their bearing, because the question concerns the form in which the stakes were kept.
Ecological anthropology shows the first form. Social and cultural anthropology of the first half of the twentieth century, in the British versions of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown as much as in the American version of Boas, gave little direct attention to relations with the environment, and when ecological anthropology became established in the 1960s some researchers were drawn to it in the hope that the study of adaptation would explain customs and institutions (Gudeman 2010: 207). Critics at once called ecosystem analysis functionalism broadened to include environmental factors (Gudeman 2010: 207), and the best-known example, Harris's account of sacred cattle in India as a response to the caloric and spatial costs of livestock (Gudeman 2010: 209), has exactly the form of a need explaining an institution. Carrithers calls it the most famous and least persuasive of such arguments and observes that the anger provoked by them shows how fervently the autonomy of culture is defended (2010: 501). The stake was kept in the substitutional form.
Medical and nutritional anthropology show the second form. The ecological or biocultural orientation in medical anthropology makes cultural practices dependent variables for the explanation of observations drawn from biomedical models, with the meaning of the practices taking second place, and the most widely used analytic dichotomy in the subfield as a whole is the disease/illness distinction, which assigns the measurable bodily disorder to biomedicine and the experience of it to anthropology (Lambert 2010: 458; see The Disease/Illness Distinction). Nutritional anthropology, as already seen, reproduces the two cultures (Strickland 2010b: 511). Biological anthropology in turn is organised by the objects of its sciences, which the survey lists as human evolution, primatology, genetics, growth and human ecology (Strickland 2010a: 82–86). In these subfields the stakes were kept on one side of the polarity.
In both forms the stake enters through an institutionally supplied object: disease, diet, growth, fertility, energy. Each has a professional carrier in biomedicine, nutrition science, demography or ecology, and each comes with a category that tells the anthropologist what the stake is. This is where sleep becomes decisive. Consider two hypotheses. On the first, vital stakes were lost on the cultural side of the polarity only, and the biological, ecological and medical subfields, which do study bodies, kept them in general. On the second, vital stakes survive only where an institutional or disciplinary object carries them, so that a stake without such a carrier should be absent on both sides. The first predicts that sleep, the most universal and least institutionalised of vital stakes, should appear in the surveys of the biological, ecological and medical subfields. The second predicts silence on both sides.
The surveys are silent. None of the entries on biological anthropology (Strickland 2010a), ecological anthropology (Gudeman 2010), medical anthropology (Lambert 2010), evolution (Claessen 2010), sociobiology (Fox 2010), the body (Staples 2010), food (Pottier 2010) or nutrition (Strickland 2010b) mentions sleep. The silence is uniform across the polarity, since the cultural side is silent too, and it is the silence that the second hypothesis predicts. Sleep acquired an institutional carrier only where a profession built one, in the physiology laboratory and the sleep clinic, as a measurable process stripped of the rest of a life (see Sleep Medicine: A Living Value History), and in law only after conversion into a disorder, a requirement of rest or a risk (see Why Law Can't See Sleep). No subfield of anthropology took the stake up in its own right, although the body is exactly what ecological, medical and biological anthropology study and each has the means to study sleep. A survey is silent about a topic when the field's general frameworks have no place for it, whatever individual studies exist. If vital stakes had remained central as such, sleep would have been among the first to be taken up. These subfields study the stakes that arrive with a category.
Integrative attempts are bridges
The literature contains many attempts to join the two sides, and they confirm the diagnosis. Biocultural anthropology joins ecological and biomedical observation to cultural practice. Holistic accounts of food systems join material, sociocultural and nutritional-medical dimensions (Pottier 2010: 302). Feminist work combines interpretive and materialist approaches to medical phenomena (Lambert 2010: 459). A synthesis in the study of nature and culture proposes that human beings evolved first as social animals and only then as culture-bearing ones (Carrithers 2010: 502). Each of these is a bridge, and a bridge presupposes banks. The proposals leave the partition standing and ask how its two sides interact, which is why integrative proposals keep being made without settling the question. The American four-field arrangement bundles biological and cultural anthropology institutionally (see The Hail Mary Test (Part 4)), and inside the discipline the nearest approach to a different architecture is Ingold's dwelling perspective (see Dwelling in the Mesocosm). Interaction between two sides differs from the absence of two sides, and the next section turns to the difference.
Evolution became especially charged
The contemporary problem is the most delicate. Histories of evolutionary anthropology really were entangled with racial classification, eugenics, colonial hierarchy and social Darwinism, and these histories must not be minimised. Late nineteenth-century evolutionists charted human progress on assumptions as much Spencerian as Darwinian, treated racial traits as functions of social behaviour, and counted the development of formal political offices and impersonal legal systems among the marks of advance (Kuklick 2010a: 95). The race theory against which Boas fought was anchored in biology by evolutionary ideas that ranked some races as more primitive and more animal-like than others (Carrithers 2010: 500). Vigilance had excellent grounds.
Evolutionary biology is not reducible to those histories. Fox, himself an advocate of the field, observes that social anthropology, in repudiating its evolutionist origins, has often confused Darwinian theory with its Spencerian version and has felt obliged to repudiate any general theories of human behaviour grounded in evolution and animality (2010: 658). The claim comes from a partisan hand and should be read as such, and his own survey includes derivations of institutions from a single motive of reproductive maximisation that repeat, in a neo-Darwinian vocabulary, the Malinowskian pattern of deriving institutions from a fixed need. The argument of this article is no more an endorsement of those derivations than of Malinowski's table. Its point is that vigilance can harden into an inability to distinguish evolutionary biology from racial evolutionism, and that an important field of legitimate comparative enquiry then becomes difficult to articulate.
The Edinburgh exchange can now be read in context. It remains an occasion and no evidence by itself. Set beside the pattern traced in this section, it shows that after a century of these intellectual conflicts the move from evolution to racism can still happen almost instantaneously, and that no colleague had to be wrong for it to happen.
VIII. Beyond Biological Need and Cultural Construction: The Living Value Theory Recovery
Living Value Theory is neither neo-functionalism nor naturalism, and the recovery has to be stated in a way that makes this evident.
The refusal of the proposed choice
Living Value Theory refuses the choice between biology and culture, between universal need and cultural construction, between organism and society, and between material necessity and symbolic meaning. These are L4 stabilisations of the kind it calls SWIPEs, splits of worlds paired with incommensurable epistemologies (see Defining SWIPEs), and they can obscure the processes from which they were abstracted. Functionalism and its opponents sat on opposite sides of the same split. The replacement for the choice is living coordination under vital stakes, and this is the positive object of the article.
Vital stakes are mesocosmic
Vital does not mean biological in the sense of the nature/culture division. Vital stakes arise within living processes. A body must coordinate temperature, nourishment, fatigue, injury and environmental conditions, and the body is never an isolated natural substrate. It is somewhere. It depends on material conditions, it is often coordinated with other living beings, and in human beings it is massively reshaped through made things and symbols. The mesocosm is what exists before the distinction between Nature and Culture is imposed, and it is no meeting point between the two (see What Is the Mesocosm?).
Dissolution and redescription
Calling something mesocosmic does not by itself abolish the nature/culture distinction, and the claim of dissolution needs an argument. A redescription keeps both terms and the questions they generate, and relabels the region between them. A dissolution shows that the partition does not carve its object and removes the questions that depended on it. Four considerations support dissolution.
The first is that no remainder exists. Any actual coordination can be examined for a component that belongs wholly to one side, and none turns up. Swallowing looks biological, yet what is swallowed, when, with whom and from what depends on every other mediation, and an infant's swallowing is coordinated with a feeding body from its first occurrence. A recipe looks cultural, yet it presupposes tongues, hunger, a stove and a season. Each candidate assignment presupposes the mediations that were assigned to the other side.
The second is that the partition fails by its own evidence. The same event is described twice, as nutrition and as food, as disease and as illness, and neither description reaches the event (Strickland 2010b: 511; Lambert 2010: 458). The subfields keep discovering phenomena that their partition excluded (see The Disease/Illness Distinction).
The third is that the partition is a historical stabilisation. In its paired form it is recent, culture having become a word capable of standing opposite nature only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (see When, Exactly, Did Nature Split from Culture?), and Carrithers records that it belongs to a small segment of the societies of the North Atlantic Rim (2010: 501). It became a presupposition prior to inquiry, which is the mark that distinguishes a SWIPE from an ordinary opposition. A SWIPE reifies an analytic difference into independently constituted domains, pairs each domain with its own way of knowing, restricts the transfer of method across the division, and becomes prior to inquiry instead of a finding that inquiry might revise (see Defining SWIPEs).
The fourth is that the five mediations do not themselves form a SWIPE, and the contrast shows what dissolution means. They are irreducible to one another, and they are not independently constituted domains, since every human coordination runs through all five. They are not paired with separate epistemologies, since fieldwork, diagnosis and close reading attend to all of them, and no restriction on the transfer of method follows. Their identification was a finding about coordination that could have gone otherwise, and a coordination in which one of them failed to appear would count against the account (see Discipline of Attention for the diagnostic form of such claims). Irreducibility without independence is what lets the architecture carry difference without partition.
What dissolves are the questions that presupposed the partition: how culture is built on biology, which part of a practice is cultural, where cultural barriers obstruct nutrition, how the two sides interact. In their place stand questions that inquiry can answer: which mediation carries the load, at which recursive level, with which counterpart relations and in which temporalities. Measurement, physiology and fieldwork all remain. What goes is the assumption that they answer to separate worlds.
Eating as a worked demonstration
A person eats soup. Embodiment supplies hunger, taste, swallowing and digestion. Multispecies being-with supplies the cook, the family, the guest, the farmer and the seller, together with the plants and animals in the pot. Dwelling supplies the climate, the season, the soil and the water from which the ingredients came. Multimateriality supplies the bowl, the stove, the spoon, the kitchen and the agricultural and transport infrastructure behind them. Multisymbolization supplies the recipe, the prohibitions, the cuisine, the price, the classification of the dish and the hospitality in which it is offered.
None of these is an addition to a biological need. The eating exists through their coordination. The metabolic stake is nevertheless real, and if nourishment fails severely enough no symbolism can abolish the consequences. This is mesocosmic constraint without institutional determination.
Sleep as a second demonstration
Every known human sleeps. Yet sleep predicts none of the following: bedrooms, beds, eight-hour blocks, night-time sleeping, privacy, co-sleeping, marital arrangements, sleep medicine or work schedules (see A Living Value Theory of Sleep, and for houses and bedrooms The House at Night). Vital necessity coexists with radical variability in the way the necessity is coordinated. This is exactly the combination that Malinowskian functionalism could not theorise, since its logic tied each stake to a corresponding institution and so left no room for a stake that is universal and an organisation that is not.
How the institutional entailment is avoided
A further objection holds that Living Value Theory merely relocates the entailment it criticises, with stakes now entailing coordinations in place of institutions. Three features of the account prevent this.
First, the mapping from stakes to institutions is many-to-many and cannot be a function. A single institution answers several stakes at once, and a single stake is answered through several institutions or through none. Households illustrate both. Goody's distinction separates dwelling units defined by sleeping, reproductive units defined by eating and economic units, and shows that each may be organised independently, so that one household can include personnel from several of the others (Sanjek 2010: 359). The vital coordinations are the same in Accra and in South Asia, and the criterion that defines the household differs. Households in an Accra neighbourhood have been defined by where people sleep and store possessions, households in a South Indian Muslim group by where people eat, and elsewhere by pooled economic contributions, each choice following a local logic (Sanjek 2010: 359). Eating and sleeping are coordinated in every one of these cases, and which of them organises the household varies. The stake constrains, since people must sleep and eat somewhere and with someone, and it does not select the institution. A functional account would have to say which institution answers the stake of sleeping, and the household data show that no single answer exists.
Second, institutions are L4 stabilisations that can stabilise several coordinations at once, and a stake is always a stake within a living coordination. The coordination can be examined at the level at which it runs, in the mediations through which it runs and in the counterpart relations it involves, before any institution is mentioned. An institution enters the analysis when it is found to be part of how the coordination is carried, and no earlier.
Third, claims of the two kinds have different logical forms. A functional claim says that institution I exists because it meets need N. Since the slot for I is presupposed, the claim is protected from failure by the search for equivalents, which is the history of African Political Systems. A diagnostic claim says that in this situation the strain is located in this mediation, at this level, and is patched in this way, and the evidence can show it wrong (see Discipline of Attention). The entailment re-enters whenever the absence of an institution is treated as a reason to look for its equivalent, and the check is easy to apply to any proposed analysis.
Evolution without evolutionary reductionism
Evolution now becomes recoverable on different terms, as the deep history of living coordination and no longer as a history of nature before culture. The emergence of embodiment, being-with and dwelling can be investigated phylogenetically. Human multimateriality and multisymbolization can be studied as evolved elaborations without turning either into a separate cultural realm (see The Genesis of the Five Mediations, Zoetic and Poietic Mediations and Easy Does It). Carrithers closes his survey on a synthesis in which human beings evolved first as social animals and only then as culture-bearing ones (2010: 502), and the present account agrees that continuity runs deeper than the symbolic, while placing the continuity in coordination across mediations. Continuity with other animals therefore does not diminish human difference, and human difference does not require an ontological rupture between animal nature and human culture.
The relevance problem recovered
The argument can now be reconnected to Goodman. Because indefinitely many comparisons are logically possible, a comparative science needs a principle of relevance. Functionalism sensed this, and its mistake was to convert relevance into institutional necessity. Living Value Theory retains the relevance and removes the institutional entailment.
Vital stakes identify what demands comparison. Living coordination identifies the object. The recursive-mediational architecture supplies the dimensions of analysis, which are the five mediations, the five recursive levels and the three types of recursive counterpart. Historical and ethnographic investigation establishes the form. That is the complete method.
Levels of comparative relevance
Not every comparison reaches equally far. At one end lie metabolic continuation, repair, the regulation of rest and activity, and orientation to the environment, which have extraordinarily deep phylogenetic scope. Next come eating, sleeping, mating, care, play and antagonistic interaction. Then come increasingly specific human coordinations such as ritual, markets, courts, universities, elections and parliamentary politics. The layers describe a topology of comparative scope, and higher or lower has no bearing on worth. The later layers can become vitally consequential without becoming ontologically foundational. Politics can determine whether someone eats, and that does not mean that eating derives its relevance from politics. The direction of explanation matters.
Return to Malinowski
The return should be generous and exact. There is no need to say that the early Malinowski was good and the late Malinowski bad, and the primary texts would not sustain so tidy a chronology. Two tendencies coexist in him. One remains close to bodily, relational and practical life. The other converts recurrent stakes into classificatory functions and institutional domains. Living Value Theory radicalises the first and rejects the conceptual architecture of the second. The recovery runs through Malinowski, and it does not lead back to him.
IX. Conclusion: Abolish the Polarity, Recover the Stakes
A century after Malinowski it can still feel difficult in social anthropology to ask very elementary questions. Why do human beings sleep? Why do they eat? What kinds of animals are they? How did these forms of coordination emerge? What continues across human and nonhuman life, and what changes? These questions need not carry us back to racial evolutionism, biological determinism or nineteenth-century naturalism. They become dangerous only if anthropology still assumes that acknowledging vital constraint means denying human variability. The argument of this article has been that this inference is false.
The century-long mistake can be summarised in four moves. Malinowski discovered the stakes and called them biological needs. Functionalism converted needs into institutional functions. Structural functionalism transferred vitality from organisms to society. The rejection of functionalism then pushed anthropology toward the opposite pole of culture, symbolism and construction, and left the underlying nature/culture opposition intact. The correction is to abolish the polarity and recover the stakes. Anthropology was right to reject functionalism, and in doing so it helped discredit precisely the question of vital relevance that functionalism had initially, if inadequately, tried to answer.
Human beings do not first possess biological needs and then invent cultural ways of satisfying them. Eating, sleeping, reproduction, injury and death are not merely meanings constituted inside cultural worlds either. Living beings continuously coordinate themselves in worlds whose conditions matter to what happens next. These stakes make some differences matter more than others without dictating institutions, symbols or forms of life, and they therefore provide something that anthropology has repeatedly sought and never adequately secured: a ground of comparative relevance without a theory of cultural determination.
Vital stakes constrain living coordination without determining its form. That is what Malinowski almost discovered, what functionalism obscured, and what anthropology can now recover without returning to nature/culture.
References
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LVT corpus articles
Culture Is Not a Text: Everything Wrong with Anthropology's Most Famous Metaphor
The Disease/Illness Distinction: Where We Went Wrong and How to Move On (Series: SWIPEs 3/5)
Dwelling in the Mesocosm: Retracing Ingold's Path
Easy Does It: A Living Value Theory of Cognitive Evolution
From Meaning to Stakes: Recovering Anthropology's True Task
The Genesis of the Five Mediations: A Deep Evolutionary Account of the Human Mesocosm
The Hail Mary Test (Part 4): Four-Field American Anthropology
The House at Night: Domestic Architecture as the Coordination of Sleep
Living Value Theory as a Discipline of Attention
A Living Value Theory of Sleep
Notes and Queries in Mesocosmography: Eating and Sleeping
Sleep Medicine: A Living Value History
The Space of Difference: Nature, Culture, and the Hidden Architecture of Anthropological Comparison
Split Worlds with Incommensurably Paired Epistemologies: Defining SWIPEs (Series: SWIPEs 1/5)
What Even Is a “Comparison”? (Series: Genesis 1-2-3)
What Is Relevant About Being a Bat? Living Value Theory after Thomas Nagel
What Is the Mesocosm? (Core LVT 1/4)
When, Exactly, Did Nature Split from Culture? (Series: SWIPEs 2/5)
The Wonder of What Works Well: How Living Value Theory Discovers Questions
Zoetic and Poietic Mediations and the Evolutionary Threshold of Homo sapiens