There are two issues at the heart of this debate. First, the question of
what constitutes culture. And second, the question of the relationship between
humans and non-human animals. Or, to put it another way, of how we should
conceive what it is to be human. The answers to the two questions are, as
might be expected, closely connected.
The historian Raymond Williams once described culture as the most difficult
word to define in the English language. But behind the complexities of the
various meanings of culture, there are two broad ways of thinking about it
pertinent for this debate. At the risk of over-simplification, one can call
them the Enlightenment and the Romantic visions of culture.
Enlightenment philosophes talked of civilisation rather than culture and through
it they expressed three key ideas. First, they saw culture or civilisation
as a single phenomenon, an expression of human universalities, rather than
of human differences. Second they understood it as transformative, as an expression
of human agency. Culture was as much about our emancipation from nature as
of our embodiment in it. And thirdly, it expressed their belief in progress
- technological, moral and social.
The Romantic view of culture developed through the nineteenth century directly
in response to such Enlightenment beliefs. Romantics saw not a single civilisation,
but a plurality of cultures, each rooted in a particular people's history
and myth. Culture, therefore, was an expression of differences, not of universals;
and of a putative past, rather than of a potential future.
Anthropologists influenced by this tradition came to view culture as functional
rather than as transformative, that is as something essential for social integration
and stability, and hence downplayed the role of agency in human life. Both
the Enlightenment and Romantic ideas of culture embodied, then, particular
(and very distinct) visions of what it is to be human.
What has this to do with the debate about chimp culture? Over the past century
the Romantic view of culture has come to dominate both academic anthropology,
and our everyday notions of culture. It also underlies the concept of culture
that Andrew Whitten has outlined. Professor Whitten's view of culture as consisting
of habits acquired from others, and as an expression of differences within
a species, is a naturalised version of the Romantic idea. It is, I think,
a useful way of thinking about chimp behaviour - but not about human culture.
Humans do not simply acquire habits from others. We also constantly innovate,
transforming ourselves, individually and collectively, in the process. There
is a fundamental distinction between a process by which certain chimpanzees
have learnt to crack open palm-nuts using two stones as 'hammer' and 'anvil',
and a process through which humans have created the industrial revolution,
unravelled the secrets of their own genome, developed the concept of universal
rights - and come to debate whether we own culture. For humans, as Enlightenment
philosophes understood, culture is as much about historical progress,
and the creation of universals, as about the delineation of differences of
habit.
Andrew Whitten suggests that understanding culture in chimps may help us understand
culture in humans, and hence to understand better what it is to be human.
Maybe. But the concept of culture he employs already embodies a view of what
it is to be human, and one that has been fashioned during 200 years of debate
about human culture.
To accept that studies of chimpanzee culture can illuminate human culture,
we already have to accept a particular (highly contested) notion of what culture
is, and what it is to be human. Or, to put it another way, chimpanzee studies
can illuminate human culture, if, and only if, we have already accepted that
chimp culture and human culture are not that different - in other words, we
have already accepted what we set out to prove in the first place.
Many animals may well be cultural creatures under a naturalistic definition.
But humans are entirely different sorts of cultural beings. In the six million
years since the human and chimpanzee lines first diverged, chimpanzees have
evolved, but, in comparative terms, their behaviour and lifestyles have barely
changed. Human behaviour and lifestyles have clearly transformed out of all
recognition.
Humans have learnt to learn from previous generations, to improve upon their
work, and to establish a momentum to human life and culture that has taken
us from cave art to quantum physics and the conquest of space. It is this
capacity for constant innovation that distinguishes humans from all other
animals. All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history.
History is not the expression of a ratchet effect. Rather it is an expression
of humans as a different kind of being. Uniquely among organisms, humans are
both biological beings, under the purview of biological and physical laws,
and also self-conscious agents, with purpose and agency, able to design ways
of breaking the constraints of biological and physical laws. We are, in other
words, both immanent in nature and transcendent to it. Understanding human
culture means also understanding the peculiar ontology of being human.