SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

184 I Social Theory and Social Action
the genetic basis for the general human ability to make conventions. The opposition
between nature and convention, between genetic determination and cultural
determination, is thus transcended. As Robin Fox (1980:185-86) puts it:
If we can analyze society itself as a natural product of natural selection, then
the categories arising from it are themselves products of the same process, deriving,
certainly, not from "individual experience" but from the collective genetic
experience of the group—its gene pool. They are thus at once both
"social" and "innate." . . . Culture and society are natural phenomena, and
concepts and categories, rules and emotions, have all developed together as interconnected
responses to recognizable selection pressures. Conceptual thought
and language, inhibitions by obedience to rules, emotional responses to objects
of social and environmental classification, all developed together.
Since the tendency to follow social customs is itself genetically specified, conventions
are rendered epiphenomenal, as merely linguistic labels for patterns of behavior
regulated by noncultural factors.
In The Red Lamp of Incest (1980) Fox sets out to explain, among other
things, one of the ur-conventions of anthropological discourse, namely, prescriptive
marriage rules stipulating that individuals must find mates outside their own
kin group yet from a specifically defined other group. At least since Morgan's
time, nothing—language excepted—has more challenged our ability to construct
universalistic explanations than the variety and complexity of documented patterns
of marriage alliance, with corresponding systems of lineage organization
and kin-term typologies. Fox argues that our early hominid ancestors faced an
increasingly difficult time reconciling two needs, the need to maximize genetic
replication through inbreeding and the need to maximize genetic strength
through outbreeding. The solution to this dilemma was forced upon more developed
homo sapiens when they began hunting for meat. With the males out hunting
and the females out gathering, the sexes began to rely on each other not just
for procreation but as exchange partners, so that rather than fight over women,
men exchange near-kin among themselves, thereby establishing the category of
"marriageable kin." In other words, a man does not marry his sister but rather
is guaranteed the sexual services of a second or third cousin. Whereas hominid
males had a "tendency to accumulate females" for breeding purposes, primitive
hunting and gathering peoples maximized sexual capital through the "investment"
in marriage. The parallel to the transition from mercantilist accumulation
of wealth to capitalist investment is remarkable. Fox even phrases this development
in terms of the switch from women as "use-values" to women as "exchange-values"!
Instead of keeping females for themselves, dominant males in
some groups began to exchange sisters; the perpetuation of this arrangement,
called cross-cousin marriage, ensured the constant circulation of the most valued
commodity, women.
Naturalization of Convention I 185
But what happened to the notion of a marriage rule, if everything is determined
in the end by the selective pressure? Fox's (1979:133-34) answer is, as
he admits, "tedious":
Our uniqueness lies not in having, recognizing, and behaving differentially to
different kin (this happens throughout nature), it lies in giving this process
names and rules of naming; in the classification not the kinship. . . . Kinship
grouping and kin-derived behavior do not make us unique: the naming of kin
does. In each case a universal, hence biological, feature is associated with a
"cultural practice." But by the same logic, the cultural practice—ruling and
naming, i.e., classification—if universal, must also be biological. Hence one set
of biological features—the propensity to classify and regulate—comes into
conjunction with two others: the propensity to outbreed and to behave differentially
toward kin. All this is possible through the mediation of language. The
latter, however, being universal, is also biological, and hence the unifying feature
of the other two biological features is itself biological. Ergo, there is no
nature-culture distinction, everything is natural-biological. Hence the argument
that we cannot use analyses developed for nature to interpret culture fails
since by its own logic the supposedly unique cultural features turn out to be
natural.
Fox's just-so attack on conventionality is double-edged: the ability to make conventions,
that is, to impose linguistic classification upon patterns of action, is
merely the inconsequential labeling of already established practices. And because
rules for kinship and marriage are found universally in human society they must
be products of the same biological forces which determine the behavior they
name. That is, conventions are either pointless or natural. 3
Naturalization and Conventionalization in Social Reality
Lastly we should realize that dancing in a partner's arms is a product of
modern European civilization. Which shows you that things we find natural
are historical. Moreover, they horrify everyone in the world but ourselves.
—Marcel Mauss (1979:116)
Thus, the concept of conventionality has in principle a relative, rather than
absolute meaning: it is impossible to say that a given form is more
conventional and another less conventional without taking into account how
these forms function in the LANGUAGE under consideration, whether it is a
natural language or a language of art.
—Boris Uspensky (1976:8z, n. 34)
We have seen that several strands of positivistic discourse, namely, Hobbes's
deductive mechanics, Morgan's practical rationality, and Fox's sociobiological
reductionism, posit the theoretical naturalness of social convention. Moreover, in