The Meme Machine

114 THE MEME MACHINE
spread in numerous other ways, despite being false. Apparently, in 1911 the
famous anthropologist Franz Boas noted that Eskimos used four unrelated words
for snow. Somehow this idea appealed and was inflated again and again until it
became hundreds. Modern estimates suggest that Eskimos use at most a dozen
snow words but then this is not many more than there are in English, and is not a
bit surprising since Eskimos spend their lives in the snow. Even in English, we
have hail, sleet, slush and wintry showers, and people who work in snow, or ski,
use extra words as required, such as corn, spring, or sugar snow, powder or (as
my dad used to call the wet heavy stuff) puddin’.
The legacy of Boas and extreme cultural relativism stretches far beyond the
small matter of the number of words for frozen rain. According to the relativists
just about every aspect of human behaviour was learned, was variable, and could
be entirely different in different cultures – even sexual behaviour.
Many people seem to hate the idea that human sexuality can be explained in
terms of genetic advantage, and early sociobiologists were pilloried for
suggesting it. The popular view had long been that familiar sex differences,
such as female choosiness and male promiscuity, were purely cultural creations,
and in another culture things might be totally different. Superficially, this is
certainly true in that some cultures prize huge feather headdresses and others
pinstripe suits; some cultures admire naked pendulous breasts and others uplift
bras. But what about the more basic differences? The view that all sexual
behaviour is culturally determined was central to the work of Franz Boas, and in
the 1920s a young student of his, Margaret Mead, set out for Samoa to study a
society that he and she believed would be totally different from their own. In
her famous book Coming of Age in Samoa, Samoa, Mead (1928) described an
apparently idyllic and peaceful life in which there were no sexual inhibitions,
and adolescent girls were free to have sex with whomever they liked. Culture, it
seemed, was to blame for our own inhibitions and unfair disparities between the
sexes. Biology was irrelevant.
This brief apparently fitted with what people wished to believe about their
own sexual nature, and was accepted as valid evidence that in other cultures
almost anything goes. It was a set of successful memes that endured for nearly
sixty years even though it was based on only a brief study by a young student.
The principle was barely questioned and almost nobody bothered to check. That
is until the early 1980s when an Australian anthropologist, Derek Freeman,
painstakingly took the story to pieces.