Abstract
This is the sort of book which ought in principle to interest sociologists but, because of its sources of data and narrative reference points, would not likely come to their attention via the usual sources. More than anything, this reflects arbitrary disciplinary divisions instituted for various administrative and budgeting reasons, having little to do with scholarly concerns. It was not too long ago that important sociology departments were formally linked with anthropology; there still remain a few of these jointly administered programs. It was surely not a great advance for learning when they were separated, mostly following WWII. As was then intuited by social scientists, anthropologists kept sociologists “grounded,” as it were, in the real behavior of real humans, while sociologists helped anthropologists think in terms that apply to contemporary life, and forced them to acknowledge the utility of surveys. Mark Pagel’s book would have stimulated a lively faculty discussion in such a department—which may indeed still exist in some quarters of the British university system.
The author is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, who “lives in Oxford” according to the jacket copy, not a trivial matter. Richard Dawkins (and other scholars with interests of this general type) also inhabited this ancient academical village for a long time, and Pagel is formally affiliated with the university there as well. This is significant in that Pagel’s argument elaborates Dawkins’ idea of a “meme,” which he coined in The Selfish Gene (1976), as his many admirers know. In Wired for Culture, Pagel extends this now famous term into the realm he knows best: culture. This is not “culture” as known to the more hip American sociologists, taking in dance crazes, tattoo parlors, movies, advertising, clothing fashions, and so on. This is the old-fashioned Melville Herskovitsian “culture” that fascinated large lay audiences from the 1920s through the 1970s, making cultural heroes of Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, Franz Boas, and others. Pagel, of course, updates this tradition by emphasizing linguistic and behavioral patterns, cross-culturally, which are more in keeping with today’s readers’ interests. The book is popular science in a good sense.
Some monographs write briefly about a range of ideas while others carry out extended analyses of one or two “big” ideas. Pagel chose the latter approach. As he does not tire of saying, “culture”—all the memes, large or small, which make it up—is a kindly straitjacket of the mind, exhibiting a surprisingly strong “degree of mind control” (p. 26). Surely William Graham Sumner said the same thing in Folkways: “While they [the folkways] are in vigor they very largely control individual and social undertakings, and they produce and nourish ideas of world philosophy and life policy” (1906, first edition, p. iv). Though ignoring Sumner, Pagel does add the evolutionary data for which biology has become famous, and indispensable, when considering humans in a large framework. He believes that the various cultural apparatuses that guide behavior have assumed the forms they have because such arrangements promoted genetic success over many generations. With this as his Archimedean point, he exhaustively illustrates the virtue of his idea by evaluating lots of human behaviors as they have evolved through various societies (he has done fieldwork in Africa, sprinkling his data throughout the book). Those which promoted genetic and reproductive success were prized and therefore perpetuated, and those which did not died out. His is a happy marriage of biological facts with speculative anthropology—a recognizable ploy in popular science writing that never seems to bore its intended audience. And the rhetoric he employs is also of that genre: “if we accept that our cultures have promoted our genetic interests throughout our history, then the arbitrariness of our particular cultural affiliation tells us something else: it reminds us that our particular culture is not for us, but for our genes” (p. 27). Not something normally voiced in sociology courses, this is what gives Pagel’s book its value.