Reviewed by: Benjamin N. Colby

Walter Goldschmidt, UCLA Professor Emeritus, has given us a handy introduction to the broad field of social anthropology as seen from the now rare perspective of someone first tutored by Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie. While holding to the conventional concept of culture commonly held in the discipline Goldschmidt has kept up with developments in other fields, particularly developmental psychology, which has come to be increasingly recognized as a germinal part of the cultural process. Rather than simply as an add-on as in the old characterization “culture and personality,” psychological anthropology will likely come to be seen as integral part of any serious well-defined development of culture theory. While Goldschmidt does not formally develop such a theory he is on the right track. Sharply critical of sociobiology and genetic determinism as explanations for human behavior, he writes that we should give more ethnographic attention to how biological and cultural forces interact. In that sense he takes the same path as Malinowski’s needs--institutional approach, though unlike Malinowski, Goldschmidt looks also at evolutionary biology. Today it is a far cry from the social Darwinistic flavor so prevalent in Malinowski’s time and extending even into the 1980’s.

The book is an excellent general introduction to sociocultural and psychological anthropology broadly conceived and with special attention to such motivational aspects as affiliative need, or as the author characterizes it, “affect hunger”which he defines as “the urge to get expressions of affection from others.” Goldschmidt cites early work by attachment theorists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth in developing their approach toward the affiliative needs of small children. Goldschmidt does not, however, mention earlier writings by fellow anthropologists about the same general subject such as Ashley Montague’s book on Touching: the human significance of the skin which, along with Montague’s other writings had an important influence on the general public at a time when academic anthropology gave little attention to such matters (1986). Nor were the cross-cultural child rejection studies by Ronald Rohner cited, yet those studies focus on the cultural consequences when affect hunger goes unfulfilled. The finding by Rohner that child rejection not only has consequences for self-esteem but also relates to increased hostility in a society—a hostility that extends even to a world view of supernaturals as hostile as well--has special relevance to our political situation today (Rohner 1986; Rohner, Khaleque et al. 2005).

While Goldschmidt’s emphasis on affect hunger is important and well-developed in the book, for professional readers these days, including biological anthropologists, my sense is that he is preaching to the choir (even Wilson himself has backtracked somewhat from the sociobiological hubris of the late 1970’s and the 1980’s). The last bastion of biologically determnistic views lies outside anthropology in the Santa Barbara school of evolutionary psychology and some of their supporters (mindful sometimes of what Malinowski would call “conjectural history”). I would guess that Goldschmidt’s book would be most interesting and useful to people who are new to anthropology, especially students who might be considering a major or graduate school in the field. In its broad coverage it reminds me of Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man (1949) which was one of the books that I read in college and which was partly responsible for my entering graduate school (surprisingly in retrospect, no anthropology courses, other than classical archeology, were offered at Princeton in those days). The “Bridge to humanity,” Goldschmidt’s main title, expresses the importance he gives to evolution as the bridge we take to understand ourselves. In another sense, his book is a bridge to the discipline.

In his description of various controversies touching members of the profession Goldschmidt is not above telling where he stands: for Margaret Mead against Derek Freeman, for the adversaries of Napoleon Chagnon rather than for him. In discussing Stephen Pinker’s dismissal of Sapir Goldschmidt observes that “Sapir was talking about what we think, about the mind, for that is an anthropological question, while Pinker is talking about how we think, about the brain, but he was too busy refuting what he knows nothing about to realize it (p. 80).”

Goldschmidt is at the forefront of disciplinary movement in another respect. In a coda he argues for an approach that actively considers well-being as an eminently anthropological subject: “I invite you to think about the ills you see in our society. Are they related to affect deprivation? If so, consider the cultural attitudes and public policies that might alleviate them (p. 151).”

The author’s approach is pleasantly discursive. There is a handy series of panels or sidebars interspersed through the book--extended footnotes, quotes, or vignettes, many taken from his own fieldwork, others of a more interdisciplinary interest. One of them tells about the discovery of mirror neurons and in his text Goldschmidt speculates how there might be a linkage between mirror neurons and language. Another sidebar concerns the prefrontal lobes as possibly the seat of the soul or sense of self.

It is gratifying to see how much attention Goldschmidt gives to the neurosciences. Nearly 20 years ago Victor Turner in the Waymarks Inaugural Lectures in Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame urged anthropologists to devote more thought to the human brain, advice that was rarely heeded except for a few specialists (Turner 1987). Now Goldschmidt, as a mainline social anthropologist, adds his voice to Turner’s in recognizing the integral importance the neurosciences have for both culture theory and for psychological anthropology.

After the postmodern turmoil of the 1980’s and early 1990’s, after the eschewing of science as a useful practice in anthropology, the sciences all around anthropology have leapt ahead of us. The neurosciences, in particular, have exploded with a host of findings that are clearly relevant to culture in the mind. This and the sea change in evolutionary biology (which now accepts group selection and the environmental shaping of phenotypes or polymorphisms) have brought anthropology into a new intellectual world of science at a time of serious danger to both our social and natural ecologies. The world is crying out. There is a deep affect hunger and plummeting cultural health everywhere. It is time for us to climb out of the pit and look around. Goldschmidt’s book is a good start.

REFERENCES CITED

Kluckhohn, C.
   1949 Mirror for man: The relation of anthropology to modern life. New York: Whittlesey House.

Montagu, A.
   1986 Touching: The human significance of the skin. New York: Harper and Row.

Rohner, R. P.
   1986 The warmth dimension: Foundations of parental acceptance-rejection theory. Beverly Hills: SAGE.

Rohner, R. P., A. Khaleque, D.E. Cournoyer
   2005 Parental acceptance-rejection theory, methods, cross-cultural evidence, and implications. Ethos 33(3):299-334.

Turner, V.
   1987 Body, brain, and culture. Waymarks: The Notre Dame inaugural lectures in anthropology. Kenneth Moore, ed. Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press: 71-103.