Anthropology and Education 9781512816495

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The Martin G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education Fifth Series

ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION

The Martin

G. Brumbaugh in

Lectures

Education

Foundations of Education The Emergence of the Modern Mind Aspects of Value Education and the State

ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION

Anthropology and Education edited, by

FREDERICK C. GRUBER Professor of Education University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

© 1961 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Published in Great Britain, India, and Pakistan by the Oxford University Press London, Bombay and Karachi Library of Congress Catalog Number 61-15200

Printed in the United States of America

The Martin G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education T h e Martin G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education were begun in the summer of 1956 to provide an opportunity for the general public and the educators of the greater Philadelphia area to join the students of the University of Pennsylvania in hearing lectures by distinguished scholars who represent some of the academic disciplines which form the foundation for current American educational theory and practice. Previous Brumbaugh Lecturers have been: 1956

FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION

J. Donald Butler, Princeton Theological Seminary August B. Hollingshead, Yale University J. W. Tilton, Yale University 1957

THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN

MIND

Ethel J. Alpenfels, New York University Abraham Edel, T h e City College of New York Perry Miller, Harvard University Conway Zirkle, University of Pennsylvania 1958

ASPECTS OF VALUE

John L. Childs, Columbia University Thomas A. Cowan, Rutgers University Elizabeth F. Flower, University of Pennsylvania Philip P. Wiener, T h e City College of New York 1959

EDUCATION AND THE STATE

5

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T H E MARTIN G. BRUMBAUGH LECTURES IN

EDUCATION

Edward Warner Brice, U. S. Office of Education William C. Kvaraceus, Boston University Roy F. Nichols, University of Pennsylvania James E. Russell, National Education Association The present volume, Anthropology and Education, makes the fifth series of addresses available to the general public. Thanks are hereby given to authors and publishers for permission to quote from their published works and to all who have contributed to the success of the series. Martin G. Brumbaugh (1862-1930) was the first professor of pedagogy at the University of Pennsylvania, occupying the chair from 1895 to 1905.

Contents PAGE

T h e Martin G. Brumbaugh Lectures in Education

5

T h e 1960 Brumbaugh Lecturers

9

Editor's Preface

11

Schools in Revolutionary and Conservative Societies by Anthony F. C. Wallace

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Functions of Speech: An Evolutionary Approach by Dell H. Hymes

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Education and Identity by Ward H. Goodenough

84

Autonomous Motivation by Dorothy Lee

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The 1960 Brumbaugh Lecturers W A R D H . GOODENOUGH is associate professor and acting chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. at Yale University and after a brief teaching assignment at the University of Wisconsin joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. He has conducted field studies in various Pacific islands, and was a Ford fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been associate curator of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania since 1954. He is a frequent contributor to scholarly journals and has written Property, Kin, and Community on Truk.

H. H Y M E S is associate professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of California (Berkeley). After receiving his doctorate at Indiana University he joined the faculty of Harvard University, as instructor and later as assistant professor of cultural anthropology and linguistics. He was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1957-1958. His articles have appeared in linguistic, anthropological, and folklore journals. T h e American Folklore Society retains him as counselor and book review editor. DELL

D O R O T H Y D E M E T R A C O P O U L O U L E E is research anthropologist to the University Health Service and lecturer in 9

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THE

1960

BRUMBAUGH

LECTURERS

anthropology at Harvard University. Upon receiving her doctorate from the University of California (Berkeley) she joined the staff of the University of Washington as instructor in anthropology. Other teaching assignments were at Sarah Lawrence, Pomona, and Vassar colleges, and the Merrill-Palmer School. She is a fellow of the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, and served as consultant to the White House Conference on Children and Youth in 1950, and as lecturer in 1960. Among her many publications are Freedom and Authority as Integral to Culture and Structure, Culture and the Experience of Value, Anthropology and American Secondary Education, and Freedom and Culture. A N T H O N Y F. C. W A L L A C E is director of clinical research, Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, and visiting associate professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Having received his doctor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculties of Bryn Mawr and his alma mater, and also pursued advanced studies at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. During this time he also engaged in special ethnological and historical studies in the Tuscarora and Allegheny Seneca Reservations. He is particularly interested in the contribution that anthropology can make to the study of mental health. Among his published works are King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung 1700-1763, Housing and Social Structure, and Human Behavior in Extreme Situations.

Editor's Preface T H E PURPOSE of education in any society is to preserve its continuity. T h e nature of the school, one of society's principal educative agencies, is therefore determined by the nature of the society itself: its national ideals, the relation of the citizen to the state, and its attitude toward childhood. In order to get an insight into a complex pluralistic society such as ours, where issues are often confused, it is well to consider the functions of education in less sophisticated social groups. T h e discipline of anthropology is most helpful in this respect because it deals with the biological and mental manifestations of human life as they appear in different races and in different societies. Accordingly, this fifth series of Brumbaugh Lectures is devoted to the contribution which four distinguished anthropologists are making to important aspects of their field which have direct bearing on educational theory, organization, and practice. In his introductory essay, Dr. Wallace describes the relative importance which revolutionary, conservative, and reactionary societies give to intellect, morality, and technic. Professor Goodenough follows with a discussion of the identification of the individual in society and of societies within the world society according to the roles they choose or must assume. Professor Hymes shows the importance of language in this identification. He espouses an evolu-

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PREFACE

tionary theory of languages and maintains that some languages are more capable of growth and adaptation than others, and are therefore more likely to be the vehicle of communication in a world society than others. He illustrates the difficulty of linguistic study and shows how modes of expression within the same language are associated with certain acts and situations and include or exclude individuals from social groups. Finally, Dr. Lee asks a searching question about motivation. She believes that heretofore our western civilization and its educational system have been too greatly influenced by the hedonistic pleasure-pain, reward-punishment philosophy. She believes that this extrinsic type of motivation is in part responsible for most of the conflict between individuals and between nations, since it stresses getting and avoiding rather than giving and self-sacrifice. She questions the validity of this plan of action from the physical, biological, and psychological points of view, and after citing examples of heroism among primitive peoples, she asks whether man should not be motivated to actualize his own potentials and to expend the utmost of his courage and capacities in doing so. T h e implications of these four essays for American education are far-reaching. It will be profitable to consider some of them in relation to certain aspects of the public schools. Dr. Wallace describes our contemporary American society as conservative. He points out that our principles and life patterns are well established and that the older American families, especially those in the middle and upper socio-economic classes, have a great measure of security. It is an observable fact that the socially, economically, and

EDITOR'S

PREFACE

13

intellectually privileged can afford to be generous with others who are less so. T h e scholar does not have to husband his knowledge. He has enough and to spare. T h e man of independent income does not find himself in competition with labor and can afford to be a parlor socialist and a philanthropist. T h e family of the highest social class often assumes an air of equality with those below it because it knows its position is unassailable. T h e person of impeccable taste can like rock-and-roll and doggerel verse without becoming déclassé. When moral codes are well established, the few who deviate can be treated as socially or mentally ill. Religion becomes a mark of class and respectability rather than a deep spiritual concern. T h e school in such a society stresses the how rather than the why of education. It is more concerned with implementation than with exploration and discovery. Pure science and rigorous scholarship are permitted, but those who engage in them are known by the derogatory term "egghead." Education tends to become individualistic and permissive. T h e schools attempt to teach everybody everything from how to scan Virgil to how to choose a husband. Art becomes individualistic. Poets begin talking to themselves and musicians and painters also invent a language known only to themselves or to a small esoteric group. Intellectualisai is equated with a flair for remembering useless information and a reluctance to do a decent day's work, and the arts are left to the ladies. Money talks, the technician runs with the ball, and the politician calls the plays. Wallace warns that such a culture or such a school is likely to lose itself in a mass of details, to sell its intellectual birthright for a mess of techniques. His plea for a restoration of the intellectual disciplines and for a respect for

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PREFACE

learning and the ability to think clearly should not go unheeded. American society must not only prepare its native young for the responsibilities of full citizenship, but must also pattern the immigrant to American ideals and modes of living. Although preparation for citizenship is the responsibility of the whole community, the greater part of the task is assigned to the public schools. While the chief activity of the school has always been intellectual training, this has never been its sole function. In colonial times there was a marked religious emphasis. With the adoption of the federal Constitution, the opening of the West, and the strong influx of immigrants from other than Anglo-Saxon cultures and traditions, the emphasis was transferred from religion to citizenship. Religious pluralism permitted the individual to worship and to believe as he pleased, but adherence to the doctrines of American democracy became mandatory. As socio-economic conditions changed, as population centers shifted, as other educational agencies became impotent or shirked their responsibilities, more and more subjects were added to the school program. At present the intellectually superior are in the minority. T h e school cannot be unmindful of the needs of the majority while it trains the few for leadership. In American democracy, leadership arises from the group, and changes as the objectives of the group change. So far as citizenship training is concerned, American schools aim to make men alike, while most other democracies and all dictatorships aim to make men different. Wallace points out the tendency of certain elements within societies to become reactionary. In what appears to them the undermining of the pure doctrine, "economic royalists" and nativistic groups seek to impose restrictive measures upon others. Teachers are made to sign loyalty

EDITOR S P R E F A C E

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oaths, flag-saluting becomes mandatory, and a watchful eye is kept upon text and teacher for subversion. In times of uncertainty there is a return to orthodoxy, not only in religion but in politics and economics as well. T h e same factions who forced religion out of the schools to safeguard their offspring from heretical teaching, now accuse the schools of being anti-religious and demand that religion be taught in the public schools. Fortunately, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in effect that public school buildings and public school personnel should not be used to teach any brand or brands of religion and that patriotism does not depend upon the daily saluting of the American flag by little school children. Wallace's point here, that the general public should keep a cool head about these matters and recognize the non sequitur, is well taken. Preparing for the roles that each American citizen must play in life requires his identification with these roles, and the recognition by the group of the identity which each individual assumes. "Education," writes Professor Goodenough, "is the practice of human development," and Dr. Wallace suggests that the individual is being continually educated in the most complete sense by life experiences. He makes a distinction between education and schooling and observes that a person goes through many formal schools during his lifetime. T h e purpose of the school would then seem to be to pattern the individual in the image of the society in which he lives. All things being equal, it is believed that an infant transplanted early enough from his native environment will reflect the mores of the society in which he has been brought up. Many psychologists maintain that there is a natural desire

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PREFACE

among individuals to belong, to be identified as fullfledged, worthy, participating members of a group. T h e substance of group identification which we call tradition is often the result of a long and sometimes unconscious process, and is made up of many components. Not the least of these, as Professor Hymes shows, is speech. T h e habits of a language, its idioms, its inflections, its appropriate and inappropriate occasional utterances are, he maintains, the products of many generations. Practice in the use of language begins in infancy, and as Whitehead says, is the most difficult thing a person is called upon to learn. Not only does a language develop a national character, but classes within the group-culture set themselves apart by differences in usage. Even though methods of mass communication tend to reduce them, differences in dialect still persist, and he who does not speak the dialect does not and cannot belong. "Learning a language," writes Hymes, "is much more than learning vocabulary and grammar." Language, then, is not only a means of communication, but also a means of identification among members of a group. A comparative study of vocabularies will show the inability of some languages to express, and perhaps even to entertain, certain ideas because of the paucity of language in which to clothe them. Such considerations lead one to ask whether or not thinking is itself a group process since the mechanics of thought and the terms by which values are recognized and expressed appear to grow from group actions and sanctions. If this be so, then the delicate nuances of language become extremely important elements in the curriculum of the school. It has been said that while the study of other languages related to one's own, for example those of the

EDITOR'S

PREFACE

17

Indo-European group, will give insights into the traditions and the physical and social backgrounds which affect the mental habits and verbal expression of other nations within the culture of the West, it is only when one studies another language-family that one begins to understand the modes of thought of other world cultures. Northrop, for example, maintains that the Chinese ideograph reflects a realistic and empirical metaphysic while the alphabet of the IndoGermanic languages is based upon a system of abstractions. This difference, he maintains, is one of the important considerations so frequently overlooked in planning programs to promote international understanding. All the essays in this volume lend support to this point of view. Other items of identification within groups are beliefs, food, clothing, housing, possessions, occupations, recreation, and human relationships. There is more truth than falsehood in the statement that one is born into a certain religion or political party. Certainly every society has a basic formula of beliefs, however derived, which it imparts to its young through custom and practice, and which it rationalizes for them through some type of formal education. Although there is a trend toward uniformity in dress, and cosmopolitanism in names of food and types of clothing, these still serve to identify nationalities as the terms wooden shoes, Lederhosen, the ten-gallon hat, spaghetti, sauerkraut, and borsch will indicate. Professor Goodenough's story about the use of corrugated iron roofing by the Nakanai to identify themselves with European civilization is an excellent example of the influence of housing within social groups. In our more sophisticated society there are "good" addresses and poor

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PREFACE

ones. There is a strong movement toward uniformity in the split-level house, the two-car family, and the private swimming pool as status symbols. Goodenough also shows how the injection of the economy and method of a foreign culture often changes communal occupations into specialized and competitive ones. Hollingshead and other sociologists have demonstrated how a large part of our population moves up or down a rung in the social ladder in every generation, and how those who purpose to climb upward carefully plan each step which they must take. In some cases this means that the aspirants must make a complete break with the past and seek an entirely new identification, including a new name to disguise their national origin. This change can be made with greater ease by members of the Nordic race, while others are handicapped by identifying features and pigmentation. T h e matter of social and geographic mobility among Americans is of considerable importance to public education. T h e problems of the new family in the community, and especially of the new child in the school who tries to identify himself with the new environment, are of considerable concern to schoolmen. T h e newcomer has been uprooted. If his family is wise, he will bring with him something personal which will preserve his identification with the past, and there will be a closely knit relationship between parents and offspring. T h e social, economic, and professional standing of the new family will help materially in identifying it with the new community and will help the child achieve status in school. But even if all these conditions are favorable, he must break into the often closed and carefully guarded circle of the groups which students form, especially adolescents in the upper high school grades. T h e newcomer is scrutinized in every

EDITOR'S

PREFACE

19

respect to determine his degree of conformity to the group and to ascertain whether he will or will not be a threat to established prestige or groupings. If the student is socially and economically unable to keep up with the group or is unacceptable because of race, religion, or physical appearance, the problem of identification and acceptance is magnified so much the more. Recent studies show that relatively more students drop out of high school before graduation because of these reasons than from inability to do the work. Many problems arise from the lack of understanding of the sub-culture by members of the established community. Conflicting standards in customs and morals make understanding difficult. T h e middle-class teacher in the substandard neighborhood must treat differences with regard to private property, health, sanitation, and human relationships with patience and understanding. When the student from the substandard community wishes to raise himself to a higher social status, as many do, he often confuses the symbols, the appearance, of the new status with its substance. Concerning this point, Professor Goodenough writes: "How often we contribute to the defeat of our educational purposes because we classify as disqualified for education those who have just gone through the act of committing themselves to it." T h e understanding teacher will recognize the intention of the student, will accept him in his new status, and will help him to select and apply the standards, activities, responsibilities, and attitudes as well as the symbols and the rewards. As most individuals identify themselves with persons they have known actually or through history and literature, the school, especially its curriculum and staff, will share extensively in helping the individual select

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PREFACE

and identify an appropriate role for himself. T h e study of literature, especially the drama, is effective here, because he who plays a role is encouraged to determine the motivation for the character he portrays and the effect of such action on others. During his school life there are four identity changes which the student must make, and in the adjustment to which the school must share. T h e first is from the restricted, intimate, and sheltered mother-child relationship to the achievement of an independent personality in the company of his peers. This is the change from infancy to childhood. Next is the change from childhood to puberty, then from early adolescence to youth, and finally from youth to young adulthood. In all cases the task of the school is to cooperate with home and community in preparing the individual for the role he is about to assume, by describing its substance and its symbols, by helping the individual to accept and to live by them, and by making sure that the individual is recognized and accepted in his new role by the rest of the community. T h e willingness of a person to accept an appropriate role and to live by it is discussed by Dr. Lee in her essay on autonomous motivation. She implies that many modern educators depend so much on external motivation and reward that learners readily get the notion that everything has its price, and that the individual remains passive, even resistant to all action until he is stimulated from without to perform after a certain pattern already determined by the motivator. Certainly the philosophies of Mill, Comte, and Spencer, and modern experimental psychology, give ample evidence to support the view that

EDITOR'S

PREFACE

21

man, both individually and collectively, acts as a machine. Education has been greatly influenced by the behavioristic, conditioned-reflex theory, and the philosophy of determinism. The curriculum of the 'twenties was made up of tabulations of job and activity analyses, and educators were enjoined to pattern students to behave as society expected them to. Dr. Lee's approach to the study of motivation is both hormic and phenomenological in that she maintains that the individual is impulseful, and that the impulse to activity is directed outward from the individual toward the objective he wishes to achieve or the object he wishes to affect. She maintains that the same attitudes of self-restraint, of exhaustive exertion, and of self-sacrifice that she observes in non-Western peoples are present in our own society, and concludes that this forward thrust, while originating in the individual, must work cooperatively with others if we are to achieve a desirable future. If Dr. Lee's theory be true, much of our education is pointed in the wrong direction. What we should work for is a cooperative striving in a semi-determined society. We shall want to invite our students to strive vigorously for a self-fulfillment which has its satisfactions not in rewards and recognitions, but in the internal satisfaction of having realized oneself, of having found one's home in one's inner being, in the world in which one lives, and in the universal scheme of things. Perhaps what Dr. Lee is saying is that it is not man's function to realize his potentials for himself alone, not to manipulate his environment, not to subdue or to be submissive to the society in which he lives, but to realize

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himself in and of the organism which is itself the vital, purposeful, self-motivating universal which is existence. From anthropology, then, the educator can learn what it means for the individual to be identified with what is real. FREDERICK

Philadelphia February 1961

C.

GRUBER

ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION

Schools in Revolutionary and Conservative Societies ANTHONY

F.

C.

WALLACE

INTRODUCTION

There is a great debate in this country today about schools. In what degrees should they stress the intellectual, technical, athletic, and social development of the student? Should the approach of the teacher to the pupil be didactic or persuasive? Should schools be integrated or segregated, by race, by religion, by intelligence, by social class? T h e very existence of debate, and the acrimonious language in which it is conducted, poses an interesting problem for the social scientist. We live now in a world society which is rapidly changing, both collectively as a result of the ongoing world-wide industrial revolution, and severally, nation by nation, in consequence of the more particular pressures of local cycles of revolution, conservatism, and reaction. May not some of the local American arguments, and their acrimony, be merely the expression of conflicts which arise, lawfully and predictably, from strains inevitably generated by those cyclical processes of cultural change the major phases of which we call revolution, conservatism, and reaction? That is the question which this essay will undertake to discuss. 25

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THE KINDS OF LEARNING

Let us begin, pedantically, by defining the word school. We shall say that a school is an institution which deliberately and systematically, by the presentation of symbols in reading matter, lectures, or ritual, attempts to transform from a condition of ignorance to one of enlightenment the intellect, the morality, and the technical knowledge and skills of an attentive group of persons assembled in a definite place at a definite time. Schools are virtually ubiquitous. It is nearly impossible for a h u m a n being to avoid attending school, whether he live in jungle or on desert, in city or in hamlet, or even in hospital, jail, or concentration camp. In America, and in all industrial societies, there are schools of six major kinds: (1) compulsory schools for that general transformation of youth into a qualified citizenry which occupies the childhood and adolescence of most young persons; (2) degree-granting schools (generally called colleges and universities) for advanced and specialized training of young adults; (3) religious (or political) schools for young and old; (4) military schools; (5) vocational and job-training schools; and (6) a vast miscellany of schools which impart what may be described as occasional knowledge, of such widely various subjects as first aid, Zen Buddhism, and the manufacture of compost. Even in the most primitive societies, where schools of a kind familiar to us would be difficult to maintain, schools there are nonetheless, of a particular kind: the mystery schools. Mystery schools would seem to be of three main types: the "bush schools" which indoctrinate pubescent males and females with the secret lore of adults; the religious schools which induct novitiates into religious cults and secret societies;

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and the professional schools which instruct young shamans in the arts of their profession. These schools have developed out of rites of passage, particularly initiation rituals, and hence are sometimes called initiation schools; they elaborate their socially useful function around joints in the tree of maturation, and always retain as much interest, if not more, in testing and celebrating the human transformation as in shaping the transformation itself. But they fit the definition: they are definite in place and time and membership, and concerned with communicating in symbols their definite bundles of information. Our schools differ from the primitive schools, apart from obvious discrepancies in size and plant, in the degree to which they are divorced from the process of celebrating the more or less spontaneous transformations of human experience, and in the extent to which they aggressively produce the transformations necessary to cultural continuity. Our schools profess, at least, to teach us almost everything we know. Yet, as we all realize, even in our own scholastic society, schools are able to impart only a fraction of what any man learns. Any one of us can testify to this poignant truism. Like most of my readers, I, for instance, as an American professional man, have been continuously entangled with some school or other since the age of five. I have, in fact, spent nearly all of my life flitting in and out of schools, as full- or part-time student or teacher. Let me enumerate "my" schools as I recall them. As a student I attended kindergarten, grade school, junior high school, Sunday school, high school, liberal arts college (leading to Bachelor of Arts degree), basic military training, Army Specialized Training Program (one semester of engineering), military radio operators' school, Armed

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Forces Institute correspondence school (mathematics), graduate school (leading to the Master's degree and doctorate in anthropology), and the Rorschach Institute Summer Workshop; and followed the didactic curriculum at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute. As a teacher I have instructed illiterate soldiers in the basic arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic; I have taught various social science subjects in three departments in two institutions of higher learning; and I have given occasional lectures to students in several curricula at various institutions. Now to be sure, many persons of my age, in this society, have attended more schools and also have taught for longer periods of time in a greater number of schools; and furthermore, while I have done a certain amount of teaching, I do not regard myself as, primarily, an educator. My major commitment thus far has been largely to research and the administration of research. So perhaps there are others who have learned in school relatively more than I of what they know, value, and can do. But for my own part I am sure that a very large proportion of what I know, value, and can do I learned apart from any school. I learned to speak a language before I went to any school; I learned to feed myself, walk, drive a car, play tennis, scrub my ears, and write halfway decent prose outside of school; I absorbed a large proportion of useful technical knowledge by reading and in conversation outside of school. Most of what little I do know about the problems I spend most of my time thinking about now, I learned after I emerged from the cocoon of graduate school, chirping like a green locust, clothed in the loose folds of a damp Ph.D. T h e point is an obvious one, but its obviousness should not tempt us to leave it out of consideration: that learn-

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ing in school is only one kind of human learning; and that human learning is simply a complex form of an activity in which all animals (and an increasingly large number of machines) engage. It is convenient to arrange the circumstances of human learning in the form of a scale of generality, each category of which is contained in, and implied by, its succeeding category. If we take schooling as the initial category, it is followed by education, then enculturation, then learning itself. Schooling is the learning that is done in a school; and a school, as before, is an institution which deliberately and systematically, by the presentation of symbols in reading matter, lectures, or ritual, attempts to transform from a condition of ignorance to one of enlightenment, the intellect, the morality, and the technical knowledge and skills of an attentive group of persons assembled in a definite place at a definite time. Education is all learning (including but not confined to schooling) obtained from reading or from listening to formally prepared symbolic presentations. Enculturation is all learning enjoined on the person with a particular status as a member of a particular culture-bearing society, and thus includes, in addition to schooling and education, such homely but essential skills as knowing a language or two; observing the proper times, places, and techniques for the execution of such malleable bodily processes as urination, defecation, breathing, walking, eating, sleeping, and sexual intercourse; the securing and effective use of clothing, shelter, transport, weapons, and help; even the manner of communicating emotion and other information by facial expression, body posture, and other kinesic devices. Learning, of course, is the cover term, embracing all of the foregoing, and also those idiosyncratic learnings which every person

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accumulates throughout his lifetime and which may or may not be transmitted to others. Let us now classify learning in a different way, by matter rather than by position on a scale of circumstance. In any situation of learning, three matters can be learned. These are the matters of technic, of morality, and of intellect. A n d since the bulk of this essay will concern the content and priority of these matters under various conditions, we shall now discuss these three matters of learning in some detail. Technic is the most conspicuous matter of learning. And it is the teaching of technic which has been the subject of the most intensive analysis by psychologists and educationists. T h e most widely used paradigm for the learning of technic has been the stimulus cue —» response reinforcement structure (the so-called S-R type of learning). This paradigm describes an animal which acts after it has been "stimulated" (i.e., after an environmental process has produced a change in its internal state). It has an opportunity to do various things, but at least one of these things will be followed by a "reinforcing" (i.e., punishing or rewarding) change of the organism's internal state. Furthermore, each action is performed in a context containing perceptible "cues." Experience shows that for almost any species it is possible to select some combination of stimuli, cues, and reinforcements in the matrix of which the animal will with increasing reliability perform some one action. T h e process of reliability increase is called "learning" because the observer feels that he too, if he were in the same spot, would perform that act as soon as he discovered that it was more frequently followed by a reward, or at least by the negation of punishment, than any other alternative. In naive

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language, the animal "learns how" (i.e., learns the technique) to secure reward and/or to avoid punishment. It is easy to infer from this what corresponds to common belief, namely that people, dogs, and rats all learn best when they are "motivated." It is also easy—but not necessarily valid—to infer that people, dogs, and rats will learn best what is reinforced, directly, personally, and materially. Technic, therefore, is "how to" learning by reinforcement. It includes such things as learning how to talk, how to extract the square root of a number, how to dance, how to harpoon a walrus, how to play a piano, how to decorate an apartment, how to cook a meal, how to balance a budget, how to identify a witch, how to get to heaven. From this standpoint, even the rote learning of information—dates, names, events, formulas, art work, institutional structures, store prices, fashions, and the like—is "how to" learning, for the motive lies not in the acquisition of the information but in the use to which it may be put, whether to impress the neighbors, to win prizes, to fill out the image of the "intellectual," or whatever. A n d even values—such as standards of beauty, tastes in music, concepts of the good life—may be learned, both by rote, as when one learns first the symbols for the rewarded values, and later, by performing the act that earns the reward. Morality, on the other hand, deals not so much with "how to" as with "what." Furthermore, in my usage here, morality concerns, not just positive and negative goals, not just values, not even all socially approved values, but one particular kind of socially approved value. T h i s kind of value is the conception that one's own behavior, as well as the behavior of others, should not merely take into

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consideration the attitude of the community, but should actively advance, or at least not retard, its welfare. Morality is thus to be sharply distinguished from mere propriety, conformity, and respectability, although it is not necessarily non-conformist. Morality, in this sense, is most conspicuously exemplified by such heroic actions as the soldier's who throws himself on a hand grenade in order to smother the blast and save his buddies; as the statesman's who suffers political oblivion rather than betray his country's interests; as the tribesman's who gives himself up to the enemy for punishment in order to prevent retaliation upon his whole people. It is also most commonly practiced in the humble endurance of discomfort, protracted over decades, by inconspicuous people in positions of responsibility. Now it is, to my way of thinking, questionable whether this kind of morality can be adequately explained by any simple learning-by-reinforcement model. Although morality is not necessarily accompanied by sacrifice, in any particular case its criterion is its potentiality for sacrifice. And sacrifice seems to fly in the face of the law of effect. Indeed, the American academic psychologist is apt to deny that moral behavior in this sense can exist in a sane person. I recall once hearing such a psychologist argue with a psychiatrist on the point. T h e psychologist had posed this extraordinary question: Suppose that a man and his wife were in some dangerous situation such that the husband could only escape with a whole skin if he abandoned his wife to her death; but he could save them both if he suffered a mutilating injury which deprived him of his genital organs. T h e psychologist argued that the normal husband would inevitably abandon his wife. T h e psychiatrist asserted that only an immature man would place a lower value on his wife's survival than on

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his own sexual anatomy. Yet anyone who has observed men in combat, who has seen the religious or the political devotee in action, who has watched a family holding together in adversity, must realize that morally altruistic behavior is possible. And it is hard to escape the inference that such persons, on such occasions, have not learned to sacrifice their own interests in favor of their conception of the interests of other persons merely by passing through some adroitly arranged sequence of Skinner boxes. The third of our matters of learning is intellect. By intellect I do not mean intelligence, nor do I mean intellectualism. As Jacques Barzun has lucidly and at considerable length explained, intelligence is not necessarily governed by intellect, nor is the intellectual, as a social type, necessarily a custodian of the "House of Intellect." Intellect is, as he puts it, an "establishment": That part of the world I call the House of Intellect embraces at least three groups of subjects: the persons who consciously and methodically employ the mind; the forms and habits governing the activities in which the mind is so employed; and the conditions under which these people and activities exist. . . . Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion—a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand. Intellect is community property and can be handed down. . . .

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That is why I have used the image of a house. I would speak of the realm of mind—limitless and untamed— but I say the House of Intellect, because it is an establishment, requiring appurtenances and prescribing conventions. . . . From the image of a house and its economy, one can see what an inquiry into the institution of Intellect must include. The main topics are: the state of the language, the system of schooling, the means and objects of communication, the supplies of money for thought and learning, and the code of feeling and conduct that goes with them. When the general tendency of these arrangements makes for order, logic, clarity, and speed of communication, one may say that a tradition of Intellect exists.1 Intellect thus is, to begin with, a social tradition, an aspect of culture, if you please. The core of this tradition is the proposition that if a subject is worthy of consideration at all, it should be considered in a particular cognitive form. That particular way of proper consideration may vary considerably from one society to the next, and, in a complex society, from one group to the next. T o the humanist, the approach of intellect involves the careful and exact use of a language: the use may or may not be conventional in lexicon or even in grammar, but it must be as little ambiguous, self-contradictory, and flabby as possible. In the tradition of intellect, language is thought, and therefore there is no such thing as a strong thought lamely expressed; lame language is lame thinking. T o the Western humanist also, a willingness to range widely for quotation, for metaphor, and for illustration is a sine qua non of intellect; a provincial intellect is a contradiction in terms. In discussion, or even in argument, a man of

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intellect is ready to be bound, as well as to bind his opponent, by rules of logic; the non sequitur and other absurdities are inadmissible tools even if in the course of their use a valid statement happens to be constructed. The concern with logic reaches its highest refinement, however, not among humanists, but among scientists, who strive for the precision of mathematics, not because mathematics is numerical, but because it is logical. Where rigorous logic can be applied to non-quantitative observations, the scientist may—depending on the nature of his problem—be glad to work without numbers. But he too is conscious of living in a tradition of thought. Like the humanist Barzun, the physicist Oppenheimer uses the metaphor of the house to describe the world of the scientific intellect; and it is, as he says, "a vast house indeed." Oppenheimer, in contrast to Barzun, is fascinated by the fluidity, the boundlessness, the openness of "the house called science"—and, most of all, by the ceaseless work that goes on there. He introduces us, first, to one relatively quiet room that we know as quantum theory or atomic theory. The great girders which frame it, the lights and shadows and vast windows—these were the work of a generation our predecessor more than two decades ago. It is not wholly quiet. Young people visit and study in it and pass on to other chambers; and from time to time someone rearranges a piece of the furniture to make the whole more harmonious; and many, as we have done, peer through its windows or walk through as sightseers. It is not so old but that one can hear the sound of the new wings being built nearby, where men walk high in the air to erect new scaffoldings, not unconscious of how far they may fall. All about there are

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busy workshops where the builders are active. . . . It is a vast house indeed. It does not appear to have been built upon any plan but to have grown as a great city grows. There is no central chamber, no one corridor from which all others debouch. . . . It is a house so vast that none of us know it, and even the most fortunate have seen most rooms only from the outside or by a fleeting passage, as in a king's palace open to visitors. It is a house so vast that there is not and need not be complete concurrence on where its chambers stop and those of the neighboring mansions begin. . . . W e go in and out; even the most assiduous of us is not bound to this vast structure. One thing we find throughout the house: there are no locks; there are no shut doors; wherever we go there are the signs and usually the words of welcome. It is an open house, open to all comers. 2 It is, as C. P. Snow reiterates, one of the tragedies of our time that the house of the humanistic intellect and the house of the scientific intellect seem so often to be, to one another, mutually barred and hostile citadels. It is possible that this conflict of the "two cultures" is more in the nature of a civil war than of a struggle between two establishments, and that the House of Intellect is one divided against itself; and conceivably, it is the relative poverty of this house, in our own society, which has made it difficult for its occupants to get along with one another. But we should not confine our discussion of intellect to the last few centuries of western Europe and the Americas. T h e r e was, for instance, a scholastic intellect which developed in the medieval religious tradition. T h e r e was a tradition of the intellect among the followers of Mohammed; and, likewise, among Indian, Chinese, and other

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civilized peoples. It would be possible, indeed, to argue that intellect has its own tradition and its own problems, in most if not all cultures, even though its house may be small and contain only a few specialists in law, religion, politics, warfare, irrigation technology, astrology, or what have you. For the utility of intellect springs from the fact that it is the only truly universal tool, capable of maintaining and restoring human arrangements against the erosions of time, capable of recognizing and solving new problems as well as learning the answers to old ones. And it does this intensely human task by requiring its users to practice what is sometimes, and paradoxically, described as an inhuman detachment from the technics and morality of the moment. We may make a schema to represent the divisions of learning which we have so far discussed. In Figure 1 are shown the three matters of learning and the scale of the circumstances of learning:

Fig I

The

Divisions

of

Leorning

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W H A T SHOULD A MAN

LEARN?

T h e obvious answer to the question of what a man should learn has already been taught us by the anthropologists. Manifestly, what it is needful to learn in one society is not necessarily needful in another. Cultural differences demonstrate that there is no absolute set of things to be learned; what a man should learn is a function of his culture. But concealed behind this principle lies a corollary: in order that noticeable cultural differences shall exist at all, there must be a significant degree of conformity to norm within each society. And this prevents us from going on to assert that what a man should learn is a matter for him alone to decide. T h e r e is, in fact, no human society on the face of the earth which concedes to any individual the right to learn anything he chooses. And furthermore, it is the school which is established by the community—not, be it noted, by the family—to ensure that the individual learns what he must know. T h e values which guide the group in its choice of what learnings to impress on the individual are legion, and they may be described on many levels of complexity; but for our purposes three contrasting value orientations are most significant: the revolutionary, or Utopian, orientation; the conservative, or ideological, orientation; and the reactionary orientation. What a man is expected to do in his life will, in part, depend on whether he lives in a revolutionary, conservative, or reactionary society. And what he is expected to do determines what he is expected to learn. Furthermore, not merely what a man should learn, but whether he should learn it in a school, or from his parents, or from his peers, or by casual reading, con-

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versation, and attendance at entertainments, will be in part determined by whether he lives in a revolutionary or a conservative or a reactionary society. W e are asserting, in other words, that the value orientation of the society—in the tripartite sense given above— will determine not only the content of what a man is expected to learn, but whether he is expected to learn it in a school or under some other circumstances. Now the utility of the three value orientations as a means of classifying each of several contemporaneous societies is unquestionable. Without much difficulty one could, for instance, label China and Cuba today as revolutionary societies; the United States and Great Britain as conservative; and Portugal and the Union of South Africa as reactionary. China and Cuba are deliberately and forcibly replacing old institutions with new ones organized in a new way according to a plan. T h e United States and Great Britain are, in regard to domestic policy, conservative in the sense that the existing institutions are considered to be adequate, not perfect but perfectible, and hence in need not of replacement but of repair. Portugal and the Union of South Africa are reactionary in the sense that their leaders' internal policies have been warped by an intention to ward off internal attack from groups which threaten to replace existing institutions with new ones. While no society can be wholly one thing or another, everywhere, in all of its aspects, at any one time, it seems reasonable to consider one value orientation or another as predominant in a given group, such as the political, economic, or religious leadership, during a stated period. T h e precise content of these values, of course, will vary: thus a revolutionary society may be communistic, capitalistic, Muslim, nativistic, or whatever,

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depending on local circumstances; and a comparable variety of conservatisms and reactions are also available. But we may also use this tripartite classification for different time periods in the same society. Here one may expect that the orientations will change in a definite order: a society which is now revolutionary will, if it changes, become conservative, next reactionary, and again most probably revolutionary. Thus, over centuries or millennia, any one society is apt to follow a roughly cyclical path through revolution, conservatism, and reaction, over and over again. This subject has been approached by scholars and scientists in various ways and is one of the classic problems of the social sciences. My own approach to it has been via the study of what I call revitalization movements, particularly of a religious variety. Thus one may, with regard to any one society, expect to find that the content and circumstances of learning will vary with the varying predominance of its value orientation. And now we may go to the crux of the matter. It would appear that with each of the major value orientations there is associated a philosophy of schooling which characteristically assigns priorities to the matters of learning in schools. It is to the elucidation of the association between these priorities and the value orientations that the remainder of this essay will be devoted. THE REVOLUTIONARY SOCIETY

Let us consider first the dynamics of a revolutionary society. A revolutionary society is a society dominated by a revitalization movement, which may be defined as a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture. It may in the extreme be either religious or political, but is usually

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a combination of both. The code of the movement defines the previous state of society as inadequate, perverse, even evil, and depicts a more or less Utopian image of the better society as the goal culture toward which the ad hoc and temporary social arrangements of the present transfer culture is carrying the society. Generally, a revitalization movement must pass through six stages in order to create a truly revolutionary society: Formulation of the code. Mere dissatisfaction with the existing state of affairs does not launch a revitalization movement. A prophet, political party, or clique must formulate explicitly the nature of the existing culture's deficiencies, the nature of a desirable goal culture, and the nature and mode of operation of the transfer culture. This formulation must be more than an exercise of intellect; it must be passionately moral. Communication. The formulator must preach his code to other people. This communication must emphasize the moral obligation of the bearer to subscribe to this new code and render service to the movement. Organization. T h e converts made by the formulator organize into a hierarchical system, with a prophet or other titular head, an elite group of disciples who constitute an executive praesidium, and a rank and file who carry out but do not make policy. Adaptation. As the movement's challenge to the existing leadership of the society is met, by counter-propaganda or by force, the movement will be required to enlarge, modify, specify, and otherwise adapt the code to the circumstances of survival. The process of reformulation is continuous from this point on, for new situations constantly arise not anticipated in the code; and it lasts long after political victory is complete. This process of doc-

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trinal elaboration is a work of disciplined intellect, and high value is accordingly placed on intellect, which can perform such work (whereas technic cannot). Cultural transformation. When social power falls into the hands of the movement (the revolution is "won"), the movement is able to carry out directly the cultural transformation of the society. In this process, morality and intellect are more valuable than technic, for technic tends to be conservative, and intellect will discern that a new technic will have to be invented to meet new tasks. Routinization. As the movement's immediate aims are realized by the acquisition of power and the establishment, if not of the goal culture, at least of the transfer culture, the organization of the movement per se tends to contract into the form of a church, or a behind-the-scenes party, which attempts to maintain the ongoing transfer culture. A t this point the society has become conservative, with a division of role between the executive and the moralitymaintaining functions. T h e present world, no less than past human history, affords numerous examples of revolutionary societies. W e have already cited China and Cuba as examples. Communist nations form a large class of revolutionary societies today, but many other kinds exist: for example, a revitalization movement among the Manus, off the coast of New Guinea, described at length in Margaret Mead's book, New Lives for Old; the numerous "cargo cult" and "marching rule" movements delineated in Peter Worsley's study of Melanesian cults. The Trumpet Shall Sound; the nationalisms, Egyptian, Algerian, and contemporary African; the new India and Indonesia; and so on. Much of contemporary world history can best be understood in terms of revitalization theory.

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With respect to schools and schooling, one inference is paramount: that in a revolutionary society (i.e., a society in the process of cultural transformation under the leadership of a revitalization movement) the primary concern of schools must be the moral transformation of the population. Next in order of priority will be intellect; and last of all, technic (despite the often critical need for technically trained personnel to carry out the program of the transfer culture). T h e reason for this priority list— morality, intellect, and technic—is that the moral rebirth of the population and the development of a cadre of morally reliable and intellectually resourceful individuals to take over executive positions throughout the society is the immediately necessary task. This is a capital investment, so to speak, from which interest in the form of technical skills will ultimately be generated. T h e moral intellectuals produced by revolutionary schools may, to conservative eyes, appear to be fanatics and theoreticians who fumble badly on technical tasks. But they are necessary, during the temporary period of revolution, in order to do the work of converting the populace, developing large plans, and adapting the code to local and temporal circumstances. If they do their work well, they will develop a base upon which later expansions of technic can build without fear of counter-revolution, apathy, and lack of foresight. T h e most conspicuous example of the revolutionary priority scale in schools is the Chinese Communist educational program, including the so-called "brain-washing" programs not only for prisoners of war and political enemies but also for new cadres. Moral reform comes first; training in the work of intellect (in order to explicate and apply political theory to local situations) falls second; and finally come technical skills: this is the order of emphasis.

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It is also noteworthy that Communists, at least in the preparation of a revitalization movement in a non-Communist country, work busily to develop cadres at universities in order to transform, in effect, the schools from institutions emphasizing technic into institutions emphasizing morality. The school thus becomes, willy-nilly, the moral battleground for the rest of the society, and (without necessarily having the blessing of faculty or administration) therefore functions as a moral and intellectual training center for both revolutionary and reactionary factions. THE CONSERVATIVE SOCIETY

A conservative society is a society in which a revitalization movement has won its battle with reaction and has established a successful new culture. This new culture may, in terms of the revitalization code, be only a transfer culture, but since the process of transfer may, even in theory, take a long time, it can become a stable way of life. Being secure and successful, the old movement does not need to preoccupy itself with combat against reaction or against new revitalization movements. T h e problem is to keep the machine going as efficiently as possible, with occasional improvements, and possibly with smoothly programmed shifts from one stage to another on the path toward the goal culture. With respect to morality, the transformation of the society is sufficiently complete for severe moral non-conformists to be treated as delinquents, criminals, or victims of mental illness. T h e reform, rehabilitation, or control of these people can be safely left to the police, the courts, the medical profession, and (most importantly) to the informal sanctions of the family and the community itself. All communication media are saturated with applications

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of the new code. Society as a whole can therefore communicate the moral values necessary to the maintenance of the transfer culture, and thus to the achievement of the goal culture, through multiple channels of communication as part of the general process of education and without extreme dependence on schools. It is even possible to permit a degree of open non-conformity, of a less severe kind, to be sure, in order to avoid the inconvenience of exercising close surveillance over individuals and the expense of deliberate schooling. A conservative society is, paradoxically, also a liberal society, precisely because the elite is secure enough that it can afford to learn from its critics and even to absorb them into the ranks of conservatism as a "loyal opposition." With respect to intellect the conservative society is tolerent, but since the work of code formulation and its application has been largely accomplished, the skilled practitioner of intellect is not necessary to the regime. Intellect becomes a rather special tradition, relatively free from constraint, but without access to power because, in a political sense, it has little power to offer. Thus the schools see relatively little need to force intellect even upon the intelligent. Intellect becomes a career in itself, self-sought and guild-protected, with the members of the guild practicing partly for the fun of it and partly as professional men selling their services to the highest bidder (and not necessarily, alas, for a high price). Under such circumstances, remarkably "pure" intellect can develop, producing vastly significant contributions to knowledge, and ultimately perhaps exerting considerable social power. But this power is exerted in an amoral manner, as in the creation of new weapons and technologies, new philosophies of the mind, new mathematics, and so forth.

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AND

EDUCATION

T h e morally concerned "intellectual" is apt (in a statistical sense) to be no intellectual at all, but a taker of unconventional moral and aesthetic stands in a stereotyped conventional way, a snob, a poseur who pretends that what is different from mass behavior must be based on superior values. T h e "intellectuals" and the practitioners of intellect are generally rather distinct groups in conservative societies, the true practitioner of intellect being a professional, ruthlessly severe in competence, and relatively indifferent to the moral implications of his work, even though his life as citizen, parent, and friend may be highly moral. Indeed, for some professionals of this type, the work of intellect is in itself morally good, provided it is competent work: this the scientist, if not the humanist, maintains. T h e "intellectual," by contrast, is likely to be an amateur, a dilettante, a poor painter, a sloppy writer, and an incompetent musician, whose noisy revolt against conventional morality and technical materialism is supported for its entertainment value by materialists, condemned by moralists, and largely ignored by practitioners of intellect. But the divorce of intellect from morality, ending a marriage which was consummated in revolution, makes the house of intellect itself appear to the outsider to be merely a specialized machine shop of technic, and transforms the orientation of the school toward it. T h e school now emphasizes technic as its primary mission. It first of all trains people to do jobs. T h e jobs may be closely defined: bookkeeping, automobile driving, jousting with a lance, praying correctly; or they may be vaguely defined: being able to vote intelligently in elections, handling human relations smoothly. T h e demands of morality come next, for morality is considered, in a negative sort of way,

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to be necessary to keep society from falling apart. (In the revolutionary society, morality was supremely necessary, both to prompt the destruction of the old society and to guide the building of the new one.) Intellect is respected, but it is also recurrently confused with native intelligence, with the pseudo-intellectualism to which we alluded earlier, with some sort of impotent disloyalty, with stuffiness, with an inhuman lack of concern for human values, or even with immorality and cruelty. As such, it may be allowed to develop spontaneously but will not be supported by the state, for fear of developing something dangerous at the expense of undeniably useful technic and unquestionably desirable morality. THE REACTIONARY

SOCIETY

T h e reactionary society is a post-conservative society. T h e conservative order, having been challenged by a budding revitalization movement (i.e., by what it regards as a treasonable, heretical conspiracy imported from abroad), adjusts its posture to minimize the effectiveness of its competitor's propaganda and to mobilize counterattacks. In the interest of preserving the same values that an earlier revitalization movement established in pain and sweat, and which the conservative society cherished and elaborated, the reactionary society subverts its own way of life in order to deliver telling blows against the enemy within. In so doing it may destroy the very social structure which it is defending; and it becomes, because of the growing discrepancy between ideal and practice, and because popular confidence in its values begins to erode, rapidly moribund, an eminent subject for revitalization. T h e reactionary society thus, in the area of learning generally, has two paramount concerns: first, to combat

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the alien heresies by revealing the inadequacy of their values and the poverty of their practice; and second, to recapture the moral enthusiasm of its earlier, revitalization phase. Consequently, the reactionary society shares with the revolutionary society a supreme concern with morality: a paradox of social history which is apt to puzzle the sophisticated conservative in the middle, who finds it difficult to understand the extremists, who seem to understand each other very well. This concern with morality is reflected in a re-emphasized religiosity, a refurbished political ritualism, repressive laws, an oppressive police, and —in the schools-—a conviction that the moral education of the young must take precedence over all else. This anxiety lest the young can be morally seduced requires, as in revolutionary societies, the schools to take over from the family, from industry, and from other social groups the responsibility for the moral development of the young, and to place extreme emphasis on the human environment of the school child. T h e moral purity of his teachers and his schoolmates comes to be more important than the content of instruction, or even than school itself, and if either knowledge or rectitude must be sacrificed, it is knowledge whose immolation is certain. Although they share a preoccupation with morality, the reactionary and the truly revolutionary society differ in their evaluation of intellect. In the logic of revolution, morality and intellect are believed to be linked in a pact with the future. Hence, as we have suggested, the revolutionary society will place intellect before technic in its scale of priority: the cultivation of intellect becomes a kind of capital investment in people. In the reactionary society, by contrast, intellect is feared as a potential enemy because, in the preceding conservative phase, it has acted

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as endowed critic of the conventional wisdom, charged with responsibility for pointing out pathways to improvement; and because, in the competing contemporary revolutionary organization, students and mature intellectuals are conspicuously influential. Thus the reactionary society will favor technic over intellect, will redefine tasks which previously were regarded as intellectual in order to make them technical, and will redefine relatively harmless aesthetic diversions as "intellectual." T h e cost of this scholastic reorganization, however, is apt to be very great, since the derogation of intellect will reduce the number of persons in the reactionary society who are capable of thinking coherently, purposefully, and creatively on matters of public concern. T h e ultimate consequence to a reactionary society of neglecting the cultivation of intellect is collapse before the onslaught of a revitalization movement which is guided by intellect. MORALITY. INTELLECT

v

, TECHNIC \ / MORALITY

TECHNIC

INTELLECT

Revolutionary Phase

Conservqtnre Phase

Fig 2.

The

.MORALITY

Motters of

TECHNIC

INTELLECT'

Social History

Reactionary Phase

Leorning

CURRENT APPLICATIONS

Today our society here in the United States is conservative. We went through our major revitalization movement nearly two hundred years ago; we have elaborated and refined the principles established during our revolutionary period—principles thought out by men of intellect and codified in the Declaration of Independence and the

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federal Constitution—and have since that time worked to preserve and perfect a way of life guided by these principles. Under the pressure of internal strains and foreign wars, cold and hot, we have so far avoided becoming truly reactionary. There is a clear danger, however, that the external pressure of a revolutionary Communist philosophy, even though its internal influence is very small, may provoke the unwary into adopting a reactionary posture. Nowhere is this danger more present than in regard to the schools. Our schools have traditionally been, as must be the case with any conservative society, less interested in intellect than in technic, but nonetheless more interested in intellect than in morality. Elaborate precautions have been taken to prevent the excessive intrusion of overt religious or political interests into the public and private schools. But by placing control of schools in the hands of all too often technically, rather than intellectually, committed educators and practical business and professional men, equally elaborate efforts are made to ensure that technic takes precedence over intellect. This situation in itself has brought cries of alarm from many people—admirals and parents, laymen and college deans—who recognize the inherent danger to our rocket program in raising generations of children who are not intimately acquainted with the obligations of intellect, who have been trained to do everything well except thinking. T h e intellectual unpreparedness of many college graduates is certainly an obvious problem to anyone who contemplates the large number of unsuccessful candidates for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Contributing to failure, in many of these cases, is an inability to construct a coherent paragraph, to design a dissertation, to understand even the

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most elementary operations of formal logic, or to distinguish the interminable presentation of disconnected observations, obtained with elaborate instrumentation and offered in a pretentious technical jargon, from disciplined scholarly or scientific investigation. It is also a critical problem in recruiting scientists for both fundamental and applied research, which, contrary to popular mythology, does not proceed automatically, guided by the goddess of wisdom, but stumbles along at best, and at worst wastes millions of dollars on hastily planned and illogically conceived assaults on empty problems. T h e question is not one of intelligence, but one of intellectual, as opposed to merely technical, training. Graduate schools are not intended, and should not serve, to convey training in intellect: they must depend on secondary schools and colleges to provide them with candidates for specialized training whose intellects are at least somewhat disciplined, if not altogether mature. But danger resides, not merely in the practical consequences of the present dilapidated condition of the house of intellect, but in the likelihood that this unsatisfactory state of affairs will become even worse. Loyalty oaths, the censoring of libraries, the singling out of teachers and scientists as a group for investigation, the cramming of curricula with courses in sex, marriage, automobile driving, citizenship, and political right thinking, and the willingness of a considerable part of the white population to do without schools rather than sit next to Negroes— these are signs of a reactionary panic which, it if spreads, will inevitably destroy the intellectual base of an entire nation, and leave it, within two generations, blind in a revolutionary world. Thus, in the view taken in this essay, the school prob-

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lem of the contemporary United States does not arise from some inexplicable deterioration of moral and intellectual stamina, related to a Spenglerian decline of the west. Nor is it the consequence of any particularly perverse philosophy of education. The progressive schoolman and the fundamentalist in education—neither of whom want precisely what I want, but who are nonetheless likely to be skilled, devoted, and self-sacrificing public servants—are both at the mercy of innumerable semieducated electorates and their politically affiliated school boards, of state and federal educational bodies, of legislatures, of boards of trustees, of colleges and foundations, all of whom are exquisitely sensitive to dangers to the conservative position, and many of whom will soon be all too ready to insist that the schools' first duty is to develop moral and well-trained citizens and soldiers, and that its last duty is to discipline the mind. Let me suggest what, in a conservative society intending to survive in a revolutionary world by refusing to freeze into the reactionary posture, the value hierarchy of the schools should be. T h e cultivation of intellect should come first, technic second, and morality last. Intellect should be cultivated in all persons, to the limit of their abilities, and those whose abilities are least should learn to respect and admire the achievements and the rewards of those more fortunate. (This is not a psychological impossibility, nor need it be traumatic: athletic sports are not prohibited as mentally unhygienic simply because ability and hard work are conspicuously rewarded, while the vast majority are left to watch delightedly the feats of the stars.) Far from supinely assuming that the rigor of logic and mathematics and of language studies does not generalize to anything but itself, such rigor

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should be required in work on all other subjects, both humane and scientific. T h e goal should be a citizenry who feel an obligation to be rational in their thinking on personal or public affairs as well as in their technical work. Let me cite a humble example. I would like to see a generation of high-school graduates who are all willing to reject a conclusion reached via a demonstrated non sequitur. Surely it is not asking too much of an educational system to train all of its graduates to recognize and reject at least a simple non sequitur! There is no sacred spark in human nature which would be tragically extinguished if, because of his intellectual training alone, a man did not feel free to conclude that because all Communists, let us say, believe in racial equality, then all those who preach racial equality must be Communists! Indeed, I will go on to assert, quite seriously, that a readiness to squeeze a non sequitur out of a simple syllogism can ruin a person's, or a nation's, career as surely as bullets or hydrogen bombs. A general tendency to reject conclusions offered by, or tentatively drawn from, use of the non sequitur, is not a matter of morality, nor of technical skill in symbolic logic, nor of innate intelligence alone. It is a matter of intellect, of acquired tradition, of learning through instruction and experience that one is rewarded less often for choices based on a non sequitur than on those based on correct logical form. It is, indeed, a principal component of intellect precisely because it is a general tool which is applicable to any problem whatsoever. Now this, to my mind, is the kind of thing that intellect is all about. Intellect is a cultural matter; it must be learned; and, for survival, it must be used. Our country's

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survival as a conservative society—or, indeed, as any kind of society—depends radically upon maintaining a system of schools which teaches the tradition of intellect as its primary obligation. NOTES 1 Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), pp. 3-6. Reprinted by permission of the publishers. ' J . Robert Oppenheimer, Science and the Common Understanding (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), pp. 82-85. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY BARZUN, JACQUES.

The House

MEAD, MARGARET.

New Lives for Old. New York: William Morrow & Com-

1959.

pany, 1956.

of Intellect.

New York: Harper 8c Brothers,

R O B E R T . Science and the Common Understanding. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954. SNOW, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. W A L L A C E , A N T H O N Y F. C. "Revitalization Movements." American Anthropologist, Vol. 58 (1956), pp. 264-81. W O R S L E Y , P E T E R . The Trumpet Shall Sound. London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1957. OPPENHEIMER, J .

Functions of Speech: An Evolutionary Approach DELL

H.

HYMES

Let me begin by stating the thesis that lies behind my title. I want to controvert two widely accepted views, first, that all languages are functionally equivalent, and second, that all languages are evolutionarily on a par. I want to maintain that the role of speech is not the same in every society, and that the differences can best be understood from an evolutionary point of view; that we must understand speech habits as functionally varying in their adaptation to particular social and natural environments, and recognize that there are ways in which some languages are evolutionarily more advanced than others. Letting "speech habits" stand for the gamut of linguistic phenomena and "functions" for the varied roles these play, I am arguing for an evolutionary, comparative approach to functions of speech. Such an approach does not now exist in anthropology. I shall indicate reasons for the present neglect, and try to show that by overcoming it, anthropology will contribute to both its own theory and the foundations of education. T h e r e can be, particularly, a contribution to some problems of education in the rapidly changing modern 55

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world, especially in underdeveloped and linguistically complex areas. We are all aware that, given the great surge throughout the world toward social and economic progress, the only feasible goal is for all to share as equitably and peacefully as possible in the fruits of industrialized civilization. T o attain this goal in many areas requires the introduction of new educational forms and content, and we must help in this introduction while maintaining and enhancing the quality of education as part of a democratic way of life in our own country. And while success depends much upon problems which are political and economic, it also involves problems which have to do with the functions of speech. As an instance of a problem encountered widely, we can cite the Mezquital Otomi of Mexico. T h e need here is through education to enable a group to overcome its poverty and isolation from the national society. Dr. Manuel Gamio, father of applied anthropology in Mexico, once commented that Otomi cultural character had changed very little during the twenty-five years of his active work among them. Part of the problem is an arid environment, but a missionary linguist writes that "the comparatively high degree of monolingualism in the tribe, forming an immediate barrier to fusion with the official system of education executed in Spanish, a language foreign to most of the members of the tribe, is an obstacle to progress tantamount to the imposing economic one." 1 And the obstacle of monolingualism in such a case can best be overcome with the help of an adequate analysis of the functions of speech in the situation. How this is so will be easier to see after we have first examined the functions of speech from a general point of view. Let us do this by considering what it means for a child (or

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an adult) to master the speech habits of a group, to function as a linguistically normal member of it. FUNCTIONS OF SPEECH

When we think of learning a language, we may think first of rules of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary; but there is clearly more than this to the acquisition of a form of speech. A person could master these rules but still be unable to use them. He could produce any possible utterance but not know which possible utterance to produce in a given situation, or whether to produce any. If he spoke, he might say something phonologically, grammatically, and semantically correct, but wrong, because inappropriate. He might find hearers (or correspondents) "taking him the wrong way" or responding in ways that indicated that, although understood, he was not a normal member of the speech community. In a society speech as an activity is not a simple function of the structure and meanings of the language or languages involved. Nor is the speech activity random. Like the languages, it is patterned, governed by rules; and this patterning also must be learned by linguistically normal participants in the society. Moreover, the patterning of speech activity is not the same from society to society, or from group to group within societies such as our own. The nature of such patterning, as well as its crosscultural variation, can be brought out by considering four aspects of it: (1) in terms of the materials of speech, there is the patterning of utterances in discourse; (2) in terms of the individual participants, there is the patterning of expression and interpretation of personality; (3) in terms of the social system, there is the patterning of

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speech situations; and (4) in terms of cultural values and outlook, there is the patterning of attitudes and conceptions about speech. Let us briefly take up each in turn. 1. Beyond the syntactic structure of sentences (with which grammars usually deal), utterances have an organization into what we may call 'routines.' By 'linguistic routine,' I refer to sequential organization, what follows what, either on the part of a single individual or in interchange between more than one. 2 Routines range from reciting the alphabet, counting, and greeting, to the sonnet form, the marriage ceremony, and the direction of a buffalo hunt. Obviously, societies and groups differ both in the content of equivalent routines, such as those for greeting, and in the kinds and numbers of their routines. T h e more complex the society, the greater the number and variety of routines, and the greater the variation in control of routines by individuals. 3 2. Persons who participate in speech activity learn the patterning of its use as medium for personality and roleplaying. Cues expressed and perceived in speech may enable individuals to place, and to adjust quite subtly to. each other. This complex process ranges from tempo and general handling of voice dynamics to choice of expressions and over-all style. T h e individual learns both signaling patterns outside language proper and the integration of these in speaking (and, correspondingly, in writing.) Such signals differ from group to group, of course, and can be misinterpreted, either in themselves or as part of other behavior. Thus, as James Sledd observes: British speakers have far more final rising pitches in statements than do Americans, whose favorite intonation pattern / 2 3 1 # / sounds brusque to British ears.

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Britishers are also likely to use a greater range of pitches than Americans, more frequent and extreme pitch changes, and more numerous expressive devices. . . . In some parts of the United States, an adult male who talked so would be suspect.4 In a school for Mesquaki Fox Indian children near Tama, Iowa, many white teachers who probably regard their classroom behavior as normal, have had loudness of voice, together with verbal directness, interpreted by Indian pupils as "mean"-ness and a tendency to "get mad." T h e relative importance of speech to personality, visà-vis other modes of activity and communication, varies from person to person and group to group; and so do the range of expression and interpretation of personality possible in speech, the extent to which speech is a form of gratification (oral or other), and the importance of speech for role performance and attaining rewards, especially those depending on personal interaction. Among the Ngoni of Africa, rules of speaking etiquette are strict, and skill in speech is greatly encouraged, for such skill is considered part of what it means to be a true Ngoni. 5 Contrast this to conceptions of the "strong, silent type," the "man of few words," etc., in sectors of American society. 3. Social systems are often regarded as patterned relationships among roles and among groups such as families, lineages, and corporations; and there are speech patterns diagnostic or characteristic of particular roles and groups, just as there are speech patterns diagnostic or characteristic of particular personalities. These of course differ cross-culturally in content and relative importance. If we also look at a social system in terms of

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the behavioral activity involved, we can see it as a network of interaction in situations or behavior settings, and can discover related patterns of speech. For example, societies differ in the settings in which speech is prescribed, proscribed, or simply optional. W e so commonly think a social situation requires something to be said that writers have described this as a universal need. 6 Certainly, were someone to come to your or my house, sit silently for half an hour, and leave still silent, we should not consider it normal. In some American Indian groups this would constitute an acceptable social visit. For them, physical presence is enough; the situation is defined as one in which speech is not necessary when one has nothing to say. If we look at a social network in terms of speech settings, we can discriminate a set of factors whose interrelations may serve to describe its patterns of speech activity, and so provide a basis for comparing the functions of speech in different social systems. These factors can be termed: a sender (or source); a receiver (or destination); a message (viewed in terms of its form or shape); a channel; a code; a topic; a context (setting, situation, scene). All are compresent in speech activity. Societies differ in what can function as an instance of each factor, and in the relations of appropriateness which obtain among the factors in given cases. There is a system of speech activity in a society, then, because not all possible combinations of particular senders, receivers, message forms, channels, codes, topics, and contexts can occur. A teacher in a school for Navaho children may discover that one boy cannot speak to a girl classmate because she stands in a certain kinship relation to him. A society may traditionally permit only certain individuals to use the

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channel of writing; and among the otherwise non-literate Hanunoo of the Philippines, writing is used only among young people in courtship and love affairs. Education for birth control may encounter the barrier that such a topic cannot be discussed among or in the presence of both sexes, including husbands and wives. A teacher may misinterpret an ornate and allusive style in an examination as an attempt to conceal ignorance of the answers, not realizing that Puerto Rican students may deem it the only style appropriate to such an occasion. One teacher in a project of fundamental education may find it hard to teach children to define the classroom situation as one in which they do not talk to each other, and in which they speak to her only when asked or acknowledged. In another society a teacher may find it equally difficult to bring children to define the classroom situation as one in which they can speak at all, they having learned to regard instruction as a situation in which they function as receivers only. These scattered examples must suffice here, except to note, under the code factor, the importance of levels, styles, and functional varieties of a language, and in some societies, of entirely different languages, in relation to particular settings, channels, senders, and receivers. Here rules of appropriateness may make a great difference, especially if they differ for teacher and students because of differences in class or cultural background. 4. Cultural attitudes and conceptions regarding speech differ notably from society to society and also from class to class. T h e pattern of such attitudes and conceptions permeates the role of speech in personality and social structure. Reciprocally, differences with regard to the interest in and valuation of speech (or of a particular

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linguistic code) may have correlates in differences with regard to how speech enters into the socialization and early education of children. It is clear from ethnographic sources that societies differ as to their conceptions of children as users of language, and of the process of language learning; as to the stage in children's speech development at which major socialization pressure is exerted; as to the extent to which interest in speech and speech play is encouraged or discouraged; as to the extent to which speech is a mode of reward and punishment for children; and as to the portions of culture which are linguistically communicated. Some societies are permissive about eating and toilet training until the child can understand verbal explanations, whereas others conceive a newborn child as capable of understanding speech, and lecture it from the cradle. A d u l t skills are transmitted verbally for the most part in many societies, but among societies such as the Kaska of northwestern Canada, children learn them almost wholly through observation and imitation. Differences as to the functions of speech in adult life probably are related to such differences as these in the functions of speech in childhood, b u t there has not been the systematic comparative study which would permit us to be sure. In any event, although we tend to think first of cases in which language has been integral to a group's sense of identity and unity, and in which it is thus a focus of pride, it is clear that here also the function of speech may vary. Four distinct functions and three correlated attitudes have been differentiated by students of the development of standard languages, and these can be applied generally to all languages. 7 T h e first two functions are separatist and unifying, jointly associated with an attitude of language loyalty. T h e r e is a prestige function associated with

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language pridej and a frame of reference function associated with awareness of a norm. Two South American peoples contrast sharply with regard to the separatist and unifying functions. The Fulnio of Brazil have abandoned their homes several times in the past three centuries to avoid assimilation by Brazilian national society. The preservation of their language and an annual religious ceremony have been the basis as well as the symbol of their distinct identity. T h e Guaqueries, a Venezuelan group, seem to have abandoned their language and native religion perhaps as early as the eighteenth century, but the society thrives as a distinct identity within the Venezuelan nation, through maintenance of a special socio-economic base.8 Two North American groups contrast sharply with regard to the prestige function. Three centuries ago a Tewa-speaking group fled from the Spanish to find refuge on one of the Hopi mesas in Arizona. There, as the HopiTewa, they have maintained a position as a specially regarded and privileged minority—a situation in which attitudes toward language have been a major factor. Loyalty to their Tewa dialect has had a separatist and unifying role, as has their persuasion of the Hopi, through the reiteration of a myth and constant ridicule, that no Hopi can learn their language. They in turn have a reputation as polyglots for their own knowledge of Hopi, and often of Navaho and English; they have maintained pride in their language, and have won linguistic prestige for it and themselves.9 In contrast, the Eastern Cherokees of North Carolina, a remnant group, retain their language in large part, but without pride. It is a source neither of prestige nor of unity, persisting only in a separatist function with a negative, anti-White language loyalty.10

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In Mexico the Zapotecs of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec resemble the Hopi-Tewa in the fact that, as a group bilingual in Spanish and Zapotec, they retain pride in their first language and national identity; and these are accorded prestige by those around. them. In contrast, language has been salient in the cultural persistence of the Otomi against Spanish pressure, but the Otomi have accepted an outside valuation of their language as inferior to Spanish, and feel no prestige in its use. Language loyalty to Otomi makes imposition of education in Spanish alone impossible, but acceptance of prestige for Spanish alone makes education in Otomi alone unacceptable; it suggests an attempt to keep them in an inferior status. Bilingual education, using diglot texts, wins acceptance, by reassurance that knowledge of Spanish is the end in view. (Such bilingual education may, of course, come to enhance the prestige of Otomi.) How groups differ in the degree to which a language serves as a frame of reference in the sense of awareness of a norm is noticeable in attitudes among themselves towards incorrectness or slovenliness of speech. Among some American Indian groups such as the Washo and Paiute, a child might receive as a nickname a word it frequently mispronounced. Attitudes towards correctness among foreigners may depend upon the identity of the speaker. Many Frenchmen find a Spanish or Italian accent charming but a Germanic accent unbearable. T h e choice of teaching personnel and procedures obviously would pose a different problem among linguistic sticklers, such as the Ngoni of Africa, from that posed among linguistically more laissez-faire peoples. T h e functions of writing systems in these respects are often significant for attempts to introduce literacy and

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new education. Often, as among the Otomi, a successful orthography for the native language, if it is to be easily accepted, must depart from scientific accuracy to resemble a prestigeful other written language. Native conceptions (folk-linguistics) enter too, as when the writing of tones with accent marks was found impractical among the Soyfaltepec Mazatec of Mexico. They conceive of tones, not as high and low, but as thick and thin, and it makes no sense to try to teach them the rule that the mark for the "high" tone slants up and that for the "low" tone slants down. Printing expense and legibility make the use of their own metaphor of thick and thin impractical also, but superscript numbers for tones have proved successful.11 Even in this cursory survey, we see that the role of language and linguistic activity can vary greatly from group to group, and we can begin to see more clearly how this variation matters for practical problems of raising the educational level of the world. In programs of fundamental education such as UNESCO has sponsored, for example, literacy must often be introduced. T o this end, one among several dialects or languages often must be chosen as the medium of education, and often an orthography must be selected or constructed. Whether literacy is already present or not, new speech habits and verbal training must be introduced, necessarily by particular sources to particular receivers, using a particular code with messages of particular forms via particular channels, about particular topics and in particular settings—and all this from and to people for whom there already exist definite patternings of linguistic routines, of personality expression via speech, of uses of speech in social situations, of attitudes and conceptions toward

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speech. It seems reasonable that success in such an educational venture will be enhanced by an understanding of this existing structure, because the innovators' efforts will be perceived and judged in terms of it, and innovations which mesh with it will have greater success than those which cross its grain. There is direct analogy with the fact that one perceives the sounds of another language in terms of the structure of sounds in one's own. 12 This phenomenon—perception of another system in terms of one's own—has been studied by linguists as interference between two systems, most notably by Uriel Weinreich of Columbia University in his book Languages in Contact.13 When both systems in question are known, it is possible to predict quite accurately where and what kind of interference will occur, and what kinds of substitutions and interpretations will be made, as speakers of one language learn the other. In consequence, it is possible to design materials for the teaching of one language specifically for speakers of another, and to anticipate the particular advantages and disadvantages their own system will confer in the task. This suggests the nature of the contribution that anthropology can make to such problems in education. It would be a matter of applied anthropology, defined as "the formal utilization of social science knowledge . . . to understand regularities in cultural processes and to achieve directed culture change. 14 A n adequate comparative study of the functions of speech would imply a descriptive science of the functions of speech, just as there is a descriptive science which deals with language structures. Such a science would provide a basis for detailed analysis of the differing systems of speech activity which meet in an educational situation, and such analysis would

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make it possible to predict or at least to anticipate more effectively the interference which a program of literacy, bilingual education, and so forth, would encounter. Even the broad conceptual analysis outlined above can help by calling attention to aspects of the problem, such as the Mesquaki children's perception of teachers as "mean," or the need for a successful written form of Otomi to resemble that of Spanish. B u t there must be detailed empirical studies, from which can emerge a more refined theory and the descriptive science I have advocated. It is remarkable that no such comparative study of speech functions exists. Anthropology is noted for just this sort of cross-cultural perspective when it is a matter of religion, of kinship, of sexual behavior, of adolescent crisis. W h y not when it is a matter of the functioning of speech in society? T h e answer lies in the theoretical perspective on the functioning of speech now usual in anthropology, a perspective which is non-evolutionary and minimizes crosscultural variation. So I must now sketch an evolutionary perspective, as framework for a short critique of current anthropological views and a basis for a broader concluding interpretation of the educational aspects of functions of speech. AN

EVOLUTIONARY

PERSPECTIVE

T h e r e is no single or monolithic body of evolutionary theory in anthropology and biology, but there is a body of recent literature from which we can single out some essential features for application to speech. 15 First, there is an essential distinction between two kinds of evolutionary study, namely of specific evolution and of general evolution. Specific evolution is concerned

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with individual lines of evolution, the development and adaptation of particular groups in particular environments. General evolution is concerned with the course of evolution as a whole. It abstracts from and often cuts across individual lines of evolution to consider types, as these have emerged and as these represent broad levels of evolutionary advance. General evolution might consider the relation between the mammal and marsupial types, and the advance which led to the dominance of the former. Specific evolution would examine such questions as the adaptation of the whale to marine existence, the bat to flight, and the radiation of the kangaroo line of marsupials into various ecological niches in Australia. In terms of specific evolution, advance means improved adaptation to the particular environment relevant to a group and in relation to those with whom it is in direct competition in that environment; outside this context it is relativistic. In terms of general evolution, advance means progress which emerges in the course of specific evolution and has consequences for it, but considered in a broader spatial, temporal, and environmental context. Thus a familiar case is the successful adaptation to a specific environment which proves fatal in the long run. Criteria for general evolutionary advance include "change in the direction of increase in range and variety of adjustments to its environment" and succession of dominant types. 16 When we study evolution specifically, we find that its focus is upon a population, and a set of traits associated therewith; that it analyzes the variation in traits within a population, and the differential retention of traits within the population over a period of time; that it interprets this process through the adaptation of the popu-

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lation within its environment (and of the traits to one another), in connection with the pressures which selectively affect the retention of traits and hence this adaptation. It sees a population and its characteristics as participating in a continuous process of change, and it interprets the change and the characteristics of the population in broadly contextual and functional terms. It is easy enough to see linguistic change in these terms: a speech community has a certain set of speech habits, whose incidence varies within the population and which are differentially retained, as a result of selective pressures (such as the social and natural environment, prestige of speakers, customs such as tabu and word-play, and internal requirements for maintenance of the linguistic code), the whole being adaptive both to the environment of the speech habits and to the maintenance of the code. If we carry through such a view, however, we can find ourselves in a stance quite different from that typical of the attitude toward language today. Our broad category of speech habits in relation to a population as the unit of primary focus, does not in the first instance isolate the formal structure of the linguistic code, the usual object of linguistic attention, from the patterning of the uses of speech. Both would equally be analytical abstractions from the same phenomenal reality, the speech activity of the population. We begin by considering the totality of the speech habits of the population, and so subsume at first the presence not only of different types, varieties, and dialects, but even of different languages as parts of the whole. Since one readily takes a functional view of traits involved with selective pressures, it becomes quite natural to analyze individual speech habits or sets of habits, in-

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eluding those of separate languages, in terms of competition within the environment of a population, and to see this competition as turning partly on the merits of the habits themselves. Such a view requires one to consider what the relevant environment for the adaptation of a population's speech habits really is at present, and is necessarily concerned with the real locus of change of such habits in the speech activity of definite individuals living in a definite society. Such an evolutionary view will direct attention toward the variation within and between the speech habits of populations, and will give due importance to the differences in the functions of speech associated with a set of speech habits of a population, to the consequences of this variation, and to the evolutionary survival, development, or disappearance of traits or sets of traits. 17 In short, the evolving units are sets of speech habits as characteristics of populations—units which sometimes will, and sometimes will not, coincide with the historical units known to us as languages. We begin by examining natural totalities of speech habits firmly embedded in environmental context, cultural and physical, as adaptive to that context, as an integral part of the whole sociocultural adaptation of the population. If we examine our recurrent example, the Mezquital Otomi, from this perspective, we find that an Otomi child grows into, and acquires its education as a member of, a population whose speech habits comprise a majority of Otomi provenience, a minority of Spanish origin. T h e child becomes well aware of the competition, selection, and specialization among these two sets of habits. T h e Otomi habits are dominant in the sphere of subsistence and in most of social life, occupying a privileged position

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in the early socialization of young and the loyalties of all, and generally in the tribal environment within which its adaptation has almost wholly taken place. But Spanish habits are dominant in certain situations such as the market and the classroom, and as the relevant environment of Otomi life and speech habits shifts and enlarges, the position of Spanish speech habits is enhanced, and more situations are encountered in which Spanish has selective advantage. T h e prestige which all accord to Spanish speech habits, and the experienced relatively greater utility of these situations in the expanding sphere of the environment, underlie the general expectation that the relative function of Spanish will continually expand—an expectation which in turn helps bring about the expected state of affairs. As for development towards filling the enlarged environment on the part of Otomi speech habits, this occurs only indirectly as a by-product of bilingual education and the inculcation of Spanish. Although the published analysis of the Otomi case is one of the few such, it is brief, and its focus is not upon the kinds of question and of data which an evolutionary perspective requires. 18 T h e discussion is cast in terms of the proposition that all languages are functionally equivalent and equal, neutral in their own cultural settings; and Otomi is seen as having been forced into a status of ascribed inferiority, because of inferiority ascribed to its associated culture. This is considered to be entirely a socialpsychological matter of prestige, having no basis in anything connected with Otomi as a language. Now this assumption is remarkable, since the discussion does mention concrete linguistic differences in the functional value of Otomi and Spanish in certain situations; and despite the declared equality of Otomi, the possibility that Otomi

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can be developed to meet the modern educational needs of its speakers is not considered. While the superiority of Spanish in the situation is partly a matter of attitude and prestige, it is at best ingenuous not to see it as also partly a matter of the actual linguistic superiority of Spanish. T h e failure to see this is in part due to heavy reliance on the view that there is no evolutionary superiority among languages, while in fact the superiority of Spanish in the situation is in part a consequence of its being one of a type of evolutionarily more advanced language. Let us now turn to the study of general evolution, which deals with this question. We mentioned "increase in range and variety of adjustments to environment" and succession of dominant types as two criteria of evolutionary advance as between general types. When such criteria are applied to Culture, it is generally agreed that some cultures are technologically more advanced than others. Vocabulary is the linguistic analogue of technology. . . . Clearly the lexical content of standard languages shows increase in range and variety of adjustments to environment in comparison to dialects or regional or minority languages, where these are not supported by a standard language outside the situation. World languages such as English, French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese show such increase, and have spread as representatives of a dominant type, quite apart from military conquests. T h e existence of linguistic science itself, and of the self-consciousness and awareness and control which go into the contruction of logics and systems of mathematical manipulation, argue for the advanced status, as a type, of languages which participate in, and indeed make possible, such activities. T h e same holds for linguistic routines in philosophy, literature, religion, and science. It has been

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argued that mathematics, logic, et al., are not language itself, but "post-language." 19 Even if this view is taken, it remains that ordinary language is the m e d i u m in which "post-language" systems must ultimately be interpreted, and not all natural languages can perform this function. Indeed, differentiation and specialization of function is an important aspect of evolutionary change in languages, as has long been recognized by students of the development of standardized languages. Of course, increase in n u m b e r and diversity of functions of a language is a response to change in other aspects of a culture. T h i s is true also of increase in the content and complexity of the vocabulary of a language. Some scholars may point to this fact as a reason for disregarding such changes as not properly a linguistic problem, or as not part of language. T h e argument does not hold. Many, if not all, linguistic changes have sociocultural roots. Lexical borrowing, a standard topic in linguistics, is a case in point. As part of general evolution in language, then, increased complexity in the lexical content and functions of a language cannot be disregarded. T h e response is linguistic, even if the stimulus is not. W e may bypass the question of evolutionary advance in grammatical features, a question raised especially in this century by leading French linguists, and also the question of increased efficiency and economy in language evolution. 2 0 Both possibilities may be regarded, not as disproved, but as unproved. T h e reality of general evolutionary advance in the sphere of language seems clear. It may be pointed out that any set of speech habits is capable of expanding in content and functions sufficiently to serve a complex civilization and its associated systems of thought. Yes, of course, potentially it can so serve; but

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we must distinguish between potential and actual development, recognizing that some languages are actually of the more advanced type while others are not. If this distinction is valid, why is it not part of the common perspective of linguistics and anthropology today or at least a subject of discussion? Particularly now that an evolutionary perspective toward culture is being renewed in anthropology, how can a part of culture, language, be omitted? T h e answer lies in a dominant outlook, whose focus is upon the single language and its most highly formal, structured aspect, its grammar and phonology considered in abstraction in the first instance apart from cultural and natural context. Vocabulary, the aspect most closely tied to his context, is likely to be treated as residual. T h e thrust has been to exclude from central concern those realms of phenomena and bits of data which do not seem to fit into formal structures. Such structures are abstracted from variation, the occurrence of which, though not denied, has been submerged under the dominant presumption of regularity and homogeneity throughout a speech community. As a background against which to set off the structure of the formal code, speech activity commonly has been considered random, perhaps a matter of individual and unpredictable choice. As for the functions of speech, these have been seen as universally equivalent; 21 while competition between sets of speech habits, languages, or parts thereof, has frequently been taken to be a purely social matter, not a matter involving the adaptive merits of the habits involved, and often interpreted under the blanket term of an unanalyzed differential "prestige." Thus important questions about linguistic change have gone unanswered because the focus is not

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upon the actual locus speech change, and the relation of language to culture becomes a theoretical problem. Now there are exceptions to each part of the picture I have sketched. It is not a question here of a monolithic ideology. It is a question of emphases, a dominant outlook and direction, and the terms in which matters tend to be couched. Moreover, one must understand that these arose in answer to definite needs, and that with them great advances in knowledge of language have been made. I see the dominance of the view just outlined as arising out of a battle that had to be won early in this century for the autonomy and legitimacy of formal linguistic structure as an object of study in its own right, as distinct from historical and psychological problems and explanations. And this carried with it, especially in anthropology, the implication of equality of all languages for such study. This autonomy of structural linguistics is a theme in two classics, the Cours de linguistique générale of Ferdinand de Saussure 22 and the Language of Edward Sapir. 23 T h e need for this focus carried with it the de-emphasis upon cultural entanglements that we have noted, and, especially in anthropology, an emphatic non-evolutionary view. There still linger misconceptions about the existence of so-called "primitive" languages, whose meager vocabularies must be eked out by gesture, which lack grammars, definite systems of sounds, and abstract terms, and which are more variable and change more rapidly because of being unwritten. All this was demonstrably untrue, and stood in the way of a general science of linguistics, whose material must be the rich diversity actually at hand in the world's languages. "Equality, diversity, relativity" became a linguistic theme.

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T h e rejected notions about "primitive" languages (along with equally mistaken notions about the superiority of an Indo-European type, or of one of its exemplars, Latin, and the use of such as ideal models for description) were of course evolutionary in one sense. But now the notion of evolution was rejected in toto. Whatever differences might obtain between simpler and more advanced cultures, no correlative difference was found to hold between the structures of their languages. "When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam." 24 N o measures which would satisfactorily rate language structures as more or less advanced appeared that were free from cultural bias. One evolutionary typology would have p u t Chinese at the bottom of the scale—a patent absurdity. Also, efforts by distinguished scholars, such as Jespersen, to show trends toward progress in efficiency, suffered from limitation in data to two language families, Indo-European and Semitic, and from inadequacies of conceptual analysis. In view of these inadequacies and errors, it is not surprising that the evolutionary notions of the day dropped out. And, despite present-day attacks on that generation of cultural anthropologists for being antievolutionary, we must remember that evolutionary theory in biology then was rather disunited and uncertain, not at all the vital force and stimulus it is today; and that to be against certain evolutionary stereotypes was to adopt a democratic and progressive stance. Now that the battle against the mistaken evolutionary ideas has been won, and the study of formal structure well established, it is time to take u p the evolutionary question again. And we can see that the fight against notions of "primitive" languages, whose echoes still reverberate

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today, confused three levels of evolutionary advance, and so jumped too quickly to the conclusion that all languages are evolutionarily equal. There is the level of "primitive" languages, proto-forms below the status of full languages; then the status of full languages; and finally, the advanced status we have indicated as occupied by world languages and some others. T h e fight against misconceptions about "primitive" languages did not distinguish the two latter stages, so that to deny the equality of all languages was taken to imply that the less advanced were "primitive." No known languages are. A l l known languages have achieved the middle status. All languages have achieved the level of basic or primary efficiency, such that they can fully adapt, in time, to the needs of any population. In this sense all languages are potentially equal, as we observed above, and hence capable of adaptation to the needs of a complex industrial civilization. This is just what has happened historically in the case of English, which in its Old English period would certainly not have been adequate to modern technology and science. But not all languages are equally efficient compared with one another, either in terms of specific evolution in meeting particular needs, or in terms of general evolution in meeting the needs of modern complex civilization. Already for many local languages, and ultimately for all, the direction of change in the world is one which is making modern complex civilization part of their relevant environment, within whose context they must compete. T h e ideal image of a single "neutral" language in a single, homogeneous cultural context hardly holds any longer. For populations such as the Otomi the relevant environment is one in which sets of habits of differing origins compete as means of developing the new forms and content of

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speech activity—among which education may be included —that successful adaptation requires. In all this, equality in primary or basic efficiency is not enough, nor is the difference purely a matter of social, non-linguistic factors. In the particular time and place of conpetition, one set of speech habits is as such functionally superior. Partly the superiority is mutual and relative, specific to particular niches e.g., that of Spanish routines for the market place, and of Otomi for the usual subsistence activities of tribal life. B u t partly it is a matter of general superiority, and here the perspective of general evolution provides a sober and realistic attitude. Otomi, like Anglo-Saxon and many languages around the world today, could become a medium of technology, science, and philosophy. J u s t so, any normal infant, wherever born, could participate in any culture, however complex. B u t the human infant need only be raised in the cultural environment for the potentiality to be realized in one lifetime, while the realization of the potential of languages often takes much longer. Even granted the will, the cost in money, personnel, and time may be prohibitive for a poor nation or a newly struggling one. T h i s is a poignant fact, for the decisions that must be made in view of it are often hard. T h e r e is a widespread respect for cultural autonomy and integrity. And, as the U N E S C O report, The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education, 2S shows a child learns to read most efficiently if taught in its native language first, even when it is then to learn to read in a second language. Yet what if, once literate, the child finds that there is nothing to read in this first language, because nothing has been written and the country cannot afford to duplicate the needed educational materials many times

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over in different languages? (The absence of the needed written materials is a problem even in such places as Egypt and Puerto Rico, where certain aspects of advanced education have had to be conducted in English.) And there are many people of great talent whose efforts to develop a literature in a local language, as for example in Ghana, must, for similar reasons, come to naught. T h e languages could so have developed, but they have not done so in their existing adaptation, and now it it too late. So the selective pressure among the languages of the world continues in environments rapidly changing with technological and social revolutions. 26 From a scientific and humanistic point of view, it is a hard loss to see much of this diversity disappear or become constricted in local uses, not because of inadequacy in its own terms, but because the terms have changed, and the chance for development through creative nationalism is lost to all but a handful. T h e scientific value of a language is independent of its political importance, just as the scientific import of a plant or animal does not depend upon its utility as food; and accordingly, some linguists are devoting their energies to recording and analyzing the languages about to disappear, so that future theories about language can have the broadest possible base, and so that we may come as close as possible to enjoying the full light that language can shed on the range of human nature and creativity. With plants and animals, discovery of a new process or type or rare form is worth more to science than millions of additional pigs and potatoes; and so it is with languages. T h e reduction of linguistic diversity is a loss for humanistic educational values too, and perhaps a matter of concern for our own future adaptation. Any one form of language of necessity selects a small portion of the total

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range of ways of categorizing and analyzing experience that language can embody. T o a large extent, the growth of science transcends the framework of any one language, but insofar as the particulars of our first language shape our later thought and use of language, the existence of diverse languages is of value as a means of transcending the perspective of any one, valuable perhaps even to mankind as a reservoir of potential change. And for such transcendence, records of past languages are never so generally effective as living examples. Let us hope, then, that the attrition of the world's languages will leave us not entirely impoverished, but still with some store of diversity. CONCLUSION

T o sum up: I believe that an evolutionary approach to speech can be unifying and vivifying. In linguistics itself it can, by its generality and functional perspective, integrate many separate concerns—genetic classification, linguistic areas, dialectology, bilingualism, standard language studies, linguistic acculturation, and the like—that deal with language change. In anthropology it can remove the embarrassing contradiction between an evolutionary view of culture and a non-evolutionary view of culture's part, language, and point toward integration of linguistic and other anthropological studies. In education it can, for instance, provide perspective on questions of correctness in speech. But chiefly, for the problems of education in large parts of the world, it can contribute to linguistics and anthropology by focusing on speech habits in relation to populations; by emphasizing a process of change through variation, adaptation, and selection; and by providing a framework and incentive for a descriptive science of the functions of speech. From this, I hope, will come the

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comparative perspective which anthropology should provide on the ways in which speech activity enters into the process of education. NOTES 1

Ethel Emilia Wallis, "Sociolinguistics in Relation to Mezquital Transition Education," Estudios Antropológicos publicado en homenaje al doctor Manuel Gamio (México, D. F.: Dirección General de Publicaciones, 1956), p. 524. I "Repertoire" can refer to the array of resources, words, phrases, constructions, etc., which are generally available for use in routines and from which are formed the alternatives available at particular points in routines. 8 Frequently, different routines are peculiar to different languages, as in the use of an esoteric foreign language for ceremonial activity, and of a foreign language, jargon, kroné, or the like for diplomacy, trade, or other communication with members of other groups. T h e Otomi use a "market Spanish" in one situation, but their own language in basic subsistence activities. An essential task of bilingual education among the Otomi is the introduction of additional linguistic routines in Otomi and Spanish. ' J a m e s Sledd, Review of R. Kingdon, The Groundwork of English Intonation, in Language, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1960), p. 178. s Margaret Read, Children of Their Fathers: Growing Up Among the Ngoni of Nyasaland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). • Edward Sapir, "Language," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1933), Vol. 9, pp. 155-69; reprinted in David G. Mandelbaum (ed.), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949), p. 16. 'See Paul Garvin and Madeleine Mathiot, " T h e Urbanization of the Guarani Language," in A. F. C. Wallace (ed.), Men and Cultures: Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), pp. 783-90. 8 W. D. Hohenthal and Thomas McCorkle, " T h e Problem of Aboriginal Persistence," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1956), pp. 288-300. • Edward P. Dozier, "Resistance to Acculturation and Assimilation in an Indian Pueblo," American Anthropologist, Vol. 53, No. 1 (1951), pp. 56-66. 10 J o h n Gulick, "Language and Passive Resistance Among the Eastern Cherokees," Ethnohistory, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1958), pp. 60-81. II For the full account, see Sarah C. Gudschinsky, "Toneme Representation in Mazatec Orthography," Word, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1959), pp. 446-52. 13 For excellent analysis and examples, see Hans Wolff, "Phonemic

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Structure and the Teaching of Pronunciation," Language Learning, Vol. 6, No. 3-4 (1956), pp. 17-23. 13 Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact (New York: Linguistic Circle of New York, 1953). 14 George M. Foster, "Applied Anthropology and Modern Life," in Estudios Antropológicos publicados en homenaje al doctor Manuel Gamio (México, D. F.: Dirección General de Publicaciones, 1956), pp. 332-33. 15 See especially Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service (eds.), Evolution and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960); Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal (Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1959); Julian S. Huxley, "Evolution, Cultural and Biological," in William L. Thomas, Jr. (ed.), Current Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 3-25. 16 See Huxley, op. cit., and George G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), chap. xv. 17 Several lines of fresh interest in speech variation are now emerging, and we can expect a number of significant studies in the next decade. T h e fresh concern manifests itself in various guises and under various names, but it is especially associated with the revitalization of dialectology. An example is the work of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland; a theoretical approach akin to that advocated here has been sketched by Trevor Hill, a member of the Survey, in his article, "Institutional Linguistics," Orbis, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1958), pp. 441-55. 18 It is because Miss Wallis' article is so valuable and stimulating, being a discussion which presents both concrete detail and theoretical assumptions, that it is the focus here for critical analysis of some of these assumptions in terms of a different theoretical perspective. Miss Wallis relies extensively upon the authority of Edward Sapir for her perspective, and, as the discussion immediately following indicates, Sapir was a principal exponent of the non-evolutionary view which it is now necessary to transcend. " J o s e p h Greenberg, "Language and Evolutionary Change," Essays in Linguistics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 56-65. 20 Evolutionary advance in grammatical features is suggested by A. Meillet, Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européenes (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 8th éd., 1937), pp. 424-5; Marcel Cohen, Le Langage, Structure et Evolution (Paris: Editions Sociales, 1950), p. 112; and Henri Frei, "Systèmes de déictiques," Acta Lingüistica, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 111-129 (1944). Meillet and Cohen cite particularly the association in various Indo-European languages between loss of the category of dual and development of more complex civilization. Frei writes that "Linguists agree in attributing the disappearance of the dual to the march of civilization," citing A. Cuny, Le nombre duel en Grec (Thèse de Paris, 1906) and J . Wackernagel, Vorlesungen über Syntax, Vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Bâle, 1926), pp. 74-5, and going to interpret as a parallel the tendency of deictic systems to evolve toward a binary type (such as "here": "there"). T h e best recent attempt to analyze the development of economy and

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efficiency in languages is probably that of W . Koenraads, Studien über sprachökonomische Entwicklungen im Deutschen (Amsterdam: Muelenhoff, 1953). T h e r e are valuable comments in the reviews of the book by H . Hoenigswald (Language, Vol. 30, pp. 591-3 (1954)) and Uriel Weinreich (Word, Vol. 11, pp. 2 3 7 ^ 0 (1955)). 21 For example, "A necessary condition for socialization in m a n is the learning and use of a language. B u t different languages are functionally equivalent in this respect, and one language is comparable with another because h u m a n speech has certain common denominators" (A. I. Hallowell, "Culture, Personality, and Society," in A. L. Kroeber a n d others, Anthropology Today [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953], p. 612). Such statements point out the i m p o r t a n t common denominator of the functioning of language in education a n d socialization, b u t ignore the important differences. 23 F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique genérale, published by C. Bally and E. Sechehaye (Paris: Payot, 1916), and now in English translation, Course in General Linguistics (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959). 28 Edward Sapir, Language (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921). " Edward Sapir, op. cit., p. 234. 25 The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education (Paris: UNESCO, Monographs on F u n d a m e n t a l Education: VIII, 1953). See the extended review by William E. Bull in the International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 21, No. 3 (1955), p p . 288-94. M Some scholars are directing attention to the linguistic aspects of this subject, notably (in the United States) Charles A. Ferguson, P a u l Garvin, J o h n J. Gumperz, a n d Uriel Weinreich. See Charles A. Ferguson and J o h n J. Gumperz (ed.), Linguistic Diversity in South Asia: Studies in Regional, Social, and Functional Variation (Bloomington, Indiana: I n d i a n a University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore and Linguistics, Publication # 1 3 ; Part III, International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 26, No. 3; July 1960).

Education and Identity WARD

H.

GOODENOUGH

Having no professional sophistication in either psychology or education, I am apparently going to speak to you about psychology and education. I come to my subject, however, by way of anthropology, and what I have to say arises from an effort to deal with a problem in applied anthropology. This problem is the familiar one of achieving cooperation between agents of community development and members of their client communities in programs of economic, social, political, or technological change. It is a problem which deeply concerns anthropology. Any such change involves changes in culture— in customs, beliefs, and principles of action and organization—and anthropologists are vitally interested in cultural processes. As students of culture, moreover, anthropologists are likely to be more aware than others of the range of cultural differences and of how these differences may affect the personal relations between agents of change and their clients in development. How a proposed program fits into the traditional values and interests of a client community is also a matter for anthropological inquiry. As with any practical problem, other disciplines are also properly concerned with agent-client cooperation in change. There are psychological as well as cultural 84

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considerations; and the problem clearly involves education. Educators are among the principal agents of community development, and education itself may be described as the practice of human development. I am concerned then with a problem where anthropology and education come together, a problem of teacher-pupil cooperation in mass adult education, where teacher and pupil represent different societies and cultures and where change in the pupil's way of life is the educational goal. A colleague's recent comment to me about an experience in Bolivia illustrates how considerations of identity affect the educational process. He found it easier to explain such complicated things as Australian marriage-class systems and the principles of Gutmann scale analysis to Aymara Indians in Peru that to college students in the United States. His Aymara friends reacted to the explanation with interest, concentrated their attention on it, and readily understood it. There was no need to apologize to them for trying to explain such matters. In our own classrooms, however, as soon as we try to put anything on the blackboard that looks as if it might require close attention and concentration, there is a groan from the students. We feel that we have to apologize to them for subjecting them to something intellectually strange and difficult. What is the difference here? As we talked about it, it occurred to us that an Aymara does not expect to suffer any loss of selfesteem or esteem by his fellows if he should fail to understand; there is no anxiety attached to learning, and he is therefore free to learn and does so easily. In our homes and schools, however, we place so much emphasis through childhood on the ability to pass tests of intellectual achievement on a highly competitive basis, tests on which vital judgments of our individual worth are based, that

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every time we are asked to understand something complicated, most of us see our self-esteem and our worth in the eyes of others as threatened. Our fear that we may not measure up leads us to seek to escape from the situation entirely. Where every intellectual effort is made a serious test of one's worth as a person rather than something to be enjoyed for its own sake, anti-intellectual adults are likely to be the result. If our educational objective is to create people who are competent in performing certain mental routines by which they can earn a good living, we succeed very well. If our goal is to stimulate an abiding interest in intellectual matters, however, we may be overplaying our hand. But it is not my purpose to discuss our school system with you. I mention this case because it reminds us that education is the process by which we try to encourage and help our fellows to develop their identities in socially approved ways, so that they will be the kinds of persons we want them to be. It also reminds us that what is good educational technique depends upon the identities we envision as end product. When we turn our attention back to community development we see that it, too, is a process of identity change. Certainly, changes in people's material and social circumstances which have little effect on their public and self images can scarcely be regarded as contributing much to their development. Education, then— and this includes community development—may be seen as a process in which people are helped to exchange features of their present identities for new ones. T h e life history of every individual is marked by a succession of identity changes. As he grows older, his fellows insist on his assuming new responsibilities. They promote him to new social categories and ascribe to him

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new features of identity. As he attempts to play new roles, his self image and public image both undergo modification. In every society, moreover, there are established procedures for motivating and facilitating these identity changes. Knowledge of these procedures and the generalizations we can make about them can give us insight into many of the problems which bedevil agents, teachers, administrators, and makers of national policy. When we stop to think of the more important identity changes which people must undergo in their lifetimes in our own society, it is evident that we frequently celebrate them with some kind of ceremony, festivity, or other special mark of recognition. We have graduation, marriage, and inaugural ceremonies. We celebrate impending marriages and impending motherhood with "showers." There are "coming out" parties, "house-warmings," funeral rites, and mourning observances. In less dramatic fashion we accompany the celebration of birthdays with formal redefinitions of their identity to our children. It is at the new birthday that new privileges are extended: staying up a half hour later at night; acquiring a driver's license; drinking the first cocktail, perhaps; or becoming a voter. In other societies also we find social formalities associated with identity changes. Dramatic among them are the rites which in many societies attend transition from childhood to young adulthood. Elaborate initiations into new social identities are by no means confined to primitive or underdeveloped societies, however. They are matched in our own with the acquisition of one's occupational identity. T h e apprentice in a trade, the rookie in military service, the graduate student working for his Ph.D., all are subject to institutionalized physical and mental ordeals, tests of competence, and organized hazing. At the same time they

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receive instruction in the performance of their future occupational roles, are let in on professional secrets, and are indoctrinated with a code of "professional ethics." T h e main difference between our own and simpler societies is in the number of different adult identities into which one may be initiated. T h e s e transition rites, as anthropologists call them, represent solutions which people have found for dealing with the problems accompanying identity change. T h e specific solutions vary, as we might expect, depending on the way in which these problems present themselves in different social settings; for when we get down to cases, there is considerable variation in the degree to which the necessary conditions for initiating and executing identity change seem to requre implementation. B u t what are the necessary conditions? First, there must be a desire for identity change. T h e r e must also be commitment to making a change. W h a t needs to be changed must be understood. People must know what are the roles, symbols, and styles of performance appropriate to their new identities; and they must be physically and emotionally able to perform these roles, to use these symbols, correctly, and to accomplish the necessary changes in style. T h e i r new identities must be recognized and accepted by others. Finally, those making the change must come to conceive of themselves as actually having new identities. L e t us look at a few of these requirements more closely and examine their implications. B u t first let me define a few terms. T h e many discriminations by which we discern our own and others' identities I shall call identity features. Identity features to which rights and duties attach, and with respect to which people have well-defined expectations regarding the boundaries within which they are to contain

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behavior, are all features of social identity. In any situation, a person's social role comprises the rights and duties attaching to his social identity as it relates to the social identities of others with whom he is dealing. T h e social role of a father in relation to his son in our society, for example, is specified by duties he owes his son and the things he can demand of him. Within the boundaries of conduct delimited by rights and duties is the domain of privilege. How one conducts oneself with reference to these boundaries is a matter of personal style. Along with all other identity features to which no rights and duties attach, discriminations of style provide the features by which we discern different kinds of personal identity. Thus we assess the father as a person largely on the basis of how he exercises his privileges—his style of play as a stern or indulgent parent, for instance—and on the degree to which he oversteps the boundaries of his social role with brutal behavior or economic neglect. C O M M I T M E N T TO

CHANGE

People often feel anxious about changes which they know they must make and which they want very much to make. A new social identity requires us to play new roles, and this may call for important modifications of our previous personal style. Ways of acting which helped us to displace or sublimate emotional problems may no longer be available to us—a prospect which adds to the uncertainty about our ability to make the change successfully. Because of their implications for our personal identity, changes in social identity often precipitate major crises. Indeed, social scientists speak of the more important ones as "life crises." When an identity change is impending, we often try to

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prepare people for it by congratulating them or involving them in obligations which make retreat from the change difficult. In our society, "showers" before a woman marries or has her first baby help facilitate the change in a material sense, but more importantly, they help to commit her to the idea of becoming a wife or mother; and by means of the gifts, they reinforce her moral obligation to carry through what she has started. Even though marriage and motherhood are among the life goals for women on which we place highest value, many brides and mothers have been rendered less reluctant by the congratulatory and envious attentions of their friends. Such ways of stimulating commitment to change can be highly effective with changes in social identity, especially those changes which are part of the normal life process. They help overcome reluctance and anxiety about changes which are at the same time valued and desired. But they can only stimulate and reinforce. T h e final act of commitment can be taken only by the person making the change. This act is a turning from things associated with our former self with a sense of finality—with a feeling that, whatever happens, our bridges have been burned. Commitment is often expressed by an action which eliminates or destroys something symbolic of our former identity and is followed by efforts to acquire symbols of the new identity toward which we aspire. On a humble scale is the little ceremony in which mother and baby throw the last bottle into the trash. In shifting to a new classroom or new school building, children are compelled to leave something of themselves behind and are thus committed to growing up another notch. T o destroy or lose old symbols with which we have been identified is in a real sense

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to destroy or lose a part of our former identity, to make it very difficult to be the same again—especially if the symbols are not easily come by, as when religious converts destroy the temples and idols which it took generations of effort to create. A famous episode on a mass scale is the one in which King Liholiho of Hawaii in 1819 deliberately and publicly broke the tabu against men eating with women, precipitating a mass repudiation of the whole Hawaiian tabu system and the religious institutions which supported it. People not only broke the tabus, they set out to destroy all their formerly sacred places and the images of their gods. A generation of dealings with Europeans had poised them on the brink of having to develop a new collective identity, and thus they committed themselves irrevocably to a changed future. 1 Physical destruction is not the only way to express commitment, of course. A person may exhibit a sudden new rudeness or a radical change in dress and mannerisms, forcing others to regard and treat him differently. By thus ridding himself of the kinds of treatment which he received in the past, he destroys something of his old identity. T h e effect may be to lower his fellows' estimation of him, but even this is a change, breaking his identity out of its old mold. Whatever his new behaviors are, to be effective they must be dramatic enough in their impact to make it impossible for others to go on viewing him as they did before. Anti-social actions are, therefore, a tempting way to commit oneself to identity change. Whatever their consequences, one cannot be the same person afterwards. Extreme action of this kind occurs when a person sees the problem of change mainly as one of forsaking his former identity, and has only minor concern for what his new identity will be, as with many of our delinquent

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teen-agers. When he has sharply in focus the new identity he desires, the act of commitment is more likely to be one which leads in the direction of its achievement and less likely to be indiscriminately destructive of his past. Nevertheless, because identity change necessarily involves the replacement of former identity features by new ones, it almost inevitably appears to require the eradication of some part of one's former self. T h e act of eradication, therefore, is the one by which we commonly take the plunge. And the more anxiety people feel about changing their identity, the more convulsive and violent the act of commitment is likely to be. Social revolutions, especially in their earlier stages, are almost inevitably punctuated by violent acts of commitment in which both human and material symbols of the old order suffer destruction. Observers, especially those who feel they have a responsibility for rational order in the conduct of human affairs, naturally tend to react negatively to these destructive acts. When torn between their desire for change and their reluctance to give up the security of the known, the Manus people of the Admiralty Islands threw all their symbols of wealth and social status into the sea in a convulsion of religious frenzy. European administrators, teachers, and missionaries all saw this behavior as subversive of good order. T h e leaders of the self-development movement to which this convulsive act had committed them asked for government schools and for help in organizing local selfgovernment councils and producers' cooperatives, things which it had been the policy of the territorial government to provide. For a time the local government officials refused, on the grounds that to accede to these requests would be to recognize and legitimize an irrational, sub-

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versive, messianic outbreak which showed that the Manus were not yet ready for development. 2 T h e people wanted what the government had been hoping they would want, but when they cleared their social decks so that they could try to do something positive about it, they were told that they were out of order and could expect no help until they had repented of their actions. Local officials in effect insisted that the price of help in their aspirations toward development was to undo their commitment to that development. How often we contribute to the defeat of our educational purposes because we classify as disqualified for education those who have just gone through the act of committing themselves to it. A C C E P T A N C E BY

OTHERS

A few years ago, a student of my acquaintance came to one of his professors baffled and desperate. He badly needed a fellowship to help finance his studies. He had an almost straight " A " record for two years of course work, but had been turned down twice for financial aid in favor of other students whose records were not so good as his own. What were his professors' objections to him? As it turned out, a stereotyped conception of him as a mediocre student had formed when he first began his studies, based mainly on his previous educational background. Decisions regarding him had been made in terms of this stereotype rather than in terms of his subsequent, good but quiet accomplishments. His plea woke his teachers up, and he received the recognition which he rightfully felt he had earned. He wanted an identity as one of the better students and the benefits to which such an identity entitled him, but although he fulfilled all the requirements of that

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identity, he still could not achieve it until others were willing to confer it upon him. Without such recognition, the best efforts at identity change fail. Non-recognition does not present itself as a problem when a person's identity change is one his fellows want him to make. Parents eagerly watch for signs of their children's further maturity and start treating them in accordance with their emerging new identities in order to encourage the change. Non-recognition becomes a serious problem when a person seeks a change which his fellows do not want. In many colonial areas, for example, there are Europeans who deliberately refuse to treat welldressed and well-educated natives as other than menials, thereby successfully frustrating their achieving the new public and self images to which they aspire. It is, of course, an infuriating experience to present oneself as having a certain identity, with what one understands to be the proper credentials, only to have the credentials ignored and to be treated instead as if one's identity were of another kind. We do this sort of thing deliberately in order to wound others toward whom we harbor feelings of hostility or aversion. But a real hazard of any identity change is the possibility that one may suffer such humiliation from the thoughtlessness or ignorance of others. Badges of identity, prominently displayed, serve as reminders to one's fellows. Public announcement of more important identity changes—of weddings and graduations, for example—helps to minimize ignorance and to prepare others for the presentation of new self to follow. Involving the community in ritual or festivity upon the occasion of an identity change also helps put others in an appropriate frame of mind. They are more likely to accept the change if they have participated in

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the events, such as graduation exercises, by which the change was formally accomplished. Regarding community development as a process, of collective identity change, in which a community's members come to look upon themselves as a different kind of people and upon their community as a different kind of place, calls attention to the importance of recognition by others — i n this case by outsiders. As development progresses, the community's members are eager for words of praise and approval from outsiders, especially those outsiders who have been their severest critics in the past. Such comment reassures them that their efforts are recognized and that they are on the way to achieving a collective identity of which they can be proud in the larger world community. Their concern for recognition makes the acquisition of each new symbol of the identity to which they aspire a momentous event. T h e y want everyone to notice it and proudly put it on display. In doing so, they make themselves exceedingly vulnerable to humiliation. It is a crushing blow to their new self image and self-esteem if others respond with indifference. If, as so often happens, others respond with disparagement or disdain, they invariably earn the undying hatred of the community's members. For just this reason, the United States has acquired not simply the political enmity but the venomous hatred of Chinese Communists. European colonials all over the world have sneeringly thwarted native efforts to adopt what they regard as the symbols of European status. T h e y are now reaping the harvest of hate. T h e trouble is that even well-intentioned people thoughtlessly inflict such humiliation, and then are baffled by the hatred which they discover they have incurred, but for which they see no reason. How this can come about is illustrated by recent

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developments among the Nakanai people of New Britain Island in the Territory of New Guinea. In 1954, when I was working among the Nakanai, they had become strongly committed to trying to remake their identity in the image of European society as they knew it from their contact with planters, missionaries, and administrators. T o achieve their ends, they establish what they called a "company." All who joined it contributed to it the copra they produced, and the proceeds were used to acquire what they regarded as the important symbols of the European way of life. Foremost among these was corrugated iron roofing. As they acquired it, they distributed it to the company's members in accordance with a system of priorities so that they could gradually convert their thatched homes into "new-style" houses. Delivery of the first sheets of roofing was a momentous occasion. Here was a token of what they could do with their company, and tangible evidence of an important step in the realization of their identity goals. T o most local Europeans the venture was thoroughly impractical. T h e uninsulated, metal-roofed houses were impossibly hot during the day, as the Nakanai themselves admitted. In European eyes possession of corrugated iron did not alter the identity of the Nakanai the least bit, but served mainly to reinforce the existing European image of the native as improvident and impractical. Some who were interested in native welfare, instead of congratulating the company's leaders on their achievement, bent their efforts to dissuade them from buying iron roofing at all, urging them to use their income for things which the Europeans felt they needed instead. By thus showing themselves not to be with the Nakanai in this matter in which their ego aspira-

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tions were so heavily involved, these Europeans found themselves regarded with suspicion. Here we see illustrated one of the most difficult problems in community development. Once people have clearly formulated the identity which they wish to achieve for themselves, they are at least as anxious to acquire the symbols of the new identity as they are to acquire its substance, if not more so; for without the symbols they cannot properly present themselves to others and gain their recognition and acceptance. Nor is it easy, without the symbols, to get the feel of oneself in one's new identity. This concern with symbols has been a frequent annoyance to development agents, and it often plagues educators in other situations as well. We are often baffled, for example, by the insistence of heads of client governments that a steel mill have top priority, or that the acquisition of modern weapons take precedence over agricultural improvement. What these clients want are the things which symbolize to them the prestigeful identity of Western powers in the community of nations. Without these symbols, they feel that they cannot present themselves as the others' social equals, just as the Nakanai feel that they cannot show themselves to be as good as Europeans without corrugated iron roofs. Nor can government heads present themselves favorably to those from whom they derive political support without taking positive steps to meet the people's aspirations for their national identity. It is not so important that the steel mill produce steel efficiently, or at all, or that the weapons really alter their military position in an appreciable way. What matters is that the nation can present itself in proper attire. Refusal to help in these "impractical" projects serves, as experience has shown us,

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only to earn the ill will of our clients. It does not incline them to follow our advice and engage in what we regard as practical or worthwhile projects instead. Development agents tend to think mainly of the substance, and their clients think largely of the symbols. T h e fact is that both are essential to successful identity change. THE

SENSE

OF NEW

IDENTITY

T h e ultimate requisite of identity change is a consolidated sense of self as the new kind of person one hoped to become. Contributing to this are such things as acts of commitment and positive recognition by others, matters we have already discussed. In addition to these things, a person must have some experience which dramatizes his new self to himself, such as success in an undertaking in which he could not have thought of himself as successful at all. "Look at what I can d o ! " is the child's way of expressing it. And having had such an experience, people seek to repeat it. Indeed, as people come to feel themselves in possession of a new identity which they have desired, they court for a while every opportunity to experience a sense of themselves in the new role in order to consolidate it thereby. They display the badges of the new identity whenever they can find an excuse to do so. They demand that others treat them in accordance with whatever new rights the new identity gives them, insisting on every prerogative. They display whatever new powers they may have acquired, flexing their muscles and exerting their new-found power at the slightest provocation. They strut their stuff before mirrors and seek to convert the world into one large mirror of the new self. We are familiar enough with such behavior in our children and in ourselves. One of the

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difficult things we have to learn as we grow older is how to keep within the bounds of good taste. We are familiar with such behavior in connection with national movements, as when the Nazis, full of their new selves, sought to make the world a reflection of their self image. Unfortunately, it appears that one of the facts of life is the tendency for people experiencing identity change to make themselves obnoxious to their fellows—a tendency which may be expressed only in a mild bumptiousness, or which may produce more aggressive and, at times, even horrendous behavior. How it is manifested depends on the nature of the new identity and the role it plays as an outlet for pent-up frustrations of the past. People who have been waiting for a chance to push others around will revel in whatever powers their new identity gives them. Others with different emotional orientations may act pompously. Where changes in individual identity are concerned, the community has effective means of control which keep the attendant behavior within tolerable limits. T h e change being a routine one for members of the society, the whole process becomes standardized, and knowing that their fellows go through stages when they tend to be a bit difficult, people make allowances for them. T h e new identities being tested and consolidated, moreover, are those which have a recognized place in the social order and to which those assuming them are entitled. These controls tend to weaken and disappear altogether when identity change is experienced collectively. Indeed, when a whole community undergoes change, acquisition of its new collective identity is likely to be marked by the creation of a new social order. Its very conception is a projection of hitherto tightly constrained emotional forces, and its structure is designed to give these forces free play. Emergent nation-

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hood brings a new identity which allows people to repay their former masters for past humiliations of second-class citizenship. Achievement of first rank as a world power permits the Soviet Union to humble those who refused to accord earlier recognition to her efforts at identity change. Cuba's government leaves no stone unturned in its efforts to impress upon us that there is a new Cuba which is no longer the economic servant of the United States. The least the new nations can do to demonstrate to others and to themselves that they are indeed nations and no longer colonies, is to proclaim themselves neutral in the international quarrels of their former colonial masters. T o support them is to be in a position no different from the one they were in before. They have to prove to themselves and to others that they are indeed free not to support those by whom they were once dominated. Only afterwards can they render support and have it appear as a voluntary decision by free men. It has taken us Americans almost two hundred years to get over having to prove to the English that we are as good as they are. Not until Britain was almost beaten to her knees in the Second World War could we as a nation decide to stop playing neutral and give up the anti-British stance of "America First." CONCLUSION

Here, then, are three aspects of identity change and the educational process which make for difficulty and misunderstanding in human relations: the bridge-burnings by which people commit themselves to change and make themselves willing to be educated; their intense concern with the symbols of their new identities; and the stances

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by which they seek to prove to themselves and to the world that they are achieving their identity goals. We are familiar enough with these things in many contexts, and have learned how to deal with them in those contexts. Schoolteachers meet with them daily in their pupils, parents in their children. But we forget to allow for these aspects of identity change in mass education and in community development. We are righteously outraged by the sophomoric behavior of revolutionary governments. We are indignant at the "ingratitude" and "disloyalty" of our former colonies and of those whose lot we have sought to improve. We have to remind ourselves that what outrages us is a natural part of the process of identity change, a necessary step along education's road. We need to remember that successful development requires our clients to demonstrate to themselves and us that they no longer need us, and that until they have done so, they cannot deal with us on a footing in keeping with their changed identity. What form the demonstration takes depends on us. How a young man shows his freedom from parental control reflects the spirit in which that control was exercised and parental willingness or unwillingness to recognize his emancipation from it. How our clients in underdeveloped countries will demonstrate that they no longer need our tutelage depends likewise on the spirit in which that tutelage is given. But some kind of demonstration will be necessary, or the tutelage will not have achieved its goals. Let us be pleased when it takes the form of neutralism. Let us be pleased when we are hanged only in effigy. Let us rejoice that the saber is only rattled, and not drawn.

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1

Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 1778-1834: Foundation and Transformation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1947), pp. 65-70. See also the different interpretation of this event by A. L. Kroeber in his Anthropology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, rev. ed., 1948), pp. 403-5. 2 These events are described in part by Margaret Mead in New Lives for Old (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1956) , and more fully by Theodore Schwartz, The Paliau Movement in the Admiralty Islands: 1946-1954 (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1958) . In time, the government wisely altered its policies regarding this self-development movement.

Autonomous Motivation DOROTHY

LEE

i I have called the subject of my paper "autonomous motivation," only because I could find no other term which would communicate what I want to say before I present it at length. I hope to show that where there is full engagement of the individual in his life, he is invited to act, rather than motivated to act. I shall speak of a view of motivation which is gaining ground in recent years; in my own case, it was arrived at through work with non-Western cultures, and it is original only insofar as the journey I made, from departure to arrival, was my own. In writing my paper I encountered great difficulty, because all the words at hand, and all the concepts they represented, were relevant to a view of motivation which I have found inadequate to cover all the data which I encountered. In describing cultural situations which have forced me to reconsider my old view, I have had to use negatives when I was referring to something whose very peculiarity was affirmation. I have had to go against my long training in restrained and measured scholarly prose. T h e words I sometimes choose are deplorable, because what they refer to—the uninhibited, the impulseful—is itself unacceptable. But in fact, there were far too few 108

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such words available to me. So I have had to describe that which is without limit, in terms which imply limit. At first I saw such situations only in the non-Western cultures I was studying, perhaps because the entire structure of the society was based on a non-Western assumption of "motivation." I have later come to see that this was true also of the people around me, in my own society; I saw that the official view of motivation, which I had accepted, and the conception of the self which this presupposed, had blurred my vision, with the result that I did not see what was there. When I first started studying anthropology, I had accepted the notion that man behaved in response to basic needs. Man's activities were presented to me as economic, or as at any rate leading to the satisfaction of needs. When they were religious, even religion was presented to me as a means to an end, usually to an economic end, with preimagined, hoped-for results, furnishing the activity literally with an end, a finish. Over the years, the social sciences have provided me with a variety of theories of motivation. Man was motivated to satisfy basic needs, or to reduce tension, or in response to an externally applied stimulus; or he was propelled by some inner drive. T o my mind, all these theories differed only in specifics. Essentially they all viewed man as inert, driven or prodded or otherwise dependent on a furnished motivating power. But what I found when I read about "primitive cultures," contradicted all this. T h e behavior I saw was often nonutilitarian or even anti-utilitarian; it was often deliberately wasteful of materials and energy, and consciously inefficient—to use a term which has relevance only within my own framework of concepts. For such and similar behavior, the social scientist provided me with motivation—for ex-

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ample, with the desire for prestige. But by this time I was wary of Western explanations. It seemed to me that the Western social scientist actually described how he felt, how he behaved, with his Western needs for sensible moderation, for weighing the consequences of his action, for the rigid limiting logic, with his admiration for restraint and reasonableness. He said to himself, "If I were a Kwakiutl or a Trobriander, why would I be doing this?" But the fact is that he was not a Kwakiutl. In fact I am not even sure that he told me how he as a person felt in this situation, what propelled him to action. I rather think he told me how he ought to feel, in accordance with the theories he held. A t any rate, the data from other societies questioned all this. For instance, I started with the view that man acted to satisfy basic needs, and that when he could not be expected to be acting directly so as to satisfy these needs, then he had to be stimulated in some other way. Reward had to be dangled before him, a stimulus had to prod him, or, later, a drive had to push him; or the discomfort of tension moved him to act to achieve a resolution, or at any rate to reduce the tension. Yet there were the Eskimo who ate when they were hungry and fully satisfied their hunger—acting, I imagine, according to the traditional theory of motivation—but then kept on eating unreasonably for many hours, as long as the food lasted. Why? Conversely, there were the hungry Arapesh, who instead of being properly motivated to work so as to satisfy their hunger, instead of spending time and energy in producing more food so that they would not be continually hungry, wasted the larger part of their time and effort in a variety of undertakings which resulted merely in a virtuosity of non-utilitarian social intercourse.

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In fact, in a variety of ways I saw people of other cultures going to absurb lengths of effort, to extremes of behavior completely inexplicable when set within my own reasonable framework of views about human behavior. I found people like the Kwakiutl, who worked outrageously, with vigor and involvement, beyond any crying need to satisfy hunger; people who collected stupendous amounts of oil only to burn it in a gigantic public conflagration, in a fantastic game of trying to unseat their visitors who had come on purpose to engage in this sport. I read Malinowski's account of the Trobrianders who undertook laborious and fearful expeditions involving the careful working of a variety of magical performances and the observation of greatly depriving tabus; expeditions which meant the cutting down of large trees with stone implements and taking them to the shore without vehicles and without roads; which necessitated the building of sea-going canoes, the collection of provisions, the striking out into witch-infested water; time-consuming, effort-demanding expeditions which brought in no food, no clothing or shelter, nothing but some "ornaments" which in fact did not adorn, as most of them could not or would not be worn; and which would be possessed for probably not more than a year. I could not see these people propelled by any of the basic needs. And what drives could be strong enough to push the Kwakiutl and the Trobrianders into such extremes of exertion? What stimulus was massive enough to result in this response? Such questions forced me to discard all theories of motivation with which I was acquainted and to see what I could find for myself. T h e needs and drives and tensions which I had been offered as sources of behavior were too bounded by the limits of our own reason to account for

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the exorbitant behavior which I found. And in fact the whole list of needs and drives was to my mind irrelevant when I tried to see it in connection with this behavior. Hunger does motivate, but meagerly, within limits; its satiation forms a rigid ceiling. Hunger goads me as I goad a reluctant animal which responds up to a point, compelled into moving a required amount. But what explains the running, the skipping, the bounding? Why does my goat leap over the highest "obstacles" in the path instead of taking the easy, effortless way around them as I do— obstacles which obviously invite rather than obstruct through their demand for effort? Why does the Eskimo, after he satisfies hunger, eat food which he has risked his life to get, without thought of tomorrow's hunger? Why did the Trobrianders grow, with such unreasonable exertion, twice as many yams as they needed, doing a great amount of hard work which did not go into increasing or bettering or ensuring the yield, "unnecessary" work, and then have magic made so that these yams should rot undisturbed and uneaten in the yamhouse? Once I decided that I needed a fresh theory, I saw that people in all the societies which I studied exerted themselves often to unimaginable lengths; but their efforts might or might not result in food or shelter or prestige. It seemed as if the exertion itself expended within a meaningful situation, was sufficient in itself. When I looked around me in this country, I did not at first glance see such absurdity of exertion. I saw people preferring to ride rather than walk, to push a button rather than light a stove, to turn on an automatic washing machine rather than scrub clothes. I saw people responding to the stimulus of profit, working harder and longer for more pay. Yet I also saw these same people working even

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harder, beyond profit and beyond pay. I saw women inventing new stitches to make their knitting more engrossing, and demanding of more alertness; and I saw them devising more intricate and laborious cooking to do on their push-button stoves. All around me, I saw people who work to earn money to buy themselves the opportunity to exert themselves, for no profit beyond any imaginable limit; unreasonably, without calculating risk or effort or profit, in danger to limb and life itself; attempting to climb inaccessible cliffs and peaks, skiing, shooting rapids, swimming beyond the limits of safety. Occasionally they did this in public, perhaps seeking prestige, but much more often they did it in obscurity. I saw all this most clearly in connection with our own educational process. This happened when my son, a highschool freshman, took u p tennis. He had been a textbook paradigm of the theory of motivation which I had held. According to his teachers and the school authorities, he was a model student, fulfilling all requirements and meeting all obligations. He carried out all his assignments competently, completing them acceptably on time. In every school situation, he moved until he bumped his head against the ceiling of his goal: the reasonable expectations of his teachers, and of the established requirements for an "A." His mind was flabby, he was bored and listless. He did not want to get u p in the morning, because there was nothing to get u p for. Then he discovered tennis. This had an inviting horizon, a horizon which could never stop him because it retreated as he moved. No contrived incentive had to be furnished, no fixed grade insured a reasonable effort, no defined achievement put an end to his effort. Tennis in-

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vited him to unlimited exertion. Now on Sundays he got up at daybreak so as to have a long time at the tennis courts; and without a break for meals, dressed unbecomingly in sweat clothes against the cold drizzle of late winter, paying no heed to discomfort or the passage of time, he played far into exhaustion. What motivated him? He was certainly not motivated by the need to succeed competitively. I watched him win a junior championship; he was apathetic and sluggish, he was engaged only to a minimum; his opponent did not offer him strong competition. It was a poor game and he did not enjoy it. He was not glad or proud of his "success." Conversely, whenever he could, he chose for himself partners who were bound to defeat him. He chose them because they gave him a good game. What was he seeking? What he was seeking was an opponent—and I use this term in its literal sense of someone who is opposite, who would draw from him the full exercise of all that was in him; one who would evoke him—not push or compel him, to an answering response of exertion beyond known limits. T h e partners he liked usually defeated him. Yet he chose them, because they invited him to actualize all his capacities—his coordination, his split-second judgment, his footwork, his skill, his imagination, his planning; all of these focused upon the one instant of hitting the tennis ball. He sought for a partner who would engage his whole being to full commitment. You will say that all this was because he liked sports, and not books; but I believe this is not the case. He went to his school with a passion for mathematics. He was filled with an urgent inquiry into logic and values and metaphysics; he wanted to know how we know that we know, and what is man. But the school could not recognize urgency, and

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felt lesponsible to protect him against the enormity of his own appetite for knowledge and exploration. Besides, they had on hand a system of organized, externally applied motivations for the students, since the filling of school assignments could not be left to the compelling force of basic needs. So they stopped his immoderate appetite by feeding him what was moderate and good for him, what was appropriate for a boy of his age. For his clamorous inquiry they substituted their concept of what an educated man should know, or even the so-called need for achievement, which could be satisfied when one's limited goal had been achieved. If his urgency had been recognized and encouraged, instead of being firmly fenced in; if the view of motivation as depending on needs and drives and external stimulus had not been substituted for the striving of the human spirit, I believe he would have been truly as alive in school as he was on the tennis court. Actually, he himself was aware of the constricting effect of set goals, and chose to go to a college without grades, where his inquiry is gushing freely and tennis has taken second place. ii

Eventually I came to form another view of man's behavior. I saw man as moving rather than motivated, as thrusting forward, striving, aspiring. As I said above, others also have come to this view of man. T h e biologist Edmund Sinnott means something of this sort when he speaks of the "inner urgencies that guide behavior," and when he says of man: "there come bubbling up in him a host of desires . . . his cravings for beauty, his moral aspirations, his love of his fellows. . . . " Another biologist, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, speaks of this when he says, "The organism should not be considered as a responding

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machine but rather as primary activity. . . . Primary behavior is continuous. . . ." Gordon Allport refers to this as "propriate striving," which could distinguish itself from other forms of motivation in that "however beset by conflict, it makes for unification of personality." Abraham Maslow speaks of the value of being fully human, and of the urge of the self to flex its muscles, so to speak; and both he and Kurt Goldstein speak of man as striving toward self-actualization. What struck me about what I call striving or thrust was that the behavior in which it eventuated was prodigal, exuberant, unpredictable in its reach. I now saw man as spontaneously eager to exert himself to the utmost of his capacities, in his striving to be fully human. And immediately I was appalled at the niggardliness of my terms, and of the concepts which they named. T h e "utmost" I just used, merely pushes the limit out a little further; the fullest is still limited by what it fills. I can fill my cup to its utmost limit, but that is only to the known lip. If I speak of brimming over, of excess or exorbitance, all my terms refer to concepts which take account of measure and limit. Yet I have to use these terms, though they are in contradiction to what I say. In fact, I believe that lack of limit, infinitude, is a necessary dimension of this propriate striving, thus differentiating it absolutely from motivation, whose quality is finitude and limit. Thus the thrust can be so exuberant as to bring down the criticism of the Western observer who will speak of improvidence, or of the inability to resist one's impulses: or, as a participant, will worry at the childishness of people who cannot be taught rationing, or to realize the necessity for forced marches. T h e exuberance of which I speak is most obvious in

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situations where we ourselves would have been moved to calculation and measure. For instance, among people who are constantly on the brink of starvation hospitality may be exercised to the point of what we would call madness. Consider, for instance, Thesiger's accounts of the Arabs of the Empty Quarter, whom he visited some ten years ago. There is his description of the occasion when he and his five companions met an encampment of Bedu in this most desolate of deserts. These people had no tent, no blankets, no headdresses, no shirts, nothing but their ragged loincloths to spread over themselves in the freezing cold of the desert night. They had no food except the milk of their camels, and this they pressed on their sudden uninvited guests, brooking no refusal; yet they had had nothing to eat or drink for a day, and would have nothing for another twenty-four hours. This is excessive giving, beyond the limits of common sense or rationality. For that matter, their entire way of living was beyond the bounds of reason or common sense. Thesiger reports that at this time the oil fields were in need of workers, who would be paid large sums for doing nothing except sit in the shade and guard a dump. Yet these Bedu resisted all invitation-—I will not say temptation; it would have tempted me in their place, but it obviously was no temptation to them—to this easy way of earning a living. They lived in an appalling discomfort, they went hungry, cold, and exhausted from hard traveling by day and from unrefreshing nights, when sleep was disturbed by the need to move about to get some warmth. They were in constant danger of death from starvation, from thirst, from camelraiders. Thesiger speaks of hiring a pack camel, whose owner was ready to walk across the desert with him. This man

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had worn out the soles of his feet on the journey he had just completed, and was prepared to walk on raw flesh, on the harsh floor of the desert. This is absurd particularly since he could easily have earned money working in a garden in a village. These people chose to live this way and no Western explanation can contain the effulgence which gave rise to and supported their choice. In one form or other, I find this exuberant exertion in most of the cultures I know. There are differences, among the cultures, however. Each culture contains its own definition of what it is to be fully human, has its own areas where man is invited to limitless exertion, and furnishes its own peculiar situations which call forth men's exertion. If to be fully human means to be completely, organically continuous with one's social unit, as it does among the Nyakyusa of Tanganyika, the people will exert themselves in learning and performing meticulously the minutely detailed and intricate practices which, for instance, will make a woman at one with the lineage of her husband, or a newly conceived embryo continuous with the body of its father. If to be a man fully meant to be a gardener, as it did among the Trobrianders whom Malinowski visited, then a man went to all sorts of (to us) unnecessary and inexplicable lengths in performing his gardening. If, as I believe to be the case in our own culture at present, there is no official recognition of exuberance, then the human spirit burgeons beyond the official stricture. At present, for instance, we do not give sanction to effulgence, to excess, to gushing behavior without calculation or measure or risk. Officially, we ask for the calculable, the graspable. We aspire to a set ceiling. (See, for

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instance, David Riesman's "The Found Generation" in the Autumn 1956 American Scholar.) Full humanness for us means no spilling over, no bursting through the bounds of measure and prediction. Yet, unofficially, outside the recognized structure of our culture the human spirit even in our present-day society does thrust beyond the limits set by the measure, and spills over into activities of absurd exertion and commitment, such as the ones I mentioned above. Another characteristic of thrust which I found was that it could not come forth in isolation; it existed in an open system of transaction. In every culture I studied, I found that if man was not "motivated," that is if he was not prodded into moving, he had to be invited to thrust forward. Cultural systems, affording man his place in the universal whole, furnished a variety of situations (to use a phrase which I shall have to contradict later) for calling forth man's exertion. I shall speak here of only one such system, which I find in a variety of forms among the Indians and the Eskimo of this continent. I believe that generally among these people, man was viewed as a collaborator with the rest of nature or the universe in building the world of experience. I have found this to be so, at any rate, among those cultures which have been studied intensively enough to uncover man's view of his place in the universe. For instance, such a view seems to be underlying the verbal structure of the Navaho language. Here we have verbal forms which indicate that rollingness, or flyingness through the air, pre-exist as potential, or as design, in certain objects. A man does not cause a ball to roll, he releases its predisposition to roll, or actualizes the potential to roll, or puts the rollingness into operation. (I am profoundly aware of the inadequacy

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of all these phrases I have used just now; there are no such concepts in American culture, and all the words with which this culture provides me are inadequate and in fact wrong when I use them to present what I am trying to present.) Such a picture of man in the universe is clearly presented in the language of the Wintu Indians of California. Here the primary verbal stem refers to a world, a universe, that neither exists nor does not exist. W e might say that it refers to the nature of things, a nature which is not realized because the things themselves do not exist, the situations have not come to be and may never come to be. Only at the instant when man experiences these do they come into existence, into history. T h e experiential or existential stem of the verb is derivative from this other stem. When man speaks with the aid of this stem, he asserts existence through his own experience of it. And it is only through his doing, through, probably, his decisive act or his act of will, that the world to which the primary stem refers can have concrete existence. This dialogue between the idea of the universe or the potential of the universe, and man's experience, runs through the entire verbal system, and perhaps through the entire linguistic structure. With the Hopi Indians, we find this picture systematically expressed in their "Hopi Way." Here there was a pre-established universal order, a design; but it needed man's cooperation to become actualized. T h e course of the sun was set between winter solstice and summer solstice; but the sun could not move between these two solstices unless man cooperated. T h e land could not thaw to allow for planting, unless man translated the design into the actuality.

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Man's part in all this was to work—both in a technical sense and also in a religious sense through his ceremonials. Through such ceremonials the sun was enabled to move from stage to stage, the corn was enabled to grow along its given cycle of growth. When he cleared the fields, when he dug and planted and weeded, when he sang to the growing corn to make it happy, and when he worked his corn ceremonial, man was cooperating with the corn to enable it to follow its course. T o do this a Hopi needed to put himself through a long, in fact an endless educational process. He had to train his body, he had to learn to endure pain and cold and hunger and thirst. He had to learn technical processes, to get detailed knowledge about the corn and its ways, and also he had to grow himself into a person who could carry out the necessary ceremonials. For instance, he had to learn to empty his mind from all dissonance and anxiety, from all evil thoughts. He had to discipline himself strongly, so that he could eventually concentrate on thinking good and peaceful thoughts only. Some men went further than others along this Hopi way. After the training of childhood, which did include punishment, all went eventually along this way without external coercion, in answer to the invitation to bring the design into human history. This kind of picture of man's share in the universe emerged for the Eskimo, also, in a recent study by Paul Riesman. These people show a gusto for life, that is, for their own way of life, which is difficult for us to comprehend. In fact, Western society was concerned to the point of making an effort to "ease the lot" of the Eskimo, thereby probably destroying the meaning of life for them. And it was easy to see them as people in need of help. Here were people for whom sudden disaster was com-

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monplace, an everyday matter of living; people for whom impending starvation was a reality to be encountered at any time; people who froze to death, murdered or were murdered with apparently slight provocation, were mauled to death by polar bears, fell into crevasses and were killed, overturned in their kayaks and were drowned. Their lives were so full of such hardships that it is incredible that anyone could have endured them, let alone chosen to endure them. And yet these people have repeatedly been reported as being sorry for the White because he had to live a different kind of life. In fact, some forty years ago, when one of them visited New York and came back to report on its large population, he was thought to be lying because his hearers could not believe that such a large number of people could choose to live this way, when they could have lived in an Eskimo way. This zest for (Eskimo) life, this readiness to endure hardship and encounter mortal danger, is called forth apparently through the part which a person finds for himself in the universal scheme. T h e Eskimo is a collaborator with the rest of the universe in creating the Eskimo world of existence. For the Eskimo the universe is thought, but man only has the capacity to think. Yet man cannot think unless thought enters him, and thought cannot exist unless man thinks it. If I say, then, that thought exists outside man, every one of the words I use is wrong because I use them in the context of my culture where man is complete in himself, the universe is complete in itself, and thought either exists or does not exist. For the Eskimo thought outside man does not have existence, it hovers on the brink of existence; in fact it is not thought, it does not

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exist, it is not outside, since the universe itself contains man, and man is not man completely without the socalled outside. Now this incompletion except in mutual collaboration, this interdependence for very existence, furnishes the equivalent of what we call motivation. Man is constantly invited to make actual both the existence of the world and his own existence. At the moment when he thinks, at the moment when he gives existence to the potential thought which is outside him (thought which is potential only insofar as man is ready and striving to give it actuality), at this moment man and the universe come into existence. Thought has now become "a think," to use Paul Riesman's term. All events come into being in this way through man's collaboration; they have existed as thoughts outside man until man has brought them into history. And if man is to create a strong, full situation, he has to do this with full humanity, he has to meet the universe with all his being strained to its utmost limits or, I should say, beyond any pre-conceivable limit. Now this in our own culture would be seen as motivation; here it is human striving in response to evocation, which takes the form of a call to create one's world in collaboration. This is what is behind his urge to learn without end, to discipline himself, and to endure without limit. And in fact, to live his life in the arctic, an Eskimo had to have a high development of skills, of perceptiveness and sensitivity, of alertness. For instance, a man traveling through a dense snow storm had to know where, in the vast expanse, to dig with his heel to uncover the two-inch track of the sled which went by before the storm. What multitude and variety of perceptions, what wealth of de-

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tailed knowledge, went into this one discovery, I cannot imagine, and the ethnographers themselves could not find out. A man had to grow in self-discipline until he could remain motionless at a seal hole for three or four days at a time, "feet planted together, head down, bottom high, forced by the seal's acute hearing to maintain absolute silence," and to do this while fully and passionately engaged, gazing with intensity, alert to the tiniest movement. He had to be ready and able to build an igloo in a blinding and smothering blizzard, imperturbable in the face of what was catastrophic to his white companion, without disorganizing haste, gently prodding the ground with his harpoon to find the proper snow, carefully cutting blocks with precision and speed, trimming lightly and accurately; and then, while his white companion huddled in the igloo in fear and misery, he had to be able to go out again into the blizzard, as a matter of course, to dig up the snowburied dogs and feed them. All this was an aspect of collaboration in building the world; it was all part of being Eskimo. When they lived a non-Eskimo life of ease, de Poncins describes the people as apathetic. He speaks about them at the trading post, where they had "warmth, they had biscuits, they had tea. . . . They are dull, sullen, miserable. . . . But open wide the door, fling them into the blizzard and they come to." Now they are Inuk, men-pre-eminently. I have not been indulging here in an exercise in cultural relativity. Though it is a view so foreign to our own official culture that our language itself cannot be used to express it, actually this view of man as invited to collaboration has been gaining ground for many years. When Dewey spoke of the transaction between buyer and seller, he was describing something like the Eskimo world. Buyer

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and seller are not buyer and seller, except insofar as they create each other in the process of transaction. I am not a buyer, unless you are willing to sell to me. Conversely, you can become a seller only insofar as I am ready to buy. There is a further dimension to this, however. This is something which my son pointed out to me when I told him how I had described his tennis-playing in the first part of this paper. He pointed out that he did not "play a game of tennis" against a competitor. There was no game to play. The two partners collaborated to create the game. T h e effort beyond calculable limit, the training in skills, the development of imagination, the boundless exertion, all these grew naturally out of the striving to help create a good game. And the choice of a strong competitor grew also out of this. If success came, it was welcome, but it was secondary. T o be motivated by the need for success in choosing a partner would have been to make the creation of the game itself incidental only. T h e game of tennis is one of many situations in our culture which are so structured as to evoke the putting forth of effort, energy, exertion through an invitation to collaborate. Most of these situations, however, are outside the official framework of our society. For many years now, for instance, our artists, our musicians, our writers have been proceeding on this basis. As Koestler puts it: T h e artist's aim is to turn his audience into accomplices. And Virginia Woolf speaking of the author, says to her reader: Be his fellow worker and accomplice. hi

I have directed my attention to motivation here largely because of the increasing concern in the schools with "underachievement" and with "underdevelopment of the

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capacity to learn." I have attempted to say in this paper that the theory of motivation which we have applied generally in the schools does motivate, but only up to a limit. If the full capacity of the individual is to be tapped and encouraged toward development, we have to have a new view, to operate on a new basis. T h e basis which I have been describing in this paper, the strong invitation to the individual to collaborate in creating his situation—in this case his educational situations—has been progressively eliminated from the schools in this century. W e have seen competition only as competitive success, as leading to a harmful comparative evaluation of the human being; and much of it was exactly this, and was rightly expelled from the school situation. W e saw achievement only as a pawn in the winning of conditional love, or as a bid for approval. As such it was undesirable and harmful, and was eliminated, at any rate at the policymaking level. W e failed to see achievement as the end product of spontaneously entered exertion and discipline, as the enjoyed performance of carefully learned skills. And we failed to see the necessity for the competitor as collaborator in creating the situations which would call forth this unmeasured exertion, this chosen self-discipline and learning; and, in fact, there were no situations to create, as they were furnished ready-made. In the beginning of my paper I said that I was not speaking of autonomous motivation. I have tried to show that I speak of striving and thrust instead, and that an individual, if he is to strive with all his capacity, is not completely autonomous: he needs to see himself as collaborating.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

No reference to specific works can express my indebtedness to the people whose work lies behind much of what I say here. For instance, a word such as "parsimonious" used by Gordon Allport spurred my vague dissatisfaction to eruption. Abraham Maslow's value of being fully human whetted my thinking on value. John Adams started me on a fresh view of the Kwakiutl when he spoke of their potlatch as a "fantastic strut." More vague and permeating is the encouragement received to turn to old material with new questions. BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALLPORT, GORDON W. Becoming. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. ALLPORT, GORDON W. Personality and Social Encounter. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. BERTALANFFY VON, LUDWIG. "General System Theory," Main Currents of Modern Thought, Vol. II, No. 4. BERTALANFFY VON, LUDWIG. "Some Considerations on Growth in Its Physical and Mental Aspects," The Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Fall 1956). FROMM, ERICH. "Values, Psychology, and Human Existence" in A. H. Maslow (ed.), New Knowledge in Human Values. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. GOLDSTEIN, KURT. The Organism. New York: American Book Company, 1939. MASLOW, ABRAHAM H. "Health as Value," in A. H. Maslow (ed.), New Knowledge in Human Values. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. MASLOW, ABRAHAM H. "Deficiency Motivation and Growth Motivation," in Nebraska Motivation Symphosium. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1955. MASLOW, ABRAHAM H. "Psychological Data and Value Theory," A. H. Maslow (ed.), New Knowledge in Human Values. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959. MOUSTAKAS, CLARK E., "True Experience and the Self," in C. E. Moustakas (ed.). The Self. New York: Harper 8c Brothers, 1956. RIESMAN, PAUL. Senior Honors Thesis, Harvard College, 1960. SINNOTT, EDMUND W. The Biology of the Spirit. New York: T h e Viking Press, 1955. 123