On occasion, I wonder what sort of person I’d be like if they hadn’t left. Between 1905 and the First World War, all the branches of my family made it out of Russia, and this occurred with a number of near misses—the train that almost left without my grandfather, the border guard who began to but then forgot to check the nonexistent papers. It could so easily have turned out otherwise, and then I’d be there. Would I have, as an adolescent, heaped the same contempt on Brezhnev as I did on Nixon? Instead of being an American model of one type of academic—Birkenstocks, teetotaling vegetarian, jeans—would I be a Slavic model—chain-smoking, vodka-laden, ill-fitting Polish-made suit, and an obsession with wheat genetics or topology? Maybe I wouldn’t even be an academic. Would I be a peddler in some frostbitten hamlet, married to someone renowned for her skill at making a meal out of turnips and potatoes?
America is one big version of The Alternative Universe, thanks to emigration. Fisherman in the Mekong Delta or dot-commer in Silicon Valley? Wife of a camel herder in Rajasthan or family practitioner/weekend softball-league ace in Houston? At the core of this what-ifing is a key fact—we are shaped by the sort of society in which we live, and we would not be the same person if we had grown up elsewhere. The language you are raised with will constrain your patterns of thought (a finding that has floated around anthropology and linguistics for close to a century). The economic structure of your society will influence whether you tend to cooperate or cheat in formal game-theory settings, as recent research has shown. The marriage structure of a culture will help determine whether the most salient thought of, say, a man during his marriage ceremony is This is the person with whom I will share love for the rest of my life, in whose arms I will die someday or Fourteen cows for a third wife? Damn, I think I got ripped off. And the theology, myths, and urban legends of your civilization will shape how you think about some of the most fundamental questions in life—for example, is life intrinsically beautiful, or sinful?
And if the culture in which we live shapes who we are—our thoughts, emotions, and actions—it must shape our underlying biology as well. This can be for utterly obvious reasons—the culture you live in determines the diet you are exposed to, the medical care you receive, the physicality with which you earn your daily bread. But the culture/biology link can be more direct and fundamental than that. As but one example, consider child development. The Cornell anthropologist Merideth Small looks at child-rearing practices from across the planet in her book Our Babies, Ourselves. You begin by reading her book assuming it is going to be an assortment box of prescriptions, that at the end you’ll emerge with a perfect combo for your kids, a mixture of the Kwakiutl Baby Diet, the Trobriand Sleeping Program, and the Ituri Pygmy Infant Aerobics Plan. But, Small emphasizes, there is no perfect, “natural” program. Societies raise their children so that they grow into adults who behave in a way valued by that society, and thus they differ enormously on a variety of measures: In a particular culture, how often is a child typically held by parents, by nonparents? Do babies ever sleep alone and, if so, starting at what age? What is the average length of time that a child cries before it is picked up and comforted? And a massive literature now demonstrates that variables such as these will influence the development of the brain—for example, some recent work by Michael Meaney and colleagues at McGill University shows the precise mechanisms by which different styles of rodent mothering (yes, some rats are more attentive and nurturing moms than others) will differentially activate certain genes in the brains of their pups for the rest of their lives.
The final section of this book explores these ideas, in three forms: First, your society, and your place in your society, will influence your biology. Next, societies differ in how people think about the biology of their behaviors. Finally, biological factors, such as the ecosystem in which people dwell, will shape the sort of society they form.
Essay thirteen, “How the Other Half Heals,” considers the first idea, looking at how your place in society influences the sort of diseases your body succumbs to. It has long been known that being poor, of low socioeconomic status, puts you more at risk for a huge number of diseases in all Westernized societies. This essay explores the smaller subset of diseases that are more common among the wealthy, with an ironic punch line. Essay fourteen, “The Cultural Desert,” examines how ecology shapes theology and argues that the cultures that have come to dominate this planet, generating something akin to a world culture, are, thanks to ecology, some of the least appealing around.
Essay fifteen, “Monkeyluv,” looks at the vagaries of passion and sexual attraction in a nonhuman primate society. Essay sixteen, “Revenge Served Warm,” examines a key issue in evolutionary biology, namely how societies (human or otherwise) develop systems of cooperation. As will be shown, a direct and laudable route for this to happen is highly unlikely, but a more emotionally frothy and disquieting one is more plausible.
Essay seventeen, “Why We Want Their Bodies Back,” looks at cross-cultural differences in how people think about the body, namely the body of someone dead. It was prompted by a very personal event, a mystery, a disappearance of two friends when I was in high school, and its only partial resolution, more than a quarter century later.
And finally, essay eighteen, “Open Season,” considers a question that, with each passing year, becomes of more interest to me as a scientist, writer, and social mammal. A hallmark of culture is the generation of new things, whether in ideas, art, or technology. Why is it that, as we get older, we’re less and less open to such novelty, and more drawn to the familiar and repetitive? Why is it that, once we pass a surprisingly young age, we become suckers for buying those “best of” anthologies of music from our adolesence, advertised on late-night TV?