Defining Human Identity Through Culture and Anthropology

Introduction: Anthropology and the Question of Human Identity

Anthropology, in the broadest sense of the term, is concerned with the whole history of mankind — with man in the context of evolution. Yet this is a difficult position to take, because being concerned with man as he occurs and as he has occurred means that the body and the soul must be taken into consideration together, and the differences in man associated with time and location must be investigated. Still, there is a fundamental difference between the work of an anthropologist and that of an anatomist or a psychologist, who deal primarily with the common functioning of the human mind and body. Accordingly, "Minor differences such as appear in any series of individuals are either disregarded or considered as peculiarities without particular significance for the type, although sometimes suggestive of its rise from lower forms."^[1] To the anthropologist, on the other hand, each individual human must be seen through the lens of his particular cultural and social group. The consequence of this position is that a human being cannot simply be categorized with a blanket definition, but must be regarded on a case-by-case basis.

It is significant that anthropology is concerned with the human being throughout history, up to the present. This means that anthropology, in its aim to tell the entire story of mankind, must centrally rely upon primary sources in history. As one authority notes, "History, in the narrower sense of the word, depends on written records."^[2] Certainly history and anthropology must converge at some points, but it is valuable to understand anthropology as something analogous to history: since historians must extract the past from individual sources, the ultimate stories they tell are fundamentally unique to the individual. Anthropology is similar in this way — individual cases are the sources, and of utmost importance is understanding them in their unique situations. Whereas historians must be concerned with the written record to tell their tale, anthropologists must be concerned with human bones, animal bones, and human handiwork. All of these sources are specific cases of humans and human activities; the human, understood through anthropology, must be a specific human, and not a general subject.

However, there remains a problem with regarding humans on a case-by-case basis while simultaneously attempting to formulate an overall history of man: where should any story of man begin? In other words, some set of boundaries between the human being and other animals is needed in order to generate an appropriate account. After all, the geological record tells the same case-by-case story of all plants and animals, so it is unclear exactly where and why humans should be singled out for discussion. Essentially, it is important that we define who is human and who is not.

Biological and Rational Definitions and Their Limits

To define who is human, one could begin with the biological definition of a species: "a set of individuals who are potentially or actually interbreeding to produce fertile offspring."^[3] This definition leaves the door open for many grey areas in nature — instances where it is impossible to determine whether animals are members of the same species or not. Lions and tigers, for example: when they do interbreed they produce fertile offspring, but it is unclear whether they would interbreed freely in nature. They no longer coexist in the same habitats — because of human actions — so they are not clearly different species. Similarly, based upon the biological definition of species, one could claim that an individual born with a genetic defect who is unable to have children is not a Homo sapiens. Biologically, one might be right; but few people would argue that we should therefore perform medical experiments upon this individual, or that they should not be afforded the same rights as any other human being in society. It is in this regard that anthropological definitions of human beings must separate themselves from the purely biological definition.

Many people have tried to use our status as moral individuals as the basis for separating ourselves from other animals. Damon Linker, associate editor of First Things magazine, writes, "Western civilization has tended to regard animals as resembling things more than human beings precisely because . . . animals have no perception of morality."^[4] Accordingly, our notions of right and wrong, our capacities as deductive thinkers, and in short our rationality, are what make us human and grant us rights above other animals. Historically, this has been a powerful motivation for human rights; however, it is also subject to arbitrary consequences. Are we to claim that mentally disabled people should not be granted equal rights because they cannot rationally choose between right and wrong, and therefore are not human? Once again, we must concede that by this definition they may not qualify, but that denying them the rights of society is clearly immoral. Designations based upon mental capacity thus run into the same problems as those based strictly upon biological grounds.

Alfred Korzybski, an early anthropologist, distinguished between the classes of life in an interesting manner: "Since plants captured one kind of energy, converted it into another, and stored it up, he defined the plant class of life as the chemistry-binding class of life. Since animals were characterized by the freedom and faculty to move about in space he defined animals as the space-binding class of life."^[5] By these two definitions, animals are fairly effectively separated from plants; but the separation between other animals and humans must fundamentally rely upon some appeal to a specific characteristic of human beings in order to be useful in the field of anthropology.

Time-Binding, Consciousness, and Locke's Personal Identity

Many anthropologists have decided that the identity of humans must be determined by their particular capacity to "summarize, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of our past," and that this mental link to our individual pasts must be the basis from which we are able to define each human being as a human being.^[6] This has, to many, placed human beings in the "time-binding class of life."^[7] This is more of a philosophical definition of identity than a purely scientific one, and it is by no means a new distinction.

John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding puts forward his analysis of human identity, and it is a similar approach to the issue. Locke's solution to the problem is to connect past and present actions — which are associated with past and present perceptions — with consciousness. Through consciousness it is possible for an individual to perceive what is around him and to perceive that he has already perceived. Consciousness links the human mind to physical actions that the human body has carried out. Human identity, to Locke, is something different from mere physical identity of man; it "is a thinking and intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places," and is linked to the actions of our physical body through consciousness.^[8] Consciousness allows individuals to consider themselves distinct from other living things, to identify what they have control over and what they do not, and to extend their identity forwards and back as far as their mental capacities allow. Human identity consists of this extension of consciousness. "Person" refers to a man who can take responsibility for his actions and is concerned with the consequences of those actions. So, although human identity is indelibly linked to bodily identity, they cannot be regarded as the same thing; the body may have performed a specific action at a specific time, but the retrospective consciousness connected to that body may have no recollection of that action.

Locke also deconstructs the idea that an immaterial soul could be said to be where personal identity rests. To Locke, the person and the soul are two very different sorts of items. Someone could claim to have the same soul as Hector, who fought in the Trojan War, but he could not possibly be concerned with the actions of that man. Since his consciousness is incapable of reaching into his past lives — though they may exist — asserting that a modern man and Hector are the same individual person is absurd. The fallacy of equating an immaterial substance with identity is seen in the result that lapses in memory must necessarily be attributed to other identities. "But though the same immaterial substance of soul does not alone, whatever it be, and in whatsoever state, make the same man; yet it is plain, consciousness, as far as ever it can be extended — should it be to ages past — unites existences and actions very remote in time into the same person."^[9]

Culture, Folk Psychology, and Human Distinctiveness

However, problems exist even when attempting to identify where one object ends and another begins. Separating the physical world from the mental world requires that the physical world have boundaries and, in particular, that objects end somewhere. It is possible, for instance, to measure an apple. We can determine its volume and density and say that the apple ends where the air around it begins. Yet every measurement we make upon this apple is only an approximation; we cannot know exactly how large it is. This limitation is not in place because our instruments are faulty, but because our very definition of the apple is lacking. The definition fails to take into account the billions of molecules that are constantly entering and leaving the apple. When "inside" the apple, the molecules are part of it; but it is impossible to know exactly where this transition takes place on a molecular scale. Moreover, determining when these molecules are part of the atmosphere and when they are part of the apple is also impossible. At some point, portions of the apple must simultaneously be portions of the atmosphere. This is true of all physical objects: parts of objects are at a single point and time parts of other objects that we generally regard as separate from them. Essentially, where we draw the line between the apple and the air is completely arbitrary and fails to coincide with any physical truth.

Similarly, asserting that there is a difference between a physical apple and a mental image of that apple runs into the same problem of finding where the physical object ends. This debate takes a more difficult turn when considering the mind and the body in particular. The mind, by the dualists' definition, is explicitly non-physical. So it should be simple to say that it is separate from the body, because we defined it as such; by being non-physical, the fact that physical objects fail to have meaningful boundaries should not affect it. Unfortunately, the fact that the mind experiences some form of interface with the physical world implies that a causal relationship exists, even if we cannot fully understand it. Since a relationship exists and the mind is overtly spiritual, the physical world must have a boundary — a point where information can be exchanged. But the physical universe fails to exhibit any clear boundaries; in fact, aspects of the universe exist that our senses cannot experience. Just as with the apple and the air, the line between the mind and the body can only be drawn arbitrarily. Ultimately, any classical definition of the human being upon these grounds must fail as well. Humans cannot all be categorized under this same arbitrary distinction based upon an immaterial mind that cannot be measured.

If we are to accept that human beings can be defined through their time-binding attributes, then it is only natural to wonder whether it is reasonable to assign this property to man alone. Is it possible that other animals have sufficient intelligence to weigh the actions of their past and decide what to do in their future? Philosopher Ernst Cassirer categorically rejects such a notion: "Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. . . . As compared with other animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality."^[11] Korzybski concurs with this position and takes it one step further: "Human nature, this time-binding power, not only has the peculiar capacity for perpetual progress, but it has, over and above all animal propensities, certain qualities constituting it a distinctive dimension or type of life."^[12] So, the fact that human identity can reach forward and backward in time through consciousness is only part of the story; the other aspect of human existence that warrants separation from other animals is that this consciousness is afforded a grasp of culture. With culture, human beings possess a discernible link to a human past that existed before each individual ever reached awareness. The connection between time and consciousness was present in each human being throughout history, and their experiences carried through to create cultural settings that influenced the consciousnesses of subsequent humans: time-binding has allowed for culture, and culture is what defines the human being.

This aspect of human existence, according to many philosophers, is apparent in the many ways we interact with and make inferences about each other. Jerry Fodor calls this aspect of human reality "folk psychology." His conception of folk psychology takes into account the realization that people in general cannot have a conscious grasp of exactly the kind of psychology they are engaging in, because it is ingrained into their own perceptions of themselves and the surrounding culture. In other words, people are capable of understanding each other's behavior without being explicitly familiar with the mechanisms they employ to reach that understanding. This phenomenon has its analogy in language: most speakers of the English language are able to speak it fluently and grammatically without having any formal understanding of its grammatical rules.^[13] "Chomsky has famously argued that the best explanation of such capacities is that speakers of natural languages have a form of unconscious knowledge of the grammar of the language that they speak. Such unconscious knowledge is known as tacit knowledge and is held to be encoded in the brain."^[14]

Recognizing this idea suggests that humans perform a similar sort of computation when making psychological inferences: we understand the causal laws that bind people's intentional states together, and we apply this knowledge without consciously knowing what we are doing. Clearly, this must be a result of cultural heritage as applied to individual thought processes, because by grasping how others behave in certain situations, we are applying an inherited way of thinking to current circumstances: "We tend not to think about our culture because it is so much a part of us that we take it for granted. . . . We would not realize that our belief in germs [for example] was cultural if we were not aware that people in some societies think that illness is caused by witchcraft and evil spirits."^[15] So, although anthropology is concerned with the behaviors of all human beings at all times, only actions or practices that are common among groups of individuals can be thought of as possessing any cultural significance. Lines can accordingly be drawn between particular groups of people based upon their practices, and lines can be drawn between people and animals as well. The fact that culture possesses this somewhat subconscious characteristic means that definitions of man do not need to depend upon mind-body divisions; instead, man can simply be thought of as an entity that engages in certain activities as inherited from one's culture. It is this observable quality that makes each person's habits both individualistic and holistic.

Conclusion: The Specific Human and the Holistic Story

Having established this tentative distinction between other animals and human beings based upon the context of culture, it is possible to discern why a human being must be understood as a specific kind of man rather than everyman: thinking of him as everyman would be to categorically ignore what binds him to other human beings — his culture. In anthropology there is no single term to blanket all of humanity under a single cultural norm, moral maxim, or physical characteristic. Differences in human beings may be nearly continuous — forming a spectrum of what it is to be human — so biological or purely mental divisions between people along the lines of race, or among animals along the lines of species, must be arbitrary. Since anthropology considers all human beings, individual variations must be regarded within their individual contexts and not with reference to a rigid definition: "Anthropology is, then, about all human beings, and it is the charge of the anthropologists to tell our story. It shouldn't present just the good side, but the bad. It should include not just one group of people, but others. It shouldn't illustrate just one aspect of human life, but all."^[19]