From the February 2004 Anthropology News

The Place of Anthropology in a Public Culture Reshaped by Bioreductivism

ROGER N LANCASTER
GEORGE MASON U

In anthropology, it’s a truism that science is constrained by ideology and sometimes takes the form of folklore outright. But perhaps because most researchers’ attention has been trained elsewhere in recent years—on the social and institutional implications of ongoing developments in biomedicine—science studies in anthropology has largely neglected the elephant in the living room.

Here’s a snapshot of the elephant: Over the course of the past decade, biomythology has permeated American culture as never before. The idea that gender norms, sexual orientations, and social institutions are genetically (or neuro-hormonally) “hard-wired” flourishes in the long shadow of the Human Genome Project. And in close sync, the ubiquitous narratives of evolutionary psychology circulate, without qualification or caveat, in prominent newspapers and newsweeklies.

These new bioreductivisms, now prevalent in both academic and popular cultures, not only reverse decades of sophisticated cultural theory and empirical research on cultural variation; they have come to occupy the place once held by anthropology in a progressively dumbed-down serious public sphere. The stakes are high, not only for the discipline, but also for the social groups (notably women, gays, and lesbians) whose interests are marginalized in prevailing theories, which above all else “naturalize” conventional gender and sexual norms.

Naturalization is, perhaps, as old as the concept “nature,” and pseudo-scientific naturalizations of social arrangements are as old as, well, science. Turn-of-the-millennium biomythology thus bears some resemblance to earlier variants of the same. But it is also worth noting three key differences.

Big Science (Especially Biotechnology) is Big Business, thus Big News, Which Creates a Big Space for Bioreductive Narratives and Pseudo-Science: Over the past two and a half decades, major newspapers have developed extensive science supplements to capture breaking research news. These grew and developed alongside the Human Genome Project, which also stimulated the apparently boundless phenomenon that Ruth Hubbard and other critics have dubbed “genomania”: the unsound idea that there exists “a” “gene” “for” virtually every biological, psychological and social trait; the equally erroneous notion that the genome provides, in micro, a blueprint for the organism; and thus, an unmodulated rage for ever-more exacting genetic explanations of the human condition.

For example, a Lexis-Nexis search reveals that from 1970 until 1984, direct references to the phrases “genetic cause,” “genetic source,” or “genetic origin” in major Anglophone newspapers ranged from zero to four per year. Most of these refer to genetic maladies or traits with established genetic correlates. Beginning in 1985, references increase, first slowly, then dramatically, until peaking in 2000 at 165. A great many of these latter references are fanciful, attributing genetic causation to institutional arrangements or complex symbolic action.

These changes have drawn in their wake the unprecedented positive attention given to sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and other forms of bioreductivism. This set-up has also predicated how research news of the past 15 years has been covered. Editors want positive stories about new developments, new breakthroughs and new knowledge. They don’t want stories about the inapplicability of biological research to social questions or the limits of scientific knowledge. Thus, studies purporting to find evidence of “genes” “for” homosexuality, risk-taking, schizophrenia, and other traits were announced with great fanfare in science journals and on the front pages of major newspapers. The same claims were quietly retired on page 19—if retractions appeared at all—when subsequent studies failed to replicate the results of the original studies.

Today’s Bioreductivism Wistfully Narrates the Social Preoccupations of Modern Subjects as an Evolutionary Pageant: Evolutionary psychology, which purports to derive the contours of a generic human nature as the outcome of biological adaptations over eons of evolutionary time, gave “legs,” as they say in show biz, to the pervasive genomania. Whereas once upon a time 1970s sociobiology had explained and rationalized the “ugly” side of human nature (violence, war, racism, rape and sexual inequality), evolutionary psychology has developed a kinder, gentler variant of bioreductivism.

The gist of evolutionary-psychological reasoning has been widely disseminated, from the early 1990s on, in terms that will be familiar to most readers. Men seem restless? Hunters are hardwired to be on the prowl. Women like to shop? It’s the biological legacy of gathering. Sweet tooth? Jealous? It’s primal biology. . . . Everybody loves a good story, and it’s no accident that the heterosexual fables of evolutionary psychology have provided source material for an ABC sit-com, “Home Improvement,” for Rob Becker’s Broadway hit, “Defending the Caveman,” and for endless invocation in entertainment culture and self-help books.

Today’s evolutionary fables describe how men and women got to be the way they (supposedly) are at a post-feminist moment when just what they are, and what it might mean to be a man or a woman, is hotly contested. Evolutionary psychology spins timeless tales about heterosexual courtship rituals, pair-bonding for life, and the inevitability of the nuclear family at a time when all of these are in the throes of change and are said, by many, to be “in crisis.”

Modern Bioreductivism puts the “I” in Identity Politics: Lastly, what defines modern bioreductivism and distinguishes it from early variants is its radical adaptability to different conditions and demands. It’s easy enough to see why the new bioreductivisms appeal to secular social conservatives (evolutionary psychology naturalizes conventional heterosexual morality) and free-market libertarians (genomania’s plucky little gene is a miniaturization of classical liberalism’s entrepreneurial individual). But bioreductivism is selectively endorsed by a great many others, as well.

A segment of the gay rights movement, for example, has always argued that same-sex desires are inborn, congenital, fixed, immutable and invariant. “The gay gene” was thus embraced by some activists as the basis for legal arguments for gay civil rights. Fables about the evolution of sexual differences—especially fables that stress how women evolved to be nurturant, altruistic, pacific creatures—have also proved irresistible to some cultural feminists. Meanwhile, men’s movement enthusiasts, even some progressive ones, were invested from the start in stories about men’s “inborn needs,” the evolutionary heritage of manhood.

“Identity politics,” the quintessentially modern, American justification for social action and political redress by appeal to deep-seated, essential identities, provides fertile ground for bioreductivism, and everybody—the marginal or oppressed and dominant alike—wants to get in on the act.

In each of these cases, the biological reductions are selective and opportunistic. Gays who champion the idea of a “gay gene,” for instance, seldom acknowledge the deeply heteronormative sociobiology from which the concept derives. Likewise, feminists and men’s movement activists can be seen picking and choosing—always the more comforting images from the repertoire of evolutionary psychology, never the biological scary monsters and genetic supercreeps.

This sort of opportunism suggests the basis for bioreductivism’s rapid spread in American culture from the early 1990s on. More than anything, today’s reductivism offers to stabilize identity in the points de capiton of biology—that is, it purports to secure stability and certitude in an era when nothing much seems anchored about either identity or biology.

Furthermore, this approach to securing basic rights and recognition resonates with a longstanding Western understanding of “nature” as that which exceeds conscious control and volition. It also follows, logically, from a broad tradition of American civil rights law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “immutable” characteristics.

Yet, there are other, more viable, ways of staking just political claims than by recourse to a biologically reified identity politics vulgate. The Supreme Court’s broad ruling in Lawrence v Texas, which struck down the nation’s remaining sodomy laws, based its reasoning on civil libertarian arguments about human freedom; it cited not biological claims about innate desires but social constructivist histories treating law, institutions and identities.

What’s an Anthropologist to Do? Notwithstanding the positive uses to which flawed arguments are sometimes put, I think it would be professionally derelict not to point out that the broader implications of bioreductive models are overwhelmingly conservative; that the evidence for hard-wired gender roles and sexual orientations is scant (to put it mildly); and that the cross-cultural data suggests that variety and adaptability are the better plot lines of our evolutionary heritage.

Rob Becker's "Defending the Caveman" is a current Broadway hit.

I don’t take it for granted that all lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people will agree with my arguments about the location of identity politics in American culture. Nor do I assume that all anthropologists will understand sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and related forms of bioreductivism as “biomythology” or “scientific folklore.” But I do think there’s an interesting and productive confluence of questions in play here.

Contrary to Stephen Pinker’s recent legerdemain in The Blank Slate, anthropologists over several generations have developed a variety of robust, synthetic models for thinking about the relationship between biology and culture, for treating the phenomenology of sex and desire, for theorizing the manner in which institutions like kinship are constructed and function, and for gauging the parameters of social variation on these (and other) questions. The best of feminist and queer studies deepens research into this central subject matter of the discipline. The problem is that these findings go against prevailing trends in public culture, which remains caught in the tow of magical thinking associated with genomania. And the problem is that theory-building in the recondite mode has not served anthropology well in recent years (and has likely done much to diminish its social relevance and its public visibility).

Would that I had a pithy list of recommendations which, if followed, would set things right. Alas, I have no easy solutions. What we need, in part, is more of what we’re already doing: studies that take up the central questions of the field in changing political-economic and social contexts. There’s a lot of intellectual excitement to be had there yet—and a lot of insight to be shed over some of the burning social and political questions of our day: What should a family look like? How might marriage and kinship be legislated? Should gays and lesbians be allowed to wed? How do routines of toil, deprivation, and violence shape the body and affect personhood? And how do we, in making the conditions of our lives, also make and remake ourselves? More to the point, what we need are more studies that join ongoing political struggles in an accessible language.

Instruction on the proper way to grunt in the 1991 ABC pilot of Home Improvement.

Roger N Lancaster is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Cultural Studies at George Mason University. He received the C Wright Mills Award and the Ruth Benedict Prize for his ethnography on gender, sexuality, and family, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (1992). His latest book is The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (2003).