Review of L. Cronk, That Complex Whole

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6 (4): 727-728 (2000).

In this succinct, readable book, Lee Cronk seeks to reconcile contemporary behavioural ecology with cultural anthropology. He begins with E.B.Tylor’s classic definition of culture ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’. Cronk deletes ‘habits’ from this list. He requires a concept which like the replicatory ‘selfishness’ central to the modern concept of a gene – explains behaviour while not forming part of it. Only culture defined as pure ideation can serve this function. Otherwise, behaviour is being explained by itself.

Cronk distances himself from the cruder versions of neo-Darwinian fundamentalism. ‘The hubris of the sociobiologists of the 1970s’, he writes (p. 49), ‘was to suggest that they could absorb and even preempt the social sciences without first taking into account what really is special about human society and culture’. So what, for Cronk, is this special dimension? Cronk accepts that human culture is exceptional. Unfortunately, however, his definition limits culture to ‘socially transmitted information’. This defeats his own purpose, since he readily admits that many non-human species have ‘culture’ in this sense. Cronk does not distinguish human culture as ‘symbolic’; neither ‘symbols’ nor ‘symbolism’ appear in his index. For that matter, speech itself – also missing from the index – is only cursorily touched on.

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Cronk Lee – That complex whole: culture and the evolution of human behavior. xvi, 160 pp., bibliogr. Boulder, Oxford:Westview Press, 1999