The Development of Meaning: Ontogeny and Culture

Abstract

If bio-cultural studies are to progress, we must find means of inserting the agency of human lives between the rival temporal schemes of evolution and history. This article starts from the neglected biological notion of ontogeny, and extends it to fit the sociality which is so essential to our life as a species. A viable model of human development must account for the life course in its entirety, including the aging process. It should view the life cycle not within the encapsulated notion of individuality, but within the context of the social relations of reproduction. The bio-cultural unit is not the static, modal, psychically integral, ungendered, ego-centred individual; it is aprocess within which persons are formed and dissolved, move between dependent impotence and independent authority, divide and multiply their being through relations with others, know more and less about the world, and acquire and lose the capacity to change it. This is the medium in which meanings, the stuff of culture, are formed, perpetuated and changed. This article is prompted by a sequence of contributions to this Journal which have been concerned to close the gaps between biology and social anthropology1 The nature-culture opposition remains 'the very matrix of Western metaphysics' (Benoist 1973: 20) and to the extent that it defines the division of academic labour, it has become a fundamental obstacle to communication between the natural sciences and the humanities. If any discipline can straddle the gap it should be anthropology, with its four classic sub-fields extending from biology to linguistics. But the schism runs deeply through anthropology itself: the old debates about society and culture have hardened into divergent ideologies of materialism and idealism, and in some academic institutions a partitioning of the subject between science and the humanities is already under way.2 In a premature 'choice' characteristic of the 'two cultures' in our society, my own formal education in science ended when I was fourteen years old. As I struggle to make sense of how the temporalities of evolution, human history and the mundane rhythms of our individual lives are interconnected, I am painfully aware that the biology I need to know is separated from the social science I have learned by everything from vocabulary to 'causal structures' (Boyer 1994: 296; Lerner & Hultsch 1983: 46). Anyone seeking to bridge the nature-culture gap, whether in the spirit of amity or conquest, must certainly be bold (Midgley 1995: xiii). The ideological brickbats fly: the natural scientists are castigated for their determinism, for subjecting the human spirit to biologistic 'constraints' of their own devising, for saddling men and women with unattrac