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Is Anthropology?
Anthropology
is the study of humankind, especially of Homo
sapiens, the biological
species to which we human beings belong. It is the study of how our species
evolved from more primitive organisms; it is also the study of how our species
developed a mode of communication known as language and a mode of social life
known as culture. It is the study of how culture evolved and diversified. And
finally, it is the study of how culture, people, and nature Interact wherever
human beings are found.
This book
is an Introduction to general
anthropology, which is an
amalgam of four fields of study traditionally found within departments of
anthropology at major universities. The four fields are cultural anthropology
(sometimes called social anthropology), archaeology, anthropological
linguistics, and physical anthropology. The collaborative effort of these four
fields is needed in order to study our species in evolutionary perspective and
in relation to diverse habitats and cultures.
Cultural
anthropology deals with the description and
analysis of the forms and styles of social life of past and present ages. Its
subdiscipline, ethnography, systematically describes
contemporary societies and cultures. Comparison of these descriptions provides
the basis for hypotheses and theories about the causes of human lifestyles.
Archaeology adds a crucial dimension to this endeavor.
By digging up the remains of cultures of past ages, archaeology studies
sequences of social and cultural evolution under diverse natural and cultural
conditions. In the quest for understanding the present-day characteristics of
human existence, for validating or invalidating proposed theories of historical
causation, the great temporal depth of the archaeological record is
indispensable.
Anthropological
linguistics provides another crucial
perspective:
the study
of the totality of languages spoken by human beings. Linguistics attempts to
reconstruct the historical changes that have led to the formation of individual
languages and families of languages. More fundamentally, anthropological
linguistics is concerned with the nature of language and Its functions and the
way language Influences and is Influenced by other aspects of cultural life.
Anthropological linguistics is concerned with the origin of language and the
relationship between the evolution of language and the evolution of Homo sapiens. And finally, anthropological
linguistics is concerned with the relationship between the evolution of
languages and the evolution and differentiation of human cultures.
Physical
anthropology grounds the work of the other
anthropological fields in our animal origins and our genetically determined
nature. Physical anthropology seeks to reconstruct the course of human
evolution by studying the fossil remains of ancient human and infrahuman
species. Physical anthropology seeks to describe the distribution of hereditary
variations among contemporary populations and to sort out and measure the
relative contributions made by heredity, environment, and culture to human
biology.
Because
of Its combination of biological, archaeological, and ethnographic
perspectives, general anthropology is uniquely suited to the study of many
problems of vital Importance to the survival and well-being of our species.
To be
sure, disciplines other than anthropology are concerned with the study of human
beings. Our animal nature is the subject of intense research by biologists,
geneticists, and physiologists. In medicine alone, hundreds of additional
specialists investigate the human body, and psychiatrists and psychologists,
rank upon rank, seek the essence of the human mind and soul. Many other
disciplines examine our cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic behavior. These
disciplines include sociology, human geography, social psychology, political
science, economics, linguistics, theology, philosophy, musicology, art,
literature, and architecture. There are also many "area specialists,"
who study the languages and life-styles of particular peoples, nations, or
regions: "Latin Americanists," "Indianists,"
"Sinologists," and so on. In view of this profusion of disciplines
that describe, explain, and Interpret aspects of human life, what justification
can there be for a single discipline that claims to be the general science of
the human species?
The
Importance of General Anthropology
Research
and publications are accumulating in each of the four fields of anthropology at
an exponential rate. Few anthropologists nowadays master more than one field.
And anthropologists increasingly find themselves working not with fellow
anthropologists of another field but with members of entirely different
scientific or humanistic specialties. For example, cultural anthropologists
interested in the relationship between cultural practices and the natural
environment may be obliged to pay closer attention to agronomy or ecology than
to linguistics. Physical anthropologists interested in the relationship between
human and protohuman fossils may, because of the Importance of teeth in the
fossil record, become more familiar with dentistry journals than with journals
devoted to ethnography or linguistics. Cultural anthropologists interested in
the relationship between culture and individual personality are sometimes more
at home professionally with psychiatrists and social psychologists than with
the archaeologists in theIr own university departments. Hence, many more than
four fields are represented in the ongoing research of modern anthropology.
The
specialized nature of most anthropological research makes it Imperative that
the general significance of anthropological facts and theories be preserved.
This is the task of general
anthropology.
General
anthropology does not pretend to survey the entire subject matter of physical,
cultural, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology. Much less does It
pretend to survey the work of the legions of scholars in other disciplines who
also study the biological, linguistic, and cultural aspects of human existence.
Rather, it strives to achieve a particular orientation toward all the human
sciences, disciplines, and fields. Perhaps the best word for this orientation
is ecumenical. General anthropology does not teach all that one must know in
order to master the four fields or all that one must know in order to become an
anthropologist. Instead, general anthropology teaches how to evaluate facts and
theories about human nature and human culture by placing them in a total,
universalist perspective. In
the words of Frederica De Laguna,
Anthropology
is the only discipline that offers a conceptual schema for the whole context of
human experience.. It is like the carrying frame onto which may be fitted all
the several subjects of a liberal education, and by organizing the load, making
it more wieldy and capable of being carried. (1968, p. 475)
I believe
that the importance of general anthropology is that It is panhuman,
evolutionary, and comparative. The previously mentioned disciplines are
concerned with only a particular segment of human experience or a particular
time or phase of our cultural or biological development. But general
anthropology is systematically and uncompromisingly comparative. Its findings
are never based upon the study of a single population, race, "tribe,"
class, or nation. General anthropology insists first and foremost that
conclusions based upon the study of one particular human group or civilization
be checked against the evidence of other groups or civilizations under both
similar and different conditions. In this way the relevance of general
anthropology transcends the interests of any particular "tribe,"
race, nation, or culture. In anthropological perspective, all peoples and
civilizations are fundamentally local and evanescent. Thus general anthropology
is implacably opposed to the insularity and mental constriction of those who
would have themselves and none other represent humanity, stand at the pinnacle
of progress, or be chosen by God or history to fashion the world in their own
Image.
Therefore
general anthropology is "relevant" even when It deals with fragments
of fossils, extinct civilizations, remote villages, or exotic customs. The proper
study of humankind requires a knowledge of distant as well as near lands and of
remote as well as present times.
Only in
this way can we humans hope to tear off the blinders of our local life-styles
to look upon the human condition without prejudice.
Because
of Its multidisciplinary, comparative, and diachronic perspective, anthropology
holds the key to many fundamental questions of recurrent and contemporary
relevance. It lies peculiarly within the competence of general anthropology to
explicate our species' animal heritage, to define what is distinctively human
about human nature, and to differentiate the natural and the cultural
conditions responsible for competition, conflict, and war. General anthropology
is also strategically equipped to probe the significance of racial factors in
the evolution of culture and in the conduct of contemporary human affairs.
General anthropology holds the key to an understanding of the origins of social
inequality - of racism, exploitation, poverty, and underdevelopment.
Overarching all of general anthropology's contributions is the search for the
causes of social and cultural differences and similarities. What is the nature
of the determinism that operates in human history, and what are the
consequences of this determinism for individual freedom of thought and action?
To answer these questions is to begin to understand the extent to which we can
increase humanity's freedom and well-being by conscious intervention in the
processes of cultural evolution.
The
Economic Process in Primitive Societies
In our
own economic system money gives a universal measure of values, a convenient
medium of exchange through which we can buy or sell almost anything, and also a
standard by which payments at one time can be expressed as commitments for the
future. In a wider sense it allows for the measurement of services against
things, and promotes the flow of the economic process. In a primitive society
without money we might expect all this to be absent, yet the economic process
goes on. There is a recognition of services, and payment is made for them;
there are means of absorbing people into the productive process, and values are
expressed in quantitative terms, measured by traditional standards.
Let us
examine, to begin with, a situation of simple distribution such as occurs when
an animal is killed in a hunt. Do the hunters fall on the carcass and cut it to
pieces, the largest piece to the strongest man? This is hardly ever the case.
The beast is normally divided according to recognized principles. Since the
killing of an animal is usually a co-operative activity one might expect to
find it portioned out according to the amount of work done by each hunter to
obtain it. To some extent this principle is followed, but other people have
their rights as well. In many parts of Australia each person in the camp gets a
share depending upon his or her relation to the hunters. The worst parts may
even be kept by the hunters themselves. In former times, at Alice Springs,
according to Palmer, when a kangaroo was killed the hunter had to give the left
hind leg to his brother, the tail to his father's brother's son, the loins and
fat to his father-in-law, the ribs to his mother-in-law, the forelegs to his
father's younger sister, the head to his wife, and he kept for himself the
entrails and the blood. In different areas the portions assigned to such
kinsfolk differ. When grumbles and fights occur, as they often do, it is not
because the basic principles of distribution are questioned, but because it is
thought they are not being properly followed. Though the hunter, his wife, and
children seem to fare badly, this inequality is corrected by their getting in
their turn better portions from kills by other people. The result is a
criss-cross set of exchanges always in progress. The net result in the long run
is substantially the same to each person, but through this system the
principles of kinship obligation and the morality of sharing food have been
emphasized.
We see
from this that though the principle that a person should get a reward for his
labour is not ignored, this principle is caught up into a wider set of codes
which recognize that kinship ties, positions, or privilege, and ritual ideas
should be supported on an economic basis. As compared with our own society,
primitive societies make direct allowance for the dependants upon producers as
well as for the immediate producers themselves.
These
same principles come out in an even more striking way in the feasts which are
such an important part of much primitive life. The people who produce the food,
or who own it, deliberately often hand over the best portions to others.
A feast
may be the means of repaying the labour of others; of setting the seal on an
important event, such as initiation or marriage; or of cementing an alliance
between groups. Prestige is usually gained by the giver of the feast, but where
personal credit and renown are linked most closely with the expenditure of
wealth, the giving of a feast is a step upon the ladder of social status. In the
Banks Islands and other parts of Melanesia such feasts are part of the
ceremonial of attaining the various ranks of the men's society, which is an
important feature of native life. In Polynesia these graded feasts do not
normally occur, but in Tikopia a chief is expected to mark the progress of his
reign by a feast every decade or so. The 'feasts of merit' of the Nagas of
Assam are not so much assertion against social competitors as means of gaining
certain recognized ranks in the society.
(From Human Types, by Raymond Firth.
The
Early Education of Manus Children
For the
first few months after he has begun to accompany his mother about the village
the baby rides quietly on her neck or sits in the bow of the canoe while his
mother punts in the stern some ten feet away. The child sits quietly, schooled
by the hazards to which he has been earlier exposed. There are no straps, no
baby harness to detain him in his place. At the same time, if he should tumble
overboard, there would be no tragedy. The fall into the water is painless. The
mother or father is there to pick him up. Babies under two and a half or three
are never trusted with older children or even with young people. The parents
demand a speedy physical adjustment from the child, but they expose him to no
unnecessary risks. He is never allowed to stray beyond the limits of safety and
watchful adult care.
So the
child confronts duckings, falls, dousings of cold water, or entanglements in
slimy seaweed, but he never meets with the type of accident which will make him
distrust the fundamental safety of his world. Although he himself may not yet
have mastered the physical technique necessary for perfect comfort in the water
his parents have. A lifetime of dwelling on the water has made them perfectly
at home there. They are sure-footed, clear-eyed, quick handed. A baby is never
dropped; his mother never lets him slip from her arms or carelessly bumps his
head against door post or shelf. In the physical care of the child she makes no
clumsy blunders. Her every move is a reassurance to the child, counteracting
any doubts which he may have accumulated in the course of his own less
sure-footed progress. So thoroughly do Manus children trust their parents that
a child will leap from any height into an adult's outstretched arms, leap
blindly and with complete confidence of being safely caught.
Side by
side with the parents' watchfulness and care goes the demand that the child
himself should make as much effort, acquire as much physical dexterity, as
possible. Every gain a child makes is noted, and the child is inexorably held
to his past record. There are no cases of children who toddle a few steps,
fall, bruise their noses, and refuse to take another step for three months. The
rigorous way of life demands that the children be self-sufficient as early as
possible. Until a child has learned to handle his own body, he is not safe in
the house, in a canoe or on the small islands. His mother or aunt is a slave,
unable to leave him for a minute, never free of watching his wandering steps.
So every new proficiency is encouraged and insisted upon. Whole groups of busy
men and women cluster about the baby's first step, but there is no such
delightful audience to bemoan his first fall. He is set upon his feet gently
but firmly and told to try again. The only way in which he can keep the
interest of his admiring audience is to try again. So self-pity is stifled and
another step is attempted.
As soon
as the baby can toddle uncertainly he is put down into the water at low tide
when parts of the lagoon are high and others only a few inches under water.
Here the baby sits and plays in the water or takes a few hesitating steps in
the yielding spongy mud. The mother does not leave his side, nor does she leave
him there long enough to weary him. As he grows older, he is allowed to wade
about at low tide. His elders keep a sharp lookout that he does not stray into
deep water until he is old enough to swim. But the supervision is unobtrusive.
Mother is always there if the child gets into difficulties, but he is not
nagged and plagued with continual 'don'ts'. His whole play-world is so arranged
that he is permitted to make small mistakes from which he may learn better
judgment and greater circumspection, but he is never allowed to make mistakes
which are serious enough to frighten him permanently or inhibit his activity.
He is a tight-rope walker, learning feats which we would count outrageously
difficult for little children, but his tight-rope is stretched above a net of
expert parental solicitude.... Expecting children to swim at three, to climb
about like young monkeys even before that age, may look to us like forcing
them; really it is simply a quiet insistence upon their exerting every particle
of energy and strength which they possess. Swimming is not taught: the small
waders imitate their slightly older brothers and sisters, and after floundering
about in waist deep water begin to strike out for themselves. Sure-footedness
on land and swimming come almost together, so that the charm which is recited
over a newly delivered woman says, 'May you not have another child until this
one can walk and swim.'
(From Growing up in New Guinea, by
Margaret Mead.)
Moral
Standards and Social Organization
What the
anthropologist does in the study of moral systems is to examine for particular
societies the ideas of right and wrong that are held, and their social
circumstances. Consideration of material from some of the more primitive
societies, and a contrast of it with Western patterns, will help to bring out
some of the basic moral aspects of social action.
A simple
way of introducing this subject is to mention a personal experience. It
concerns the morality of giving, which has important problems in all human
societies.
When I
went to the isolated island of Tikopia I was dependent, as every anthropologist
is, on the local people for information and for guidance. This they gave,
freely in some respects, but with reservation in others, particularly on
religious matters. Almost without exception, too, they showed themselves greedy
for material goods such as knives, fish-hooks, calico, pipes and tobacco, and
adept at many stratagems for obtaining them. In particular, they used the forms
of friendship. They made me gifts in order to play upon the sense of obligation
thus aroused in me. They lured me to their houses by generous hospitality which
it was difficult to refuse, and then paraded their poverty before me. The
result of a month or two of this was that I became irritated and weary. My
stocks of goods were not unlimited, and I did not wish to exhaust them in this
casual doling out to people from whom I got no special anthropological return.
I foresaw the time when I would wish to reward people for ethnographic data and
help of a scientific kind and I would either have debased my currency or
exhausted it. Moreover I came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as
friendship or kindliness among these people. Everything they did for me seemed
to be in expectation of some return. What was worse, they were apt to ask for
such return at the time, or even in advance of their service.
Then I
began to reflect. What was this disinterested friendship and kindness which I expected to find?
Why, indeed, should these people do many services for me, a perfect stranger,
without return? Why should they be content to leave it to me to give them what
I wanted rather than express their own ideas upon what they themselves wanted?
In our European society how far can we say disinterestedness goes? How far do
we use this term for what is really one imponderable item in a whole series of
interconnected services and obligations? A Tikopia, like anyone else, will help
to pick a person up if he slips to the ground, bring him a drink, or do many
other small things without any mention of reciprocation. But many other
services which involve him in time and trouble he regards as creating an
obligation. This is just what they do themselves. He thinks it right to get a
material reward, and right that he should be able to ask for it. Is he wrong in
this? Was my moral indignation at his self-seeking justified?
So I
revised my procedure. At first I had expected a man to do me a service and
wait, until, in my own good time, I made him a freewill gift. Now I abandoned
the pretence of disinterested friendliness. When a gift was made to me or a
service done, I went at once to my stores, opened them, and made the giver a
present roughly commensurate to the value of that received.
But more
important than the change in my procedure was the change in my moral attitudes.
I was no longer indignant at the behaviour of these calculating savages, to
whom friendship seemed to be expressed only in material terms. It was pleasant
and simple to adopt their method. If one was content to drop the search for
'pure' or 'genuine' sentiments and accept the fact that to people of another
culture, especially when they had not known one long, the most obvious
foundation of friendship was material reciprocity, the difficulties
disappeared. When the obligation to make a material return was dragged into the
light, it did not inhibit the development of sentiments of friendship, but
fostered it.
What I
have shown of the material elements of friendship in Tikopia is intelligible in
a society where no very clear-cut line is drawn between social service and
economic service, where there is no sale or even barter of goods, but only
borrowing and exchange in friendly or ceremonial form. In European culture we
demarcate the sphere of business from that of friendship. The former insists on
the rightness of obtaining the best bargain possible, while the latter refuses
to treat in terms of bargains at all. Yet there is an intermediate sphere.
Business has its social morality. Things are done 'as a favour', there are
concepts of 'fair' prices, and sharp practice and profiteering are judged as
wrong. On the other hand, friendship does not necessarily ignore the material
aspects. 'One good turn deserves another' epitomizes regard for reciprocity
which underlies many friendly actions.
(From Elements of Social Organization,
by Raymond Firth.)
A Day
in Samoa
The life
of the day begins at dawn, or if the moon has shown until daylight, the shouts
of the young men may be heard before dawn from the hillside. Uneasy in the
night, populous with ghosts, they shout lustily to one another as they hasten
with their work. As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the
slender palm trees stand out against a colourless, gleaming sea, lovers slip
home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of beached canoes,
that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place. Cocks crow,
negligently, and a shrill-voiced bird cries from the breadfruit trees. The
insistent roar of the reef seems muted to an undertone for the sounds of a
waking village. Babies cry, a few short wails before sleepy mothers give them
the breast. Restless little children roll out of their sheets and wander
drowsily down to the beach to freshen their faces in the sea. Boys, bent upon
an early fishing, start collecting their tackle and go to rouse their more
laggard companions. Fires are lit, here and there, the white smoke hardly
visible against the paleness of the dawn. The whole village, sheeted and
frowsy, stirs, rubs its eyes, and stumbles towards the beach. 'Talofa!'
'Talofa!' 'Will the journey start today?' 'Is it bonito fishing your lordship
is going?' Girls stop to giggle over some young ne'er-do-well who escaped
during the night from an angry father's pursuit and to venture a shrewd guess
that the daughter knew more about his presence than she told. The boy who is
taunted by another, who has succeeded him in his sweetheart's favour, grapples
with his rival, his foot slipping in the wet sand. From the other end of the
village comes a long-drawn-out, piercing wail. A messenger has just brought
word of the death of some relative in another village. Half-clad, unhurried
women, with babies at their breasts or astride their hips, pause in their tale
of Losa's outraged departure from her father's house to the greater kindness in
the home of her uncle, to wonder who is dead. Poor relatives whisper their
requests to rich relatives, men make plans to set a fish-trap together, a woman
begs a bit of yellow dye from a kinswoman, and through the village sounds the
rhythmic tattoo which calls the young men together. They gather from all parts
of the village, diggingsticks in hand, ready to start inland to the plantation.
The older men set off upon their more lonely occupations, and each household,
reassembled under its peaked roof, settles down to the routine of the morning.
Little children, too hungry to wait for the late breakfast, beg lumps of cold
taro which they munch greedily. Women carry piles of washing to the sea or to
the spring at the far end of the village, or set off inland after weaving
materials. The older girls go fishing on the reef, or perhaps set themselves to
weaving a new set of Venetian blinds.
In the
houses, where the pebbly floors have been swept bare with a stiff, long-handled
broom, the women great with child and the nursing mothers sit and gossip with
one another. Old men sit apart, unceasingly twisting palm husk on their bare
thighs and muttering old tales under their breath. The carpenters begin work on
the new house, while the owner bustles about trying to keep them in a good
humour. Families who will cook today are hard at work; the taro, yams, and
bananas have already been brought from inland; the children are scuttling back
and forth, fetching sea water, or leaves to stuff the pig. As the sun rises higher
in the sky, the shadows deepen under the thatched roofs, the sand is burning to
the touch, the hibiscus flowers wilt on the hedges, and little children bid the
smaller ones, 'Come out of the sun.' Those whose excursions have been short
return to the village, the women with strings of crimson jellyfish, or baskets
of shellfish, the men with coconuts, carried in baskets slung on a
shoulder-pole. The women and children eat their breakfast, just hot from the
oven, if this is cook day, and the young men work swiftly in the midday heat,
preparing the noon feast for their elders.
It is
high noon. The sand burns the feet of the little children, who leave their
palm-leaf balls and their pinwheels of frangipani blossoms to wither in the
sun, as they creep into the shade of the houses. The women who must go abroad
carry great banana leaves as sunshades or wind wet cloths about their heads.
Lowering a few blinds against the slanting sun all who are left in the village
wrap their heads in sheets and go to sleep. Only a few adventurous children may
slip away for a swim in the shadow of a high rock, some industrious woman
continues with her weaving, or a close little group of women bend anxiously
over a woman in labour. The village is dazzling and dead; any sound seems oddly
loud and out of place. Words have to cut through the solid heat slowly. And
then the sun gradually sinks over the sea.
A second
time the sleeping people stir, roused perhaps by the cry of 'A boat!'
resounding through the village. The fishermen beach their canoes, weary and
spent from the heat, in spite of the slaked lime on their heads, with which
they have sought to cool their brains and redden their hair. The brightly
coloured fishes are spread out on the floor, or piled in front of the houses
until the women pour water over them to free them from taboo. Regretfully, the
young fishermen separate out the 'taboo fish', which must be sent to the chief,
or proudly they pack the little palm-leaf baskets with offerings offish to take
to their sweethearts. Men come home from the bush, grimy and heavy laden,
shouting as they come, greeted in a sonorous rising cadence by those who have
remained at home. They gather in the guest house for their evening kava
drinking. The soft clapping of hands, the highpitched intoning of the talking
chief who serves the kava echo through the village. Girls gather flowers to
weave into necklaces; children, lusty from their naps and bound to no
particular task, play circular games in the half shade of the late afternoon.
Finally the sun sets, in a flame which stretches from the mountain behind to
the horizon on the sea; the last bather comes up from the beach, children
straggle home, dark little figures etched against the sky; lights shine in the
houses, and each household gathers for its evening meal. The suitor humbly
presents his offering, the children have been summoned from their noisy play,
perhaps there is an honoured guest who must be served first, after the soft,
barbaric singing of Christian hymns and the brief and graceful evening prayer.
In front of a house at the end of the village, a father cries out the birth of
a son. In some family circles a face is missing, in others little runaways have
found a haven. Again quiet settles upon the village, as first the head of the household,
then the women and children, and last of all the patient boys, eat their
supper.
After
supper the old people and the little children are bundled off to bed. If the
young people have guests, the front of the house is yielded to them. For day is
the time for the councils of old men and the labours of youth, and night is the
time for lighter things. Two kinsmen, or a chief and his councillor, sit and
gossip over the day's events or make plans for the morrow. Outside a crier goes
through the village announcing that the communal breadfruit pit will be opened
in the morning, or that the village will make a great fish-trap. If it is
moonlight, groups of young men, women by twos and threes, wander through the
village, and crowds of children hunt for land crabs or chase each other among
the breadfruit trees. Half the village may go fishing by torchlight, and the
curving reef will gleam with wavering lights and echo with shouts of triumph or
disappointment, teasing words or smothered cries of outraged modesty. Or a
group of youths may dance for the pleasure of some visiting maiden.
Many of
those who have retired to sleep, drawn by the merry music, will wrap their
sheets about them and set out to find the dancing. A white-clad, ghostly throng
will gather in a circle about the gaily lit house, a circle from which every
now and then a few will detach themselves and wander away among the trees.
Sometimes sleep will not descend upon the village until long past midnight;
then at last there is only the mellow thunder of the reef and the whisper of
lovers, as the village rests until dawn.
(From Coming of age in Samoa by Margaret Mead (1928))
Production
in Primitive Societies
The
exploitation of the natural resources of the environment constitutes the
productive system of any people, and the organization of this system in
primitive society differs in several important respects from our own. The first
point which must be mentioned is the character of work. As we have said, most
economic effort in primitive society is devoted to the production of food. The
activities involved in this have, quite apart from the stimulus of real or
potential hunger, a spontaneous interest lacking in the ordinary work of an
office or factory in contemporary civilization. This will become clear when we
reflect that most of the food-getting activities of primitive peoples, such as
fishing, hunting and gardening, are recreations among ourselves. It does not
follow that primitive man takes an undiluted pleasure in such activities-much
of the labour connected with them is heavy, monotonous or hazardous. But they
do possess an inherent interest lacking in most of the economic labour in
modern civilization, and much the same applies to primitive technology, in
which the craftsman himself creates an artefact, rather than being merely a
human cog in the machinery of production.
The
spontaneous interest of work under primitive conditions is reinforced by a
number of social values attached to it. Skill and industry are honoured and
laziness condemned, a principle exemplified in the folk songs and proverbs of
the Maori. From childhood onwards the virtues of industry are extolled, as in
the term ihu puku, literally 'dirty nose', applied as a compliment to an
industrious man because it implies that he is continually occupied in
cultivation with his face to the ground; on the other hand, the twin vices of
greed and laziness are condemned in the saying: 'Deep throat, shallow muscles'.
Such social evaluations as these give pride in successful and energetic work, and
stimulate potential laggards to play their part in productive effort.
The
interest of primitive work is increased, and its drudgery mitigated, by the
fact that it is often co-operative. Major undertakings, such as house-building
or the construction of large canoes, usually require the labour of more than
one person. And even when the task concerned could be done individually,
primitive peoples often prefer collective labour. Thus in Hehe agriculture much
of the cultivation is done individually or by small family groups. But at the
time of the annual hoeing of the ground, it is customary for a man to announce
that on a certain day his wife will brew beer. His relatives and neighbours
attend, help with the hoeing, and are rewarded with beer in the middle of the
day and in the evening. This is not to be regarded as payment, since casual
visitors who have not helped with the hoeing may also take part in the beer
drink. Under this system, each man helps others and is helped by them in turn.
From the purely economic point of view, the system has no advantage, since each
man could quite well hoe his own ground and the preparation of beer adds
substantially to the work involved. But the system does possess psychological
advantages. The task of hoeing might well appear endless if undertaken by each
individual separately. Collective labour, and the collateral activity of
beer-drinking, changes a dreary task into a social occasion. The same principle
applies to collective labour in general in primitive society, and to the social
activities of feasting, dancing and other forms of collective enjoyment which
frequently accompany it or mark its conclusion.
(From An Introduction to Social
Anthropology, by Ralph Piddington.)
The
Rules of Good Fieldwork
In my
sketch of an anthropologist's training, I have only told you that he must make
intensive studies of primitive peoples. I have not yet told you how he makes
them. How does one make a study of a primitive people? I will answer this
question very briefly and in very general terms, stating only what we regard as
the essential rules of good fieldwork.
Experience
has proved that certain conditions are essential if a good investigation is to
be carried out. The anthropologist must spend sufficient time on the study, he
must throughout be in close contact with the people among whom he is working,
he must communicate with them solely through their own language, and he must
study their entire culture and social life. I will examine each of these
desiderata for, obvious though they may be, they are the distinguishing marks
of British anthropological research which make it, in my opinion, different
from and of a higher quality than research conducted elsewhere.
The
earlier professional fieldworkers were always in a great hurry. Their quick
visits to native peoples sometimes lasted only a few days, and seldom more than
a few weeks. Survey research of this kind can be a useful preliminary to
intensive studies and elementary ethnological classifications can be derived
from it, but it is of little value for an understanding of social life. The
position is very different today when, as I have said, one to three years are
devoted to the study of a single people. This permits observations to be made
at every season of the year, the social life of the people to be recorded to
the last detail, and conclusions to be tested systematically.
However,
given even unlimited time for research, the anthropologist will not produce a
good account of the people he is studying unless he can put himself in a position
which enables him to establish ties of intimacy with them, and to observe their
daily activities from within, and not from without, their community life.
He must
live as far as possible in their villages and camps, where he is, again as far
as possible, physically and morally part of the community. He then not only
sees and hears what goes on in the normal everyday life of the people as well
as less common events, such as ceremonies and legal cases, but by taking part
in those activities in which he can appropriately engage, he learns through
action as well as by ear and eye what goes on around him. This is very unlike
the situation in which records of native life were compiled by earlier
anthropological fieldworkers, and also by missionaries and administrators, who,
living out of the native community and in mission stations or government posts,
had mostly to rely on what a few informants told them. If they visited native
villages at all, their visits interrupted and changed the activities they had come
to observe.
What is
perhaps even more important for the anthropologist's work is the fact that he
is all alone, cut off from the companionship of men of his own race and
culture, and is dependent on the natives around him for company, friendship,
and human understanding. An anthropologist has failed unless, when he says
goodbye to the natives, there is on both sides the sorrow of parting. It is
evident that he can only establish this intimacy if he makes himself in some
degree a member of their society and lives, thinks, and feels in their culture
since only he, and not they, can make the necessary transference.
It is
obvious that if the anthropologist is to carry out his work in the conditions I
have described he must learn the native language, and any anthropologist worth
his salt will make the learning of it his first task and will altogether, even
at the beginning of his study, dispense with interpreters. Some do not pick up
strange languages easily, and many primitive languages are almost unbelievably
difficult to learn, but the language must be mastered as thoroughly as the
capacity of the student and its complexities permit, not only because the
anthropologist can then communicate freely with the natives, but for further
reasons. To understand a people's thought one has to think in their symbols.
Also, in learning the language one learns the culture and the social system
which are conceptualized in the language. Every kind of social relationship,
every belief, every technological process-in fact everything in the social life
of the natives-is expressed in words as well as in action, and when one has
fully understood the meaning of all the words of their language in all their
situations of reference one has finished one's study of the society. I may add
that, as every experienced fieldworker knows, the most difficult task in
anthropological fieldwork is to determine the meanings of a few key words, upon
which the success of the whole investigation depends; and they can only be
determined by the anthropologist himself learning to use the words correctly in
his converse with the natives. A further reason for learning the native
language is that it places the anthropologist in a position of complete
dependence on the natives. He comes to them as pupil, not as master.
Finally,
the anthropologist must study the whole of the social life. It is impossible to
understand clearly and comprehensively any part of a people's social life
except in the full context of their social life as a whole. Though he may not
publish every detail he has recorded, you will find in a good anthropologist's
notebooks a detailed description of even the most commonplace activities, for
example, how a cow is milked or how meat is cooked. Also, though he may decide
to write a book on a people's law, or their religion, or on their economics,
describing one aspect of their life and neglecting the rest, he does so always
against the background of their entire social activities and in terms of their
whole social structure.
(From Social Anthropology, by E. E. Evans-Prichard, 1951,
published by Cohen & West, pp. 77-80)
The
Science of Custom
Anthropology
is the study of human beings as creatures of society. It fastens its attention
upon those physical characteristics and industrial techniques, those
conventions and values, which distinguish one community from all others that
belong to a different tradition.
The
distinguishing mark of anthropology among the social sciences is that it
includes for serious study other societies than our own. For its purposes any
social regulation of mating and reproduction is as significant as our own,
though it may be that of the Sea Dyaks, and have no possible historical
relation to that of our civilization. To the anthropologist, our customs and
those of a New Guinea tribe are two possible social schemes for dealing with a
common problem, and in so far as he remains an anthropologist he is bound to
avoid any weighting of one in favour of the other. He is interested in human
behaviour, not as it is shaped by one tradition, our own, but as it has been
shaped by any tradition whatsoever. He is interested in the great gamut of
custom that is found in various cultures, and his object is to understand the
way in which these cultures change and differentiate, the different forms
through which they express themselves, and the manner in which the customs of
any peoples function in the lives of the individuals who compose them.
Now
custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject of any great moment. The
inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of
investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most
commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way round. Traditional
custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing
than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions no matter how
aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of
first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience
and belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
No man
ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set
of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical
probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true
and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs.
John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in
shaping the behaviour of the individual as over against any way in which he can
affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his
mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up
into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies social orders
that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no
more than exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life-history of the
individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards
traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the
customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time
he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is
grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its
beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that
is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on
the opposite side of the globe will ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no
social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role
of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main
complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
(From Patterns of Culture, by Ruth
Benedict.)
Survival
in the Cage
Most
casual visitors to zoos are convinced, as they stroll from cage to cage, that
the antics of the inmates are no more than an obliging performance put on
solely for their entertainment. Unfortunately for our consciences, however,
this sanguine view of the contented, playful, caged animal could in many cases
be hardly farther from the truth. Recent research at London Zoo has amply
demonstrated that many caged animals are in fact facing a survival problem as
severe as that of their cousins in the wild-a struggle to survive, simply,
against the monotony of their environment. Well fed, well housed, well cared
for, and protected from its natural enemies, the zoo animal in its
super-Welfare State existence is bored, sometimes literally to death.
The
extraordinary and subtle lengths to which some animals go to overcome this
problem, and the surprising behaviour patterns which arise as a result, were
vividly described by Dr Desmond Morris (Curator of Mammals, London Zoo) at a
conference on `The biology of survival' held in the rooms of the Zoological
Society. As he and other speakers pointed out, the problem of surviving in a
monotonous and restricted environment is not confined to the animal cage. Apart
from the obvious examples of human prisoners or the astronaut, the number of
situations in which human beings have to face boredom and confinement for long
stretches is growing rather than decreasing. More to the point, many of the
ways in which animals respond to these conditions have striking analogies in
many forms of obsessional or neurotic behaviour in humans: the psychiatrist
could well learn from the apes.
The
animals which seem to react most strongly to this monotony are the higher
'non-specialists' - those that do not rely on one or two highly developed
adaptations or `tricks' to survive in the wild. Normally seizing every
opportunity to exploit the chances and variety of their surroundings, they are
constantly investigating and exploring; in short, they are neophilic (loving
the new). Most species seem to show a balance between this active, curious
behaviour and its opposite, or neophobic; but with the primates and members of
the dog and cat families, for example, the neophilic pattern is usually
overwhelmingly predominant.
It is not
surprising that when such species are placed in the highly non-variable
environment of a zoo cage, where there are few novel stimuli, they cannot
accept-and indeed actually fight against-any kind of enforced inactivity (apart
from those times when they obviously just give up and relax). As Dr Morris has
remarked, how they do this is a great testimony to their ingenuity.
Observations
by Dr Morris and the staff of London Zoo have revealed that there are probably
five main ways in which animals try to overcome their monotony. The first is to
invent new motor patterns for themselves-new exercises, gymnastics, and so
forth. They may also try to increase the complexity of their environment by
creating new stimulus situations: many carnivores, such as the large cats, play
with their food as though it were a living animal, throwing up dead birds in
the air, pursuing the carcass, and pouncing on it to kill.
Alternatively
the animal may increase the quantity of its reaction to normal stimuli.
Hypersexuality is one common response to this type of behaviour. A fourth
method, akin to some kinds of obsessional behaviour in man, is to increase the
variability of its response to stimuli such as food. Many animals can be seen
playing, pawing, advancing, and retreating from their food before eating it:
some even go further by regurgitating it once eaten and then devouring it
again, and so on. Lastly-and this kind of behaviour can most nearly be called
neurotic-is the development of full, normal responses to subnormal stimuli,
such as the camel's expression of sexual arousal when cigarette smoke is blown
in its face, or the making of mother substitutes out of straw, wood, and
suchlike.
No one
claims that the observations of animals under these conditions are anything but
fragmentary. But at least enough is now known about them to persuade zoologists
that these bizarre behaviour patterns are not just haphazard, neurotic
responses but are genuine attempts to put back some kind of values into the
animal's surroundings, attempts which are beginning to show consistent
patterns. It is also too early to say how far studies of this sort can throw
light on human behaviour under similar conditions (though as one zoologist
remarked, they do show that the best way of surviving a prison sentence is to
turn oneself utterly neophobic and take up an advanced course on economics).
Yet there is a growing realization that the human environment in the future
will become more like that of the zoo animal rather than less, so that the kind
of observations mentioned above might well have a growing relevance.
Fairly
recent studies of coalminers, for example, have shown that in spite of their
phenomenally high daily energy output they spend about seventeen hours sitting
or lying down, and sedentary workers some twenty to twenty-one hours. With the
spread of automation and the growth of white collar workers these figures are
likely to increase. With astronauts, polar scientists, and long-range aircraft
crews the problem already exists: a recent study of Antarctic scientists
produced the remarkable fact that on average they spent only four per cent of
their time in winter outside the confines of their living quarters. With this
continued confinement and the extreme uniformity of the outside environment
many odd behaviour patterns were developed.
(From an
article by Gerald Leach in The
Guardian, Tuesday, May 14th, 1963.)
GESTURES
A gesture
is any action that sends a visual signal to an onlooker. To become a gesture,
an act has to be seen by someone else and has to communicate some piece of
information to them. It can do this either because the gesturer deliberately
sets out to send a signal - as when he waves his hand - or it can do it only
incidentally - as when he sneezes. The hand-wave is a Primary Gesture, because
it has no other existence or function. It is a piece of communication from
start to finish. The sneeze, by contrast, is a secondary, or Incidental
Gesture. Its primary function is mechanical and is concerned with the sneezer's
personal breathing problem. In its secondary role, however, it cannot help but
transmit a message to his companions, warning them that he may have caught a
cold.
Most
people tend to limit their use of the term 'gesture' to the primary form - the
hand-wave type - but this misses an important point. What matters with
gesturing is not what signals we think we are sending out, but what signals are
being received. The observers of our acts will make no distinction between our
intentional Primary Gestures and our unintentional, incidental ones. In some
ways, our Incidental Gestures are the more illuminating of the two, if only for
the very fact that we do not think of them as gestures, and therefore do not
censor and manipulate them so strictly. This is why it is preferable to use the
term 'gesture' in its wider meaning as an 'observed action'.
A
convenient way to distinguish between Incidental and Primary Gestures is to ask
the question: Would I do it if I were completely alone? If the answer is No,
then it is a Primary Gesture. We do not wave, wink, or point when we are by
ourselves; not, that is, unless we have reached the unusual condition of
talking animatedly to ourselves.
INCIDENTAL
GESTURES
Mechanical
actions with secondary messages
Many of
our actions are basically non-social, having to do with problems of personal
body care, body comfort and body transportation; we clean and groom ourselves
with a variety of scratchings, rubbings and wipings; we cough, yawn and stretch
our limbs; we eat and drink; we prop ourselves up in restful postures, folding
our arms and crossing our legs; we sit, stand, squat and recline, in a whole
range of different positions; we crawl, walk and run in varying gaits and
styles. But although we do these things for our own benefit, we are not always
unaccompanied when we do them. Our companions learn a great deal about us from
these 'personal' actions - not merely that we are scratching because we itch or
that we are running because we are late, but also, from the way we do them,
what kind of personalities we possess and what mood we are in at the time.
Sometimes
the mood-signal transmitted unwittingly in this way is one that we would rather
conceal, if we stopped to think about it. Occasionally we do become
self-consciously aware of the 'mood broadcasts' and 'personality displays' we
are making and we may then try to check ourselves. But often we do not, and the
message goes out loud and clear.
For
instance, if a student props his head on his hands while listening to a boring
lecture, his head-on-hands action operates both mechanically and gesturally. As
a mechanical act, it is simply a case of supporting a tired head - a physical
act that concerns no one but the student himself. At the same time, though, it
cannot help operating as a gestural act, beaming out a visual signal to his
companions, and perhaps to the lecturer himself, telling them that he is bored.
In such a
case his gesture was not deliberate and he may not even have been aware that he
was transmitting it. If challenged, he would claim that he was not bored at
all, but merely tired. If he were honest - or impolite - he would have to admit
that excited attention easily banishes tiredness, and that a really fascinating
speaker need never fear to see a slumped, head-propped figure like his in the
audience.
In the
schoolroom, the teacher who barks at his pupils to 'sit up straight' is
demanding, by right, the attention-posture that he should have gained by
generating interest in his lesson. It says a great deal for the power of
gesture-signals that he feels more 'attended-to' when he sees his pupils
sitting up straight, even though he is consciously well aware of the fact that
they have just been forcibly un-slumped, rather than genuinely excited by his
teaching.
Many of
our Incidental Gestures provide mood information of a kind that neither we nor our companions become consciously alerted to. It
is as if there is an underground communication system operating just below the
surface of our social encounters. We perform an act and it is observed. Its
meaning is read, but not out loud. We 'feel' the mood, rather than analyse it.
Occasionally an action of this type becomes so characteristic of a particular
situation that we do eventually identify it - as when we say of a difficult
problem: 'That will make him scratch his head', indicating that we do
understand the link that exists between puzzlement and the Incidental Gesture
of head-scratching. But frequently this type of link operates below the
conscious level, or is missed altogether.
Where the
links are clearer, we can, of course, manipulate the situation and use our
Incidental Gestures in a contrived way. If a student listening to a lecture is
not tired, but wishes to insult the speaker, he can deliberately adopt a bored,
slumped posture, knowing that its message will get across. This is a Stylized
Incidental Gesture - a mechanical action that is being artificially employed as
a pure signal. Many of the common 'courtesies' also fall into this category -
as when we greedily eat up a plate of food that we do not want and which we do
not like, merely to transmit a suitably grateful signal to our hosts.
Controlling our Incidental Gestures in this way is one of the processes that
every child must learn as it grows up and learns to adapt to the rules of
conduct of the society in which it lives.
EXPRESSIVE
GESTURES
Biological
gestures of the kind we share with other animals
Primary
Gestures fall into six main categories. Five of these are unique to man, and
depend on his complex, highly evolved brain. The exception is the category I
called Expressive Gestures. These are gestures of the type which all men,
everywhere, share with one another, and which other animals also perform. They
include the important signals of Facial Expression, so crucial to daily human
interaction.
All
primates are facially expressive and among the higher species the facial
muscles become increasingly elaborate, making possible the performance of a
whole range of subtly varying facial signals. In man this trend reaches its
peak, and it is true to say that the bulk of non-verbal signalling is
transmitted by the human face.
The human
hands are also important, having been freed from their ancient locomotion
duties, and are capable, with their Manual Gesticulations, of transmitting many
small mood changes by shifts in their postures and movements, especially during
conversational encounters. I am defining the word 'gesticulation', as distinct
from 'gesture', as a manual action performed unconsciously during social
interactions, when the gesticulator is emphasizing a verbal point he is making.
These
natural gestures are usually spontaneous and very much taken for granted. Yes,
we say, he made a funny face. But which way did his eyebrows move? We cannot
recall. Yes, we say, he was waving his arms about as he spoke. But what shape
did his fingers make? We cannot remember. Yet we were not inattentive. We saw
it all and our brains registered what we saw. We simply did not need to analyse
the actions, any more than we had to spell out the words we heard, in order to
understand them. In this respect they are similar to the Incidental Gestures of
the previous category, but they differ, because here there is no mechanical
function - only signalling. This is the world of smiles and sneers, shrugs and
pouts, laughs and winces, blushes and blanches, waves and beckons, nods and
glares, frowns and snarls. These are the gestures that nearly everyone performs
nearly everywhere in the world. They may differ in detail and in context from
place to place, but basically they are actions we all share. We all have
complex facial muscles whose sole job it is to make expressions, and we all
stand on two feet rather than four, freeing our hands and letting them dance in
the air evocatively as we explain, argue and joke our way through our social
encounters. We may have lost our twitching tails and our bristling fur, but we
more than make up for it with our marvellously mobile faces and our twisting,
spreading, fluttering hands.
In
origin, our Expressive Gestures are closely related to our Incidental Gestures,
because their roots also lie in primarily non-communicative actions. The
clenched fist of the gesticulator owes its origin to an intention movement of
hitting an opponent, just as the frown on the face of a worried man can be
traced back to an ancient eye-protection movement of an animal anticipating
physical attack. But the difference is that in these cases the link between the
primary physical action and its ultimate descendant, the Expressive Gesture,
has been broken. Smiles, pouts, winces, gapes, smirks, and the rest, are now,
for all practical purposes, pure gestures and exclusively communicative in
function.
Despite
their worldwide distribution, Expressive Gestures are nevertheless subject to
considerable cultural influences. Even though we all have an evolved set of
smiling muscles, we do not all smile in precisely the same way, to the same
extent, or on the same occasions. For example, all children may start out as
easy-smilers and easy-laughers, but a local tradition may insist that, as the
youngsters mature, they must hide their feelings, and their adult laughter may
become severely muted as a result. These local Display Rules, varying from
place to place, often give the false impression that Expressive Gestures are
local inventions rather than modified, but universal, behaviour patterns.
MIMIC
GESTURES
Gestures
which transmit signals by imitation
Mimic
Gestures are those in which the performer attempts to imitate, as accurately as
possible, a person, an object or an action. Here we leave our animal heritage
behind and enter an exclusively human sphere. The essential quality of a Mimic
Gesture is that it attempts to copy the thing it is trying to portray. No
stylized conventions are applied. A successful Mimic Gesture is therefore
understandable to someone who has never seen it performed before. No prior
knowledge should be required and there need be no set tradition concerning the
way in which a particular item is represented. There are four kinds of Mimic
Gesture:
First,
there is Social Mimicry, or 'putting on a good face'. We have all done this. We
have all smiled at a party when really we feel sad, and perhaps looked sadder
at a funeral than we feel, simply because it is expected of us. We lie with
simulated gestures to please others. This should not be confused with what
psychologists call 'role-playing'. When indulging in Social Mimicry we deceive
only others, but when role-playing we deceive ourselves as well.
Second,
there is Theatrical Mimicry - the world of actors and actresses, who simulate
everything for our amusement. Essentially it embraces two distinct techniques.
One is the calculated attempt to imitate specifically observed actions. The
actor who is to play a general, say, will spend long hours watching films of
military scenes in which he can analyse every tiny movement and then
consciously copy them and incorporate them into his final portrayal. The other
technique is to concentrate instead on the imagined mood of the character to be
portrayed, to attempt to take on that mood, and to rely upon it to produce,
unconsciously, the necessary style of body actions.
In
reality, all actors use a combination of both these techniques, although in
explaining their craft they may stress one or other of the two methods. In the
past, acting performances were usually highly stylized, but today, except in
pantomime, opera and farce, extraordinary degrees of realism are reached and
the formal, obtrusive audience has become instead a shadowy group of
eavesdroppers. Gone are the actor's asides, gone are the audience
participations. We must all believe that it is really happening. In other
words, Theatrical Mimicry has at last become as realistic as day-to-day Social
Mimicry. In this respect, these first two types of mimic activity contrast
sharply with the third, which can be called Partial Mimicry.
In
Partial Mimicry the performer attempts to imitate something which he is not and
never can be, such as a bird, or raindrops. Usually only the hands are
involved, but these make the most realistic approach to the subject they can
manage. If a bird, they flap their 'wings' as best they can; if raindrops, they
describe a sprinkling descent as graphically as possible. Widely used mimic
gestures of this kind are those which convert the hand into a 'gun', an animal
of some sort, or the foot of an animal; or those which use the movements of the
hand to indicate the outline shape of an object of some kind.
The
fourth kind of Mimic Gesture can best be called Vacuum Mimicry, because the
action takes place in the absence of the object to which it is related. If I am
hungry, for example, I can go through the motions of putting imaginary food
into my mouth. If I am thirsty, I can raise my hand as if holding an invisible
glass, and gulp invisible liquid from it.
The
important feature of Partial Mimicry and Vacuum Mimicry is that, like Social
and Theatrical Mimicry, they strive for reality. Even though they are doomed to
failure, they make an attempt. This means that they can be understood
internationally. In this respect they contrast strongly with the next two types
of gesture, which show marked cultural restrictions.
SCHEMATIC
GESTURES
Imitations
that become abbreviated or abridged
Schematic
Gestures are abbreviated or abridged versions of Mimic Gestures. They attempt
to portray something by taking just one of its prominent features and then
performing that alone. There is no longer any attempt at realism.
Schematic
Gestures usually arise as a sort of gestural shorthand because of the need to
perform an imitation quickly and on many occasions. Just as, in ordinary
speech, we reduce the word 'cannot' to 'can't', so an elaborate miming of a
charging bull becomes reduced simply to a pair of horns jabbed in the air as a
pair of fingers.
When one
element of a mime is selected and retained in this way, and the other elements
are reduced or omitted, the gesture may still be easy to understand, when seen
for the first time, but the stylization may go so far that it becomes
meaningless to those not 'in the know'. The Schematic Gesture then becomes a
local tradition with a limited geographical range. If the original mime was
complex and involved several distinctive features, different localities may
select different key features for their abridged versions. Once these different
forms of shorthand have become fully established in each region, then the
people who use them will become less and less likely to recognize the foreign
forms. The local gesture becomes 'the' gesture, and there quickly develops, in
gesture communication, a situation similar to that found in linguistics. Just
as each region has its own verbal language, so it also has its own set of
Schematic Gestures.
To give
an example: the American Indian sign for a horse consists of a gesture in which
two fingers of one hand 'sit astride' the fingers of the other hand. A
Cistercian monk would instead signal 'horse' by lowering his head slightly and
pulling at an imaginary tuft of hair on his forehead. An Englishman would
probably crouch down like a jockey and pull at imaginary reins. The
Englishman's version, being closer to a Vacuum Mimic Gesture, might be
understood by the other two, but their gestures, being highly schematic, might
well prove incomprehensible to anyone outside their groups.
Some
objects, however, have one special feature that is so strongly characteristic
of them that, even with Schematic Gestures, there is little doubt about what is
being portrayed. The bull, mentioned above, is a good example of this. Cattle
are nearly always indicated by their horns alone, and the two horns are always
represented by two digits. In fact, if an American Indian, a Hindu dancer, and
an Australian Aborigine met, they would all understand one another's cattle
signs, and we would understand all three of them. This does not mean that the
signs are all identical. The American Indian's cattle sign would represent the
bison, and the horns of bison do not curve forward like those of domestic
cattle, but inward, towards each other. The American Indian's sign reflects
this, his hands being held to his temples and his forefingers being pointed
inward. The Australian Aborigine instead points his forefingers forward. The
Hindu dancer also points forward, but rather than using two forefingers up at
the temples, employs the forefinger and little finger of one hand, held at
waist height. So each culture has its own variant, but the fact that horns are
such an obvious distinguishing feature of cattle means that, despite local
variations, the bovine Schematic Gesture is reasonably understandable in most
cultures.
SYMBOLIC
GESTURES
Gestures
which represent moods and ideas
A
Symbolic Gesture indicates an abstract quality that has no simple equivalent in
the world of objects and movements. Here we are one stage further away from the
obviousness of the enacted Mimic Gesture.
How, for
instance, would you make a silent sign for stupidity? You might launch into a
full-blooded Theatrical Mime of a drooling village idiot. But total idiocy is
not a precise way of indicating the momentary stupidity of a healthy adult.
Instead, you might tap your forefinger against your temple, but this also lacks
accuracy, since you might do precisely the same thing when indicating that
someone is brainy. All the tap does is to point to the brain. To make the
meaning more clear, you might instead twist your forefinger against your
temple, indicating 'a screw loose'. Alternatively, you might rotate your
forefinger close to your temple, signalling that the brain is going round and
round and is not stable.
Many
people would understand these temple-forefinger actions, but others would not.
They would have their own local, stupidity gestures, which we in our turn would
find confusing, such as tapping the elbow of the raised forearm, flapping the
hand up and down in front of half-closed eyes, rotating a raised hand, or
laying one forefinger flat across the forehead.
The
situation is further complicated by the fact that some stupidity signals mean
totally different things in different countries. To take one example, in Saudi
Arabia stupidity can be signalled by touching the lower eyelid with the tip of
the forefinger. But this same action, in various other countries, can mean
disbelief, approval, agreement, mistrust, scepticism, alertness, secrecy,
craftiness, danger, or criminality. The reason for this apparent chaos of
meanings is simple enough. By pointing to the eye, the gesturer is doing no
more than stress the symbolic importance of the eye as a seeing organ. Beyond
that, the action says nothing, so that the message can become either: 'Yes, I
see', or 'I can't believe my eyes', or 'Keep a sharp look-out', or 'I like what
I see', or almost any other seeing signal you care to imagine. In such a case
it is essential to know the precise 'seeing' property being represented by the
symbolism of the gesture in any particular culture.
So we are
faced with two basic problems where Symbolic Gestures are concerned: either one
meaning may be signalled by different actions, or several meanings may be
signalled by the same action, as we move from culture to culture. The only
solution is to approach each culture with an open mind and learn their Symbolic
Gestures as one would their vocabulary.
As part
of this process, it helps if a link can be found between the action and the
meaning, but this is not always possible. In some cases we simply do not know
how certain Symbolic Gestures arose. It is clear that they are symbolic because
they now represent some abstract quality, but how they first acquired the link
between action and meaning has been lost somewhere in their long history. A
good instance of this is the 'cuckold' sign from Italy. This consists of making
a pair of horns, either with two forefingers held at the temples, or with a
forefinger and little finger of one hand held in front of the body. There is
little doubt about what the fingers are meant to be: they are the horns of a
bull. As such, they would rate as part of a Schematic Gesture. But they do not
send out the simple message 'bull'. Instead they now indicate 'sexual
betrayal'. The action is therefore a Symbolic gesture and, in order to explain
it, it becomes necessary to find the link between bulls and sexual betrayal.
Historically,
the link appears to be lost, with the result that some rather wild speculations
have been made. A complication arises in the form of the 'horned hand', also
common in Italy, which has a totally different significance, even though it
employs the same motif of bull's horns. The Y horned hand is essentially a
protective gesture, made to ward off imagined dangers. Here it is clear enough
that it is the bull's great power, ferocity and masculinity that is being
invoked as a symbolic aid to protect the gesturer. But this only makes it even
more difficult to explain the other use of the bull's-horns gesture as a sign
of a 'pathetic' cuckold.
A
suggested explanation of this contradiction is that it is due to one gesture
using as its starting point the bull's power, while the other - the cuckold
sign - selects the bull's frequent castration. Since the domestication of
cattle began, there have always been too many bulls in relation to cows. A
good, uncastrated bull can serve between 50 and 100 cows a year, so that it is
only necessary to retain a small proportion of intact bulls for breeding
purposes. The rest are rendered much more docile and easy to handle for beef
production, by castration. In folk-lore, then, these impotent males must stand
helplessly by, while the few sexually active bulls 'steal their rightful
females'; hence the symbolism of: bull = cuckold.
A
completely different explanation once offered was that, when the cuckold
discovers that his wife has betrayed him, he becomes so enraged and jealous
that he bellows and rushes violently about like a 'mad bull'.
A more
classical interpretation involves Diana the Huntress, who made horns into a
symbol of male downfall. Actaeon, another hunter, is said to have sneaked a
look at her naked body when she was bathing. This so angered her that she
turned him into a horned beast and set his own hounds upon him, who promptly
killed and ate him.
Alternatively,
there is the version dealing with ancient religious prostitutes. These ladies
worshipped gods who wore 'horns of honour' - that is, horns in their other role
as symbols of power and masculinity - and the gods were so pleased with the
wives who became sacred whores that they transferred their godly horns on to
the heads of the husbands who had ordered their women to act in this role. In
this way, the horns of honour became the horns of ridicule.
As if
this were not enough, it is also claimed elsewhere, and with equal conviction,
that because stags have horns (antlers were often called horns in earlier
periods) and because most stags in the rutting season lose their females to a
few dominant males who round up large harems, the majority of 'horned' deer are
unhappy 'cuckolds'.
Finally,
there is the bizarre interpretation that bulls and deer have nothing to do with
it. Instead, it is thought that the ancient practice of grafting the spurs of a
castrated cockrel on to the root of its excised comb, where they apparently
grew and became 'horns', is the origin of the symbolic link between horns and
cuckolds. This claim is backed up by the fact that the German equivalent word
for 'cuckold' (hahnrei) originally meant 'capon'.
If, after
reading these rival claims, you feel that all you have really learned is the
meaning of the phrase 'cock-and-bull story', you can be forgiven. Clearly, we
are in the realm of fertile imagination rather than historical record. But this
example has been dealt with at length to show how, in so many cases, the true
story of the origin of a Symbolic Gesture is no longer available to us. Many
other similarly conflicting examples are known, but this one will suffice to
demonstrate the general principle.
There are
exceptions, of course, and certain of the Symbolic Gestures we make today, and
take for granted, can easily be traced to their origins. 'Keeping your fingers
crossed' is a good example of this. Although used by many non-Christians, this
action of making the cross, using only the first and second fingers, is an
ancient protective device of the Christian church. In earlier times it was
commonplace to make a more conspicuous sign of the cross (to cross oneself) by
moving the whole arm, first downwards and then sideways, in front of the body,
tracing the shape of the cross in the air. This can still be seen in some countries
today in a non-religious context, acting as a 'good luck' protective device. In
more trivial situations it has been widely replaced, however, by the act of
holding up one hand to show that the second finger is tightly crossed over the
first, with the crossing movement of the arm omitted. Originally this was the
secret version of 'crossing oneself' and was done with the hand in question
carefully hidden from view. It may still be done in this secret way, as when
trying to protect oneself from the consequences of lying, but as a 'good luck'
sign it has now come out into the open. This development is easily explained by
the fact that crossing the fingers lacks an obvious religious character.
Symbolically, the finger-crossing may be calling on the protection of the
Christian God, but the small finger action performed is so far removed from the
priestly arm crossing action, that it can without difficulty slide into
everyday life as a casual wish for good fortune. Proof of this is that many
people do not even realize that they are demanding an act of Christian worship
- historically speaking - when they shout out: 'Keep your fingers crossed!'
TECHNICAL
GESTURES
Gestures
used by specialist minorities
Technical
Gestures are invented by a specialist minority for use strictly within the
limits of their particular activity. They are meaningless to anyone outside the
specialization and operate in such a narrow field that they cannot be
considered as playing a part in the mainstream of visual communication of any
culture.
Television-studio
signals are a good example of Technical Gestures in use today. The studio
commentator we see on our screens at home is face to face with a 'studio
manager'. The manager is linked to the programme director in the control room
by means of headphones and conveys the director's instructions to the
commentator by simple visual gestures. To warn the commentator that he will
have to start speaking at any moment, the manager raises a forearm and holds it
stiffly erect. To start him speaking, he brings the forearm swiftly down to
point at the commentator. To warn him that he must stop speaking in a few
seconds, the manager rotates his forearm, as if it were the hand of a clock
going very fast - 'Time is running out fast.' To ask him to lengthen the
speaking time and say more, he holds his hands together in front of his chest
and pulls them slowly apart, as if stretching something - 'stretch it out.' To
tell the speaker to stop dead this instant, the manager makes a slashing action
with his hand across his throat - 'Cut!' There are no set rules laid down for
these signals. They grew up in the early days of television and, although the
main ones listed here are fairly widespread today, each studio may well have
its own special variants, worked out to suit a particular performer.
Other
Technical Gestures are found wherever an activity prohibits verbal contact.
Skindivers, for instance, cannot speak to one another and need simple signals
to deal with potentially dangerous situations. In particular they need gestures
for danger, cold, cramp and fatigue. Other messages, such as yes, no, good,
bad, up and down, are easily enough understood by the use of everyday actions
and require no Technical Gestures to make sense. But how could you signal to a
companion that you had cramp? The answer is that you would open and close one
hand rhythmically - a simple gesture, but one that might nevertheless save a
life.
Disaster
can sometimes occur because a Technical Gesture is required from someone who is
not a specialist in a technical field. Suppose some holiday-makers take out a
boat, and it sinks, and they swim to the safety of a small, rocky island. Wet
and frightened, they crouch there wondering what to do next, when to their
immense relief a small fishing-boat comes chugging towards them. As it draws
level with the island, they wave frantically at it. The people on board wave
back, and the boat chugs on and disappears. If the stranded holiday-makers had
been marine 'specialists', they would have known that, at sea, waving is only
used as a greeting. To signal distress, they should have raised and lowered
their arms stiffly from their sides. This is the accepted marine gesture for
'Help!'
Ironically,
if the shipwrecked signallers had been marine experts and had given the correct
distress signal, the potential rescue boat might well have been manned by
holiday-makers, who would have been completely nonplussed by the strange
actions and would probably have ignored them. When a technical sphere is
invaded by the non-technical, gesture problems always arise.
Firemen,
crane-drivers, airport-tarmac signalmen, gambling-casino croupiers, dealers at
auctions, and restaurant staff, all have their own special Technical Gestures.
Either because they must keep quiet, must be discreet, or cannot be heard, they
develop their own sets of signals. The rest of us can ignore them, unless we,
too, wish to enter their specialized spheres.
CODED GESTURES
Sign-language
based on a formal system
Coded
Gestures, unlike all others, are part of a formal system of signals. They
interrelate with one another in a complex and systematic way, so that they
constitute a true language. The special feature of this category is that the
individual units are valueless without reference to the other units in the
code. Technical Gestures may be systematically planned, but, with them, each
signal can operate quite independently of the others. With Coded Gestures, by
contrast, all the units interlock with one another on rigidly formulated
principles, like the letters and words in a verbal language.
The most
important example is the Deaf-and-dumb Sign Language of hand signals, of which
there is both a one-handed and a two-handed version. Also, there is the
Semaphore Language of arm signals, and the Tic-tac Language of the race course.
These all require considerable skill and training and belong in a totally
different world from the familiar gestures we employ in everyday life. They
serve as a valuable reminder, though, of the incredibly sensitive potential we all
possess for visual communication. It makes it all the more plausible to argue
that we are all of us responding, with greater sensitivity than we may realize,
to the ordinary gestures we witness each day of our lives.
(From Manwatching by Desmond Morris.)
REGIONAL
SIGNALS
The
way signals change from country to country and district to district
A
Regional Signal is one that has a limited geographical range. If a Norwegian, a
Korean and a Masai were marooned together on a desert island, they would easily
be able to communicate their basic moods and intentions to one another by their
actions. All humanity shares a large repertoire of common movements,
expressions and postures. But there would also be misunderstandings. Each man
would have acquired from his own culture a special set of Regional Signals that
would be meaningless to the others. If the Norwegian were shipwrecked instead
with a Swede and a Dane, he would find his task much easier, because their
closer origins would mean a greater share of these regional gestures, since
localized actions, like many words, do not follow precisely the present-day
national boundaries.
This
comparison of gestures with words is significant because it reveals immediately
our state of ignorance as regards gestural geography. We already know a great
deal about linguistic maps, but we know far too little about Gesture Maps. Ask
a linguist to describe the distribution of any language you like to name and he
will be able to provide accurate, detailed information for you. Take any word,
and he will be able to demonstrate its spread from country to country. He can
even present you with local dialect maps for some parts of the world and show
you, like Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, how slang expressions are limited to
certain small areas of big cities. But ask anyone for a world-wide gesture
atlas, and you will be disappointed.
A start
has already been made, however, and new field work is now beginning. Although
this research is only in its infancy, recent studies in Europe and around the
Mediterranean are providing some valuable clues about the way gestures change
as one travels from locality to locality. For example, there is a simple
gesture in which the forefinger taps the side of the nose. In England most
people interpret this as meaning secrecy or conspiracy. The message is: 'Keep
it dark, don't spread it around.' But as one moves down across Europe to
central Italy, the dominant meaning changes to become a helpful warning: 'Take
care, there is danger-they are crafty.' The two messages are related, because
they are both concerned with cunning. In England it is we who are cunning, by not divulging
our secret. But in central Italy it is they who are cunning, and we must be
warned against them. The Nose Tap gesture symbolizes cunning in both cases, but
the source of the cunning has shifted.
This is
an example of a gesture keeping the same form over a wide range, and also
retaining the same basic meaning, but nevertheless carrying a quite distinct
message in two regions. The more gestures that are mapped in the field, the
more common this type of change is proving to be. Another instance is found in
the Eye Touch gesture, where the forefinger touches the face just below the eye
and pulls the skin downwards, opening the eye wider. In England and France this
has the dominant meaning: 'You can't fool me - I see what you are up to.' But
in Italy this shifts to: 'Keep your eyes peeled - pay attention, he's a crook.'
In other words the basic meaning remains one of alertness, but it changes from
'I am alert' to 'You be alert'.
In both
these cases, there is a small number of people in each region who interpret the
gesture in its other meaning. It is not an all-or-none situation, merely a
shift in dominance of one message over the other. This gives some idea of the
subtlety of regional changes. Occasionally there is a total switch as one moves
from one district to the next, but more often than not the change is only a
matter of degree.
Sometimes
it is possible to relate the geography of modern Regional Signals to past
historical events. The Chin Flick gesture, in which the backs of the fingers
are swept upwards and forwards against the underside of the chin, is an
insulting action in both France and northern Italy. There it means 'Get
lost-you are annoying me.' In southern Italy it also has a negative meaning,
but the message it carries is no longer insulting. It now says simply 'There is
nothing' or 'No' or 'I cannot' or 'I don't want any'. This switch takes place
between Rome and Naples and gives rise to the intriguing possibility that the
difference is due to a surviving influence of ancient Greece. The Greeks
colonized southern Italy, but stopped their northern movement between Rome and
Naples. Greeks today use the Chin Flick in the same way as the southern
Italians. In fact, the distribution of this, and certain other gestures,
follows remarkably accurately the range of the Greek civilization at its
zenith. Our words and our buildings still display the mark of early Greek
influence, so it should not be too surprising if ancient Greek gestures are
equally tenacious. What is interesting is why they did not spread farther as
time passed. Greek architecture and philosophy expanded farther and farther in
their influences, but for some reason, gestures like the Chin Flick did not
travel so well. Many countries, such as England, lack them altogether, and
others, like France, know them only in a different role.
Another
historical influence becomes obvious when one moves to North Africa. There, in
Tunisia, the Chin Flick gesture once again becomes totally insulting: a
Tunisian gives a 'French' Chin Flick, rather than a 'Southern Italian' Chin
Flick, despite the fact that France is more remote. The explanation, borne out
by other gesture links between France and Tunisia, is that the French colonial
influence in Tunisia has left its imperial mark even on informal body-language.
The modern Tunisian is gesturally more French than any of his closer neighbours
who have not experienced the French presence.
This
gives rise to the question as to whether gestures are generally rather
conservative, compared with other social patterns. One talks about the latest
fashions in clothing, but one never hears of 'this season's crop of new
gestures'. There does seem to be a cultural tenacity about them, similar to the
persistence found in much folklore and in many children's games and rhymes. Yet
new gestures do occasionally manage to creep in and establish themselves. Two
thousand years ago it was apparently the Greeks who were the 'gesturally
virile' nation. Today it is the British, with their Victory-sign and their
Thumbs-up, and the Americans with their OK Circle-sign. These have spread right
across Europe and much of the rest of the world as well, making their first
great advance during the turmoil of the Second World War, and managing to cling
on since then, even in the gesture-rich countries of southern Europe. But these
are exceptions. Most of the local signs made today are centuries old and
steeped in history.
(From Manwatching by Desmond Morris)
Evolution
and Natural Selection
The idea
of evolution was known to some of the Greek philosophers. By the time of
Aristotle, speculation had suggested that more perfect types had not only
followed less perfect ones but actually had developed from them. But all this
was guessing; no real evidence was forthcoming. When, in modern times, the idea
of evolution was revived, it appeared in the writings of the philosophers-Bacon,
Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. Herbert Spencer was preaching a full evolutionary
doctrine in the years just before Darwin's book was published, while most
naturalists would have none of it. Nevertheless a few biologists ran counter to
the prevailing view, and pointed to such facts as the essential unity of
structure in all warm-blooded animals.
The first
complete theory was that of Lamarck (1744-1829), who thought that modifications
due to environment, if constant and lasting, would be inherited and produce a
new type. Though no evidence for such inheritance was available, the theory
gave a working hypothesis for naturalists to use, and many of the social and
philanthropic efforts of the nineteenth century were framed on the tacit
assumption that acquired improvements would be inherited.
But the
man whose book gave both Darwin and Wallace the clue was the Reverend Robert
Malthus (1766-1834), sometime curate of Albury in Surrey. The English people
were increasing rapidly, and Malthus argued that the human race tends to outrun
its means of subsistence unless the redundant individuals are eliminated. This
may not always be true, but Darwin writes:
In
October 1838, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being
well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes
on, from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at
once struck me that, under these circumstances, favourable variations would
tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this
would be the formation of new species. Here then I had a theory by which to
work.
Darwin
spent twenty years collecting countless facts and making experiments on
breeding and variation in plants and animals. By 1844 he had convinced himself
that species are not immutable, but worked on to get further evidence. On 18
June 1858 he received from Alfred Russell Wallace a paper written in Ternate,
in the space of three days after reading Malthus's book. Darwin saw at once
that Wallace had hit upon the essence of his own theory. Lyell and Hooker
arranged with the Linnaean Society to read on July 1st 1858 Wallace's paper
together with a letter from Darwin and an abstract of his theory written in
1844, Then Darwin wrote out an account of his labours, and on 24th November
1859 published his great book The
Origin of Species.
In any
race of plants or animals, the individuals differ from each other in innate
qualities. Darwin offered no explanation of these variations, but merely
accepted their existence. When the pressure of numbers or the competition for
mates is great, any variation in structure which is of use in the struggle has
'survival value', and gives its possessor an improved chance of prolonging life
and leaving offspring. That variation therefore tends to spread through the
race by the elimination of those who do not possess it, and a new variety or
even species may be established. As Huxley said, this idea was wholly unknown
till 1858. Huxley said the book was like a flash of lightning in the darkness.
He wrote
It did
the immense service of freeing us from the dilemma - Refuse to accept the
Creation hypothesis, and what have you to propose that can be accepted by any
cautious reasoner? In 1857 I had no answer ready, and I do not think anyone
else had. A year later we reproached ourselves with dullness for being
perplexed with such an enquiry. My reflection when I first made myself master
of the central idea of the Origin was 'How extremely stupid not to
have thought of that!'
The hypothesis
of natural selection may not be a complete explanation, but it led to a greater
thing than itself-an acceptance of the theory of organic evolution, which the
years have but confirmed. Yet at first some naturalists joined the opposition.
To the many, who were unable to judge the biological evidence, the effect of
the theory of evolution seemed incredible as well as devastating, to run
counter to common sense and to overwhelm all philosophic and religious
landmarks. Even educated man, choosing between the Book of Genesis and theOrigin
of Species, proclaimed with
Disraeli that he was 'on the side of the Angels'.
Darwin
himself took a modest view. While thinking that natural selection was the chief
cause of evolution, he did not exclude Lamarck's idea that characters acquired
by long use or disuse might be inherited, though no evidence seemed to be
forthcoming. But about 1890 Weismann drew a sharp distinction between the body
(or soma) and the germ cells which it contains. Somatic cells can only
reproduce cells like themselves, but germ cells give rise not only to the germ
cells of a new individual but to all the many types of cell in his body. Germ
cells descend from germ cells in a pure line of germ plasm, but somatic cells
trace their origin to germ cells. From this point of view, the body of each
individual is an unimportant by-product of his parents' germ cells. The body
dies, leaving no offspring, but the germ plasms show an unbroken continuity.
The products of the germ cells are not likely to be affected by changes in the
body. So Weismann's doctrine offered an explanation of the apparent
noninheritance of acquired characters.
The
supporters of pure Darwinism came to regard the minute variations as enough to
explain natural selection and natural selection enough to explain evolution.
But animal breeders and horticulturalists knew that sudden large mutations
occur, especially after crossing, and that new varieties might be established
at once. Then in 1900 forgotten work by Mendel was rediscovered and a new
chapter opened.
In 1869
Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, applied these principles to mental qualities.
By searching books of reference, Galton examined the inheritance of ability.
For instance, he found that the chance of the son of a judge showing great
ability was about 500 times as high as that of a man taken at random, and for
the judge's father it was nearly as much. While no prediction can be made about
individuals, on the average of large numbers, the inheritance of ability is
certain.
(From Chapter
VIII of A Shorter History of
Science by Sir W. C.
Dampier.)
The
Laws of Heredity: Mendel
In 1866
Gregor Mendel, Abbot of Br�nn, published the results of certain
experiments he had made in cross-breeding varieties of the common garden pea
and the conclusions he had drawn from them. Though the value of his work was
not recognized until 1900, the first half of this present century has seen
great advances in the knowledge of heredity based on the original discoveries
he made, and the breeding of new varieties of plants and of animals is now a
scientific process.
In one of
his experiments, Mendel cross-pollinated a variety of pea having round seeds
when ripe with one having wrinkled seeds when ripe. This he effected by
removing the unripe stamens from unopened flowers of one variety and then, when
the stigmas were ready for pollination, he placed pollen on them from the other
variety. When the ripe pods so produced were examined, all the peas in them
were found to be round. This was the case whichever variety was used as the
'female' parent, i.e. the one used to receive pollen from the other. These peas
Mendel called the first filial
generation (designated Fl in diagram). Mendel sowed these seeds
the following year, and this time he allowed the flowers produced to be
self-pollinated, as they normally are in the garden pea, provided insects are
excluded. The ripe pods this time contained both round and wrinkled peas. He called these
peas thesecond filial generation (F2),
and on counting the two kinds found that there were 5,474 round and 1,850
wrinkled peas. The ratio of round peas to wrinkled was thus nearly 3:1. Mendel
then proceeded to sow these peas in the next year, and again allowed the plants
to be self pollinated. The wrinkled peas produced plants which bore only
wrinkled seeds, but only one-third of the round peas produced plants bearing
round peas only; the other two-thirds had pods containing both round and
wrinkled peas in the former ratio of 3 round: 1 wrinkled. The result of this experiment may be
summarized thus:

Mendel
explained these results in the following terms.
Factors - the pollen grains and ovules bear character-producing factors. These are now called genes, and are known to be
situated in the nuclei of the pollen and of the ovule. When fertilization
occurs one of the 'male' nuclei of the pollen tube fuses with the 'female'
nucleus of the ovum in the ovule. From the zygote thus produced the new plant arises by
cell division. The factors (genes) carried by the male nucleus are combined
with those carried by the female nucleus, so that the new plant inherits half
its factors from the male parent and half from its female parent. These factors
(genes) determine the characters formed in the new plant during its
development. The germ cells (male and female nuclei) of the 'round' pea variety
carry a factor for the production of the round character, while those of the
'wrinkled' variety carry a factor for producing the wrinkled character. Since a pea cannot be both
round and wrinkled, but only one or the other, Mendel called the two factors a
pair of opposed factors.
Dominance - Mendel supposed that in any one pair of opposed factors, one
factor was dominant and the other recessive. In the hybrid (Fl)
round pea both factors for 'roundness' and 'wrinkledness' are present, but the
effect of the 'round' factor only is seen since this factor is dominant, while
the 'wrinkled' factor is recessive. In this hybrid the 'round' factor had been
inherited from the 'round' parent and the 'wrinkled' factor from the 'wrinkled'
parent, so that both factors were present in the same plant. A plant which
contains only one of two opposed factors is said to be homozygous, while the hybrid
which contains both opposed factors is said to be heterozygous.
Segregation - When the 'germ cells' of the hybrids are formed, Mendel supposed
that the opposed factors are separated (segregated), so that two kinds of
pollen grains and of ovules are formed. These carry either one or other of the
two factors but not both. Thus the hybrid 'round' pea plant produces some
pollen grains carrying the 'round' factor and some carrying the 'wrinkled'
factor and similarly the ovules. He supposed, moreover, that the two kinds of
pollen grains and ovules were produced in approximately equal numbers, and
that, on self-pollination, random (chance) combination of these two types of
germ 'cells' would produce four possible combinations, also in approximately
equal numbers, just as when tossing two coins (A and B) four results may occur:
A1 and B1;
A1 and B2,
A2 and B1;
A2 and B2.
The result of this random pollination can be seen in figure 2.
The
ripened pods of the Fl plants
show the effect of segregation and recombination of the factors. Of the four
possible combinations (1), (2) and (3) produce round seeds, since the dominant
factor for 'roundness' is present in each. Combination (4) alone produces
wrinkled peas, since only the recessive factor for 'wrinkledness' is present.
In F3 the homozygous
combinations RR and ww on self-pollination can only produce round and wrinkled
peas respectively, while the heterozygous combinations Rw and wR will show
segregation, as in the case of the original Fl hybrid. This is what Mendel actually found by experiment.

He also
confirmed that in the segregation of the 'round' factor from the 'wrinkled'
factor, equal numbers of the two types of pollen
grains were formed, one carrying the 'round' factor and the other the
'wrinkled' factor, by pollinating the 'wrinkled' pea variety with pollen from
the Fl hybrid plants.
Since Fl pollen (R)
plus egg cell (r) produces a round pea (Rr) and Flpollen (r) plus
egg cell (r) produces a wrinkled pea (rr), then if the two types of pollen
grains (R) and (r) were produced in equal numbers, equal numbers of round and
wrinkled peas should result. Again, the experimental result was that expected,
equal numbers of round and wrinkled peas being found in the pods.
Following
the revival of Mendel's work in 1900, many breeding experiments have been made,
and have shown that Mendel's principles are of general application both among
plants and animals. Mendel's work has provided the basis for a new branch of
science called genetics or the study of inheritance. Already
outstanding achievements in the production of new varieties of plants with
valuable properties such as disease resistance have been recorded.
(From
Chapter XXVI of Biology by H. J. Cooke, K. F. P. Burkitt and
W. B. Barker.)
Banting
and the Discovery of Insulin
While at
the Medical School, Banting went into the library and looked at the November
issue of Surgery,
Gynaecology and Obstetrics. The
first article was entitled 'The relation of the Islets of Langerhans to
Diabetes' by Dr. Moses Barron of Minneapolis. Banting had to talk to his
students next day on the functions of the pancreas, so he took the journal home
with him.
One
paragraph in Barron's review of previous literature on the subject referred to
the experiments on tying the pancreatic ducts of rabbits made by Arnozen and
Vaillard thirty-six years earlier. Banting had not heard of these experiments
before, but he knew that attempts to treat diabetes with extracts of the
pancreas had failed; and he wondered why.
A
possible answer that occurred to him was that the hormone from the islets of Langerhans
was destroyed during the extraction of the pancreas. The question then was what
might destroy it; and his thoughts turned to the digestive ferment that the
pancreas produced. He knew this was very powerful, so powerful that it could
break up and dissolve all sorts of protein foods including the toughest meats.
Perhaps, during the process of extraction, this ferment destroyed the vital
hormone.
If that
were so, Banting reasoned, the extraction ought to be delayed until the
pancreas was no longer producing this ferment. According to the experiments of
Arnozen and Vaillard, this condition could be reached by tying the pancreatic
ducts. It was two o'clock in the morning of October 31, 1920, when he wrote in
his small black notebook: 'Tie off pancreas ducts of dogs. Wait six or eight
weeks. Remove and extract.'
Although
he did not know it, this was much the same idea that had come to Lydia de Witt
fourteen years earlier. But it was not for the idea alone that Banting deserves
to be remembered; his greatness lay in the way he put it into practice. He had
to wait until the spring of 1921 before he could start work, and he filled in
the time by reading all the literature on the subject he could find. He still
missed Lydia de Witt's work. At last he was given his laboratory-small, hot and
rather primitive-and his ten dogs. His assistant, Charles Best, was a recent
graduate in physiology and biochemistry who had been working under Macleod on
sugars. They began work on May 16.
Banting
began by tying off the pancreatic ducts of a number of dogs, which was quite
easy. Then he had to remove the pancreas from other dogs to give them diabetes.
The operation was not easy, and Banting's training and ability as a surgeon
proved invaluable. Even so, several dogs died before he evolved a suitable
technique.
On July 6
Banting and Best chloroformed two of the dogs whose pancreatic ducts they had
tied seven weeks earlier, and were disappointed to find that the pancreas had
not degenerated as they had hoped. They had not tied the ducts with the correct
degree of tension needed-the margin of error was very small. And they had only
one week left to complete their work. Macleod was away in Europe, but an
extension was granted by the authorities, and the experiment was continued. On
July 27 another duct-tied dog was chloroformed, and when Banting operated he
found that the pancreas had shrivelled to about one-third of its original size.
It was removed, chopped into pieces and mixed with saline; and a small amount
of a filtered extract was injected into one of the diabetic dogs. Within two
hours its blood sugar had fallen considerably, and before long the dog became
conscious, rose, and wagged its tail.
The
effect of the injection was so dramatic that Banting and Best could hardly believe
it; but further experiments made them sure that they had indeed found what they
were looking for. They had succeeded in extracting the anti-diabetic hormone
secreted by the islets of Langerhans. They called it 'isletin'. It was some
time later that Macleod renamed it insulin, a word that had been suggested in
1910. Insulin did not cure diabetes. After a while the dog relapsed, and
further injections were needed to revive it again. But with regular injections
of insulin a dog with diabetes could live.
Banting
and Best next succeeded in obtaining insulin by injecting secretin to stimulate
the production of the digestive ferment from the pancreas and exhaust the cells
from which it came. This was a much quicker method than tying the ducts and
waiting several weeks; and although the practical results were disappointing,
its importance to the theory was considerable.
So far
insulin had been extracted only in sufficient quantity for laboratory work, and
already Banting and Best were seeking means of getting larger supplies. They
now obtained insulin from the pancreas of a foetal calf-that is, a calf that
had not yet been born. Nature, ever practical, does not supply digestive
ferments until a calf starts eating, so there was nothing to destroy the
insulin during extraction. This new success enabled Banting and Best to keep up
an adequate supply of insulin for more extensive experiments. At the same time
they realized that if their work was to have practical results in medical
treatment it would be necessary to get much larger supplies. And they could
only come from adult cattle in the slaughterhouse. The problem was to find a
means of extracting the insulin from the pancreas of an ordinary adult animal.
The
problem was solved well enough to provide insulin for the first injections on
human beings. Two patients in Toronto General Hospital were chosen-a
fourteen-year-old boy and a doctor, both very seriously ill with diabetes:
'hopeless' cases. When treated with insulin-although still in a relatively
impure form-they improved at once. The boy is alive and well to-day.
'Research
in medicine is specialized,' Banting said later, 'and as in all organized walks
of life, a division of labour is necessary. In consequence, a division of
labour in the field of insulin took place.' Professor J. B. Collip, a
biochemist, was called in to produce a purer extract. He succeeded very
quickly; and other workers made it possible to obtain insulin on a really large
scale. Before very long insulin injections became the standard treatment for
diabetes all over the world. They still are today.
Banting,
only thirty-one years old, was suddenly famous. Although for some extraordinary
reason he was not knighted until 1934, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine
in 1923 jointly with Macleod.
(From
Chapter VIII of Great
Discoveries in Modern Science by
Patrick Pringle.)
The
Galapagos Islands
After
Tahiti the Galapagos were the most famous of all the tropical islands in the
Pacific. They had been discovered in 1535 by Fray Tomas de Berlanga, Bishop of
Panama, and were now owned by Ecuador, 500 odd miles away. Already in the 1830s
some sixty or seventy whalers, mostly American, called there every year for
'refreshments', They replenished their water tanks from the springs, they
captured tortoises for meat, (galapagos is the Spanish word for giant
tortoises), and they called for mail at Post Office Bay where a box was set up
on the beach. Every whaling captain took from it any letters which he thought
he might be able to forward. Herman Melville called in at the Galapagos aboard
theAcushnet not long after
the Beagle's visit, and the 'blighted Encantadas'
are a part of the saga of the white whale. 'Little but reptile life is here
found', wrote Melville, 'the chief sound of life is a hiss'.
Apart
from their practical uses there was nothing much to recommend the Galapagos;
they were not lush and beautiful islands like the Tahiti group, they were (and
still are) far off the usual maritime routes, circled by capricious currents,
and nobody lived in them then except for a handful of political prisoners who
had been stranded there by the Ecuador government. The fame of the islands was
founded upon one thing; they were infinitely strange, unlike any other islands
in the world. No one who went there ever forgot theta. For theBeagle this was just another port of call
in a very long voyage, but for Darwin it was much more than that, for it was
here, in the most unexpected way-just as a man might have a sudden inspiration
while he is travelling in a car or a train-that he began to form a coherent
view of the evolution of life on this planet. To put it into his own words:
'Here, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat near to that
great fact-that mystery of mysteries-the first appearance of new beings on this
earth'.
The Beagle cruised for just over a month in
the Galapagos, and whenever they reached an interesting point FitzRoy dropped
off a boatload of men to explore. On Narborough Island the turtles were coming
in at night to lay their eggs in the sand, thousands of them; they laid six
eggs in each hole. On Charles Island there was a penal settlement of two
hundred convicts, who cultivated sugar-cane, bananas and corn on the high
ground. But the group that concerns us is the one that was put ashore on James
Island. Here Darwin, Covington, Bynoe and two sailors were landed with a tent
and provisions, and FitzRoy promised to come back and pick them up at the end
of a week. Darwin visited other islands as well, but they did not differ very
much from James Island, and so we can conveniently group all his experiences
into this one extraordinary week. They set up their tent on the beach, laid out
their bedding and their stores, and then began to look around them.
The
marine lizards, on closer inspection, turned out to be miniature dragons,
several feet in length, and they had great gaping mouths with pouches under
them and long flat tails; 'imps of darkness', Darwin called them. They swarmed
in thousands; everywhere Darwin went they scuttled away before him, and they
were even blacker than the forbidding black rocks on which they lived.
Everything about these iguanas was odd. They never went more than ten yards
inland; either they sunned themselves on the shore or dived into the sea where
at once they became expert swimmers, holding their webbed feet close to their
sides and propelling themselves along with strong swift strokes of their tails.
Through the clear water one could see them cruising close to the bottom, and
they could stay submerged for a very long time; a sailor threw one into the sea
with a heavy weight attached to it, and when he fished it up an hour later it
was still alive and kicking. They fed on seaweed, a fact that Darwin and Bynoe
ascertained when with Bynoe's surgical instruments they opened one up and
examined the contents of its stomach. And yet, like some sailors, these marine
beasts hated the sea. Darwin took one by the tail and hurled it into a big pool
that had been left in the rocks by the ebb-tide. At once it swam back to the
land. Again Darwin caught it and threw it back, and again it returned. No
matter what he did the animal simply would not stay in the sea, and Darwin was
forced to conclude that it feared the sharks there and instinctively, when
threatened by anything, came ashore where it had no enemies. Their breeding
season was November, when they put on their courting colours and surrounded
themselves with their harems.
The other
creatures on the coast were also strange in different ways; flightless
cormorants, penguins and seals, both cold-sea creatures, unpredictably living
here in these tropical waters, and a scarlet crab that scuttled over the
lizards' backs, hunting for ticks. Walking inland with Covington, Darwin
arrived among some scattered cactuses, and here two enormous tortoises were
feeding. They were quite deaf and did not notice the two men until they had
drawn level with their eyes. Then they hissed loudly and drew in their heads.
These animals were so big and heavy that it was impossible to lift them or even
turn them over on their sides Darwin and Covington tried-and they could easily
bear the weight of a man. Darwin got aboard and found it a very wobbly seat,
but he in no way impeded the tortoise's progress; he calculated that it managed
60 yards in ten minutes, or 360 yards an hour, which would be roughly four
miles a day - 'allowing a little time for it to eat on the road'.
INTRODUCTION
When on
board H.M.S. Beagle as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the
distribution of the organic beings inhabiting South America, and in the
geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent.
These facts, as will be seen in the latter chapters of this volume, seemed to
throw some light on the origin of species- that mystery of mysteries, as it has
been called by one of our greatest philosophers. On my return home, it occurred
to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by
patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could
possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work I allowed myself to
speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in
1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable: from
that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope
that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to
show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.
My work
is now (1859) nearly finished; but as it will take me many more years to
complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish
this abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace,
who is now studying the natural history of the Malay Archipelago, has arrived
at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of
species. In 1858 he sent me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I
would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnean Society, and
it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that society. Sir C.
Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew of my work- the latter having read my
sketch of 1844- honoured me by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr.
Wallace's excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts.
This
abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect. cannot here give
references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the
reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy. No doubt errors will have crept
in, though I hope I have always been cautious in trusting to good authorities
alone. I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived,
with a few facts in illustration, but which, I hope, in most cases will
suffice. No one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter
publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions
have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this. For I am well aware
that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot
be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those
at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating
and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; and this
is here impossible.
I much
regret that want of space prevents my having the satisfaction of acknowledging
the generous assistance which I have received from very many naturalists, some
of them personally unknown to me. I cannot, however, let this opportunity pass
without expressing my deep obligations to Dr. Hooker, who, for the last fifteen
years, has aided me in every possible way by his large stores of knowledge and
his excellent judgment.
In
considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist,
reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological
relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other
such facts, might come to the conclusion that species had not been
independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species.
Nevertheless, such a conclusion, even if well founded, would be unsatisfactory,
until it could be shown how the innumerable species inhabiting this world have
been modified, so as to acquire that perfection of structure and coadaptation
which justly excites our admiration. Naturalists continually refer to external
conditions, such as climate, food, &c., as the only possible cause of
variation. In one limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true;
but it is preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions, the structure,
for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so
admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees. In the case of the
mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that
must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes
absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one
flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of
this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the
effects of external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant
itself.
It is,
therefore, of the highest importance to gain a clear insight into the means of
modification and coadaptation. At the commencement of my observations it seemed
to me probable that a careful study of domesticated animals and of cultivated
plants would offer the best chance of making out this obscure problem. Nor have
I been disappointed; in this and in all other perplexing cases I have
invariably found that our knowledge, imperfect though it be, of variation under
domestication, afforded the best and safest clue. I may venture to express my
conviction of the high value of such studies, although they have been very
commonly neglected by naturalists.
From
these considerations, I shall devote the first chapter of this Abstract to
Variation under Domestication. We shall thus see that a large amount of
hereditary modification is at least possible; and, what is equally or more
important, we shall see how great is the power of man in accumulating by his
Selection successive slight variations. I will then pass on to the variability
of species in a state of nature; but I shall, unfortunately, be compelled to
treat this subject far too briefly, as it can be treated properly only by
giving long catalogues of facts. We shall, however, be enabled to discuss what
circumstances are most favourable to variation. In the next chapter the
Struggle for Existence amongst all organic beings throughout the world, which
inevitably follows from the high geometrical ratio of their increase, will be
considered. This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and
vegetable kingdoms. As many more individuals of each species are born than can
possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring
struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly
in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying
conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be
naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected
variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
This
fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the
fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably
causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life, and leads to what I
have called Divergence of Character. In the next chapter I shall discuss the
complex and little known laws of variation. In the five succeeding chapters,
the most apparent and gravest difficulties in accepting the theory will be
given: namely, first, the difficulties of transitions, or how a simple being or
a simple organ can be changed and perfected into a highly developed being or
into an elaborately constructed organ; secondly, the subject of Instinct, or
the mental powers of animals; thirdly, Hybridism, or the infertility of species
and the fertility of varieties when intercrossed; and fourthly, the
imperfection of the Geological Record. In the next chapter I shall consider the
geological succession of organic beings throughout time; in the twelfth and
thirteenth, their geographical distribution throughout space; in the
fourteenth, their classification or mutual affinities, both when mature and in
an embryonic condition. In the last chapter I shall give a brief recapitulation
of the whole work, and a few concluding remarks.
No one
ought to feel surprise at much remaining as yet unexplained in regard to the
origin of species and varieties, if he make due allowance for our profound
ignorance in regard to the mutual relations of the many beings which live
around us. Who can explain why one species ranges widely and is very numerous,
and why another allied species has a narrow range and is rare? Yet these
relations are of the highest importance, for they determine the present welfare
and, as I believe, the future success and modification of every inhabitant of
this world. Still less do we know of the mutual relations of the innumerable
inhabitants of the world during the many past geological epochs in its history.
Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, I can entertain no
doubt, after the most deliberate study and dispassionate judgment of which I am
capable, that the view which most naturalists until recently entertained, and
which I formerly entertained - namely, that each species has been independently
created- is erroneous. I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but
that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants
of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the
acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species.
Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the most important,
but not the exclusive, means of modification.
(Introduction
to On The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, 1859)
'A
modern look at Monsters' by Daniel Cohen
Each
nation had its own conception of evil spirits or monsters that lived in deep
lakes. In the Highlands of Scotland, the monstrous inhabitants of lakes (or
lochs) were called 'water horses" or "water bulls." There was
hardly a loch or bay which, according to local folklore, did not have some sort
of monster in it.
But the
Loch Ness monster has a better pedigree than most of the other Scottish lake
monsters. While most were only known in oral tradition, the Loch Ness monster
was mentioned in writing in AD. 565. The monster, it seems, ran afoul of the
great Scottish holy man, Saint Columba. Adamnan, Saint Columba's biographer,
tells of an incident where the saint saved a swimmer from the rampaging monster
by saying, "Think not to go further, touch not thou that man. Quick! Go
back! Then the beast, upon hearing the voice of the saint, was terrified and
fled backwards more rapidly than he came."
It was
traditional in pagan societies for heroes to slay dragons and other monsters.
When the pagans became Christians these monster-fighting activities were often
taken over by the saints. The story of Saint Columba and the Loch Ness monster
would have remained nothing more than an obscure bit of folklore, to be treated
no more seriously than the story of Saint George and the dragon, had it not
been for the events of 1933-1934.
During
those years a road was built around the once-isolated loch in the Highlands.
The construction brought a large number of outsiders to Loch Ness, and clearing
the shore of the loch for the road gave observers a better view of the water.
In those years the Loch Ness monster appeared, or reappeared, if we are to
accept the story of Saint Columba.
The Loch
Ness monster captured the public fancy as no creature real or imaginary has in
a very long time. It knocked the Great Sea Serpent right out of contention as
the number one unknown animal in the world. To this day, despite years of
disappointment, the Loch Ness monster remains the world's most popular monster,
and the only one for which there is a regular and well-organized search.
So much
has already been written on the Loch Ness monster that it seems unnecessary to
give another detailed account of its history. A brief rundown of background
information will be supplied but we will concentrate on developments in the
story of the monster during the last few years.
Of the
thousands who have reported seeing the monster since 1933 the vast majority
have seen only its back or "humps". Most commonly what they have seen
is a shape in the water that looks something like an upturned boat, or a string
of them. This shape may be anywhere from a few inches to many feet above the
water.
Only a
small number have reported actually seeing the creature's head and neck. One of
the first people to sight the creature's head, and indeed the man who claims to
have coined the term Loch Ness monster, is Alex Campbell, a retired fisheries
official at the loch. He saw the monster for the first time in 1934. 'It had a
long tapering neck, about six feet long, and a smallish head, with a serpentine
look about it, and a huge hump behind which I reckon was about thirty feet
long. It was turning its head constantly.
In
addition to his duty at the loch, Campbell was also a correspondent for the
Inverness Courier, the local newspaper for the region. It was Campbell's
reports that helped catapult the Loch Ness monster to world-wide fame. Why did
he call it monster? "Not because there was anything horrible about it at
all, but because of the great size of the creature."
The
serpentine appearance of the monster's head and neck was firmly fixed in the
public's consciousness by "the famous London surgeon's photograph."
It was taken in 1934 by Kenneth Wilson, a surgeon on holiday in Scotland. The
photo apparently shows the snakelike neck and tiny head of the monster sticking
out of the waters of the loch.
In the
1930s most people agreed that the monster looked very much like an ancient
marine reptile plesiosaur. At the time the plesiosaur was also a popular
candidate for the Great Sea Serpent, and so was very much on every-one's mind.
After the
first sensational sightings there were no further important revelations about
the monster. The sceptics and the jokers began to move in. By the beginning of
World War II (during which time it dropped out of the news entirely) the Loch
Ness monster came to be regarded as either a hoax concocted by canny Scots
hotel owners or a hallucination seen only by those who imbibed too freely in
Scotland's most famous product.
But a
hardy few kept the faith. After the war they came back to Loch Ness and in the
face of scorn and ridicule managed to collect what has to be considered the
best evidence for the existence of any monster anywhere in the world.
Exhibit A
in the new case for the Loch Ness monster is the Dinsdale film. In 1960 monster
watcher and amateur photographer Tim Dinsdale filmed what he thought to be the
monster swimming in the far side of the loch.
To the
untrained observer the short film shows little - just a spot moving through the
water. It could be anything - a motorboat, for example. That is what many
viewers claimed, and still claim the film shows. In 1965 David James, a former
Member of Parliament who had become interested in the Loch Ness
"problem", persuaded photographic interpretation experts at the Royal
Air Force to examine the Dinsdale film. On the basis of an exhaustive
frame-by-frame analysis the RAF reported that the shape in the film is
"probably an animate object." Furthermore, they speculated that the
object might be as much as ninety-two feet in length although it was probably
more like thirty or forty feet long and "not less than six feet wide and
five feet high." It was also moving through the water at a considerable
speed.
Since
Dinsdale took his film other films have been taken, all at long range. One
apparently shows the humps of two monsters moving side by side through the
water. Another supposedly shows the monster on a small pebbly beach at the
loch. The problem with these films, as with the Dinsdale film, is that they are
unspectacular. The object that is supposed to be the monster appears as nothing
more than a little blob. Despite the RAF report many refuse to consider the
case for the Loch Ness monster proven. They contend, quite correctly, that
photographic interpretation, even when done by experts, is far from an exact
science. The quality of the monster films is so poor that even the experts
might easily be wrong.
Public
interest in the monster was beginning to wane again until 1968, when it
received a new lease of life. Scientists from the University of Birmingham
(England) using a new type of sonar equipment picked up stirrings in Loch Ness
that seemed highly suggestive. (The tests were made in 1967 but the results
were not published until the following year). The conclusions drawn from the
tests were highly tentative. Wrote Hugh Braithwaite who headed the expedition:
"Since the objects . are clearly comprised of animals, is it possible they
could be fish? The high rate of ascent and descent makes it seem very unlikely,
and fishery biologists we have consulted cannot suggest what fish they might
be. It is a temptation to suppose they must be the fabulous Loch Ness monsters,
now observed for the first time in their underwater activities! The present
data, while leaving this a possiblility, are quite inadequate to decide the
matter. A great deal of further investigation with more refined equipment -
which is not at present available - is needed before definite conclusions can
be drawn."
But even
this cautious approach was quickly challenged by other scientists who said what
the sonar had picked up was a "ghost" not a monster. The University
of Birmingham equipment, they said, was registering a false image, a not
uncommon occurrence with sonar.
Naturally,
during this period the Loch Ness monster, or Nessie, as she, he, it, or they is
affectionately called by the watchers, has not gone unnoticed. Aside from the
tourists who flock by the hundreds each summer to the shores of Loch Ness to
see if they can catch a glimpse of the elusive creature, there has been, since
1963, a regular yearly expedition organized to watch for the monster. The
expedition is run by the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau, Ltd. founded
by David James. During the warmer months a full crew of watchers, armed with
binoculars and cameras, drive specially equipped vans to various locations
around the loch. On a good day they have virtually the entire surface of Loch
Ness under visual observation. Most of the watchers are student volunteers from
various countries. (America is most heavily represented.) Two weeks of monster
watching makes a cheap and often exciting holiday. But it would be a mistake to
underestimate either the seriousness or competence of these amateurs. The
bureau is a non-profit organization.
Field
Director of the Loch Ness Investigation is Clem Skelton, a photographer with a
severe case of monster fever. During the long Highland winter, when the weather
becomes frigid and the daylight almost negligible, and the tourists and college
students abandon the shores of Loch Ness, Skelton and his wife remain in their
trailer on the shores of the loch. Their closest neighbour may be the monster
itself.
Since he
spends more time looking for the monster than anyone else, Skelton has quite
naturally seen the monster or what he thinks is the monster more times than
anyone else.
Once, he
says, he was practically on top of it. In June 1964 Skelton saw the creature's
hump from a distance of only fifteen yards. "I was rowing a boat across
the loch at 12.30 a.m. It never really gets dark at Loch Ness in the middle of
June, there is always a glow in the sky. I looked over my right shoulder and
there it was. It was the classic upturned boat sighting, but it was bigger than
my boat and if anyone wanted to win the diamond skulls at Henley he should have
rowed nearly as fast as I did to get out of its way.
Skelton
is absolutely convinced that there is a monster in Loch Ness. Many others who
have seen what they take to be the monster are equally convinced, as are a lot
of people who have never seen the monster at all. Each year the Loch Ness
Investigation carefully records all the sightings. From their lists they try to
eliminate all hoaxes and mistakes. Skelton figures that eighty to ninety
percent of the people who think they have seen the monster have really seen
something else. The remaining probable sightings are then carefully tallied and
published by the Bureau at the end of the year. They make an impressive record.
But the monster watchers know that they need more than an endless accumulation
of sighting reports to convince the scientific world and the public at large
that Nessie exists.
Numerous
suggestions have been made for catching the monster, from poisoning the loch to
stretching a net across it. Less drastic but more practical suggestions have
been offered for getting a piece of the monster's hide (or whatever) by the use
of a harpoon or crossbow. In 1962 a small ship sailed around Loch Ness with a
crew member on deck, ready with a long pole tipped with a piece of sticky
stuff. The hope was that with the pole and sticky material they could detach a
scale or piece of skin from the monster. The problem was that in order to
stick, or shoot, or prod the monster you have to get close to it. In this the
monster has proved thoroughly uncooperative.
Most
hopes are pinned on getting what members of the Bureau call "The
Picture" - a good close up shot, or preferably film of the monster with
its head above the water. This, they feel, unlike the vague spots and shapes
which have appeared in the other pictures, would clinch the case for the monster.
For this reason they have spent the bulk of their funds, which come from
private donations and grants, on buying good camera equipment. The largest
single grant, twenty thousand dollars, came from Field Educational Enterprises,
the same organization that helped to bankroll an expedition to find the
Abominable Snowman in the Himalayas.
The Loch
Ness monster is a near-perfect subject for scientific investigation. Unlike the
Great Sea Serpent, which could be anywhere in the vast expanse or abyssal
depths of the oceans, the Loch Ness monster is strictly confined. No large
creature could get in or out of Loch Ness without being observed. So whatever
it is lives in the loch and has for a long time. Naturally the monster buffs do
not say what they are seeing is the same ageless specimen confronted by Saint
Columba a millennium ago. They speak of the loch as home for a small but viable
breeding herd of monsters.
Many
people wonder why, if the monster's range is so confined, a specimen has not
yet been captured or at least photographed at closer range. The question is a
good one. But just because the monster has not yet been captured or well
photographed, we should not simply jump to the conclusion that it does not
exist. Loch Ness is a lot bigger than it looks on the map. It is the largest
body of fresh water in the British Isles, cutting twenty-four miles through
Scotland's Great Glen. At one end it is connected to the sea by the little
river Ness. It also serves as a link in the Caledonian Canal which bisects the
Highlands and is the country's principal waterway.
The
waters of Loch Ness are deep, dark, cold, and often dangerous. Average width of
the loch is only a mile, but the sides plunge precipitously to depths of over
seven hundred feet. A suspension of peat makes the water brown and murky and
the few divers who have ventured into it found themselves in a world where even
a strong light would penetrate no more than twelve feet. The loch never
freezes, but it never really warms up either. Throughout the year the
temperature hovers in the chilly mid-forties. Currents of surprising strength
can catch the unwary boater, and more than one has rowed or sailed onto the
loch and never been seen again.
Because
of the dangers of the loch, the history of the monster has been kept remarkably
free from a particular sort of hoax - the kind in which a group of jokers float
a model monster in the water. The model would have to be propelled in some way,
presumably by a swimmer or a group of swimmers underwater. It would then have
to be pulled under or gotten out of sight in some other way, before the
startled observers had a chance to discover what it really was. But nobody
wants to go swimming in Loch Ness, particularly underwater. A group of college
students who built a rubber monster were forced to float it in a smaller,
friendlier loch nearby.
Divers
don't like to go into the loch at all. When they do they can't see much anyway.
So there is little point in searching for the monster underwater except by
sonar. You might think that with all the publicity the monster has received in
the last decade the shores of Loch Ness would be packed solidly with tourists
bristling with binoculars and cameras and that the boats would be as thick as
rowboats in the Central Park lagoon. Actually, even at the peak of the tourist
season Loch Ness seems pleasantly uncrowded to an American. There are
relatively few good places to sit and watch for the monster, and the weather is
so rotten so often that only the most dedicated will brave it regularly. Boats
are surprisingly infrequent on the loch, and if you wished to rent one you
would find them scarce.
Despite
all the publicity, the search for the Loch Ness monster remains remarkably
under financed. Visitors to the loch often ask expedition members why they
don't just send down a miniature submarine to find the monster - as if
miniature submarines were the cheapest and most easily obtainable things in the
world. The Loch Ness investigators have never had anywhere near the amount of
funds they need to conduct a thorough investigation.
In 1969 a
miniature submarine actually was brought to the loch to aid in the
investigation. But the submarine was a homemade contraption, and it never
worked properly. Despite high hopes it added nothing to our knowledge of the
Loch Ness monster.
Therefore,
it is possible - barely perhaps - but possible, that a large unknown creature
or rather a group of them really do live in the depths of Loch Ness and have
escaped conclusive detection.
Brands
Up.
New
Labour has proved a marketable package, but it may be that Tony Blair and his
cabinet colleagues should now go the whole hog and reinvent themselves as
individual brands. A survey recently found that consumers consider Heineken
more trustworthy than the Prime Minister, and brands like BT and BMW are better
known than Gordon Brown and Jack Straw.
You know
where you are with a brand. Invented in the 19th century to reassure consumers
they were getting the real McCoy, brands have long been the way shoppers
navigate in a sea of unknowns. They are beacons of consistency, badges of
style. You know what you're getting when you buy Marmite, Tennents lager or PG
Tips. Or do you? Most of our best-known brands have become baubles for
multinationals. Brands are revenue streams, assets which are made to sweat and
sold between international corporations for millions. Marmite may have been a
national institution since 1902 when it was invented as a product of the
brewing industry in Burton on Trent. But it's now owned by the New Jersey based
American giant, CPC International - as are Bovril, Pot Noodles and Hellman's
Mayonnaise. Lea & Perrins is part of the French company, Danone, and PG
Tips isn't owned by Brooke Bond; it's part of the gigantic portfolio of
margarine baron Unilever.
You think
brands deliver consistency? Think again. Persil is owned he by Unilever in
Britain and by Henkel in Germany. Persil is Omo in Spain and the Netherlands
and Skip in France and Greece. Flora is Flora in the UK, but it's Becel in
France and the Netherlands, and it's Rama in Germany and Russia.
Names are
misleading. Customers of the posh sounding Jeeves of Belgravia may be dismayed
to know it used to be owned by the down market chain Sketchley, until they sold
it to a German shoe company called Mr Minute. The QE2 sounds quintessentially
British, but book a cruise and you'll be swelling the coffers of Norwegian ship
builders Kvaerner.
It's
somehow equally disappointing to learn that the trendy new chain All Bar One is
owned by boring old Bass. All Bar One may be decently designed, but so it
should be. Bass has a long way to go to make amends for inflicting on the high
street those fake Irish bars and eyesores, O'Neills. Don't, however, think you
can get away from Bass by drinking Grolsch, Carling, Hoopers Hooch, Caffreys or
Britvic Soft Drinks - Bass owns the lot. And if you round off your evening by
staying in the Holiday Inn, you'll bump up its profits nicely.
We like
to think brands mean something. Consumers don't buy products; they make style
state-ments and are often prepared to pay a premium for the privilege.
"The amount of reliance placed on a brand is quite high, but it's not very
well justified," says Robert East. You certainly may not have planned to
benefit Barbie makers, Mattel, when you bought Scrabble, nor profit the highly
secretive Proc-ter and Gamble when you popped a Pringle or washed your hair
with Vidal Sassoon. You may have known P&G owned Ariel, Tampax and Pampers,
but did you know it also owns Sunny Delight orange drink, Crest, Clearasil,
Pantene Pro V, Cover Girl, Max Factor and Hugo Boss?
You might
think Virgin at least delivers on its promise. As brands go, it has more reason
than most to lay claim to certain values. It's inextricably associated with the
founder, Richard Branson. Yet even Virgin is not what it seems. In February,
The Economist did an audit of the empire: Virgin owns less than 50 per cent of
Virgin Direct, Virgin Cola, Virgin Spirits, Virgin Cinema, Virgin Vie and the
Virgin Clothing Company. Hardly like a Virgin at all.
Does it
matter? Should we worry about who owns what? "No," says Nicholas Morgan,
marketing director for premium malt whiskies at United Distillers (owned by
Diageo.) "People buy a bottle of Bells or Johnnie Walker. They don't think
about United Distillers and we don't want them to. Information about the
company gets in the way. It's not good for anyone.
Consultants
Inter-brand agree - but so they would. Inventors of brand names Hobnobs and
Mondeo, Interbrand were the first people to say you can put a price on a brand,
and write it on the balance sheet. "Most consumers are not that bothered
about who owns the brand, providing they get the service they want," says
its brand evaluation director, Alex Batchdor. "It's getting the product
right that matters. When ownership changes, no one gives a stuff."
But
shoppers may care much more than he would like to think. Angry consumers have
in the past inflicted major boycotts on the products of Barclays, Shell and
Nestl�
when they didn't like what the companies were up to. Batchebr at Interbrand and
Morgan at United Distillers say no one is being misled - it's very easy to find
out who owns what. But not from the product it's not. Bylaw, all products need
to have is an address you can write to. There's no need to put any-thing about
the parent company. So there's no way of knowing, when you're buying a product
of, say, Kraft Jacobs Suchard, that its parent company is the tobacco giant
Philip Morris. There's even less chance of knowing that the Chinese government
owns part of Midland Bank and First Direct (because the Hong Kong government
bought an 8.9 per cent stake in the banks' parent company, HSBC.)
Nor is it
easy to unravel what ownership means at Rolls Royce after BMW bought the marque
and VW bought the factory. Ask either company exactly what is going on and both
refer you to Germany.
Not caring
about ownership is also not an argument you could get past a Manchester United
supporter. Man U is the sports brand par
excellence. The All Blacks
are one of many clubs on record as saying it's the brand on which they want to
model themselves. It's the best-known sports brand in the world - which is
precisely why Rupert Murdoch would like to buy it, much to the fans' dismay.
Andy
Walsh, spokesman for the Manchester United Independent Supporters Association,
will fight a change of ownership tooth and nail. "We'd lose all our
independence. It would no longer be Man U. A football club generates a feeling
of family, rather than a business, and in terms of the emotional attachment,
who owns it matters very much."
There are
other reasons why ownership matters. "Ownership is important in terms of
public policy and accountability," says Robert East, professor of
Marketing at Kingston University Business School. It's where responsibility
lies. Excluding own brands and fruit and veg, most supermarket products are made
by just three companies (four if you include booze). They are Unilever,
P&G, Nestl�
and Diageo. It's a stranglehold even the supermarkets seem unaware of.
"Every
week, we used to send a salesman to the supermarkets from each of our four main
companies: Van Den Berg Foods, Bird's Eye Walls, Lever Bros, and Elida Faberg�," says a spokesman for
Unilever. "The supermarkets often had no idea they were all part of the
same company."
Ownership
certainly matters to the companies. This year Guinness (which already owned
United Distillers), merged with Grand Metropolitan. The newly formed group came
up with the unlovely name Diageo. The regulators made it sell Dewar's whisky
and Bombay gin. The two brands
cost Bacardi-Martini �1.15
billion.
Brands
are the life-blood of companies. You can buy a familiar but floundering brand,
as Unilever did with Colman's mustard, re-market it, then through brand
extension flog the brand to death. On the back of the mustard (made in Norwich
for seven generations), Unilever has now launched Colman's dry sauces, and
Colman's and Oxo condiments.
But
Unilever is beginning to change its brand strategy. "We think people want
to know who is controlling what, and who's behind the things they buy,"
says a spokesman, Stephen Milton. "They don't want some faceless
conglomerate, and we think it's a trend that will continue." You can
therefore expect to hear more about Unilever - which is just as well, as you're
likely to have plenty of its products in your home.
It's a
high-risk strategy. Persil Power, accused of rotting your clothes, probably
caused less of a hiccup to Unilever's share price than New Coke's did to
Coca-Cola. Being known to all your customers - government/regulators,
share-holders, trade and consumers - by the same name means you have to take
great care of it. A blip in one area, and the whole thing crashes down -as
Virgin may find now it has put its name on trains.
But it
seems that the rewards can be greater. Whichever way they foster their brands,
Nestl�,
Unilever, P&G, Diageo and the rest have a long way to go. Every time
someone does a survey, the super-brands that come out on top are the
one-product or one-category companies, known by the names under which they
trade. You might not like them a great deal, but with Coca-Cola, McDonald's,
Sony and Microsoft you do at least know where you stand.
(From The Guardian November 5th 1998)
How to
be a great manager
At the
most general level, successful managers tend to have four characteristics:

they take
     enormous pleasure and pride in the growth of their people;
they are
     basically cheerful optimists - someone has to keep up morale when setbacks
     occur;
they don't
     promise more than they can deliver;
when they
     move on from a job, they always leave the situation a little better than
     it was when they arrived.

The
following is a list of some essential tasks at which a manager must excel to be
truly effective.
Great
managers accept blame: When the big wheel from head
office visits and expresses displeasure, the great manager immediately accepts
full responsibility. In everyday working life, the best managers are constantly
aware that they selected and should have developed their people. Errors made by
team members are in a very real sense their responsibility.
Great
managers give praise: Praise is probably the most
under-used management tool. Great managers are forever trying to catch their
people doing something right, and congratulating them on it. And when praise
comes from outside, they are swift not merely to publicise the fact, 'but to
make clear who has earned it. Managers who regularly give praise are in a much
stronger position to criticise or reprimand poor performance. If you simply
comment when you are dissatisfied with performance, it is all too common for
your words to be taken as a straightforward expression of personal dislike.
Great
managers make blue sky: Very few people are comfortable
with the idea that they will be doing exactly what they are doing today in 10
years' time. Great managers anticipate people's dissatisfaction.
Great
managers put themselves about: Most
managers now accept the need to find out not merely what their team is
thinking, but what the rest of the world, including their customers, is saying.
So MBWA (management by walking about) is an excellent thing, though it has to
be distinguished from MBWAWP (management by walking about - without purpose),
where senior management wander aimlessly, annoying customers, worrying staff and
generally making a nuisance of themselves.
Great
managers judge on merit: A great deal more
difficult than it sounds. It's virtually impossible to divorce your feelings
about someone - whether you like or dislike them - from how you view their
actions. But suspicions of discrimination or favouritism are fatal to the
smooth running of any team, so the great manager accepts this as an aspect of
the game that really needs to be worked on.
Great
managers exploit strengths, not weaknesses, in themselves and in their
people: Weak managers feel threatened by other
people's strengths. They also revel in the discovery of weakness and regard it
as something to be exploited rather than remedied. Great managers have no truck
with this destructive thinking. They see strengths, in themselves as well as in
other people, as things to be built on, and weakness as something to be
accommodated, worked around and, if possible, eliminated.
Great
managers make things happen: The old-fashioned
approach to management was rather like the old-fashioned approach to
child-rearing: 'Go and see what the children are doing and tell them to stop
it!' Great managers have confidence that their people will be working in their'
interests and do everything they can to create an environment in which people
feel free to express themselves.
Great
managers make themselves redundant: Not as
drastic as it sounds! What great managers do is learn new skills and acquire
useful information from the outside world, and then immediately pass them on,
to ensure that if they were to be run down by a bus, the team would still have
the benefit of the new information. No one in an organisation should be doing
work that could be accomplished equally effectively by someone less well paid
than themselves. So great managers are perpetually on the look-out for '
higher-level activities to occupy their own time, while constantly passing on
tasks that they have already mastered.
(From The
Independent )
Derivatives
- The Beauty
Financial
markets have grown more volatile since exchange rates were freed in 1973.
Interest rates and exchange rates now fluctuate more rapidly than at any time
since the Crash of 1929. At the same time, companies' profit margins have been
squeezed by the lowering of trade barriers and increased international
competition. The result is that companies worldwide have been forced to come to
terms with their financial risks. No longer can managers stick their heads in
the sand and pretend that because their firms make cars, or sell soap powders,
they need only worry about this year's convertible or whether their new formula
washes whiter than Brand X. As many have found to their cost, ignoring
interest-rate, currency or commodity risks can hurt a company just as badly as
the failure of a new product.
Derivatives
offer companies the chance to reduce their financial risks - chiefly by
transferring them to someone (usually a bank) who is willing to assume and
manage them. As they realize this, more and more companies are using
derivatives to hedge their exposures. America's General Accounting Office
reported that between 1989 and 1992 derivative volumes grew 145% to $12.1
trillion (in terms of the notional amount represented). This does not include
about $5.5 trillion of foreign-exchange forwards. Interest-rate risk was the
main risk hedged - at the end of 1992, interest-rate contracts accounted for
62% of total notionals, compared with 37% for foreign exchange.
In the
US companies can now be sued for not hedging their exposures.
In 1992, the Indiana Court of Appeal held that the directors of a grain
elevator co-operative had breached their fiduciary duty by failing to sell
forward the co-op's grain to hedge against a drop in prices. Since 90% of the
co-operative's operating income came from grain sales, its shareholders argued
that it was only prudent for the directors to have protected the co-op from the
huge losses it suffered (Brave v Roth, Indiana Court of
Appeal). In another case, shareholders sued Compaq Computers for violating
securities laws by failing to disclose that it lacked adequate mechanisms to
hedge foreign-exchange risks.
Hedging
does not necessarily remove all of a company's financial risk. When a firm
hedges a financial exposure, it is protecting itself against adverse market
moves. If the markets move in what would normally be the company's favour, the
hedger could find itself in a position that combined the worst of both hedged
and unhedged worlds. For many firms, though, this is a worthwhile price to pay
for ensuring stability or certainty for some of their cashflows.
(From Managing
derivative risks by Lillian Chew)
Motives
There
is a multitude of psychological theories about what motivates man. Is the force
inside man, outside man, conditioned or not conditioned, goal directed or not
goal directed? These are all very controversial issues in academic research
into what gets people to want to work. Most people in organizations are not
concerned with academic controversies and rely on their commonsense view of
behaviour.
The
simplest motivation theory suggests that man is motivated by a series of needs
or motives. This theory argues that some of the motives are inherited and some
learnt: that some are primarily physiological, while others are primarily
psychological. Other theories deny the existence of needs or motives.
Therefore, at one extreme the behaviourists argue that behaviour is a series of
learned responses to stimuli, and at the other extreme systems theorists talk
about all systems - individuals, groups, and organizations - having needs.
Motivation
can be either a conscious or an unconscious process: the allocation of time and
energy to work in return for rewards. Both internal and external stimuli lead
to action. Internalized values, hopes, expectations, and goals affect the
decision process of the individual, and thereby affect the resultant behaviour.
Motivation is not an 'engine' built inside an individual - as so many training
managers believe. It is the individual responding to a whole range of
experiences, and responding as a totality, not as 'a need'. If we are
threatened by physical force, the stimulus for activity is external. If the
hormone secretions in our bodies operate effectively then we will wish to
behave in physically satisfying ways. In both examples, some of the force is
inside the individual, while some of the stimulus is external. How the
individual will respond, how much energy he will expend, and how important are
the consequences (rewards) are all factors which moderate his motivation.
There
have been many attempts to classify personal moderators in the decision
process. The most popular construct is the need, and
categories of needs (e.g., body needs, safety needs, social needs, achievement
needs) dominate the literature. Goal categories, remarkably
like need categories, are also popular (e.g., money, status, power,
friendship). Satisfactiontheories are a variation of goal theories,
but have produced even 14 more controversial classifications (e.g., implicit
and explicit rewards).
There
is no space here to go into what is primarily an academic debate on theories of
behaviour. I will contend that people are motivated to realize the outcome of
ends or goals. Where I use the term 'need', I do so in the sense of ends or
goals desired by the individual. I have difficulty in accepting a 'need' as a
personality construct. However, desiring or wanting an outcome does reveal
something about a person, and 'need' can be used to refer to that wanting. To
many psychologists this view will be heresy, but I doubt if managers care what
the energy force is called (need, want, goal, etc.).
Organizational
psychologists adopt hierarchies of goals or needs, along the lines suggested by
Maslow, McClelland, Ghiselli, and Likert. Maslow's need classifications are the
most extensively used, mainly because they seem to fit organizations rather
than because they have been empirically verified. We have little data to
support the concept of a hierarchy of needs in which lower order needs are
satisfied before higher (hierarchically) order needs. However, while need
hierarchies may be difficult to accept, there is a great deal of data on the
relevance of these needs or ends or goals for individuals working in
organizations, and it is these data which are of value to managers.
The
managers' dilemma is that, while they must accept the individual differences
that exist among their staff, organizational (and particularly personnel)
practices assume that such differences do not exist. The field of organization
theory has been - and still is - plagued by the conflict between the individual
and the organization. As the orientation of this book is towards organizations,
it is important to deal with sameness or similarities between people, while
acknowledging differences within groups.
(From Managing
people at work by John Hunt)
Research
and Development
There
are two kinds of research: research and development, and basic research. The
purpose of research and development is to invent a product for sale. Edison
invented the first commercially successful light bulb, but he did not invent
the underlying science that made the light bulb possible. Edison at least
understood the science, though, which was the primary difference between
inventing the light bulb and inventing fire. Basic research is something else -
ostensibly the search for knowledge for its own sake. Basic research provides
the scientific knowledge upon which R&D is later based. Sending telescopes
into orbit or building superconducting supercolliders is basic research. There
is no way, for example, that the $1.5 billion Hubble space telescope is going
to lead directly to a new car or computer or method of solid waste disposal.
That is not what it is for. If a product ever results from basic research, it
usually does so fifteen to twenty years later, following a later period of
research and development.
Nearly
all companies do research and development, but only a few do basic research.
The companies that can afford to do basic research (and cannot afford not to)
are ones that dominate their markets. Most basic research in industry is done
by companies that have at least a 50 percent market share. They have both the
greatest resources to spare for this type of activity and the most to lose if,
by choosing not to do basic research, they eventually lose their technical
advantage over competitors. Such companies typically devote about 1 percent of
sales each year to research intended not to develop specific products but to
ensure that the company remains a dominant player in its industry twenty years
from now. It is cheap insurance, since failing to do basic research guarantees
that the next major advance will be owned by someone else.
The
problem with industrial basic research, and what differentiates it from
government basic research, is this fact that its true product is insurance, not
knowledge. If a researcher at the government-sponsored Lawrence Livermore Lab
comes up with some particularly clever new way to kill millions of people,
there is no doubt that his work will be exploited and that weapons using the
technology will eventually be built. The simple rule about weapons is that if
they can be built, they will be built. But basic researchers in industry find
their work is at the mercy of the marketplace and their captains-of-industry
bosses. If a researcher at General Motors comes up with a technology that will
allow cars to be built for $100 each, GM executives will quickly move to bury
the technology, no matter how good it is, because it threatens their current
business, which is based on cars that cost thousands of dollars each to build.
Consumers would revolt if it became known that GM was still charging high
prices for cars that cost $100 each to build, so the better part of business
valor is to stick with the old technology since it results in more profit
dollars per car produced.
In the
business world, just because something can be built does not
at all guarantee that it will be built, which explains why RCA
took a look at the work of George Heilmeier, a young researcher working at the
company's research center in New Jersey and quickly decided to stop work on
Heilmeier's invention, the liquid crystal display. RCA made this mid-1960s
decision because LCDs might have threatened its then-profitable business of
building cathode ray picture tubes. Twenty-five years later, of course, RCA is
no longer a factor in the television market, and LCD displays - nearly all made
in Japan - are everywhere.
(From Accidental
empires by Robert X Cringeley)
SONY
I had
decided during my first trip abroad in 1953 that our full name - Tokyo Tsushin
Kogyo Kabushiki Kaisha - was not a good name to put on a product. It was a
tongue-twister. Even in Japan, we shortened it sometimes to Totsuko, but when I
was in the United States I learned that nobody could pronounce either name. The
English-language translation - Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company -
was too clumsy. We tried Tokyo Teletech for a while, but then we learned there
was an American company using the name Teletech.
It
seemed to me that our company name didn't have a chance of being recognized
unless we came up with something ingenious. I also thought that whatever new
name we came up with should serve double duty- that is, it should be both our
company name and our brand name. That way we would not have to pay double the
advertising cost to make both well known.
We
tried a symbol for a while, an inverted pyramid inside a thin circle with small
wedges cut from the sides of the pyramid to give us a stylized letter
"T." But for our first transistors and for our first transistor
radio, we wanted a brand name that was special and clever and that people would
remember. We decided our transistor radio would be the first consumer, product
available to the public with our new brand name on it.
I
thought a lot about this when I was in the United States, where I noticed that
many companies were using three letter logotypes, such as ABC, NBC, RCA, and
AT&T. Some companies were also using just their full name as their logo.
This looked like something new to me. When I was a boy, I had learned to
recognize the names of imported automobiles by their symbols, the three-pointed
star for Mercedes, the blue oval with Ford in it, the Cadillac crown, the
Pierce Arrow arrow, the Winged Victory of Rolls-Royce. Later, many car
companies began to use their names together with the symbol, like Chevrolet,
Ford,
Buick,
and others, and I could recognize their names even if I couldn't actually read
them. I pondered every possibility. Ibuka and I took a long time deciding on a
name. We agreed we didn't want a symbol. The name would be the symbol, and
therefore it should be short, no more than four or five characters. All
Japanese companies have a company badge and a lapel pin, usually in the shape
of the company symbol, but except for a prominent few, such as the three
diamonds of Mitsubishi, for example, it would be impossible for an outsider to
recognize them. Like the automobile companies that began relying less and less
on symbols and more and more on their names, we felt we really needed a name to
carry our message. Every day we would write down possibilities and discuss them
whenever we had the time. We wanted a new name that could be recognized
anywhere in the world, one that could be pronounced the same in any language.
We made dozens and dozens of tries. Ibuka and I went through dictionaries
looking for a bright name, and we came across the Latin word sonus, meaning
"sound." The word itself seemed to have sound in it. Our business was
full of sound, so we began to zero in on sonus. At that time in Japan borrowed
English slang and nicknames were becoming popular and some people referred to
bright young and cute boys as "sonny," or "sonny-boys,"
and, of course, "sunny" and "sonny" both had an optimistic and
bright sound similar to the Latin root with which we were working. And we also
thought of ourselves as "sonny-boys" in those days. Unfortunately,
the single word "sonny" by itself would give us troubles in Japan
because in the romanization of our language, the word "sonny" would
be pronounced "sohn-nee," which means to lose money. That was no way
to launch a new product. We pondered this problem for a little while and the
answer struck me one day: why not just drop one of the letters and make it
"Sony"? That was it!
The new
name had the advantage of not meaning anything but "Sony" in any
language; it was easy to remember, and it carried the connotations we wanted.
Furthermore, as I reminded Ibuka, because it was written in roman letters,
people in many countries could think of it as being in their own language. All
over the world governments were spending money to teach people how to read
English and use the roman alphabet, including Japan. And the more people who
learned English and the roman alphabet, the more people would recognize our
company and product name-at no cost to us.
We kept
our old corporate name for some time after we began putting the Sony logotype
on our products. For our first product logo, we used a tall, thin sloping
initial letter inside a square box, but I soon realized that the best way to
get name recognition would be to make the name as legible and simple as
possible, so we moved to the more traditional and simple capital letters that
remain today. The name itself is the logo.
We
managed to produce our first transistorized radio in 1955 and our first tiny
"pocketable" transistor radio in 1957. It was the world's smallest,
but actually it was a bit bigger than a standard men's shirt pocket, and that
gave us a problem for a while, even though we never said which pocket we had in
mind when we said "pocketable." We liked the idea of a salesman being
able to demonstrate how simple it would be to drop it into a shirt pocket. We
came up with a simple solution. We had some shirts made for our salesmen with
slightly larger than normal pockets, just big enough to slip the radio into.
The
introduction of this proud achievement was tinged with disappointment that our
first transistorized radio was not the very first one on the market. An
American company called Regency, supported by Texas Instruments, and using TI
transistors, put out a radio with the Regency brand name a few months before
ours, but the company gave up without putting much effort into marketing it. As
the first in the field, they might have capitalized on their position and
created a tremendous market for their product, as we did. But they apparently
judged mistakenly that there was no future in this business and gave it up.
Our
fine little radio carried our company's new brand name, Sony, and we had big
plans for the future of transistorized electronics and hopes that the success
of our small "pocketable" radio would be a harbinger of successes to
come.
In June
1957, we put up our first billboard carrying the Sony name opposite the
entrance to Tokyo's Haneda International Airport, and at the end of the year we
put up another in the heart of the Ginza district of Tokyo. In January 1958 we
officially changed our company name to Sony Corporation and were listed on the
Tokyo Stock Exchange that December.
We had
registered the name Sony in one hundred and seventy countries and territories
and in various categories, not just electronics, in order to protect it from
being used by others on products that would exploit the similarity. But we soon
learned that we had failed to protect ourselves from some entrepreneurs right
at home in Japan. One day we learned that somebody was selling "Sony"
chocolate.
We were
very proud of our new corporate name and I was really upset that someone would
try to capitalize on it. The company that picked up our name had used a
completely different name on their products before and only changed the name
when ours became popular. They registered the name "Sony" for a line
of chocolates and snack foods and even changed their company trade name to Sony
Foods. In their logo they used the same type of letters we used.
In
those days we sometimes used a small cartoon character called "Sonny
Boy" in our advertising. The character was actually called
"Atchan," and was created by cartoonist Fuyuhiko Okabe of the Japanese
newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The bogus Sony chocolate merchants
started using a similar cartoon. Seeing this stuff on sale in major department
stores made me sick with anger. We took the imposters to court and brought
famous people such as entertainers, newspapermen, and critics to confirm the
damage that was being done to us. One witness said he thought the appearance of
Sony chocolate meant that the Sony Corporation was in financial difficulty if
it had to resort to selling chocolate instead of high-technology electronics.
Another witness said she had the impression that since Sony was really a
technical company, the chocolate must be some kind of synthetic. We were afraid
that if these chocolates continued to fill the marketplace, it would completely
destroy the trust people had in our company.
I have
always believed that a trademark is the life of an enterprise and that it must
be protected boldly. A trademark and a company name are not just clever
gimmicks-they carry responsibility and guarantee the quality of the product. If
someone tries to get a free ride on the reputation and the ability of another
who has worked to build up public trust, it is nothing short of thievery. We
were not flattered by this theft of our name.
Court
cases take a long time in Japan, and the case dragged on for almost four years,
but we won. And for the first time in Japanese history, the court used the
unfair competition law rather than patent or trademark registration laws in
granting us relief. The chocolate people had registered the name, all right,
but only after our name had become popular. In trying to prove that the name
was open for anyone to use, their lawyers went to the major libraries of the
country to show that the name was in the public domain, but they were in for a
shock. They came away empty-handed because no matter what dictionaries they
went to they could not find the word Sony. We knew they would discover that; we
had done it ourselves long before. The name is unique, and it is ours.
On our
thirty-fifth anniversary, we thought we should consider revising our trademark.
Styles and fashions were changing in clothing, in product design, and in
virtually everything, so we thought that perhaps we should consider changing
the style of the letters of our name. We held an international competition, and
we received hundreds of suggestions, along with hundreds of pleas from our
dealers not to change. After reviewing all the suggestions, we decided not to
make any changes. S O N Y still looked very good to us, and we decided, as they
say today, that there was no point in fixing something that was far from
broken.
(From Made
in Japan by Akio Morita)
American
And Japanese Styles
Japanese
attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes.
Japanese people tend to be much better adjusted to the notion of work, any kind
of work, as honourable. Nobody would look down on a man who retires at age
fifty-five or sixty and then to keep earning money takes a more menial job than
the one he left. I should mention that top-level executives usually have no
mandatory retirement age, and many stay on into their seventies and even their
eighties.
At Sony
we have mandatory retirement from the presidency at sixty-five, but to utilize
their experience and knowledge we keep former executives who have retired as
consultants. We provide them with office space and staff, so that they can work
apart from the day-to-day affairs of the company, at Ibuka Hall, a building
located five minutes away from the headquarters building. From time to time, we
ask them for advice and they attend conferences and other events as
representatives of Sony. Many of those people who retire from managerial jobs
find executive positions in smaller companies or subsidiary companies of Sony
where their managerial experience and skill are needed and valued.
Workers
generally are willing to learn new skills. Japan has never devised a system
like the American, in which a person is trained to do one thing and then
refuses to take a job doing anything else-and is even supported by government
funds while he looks for a job that suits his specific tastes. Because of
Japan's special situation, our people do not have that luxury. And our
unemployment rate lately has not reached 3 percent.
One old
style of management that is still being practiced by many companies in the
United States and by some in Japan is based on the idea that the company that
is successful is the one that can produce the conventional product most
efficiently at cheaper cost. Efficiency, in this system, becomes a god.
Ultimately, it means that machinery is everything, and the ideal factory is a
perfectly automated one, perhaps one that is unmanned. This machinelike
management is a management of dehumanization.
But
technology has accelerated at an unparalleled pace in the past few decades and
it has entailed digesting new knowledge, new information, and different
technologies. Today, management must be able to establish new business ahead of
its competitors, rather than pursue higher efficiency in manufacturing
conventional products. In the U.S. and Europe today, old-fashioned low-level
jobs are being protected while the new technologies are being neglected.
More
important, an employee today is no longer a slave to machinery who is expected
to repeat simple mechanical operations like Charlie Chaplin in the film Modern
Times. He is no longer a beast of burden who works under the
carrot-and stick rule and sells his labour. After all, manual labour can be
taken over by machine or computer. Modern industry has to be brain-intensive
and so does the employee. Neither machinery nor animals can carry out
brain-intensive tasks. In the late sixties, when integrated circuits had to be
assembled by hand, the deft fingers of Asian women were greatly in demand by
U.S. companies. As the design of these devices became more and more complicated,
along came more sophisticated machinery, such as laser trimmers, which required
not deft fingers but agile minds and intelligence. And so this upgrading of the
workers is something that every country will have to be concerned about, and
the idea of preserving old-fashioned jobs in the modern era does not make
sense. This means educating new employees and re-educating older employees for
new challenges.
That is
not all. At Sony we at times have scientists participate in sales for a while
because we don't want our scientists to live in ivory towers. I have always
felt they should know that we are in a very competitive business and should
have some experience in the front lines of the business. Part of the training
program for graduates who enter Sony as recruits fresh out of university
includes a program where non-technical persons undergo a month of training at a
factory and technical persons work as salespeople in a Sony shop or department
store, selling our products.
Japanese
labour practices are often called old-fashioned in today's world, and some say
the old work ethic is eroding in Japan as it has elsewhere, but I do not think
this is inevitable. As I see it, the desire to work and to perform well is not
something unnatural that has to be imposed on people. I think all people get a
sense of satisfaction from accomplishing work that is challenging, when their
work and role in the company are being recognized. Managers abroad seem to
overlook this. People in America, for example, have been conditioned to a
system in which a person sells his labour for a price. In a way, that's good
because people cannot coast; they know they have to work to earn their money or
be fired. (I also think the way Americans make their children do work to earn
their allowance is a fine idea; in Japan we often just give the money without
requiring anything of our children.) In Japan we do take the risk of promising
people job security, and then we have to keep motivating them. Yet I believe it
is a big mistake to think that money is the only way to compensate a person for
his work.
People
need money, but they also want to be happy in their work and proud of it. So if
we give a lot of responsibility to a younger man, even if he doesn't have a
title, he will believe he has a good future and will be happy to work hard. In
the United States, title and job and monetary incentives are all tied together.
That is why, if a young person has a big job, management thinks he has to have
a big salary. But in Japan we customarily give raises each year as employees
get older and more experienced in the company. If we give an unusually high
salary to one person, we cannot continue to give him annual increases
indefinitely. At some point, his salary will have to level off, and at that
point, he is likely to get discouraged. So we like to give the same sort of
raise to all. I think this keeps our people well motivated. This may be a
Japanese trait, but I do not think so.
I
believe people work for satisfaction. I know that advertisements and
commercials in the U.S. seem to hold up leisure as the most satisfying goal in
life, but it is not that way in Japan yet. I really believe there is such a
thing as company patriotism and job satisfaction - and that it is as important
as money. It goes without saying that you must pay good wages. But that also
means, of course, that the company must not throw money away on huge bonuses
for executives or other frivolities but must share its fate with the workers.
Japanese workers seem to feel better about themselves if they get raises as
they age, on an expectable curve. We have tried other ways.
When we
started our research laboratory, we had to go out and find researchers, and
because these people had more education and were, naturally, older than our
normal new employees we decided they should have higher wages, equivalent to
U.S. salary levels. One suggested plan was to put them under short-term
contract, say three years, after which we would decide whether to renew or not.
But before we decided on this new pay scheme, I asked the new employees whether
they would prefer the more common system of lower pay to start, but with yearly
increases, or the three-year contract at a much higher wage.
Not one
of them asked for the American-level salary. Everyone opted for long-range
security. That is why I tell the Americans I meet that people don't work only
for money. But often when I say it, they respond, "Yes, I see, but how
much do you pay the ones who really work hard?" Now this is an important
point. When a worker knows he will be getting a raise each year, he can feel so
secure that he thinks there is no need to work hard. Workers must be motivated
to want to do a good job. We Japanese are, after all, human beings, with much
in common with people everywhere. Our evaluation system is complex and is
designed to find really capable persons, give them challenging jobs, and let
them excel. It isn't the pay we give that makes the difference-it is the
challenge and the recognition they get on the job.
My
eldest son, Hideo, may not be the best example of the typical Japanese worker,
but he has an interesting and, I think, typical view of work in Japan. He has
studied in Britain and the United States, and all his life he wanted to work
for Sony. He went to work as an Artists and Repertory man at the CBS-Sony
record company on the urging of Norio Ohga. He and I felt that for him to come
directly into Sony headquarters would be wrong, because of the family
connection and the overtones of nepotism. So he was proving himself at
CBS-Sony. He worked with foreign and local artists and became famous and
successful in the record industry in Japan. He worked very hard, from about
noon until three or four o'clock in the morning, doing his regular office
business during the day and then dealing with musicians after they finished
their work. Hideo doesn't drink, and so it was hard for him to sit around the
Tokyo discos and bars with these rock stars, drinking Coca-Cola while they
relaxed with whiskey in the wee small hours of the morning. But it was important
for him to do this, and although he could have gone on a long time resting on
his laurels, he took stock of himself on his thirtieth birthday and made a
decision.
As he
put it, "In the record business, there are many people in their late
thirties and early forties wearing jogging shoes and white socks and jeans and
T-shirts to the office. I looked at those guys and said; I don't want to be
like that when I am forty or forty-five. This business is fine and I have been
successful, and I have no reason to leave it. If I keep this job, I thought, I
might end up being a top officer of CBS-Sony, but I didn't want to see myself
at fifty coming into the office at one o'clock in the afternoon in jogging
shoes and white socks saying 'Good morning.' I felt I had to prove to myself
after seven years in the record business that I could work from nine to five,
like ordinary people."
He was
assigned to the Sony accounting division-quite a change, you might think, from
the artistic side of the record business-and some might have wondered whether
he could make it or not, but I believed he could. His attitude is very
Japanese, despite his international upbringing:
"All
jobs are basically the same. You have to apply yourself, whether you are a
record A&R man, a salesman on the street, or an accounting clerk. You get
paid and you work one hundred percent to do the job at hand. As an A&R man,
I was interested and excited and happy, but naturally as long as you are
satisfied with your work and are using your energy, you will be happy. I was
also very excited about the accounting division. I found out something new
every day, struggling with a whole bunch of invoices and the payment sheets,
the balance sheet, the profit and loss statement, and working with all those
numbers. I began to get a broad picture of the company, its financial position
and what is happening day to day and which way the company is heading. I
discovered that that excitement and making music at the studio are the same
thing."
.
In the
late sixties a European Commission internal memo on Japan was leaked, and a
great stir was created because it referred to the Japanese as
"workaholics" who live in "rabbit hutches." There is no
doubt that inadequate housing is a major problem in Japan, and nobody could
deny that the Japanese are probably the hardest working people in the world. We
have many holidays in Japan, but only about the same number as the United
States. We do not give long summer vacations, even to our schoolchildren.
At Sony
we were one of the first Japanese companies to close down our factory for one
week in the summer, so that everybody could take off at the same time. And we
long ago instituted the five-day, forty-hour week. The Japan Labour Standards
Act still provides for a maximum forty-eight-hour workweek, though it is soon
to be revised downward, and the average workweek in manufacturing is now
forty-three hours. But even with up to twenty days of paid vacation a year,
Japanese workers managed to take fewer days off and spend more days on the job
than workers in the United States and Europe.
It was
only in 1983 that banks and financial institutions began to experiment with the
five-day week, closing one Saturday a month, and eventually the whole nation
will move closer to the five-day week. Still, International Labour Organization
data show that Japanese work longer weeks and have fewer labour disputes than
workers in the U.S., the U.K., France, or West Germany. What I think this shows
is that the Japanese worker appears to be satisfied with a system that is not
designed only to reward people with high pay and leisure.
At Sony
we learned that the problem with an employee who is accustomed to work only for
the sake of money is that he often forgets that he is expected to work for the
group entity, and this self-cantered attitude of working for himself and his
family to the exclusion of the goals of his co-workers and the company is not
healthy. It is management's responsibility to keep challenging each employee to
do important work that he will find satisfying and to work within the family.
To do this, we often reorganize the work at Sony to suit the talents and
abilities of the workers.
I have
sometimes referred to American companies as being structures like brick walls
while Japanese companies are more like stone walls. By that I mean that in an
American company, the company's plans are all made up in advance, and the
framework for each job is decided upon. Then, as a glance at the classified
section of any American newspaper will show, the company sets out to find a
person to fit each job. When an applicant is examined, if he is found to be
oversized or undersized for the framework, he will usually be rejected. So this
structure is like a wall built of bricks: the shape of each employee must fit
in perfectly, or not at all.
In
Japan recruits are hired, and then we have to learn how to make use of them.
They are a highly educated but irregular lot. The manager takes a good long
look at these rough stones, and he has to build a wall by combining them in the
best possible way, just as a master mason builds a stone wall. The stones are
sometimes round, sometimes square, long, large, or small, but somehow the
management must figure out how to put them together. People also mature, and
Japanese managers must also think of the shapes of these stones as changing
from time to time. As the business changes, it becomes necessary to refit the
stones into different places. I do not want to carry this analogy too far, but
it is a fact that adaptability of workers and managements has become a hallmark
of Japanese enterprise.
When
Japanese companies in declining or sunset industries change their line of
business or add to it, workers are offered retraining and, for the most part,
they accept it eagerly. This sometimes requires a family move to the new job,
and Japanese families are, again, generally disposed to do this.
(From Made
in Japan by Akio Morita)
Metallurgy:
Making Alloys
The
majority of alloys are prepared by mixing metals in the molten state; then the
mixture is poured into metal or sand moulds and allowed to solidify. Generally
the major ingredient is melted first; then the others are added to it and
should completely dissolve. For instance, if a plumber makes solder he may melt
his lead, add tin, stir, and cast the alloy into stick form. Some pairs of
metals do not dissolve in this way. When this is so it is unlikely that a
useful alloy will be formed. Thus if the plumber were to add aluminium, instead
of tin, to the lead, the two metals would not dissolve - they would behave like
oil and water. When cast, the metals would separate into two layers, the heavy
lead below and aluminium above.
One
difficulty in making alloys is that metals have different melting points. Thus
copper melts at 1,083�C, while zinc melts at 419�C and boils at 907�C So,
in making brass, if we just put pieces of copper and zinc in a crucible and
heated them above 1,083�C, both the metals would certainly melt.
But at that high temperature the liquid zinc would also boil away and the
vapour would oxidize in the air. The method adopted in this case is to heat
first the metal having the higher melting point, namely the copper. When this
is molten, the solid zinc is added and is quickly dissolved in the liquid
copper before very much zinc has boiled away. Even so, in the making of brass,
allowance has to be made for unavoidable zinc loss which amounts to about one
part in twenty of the zinc. Consequently, in weighing out the metals previous
to alloying, an extra quantity of zinc has to be added.
Sometimes
the making of alloys is complicated because the higher melting point metal is
in the smaller proportion. For example, one light alloy contains 92 per cent aluminium
(melting point 660�C) with 8 per cent copper (melting point
1,083�C). To manufacture this alloy it would be
undesirable to melt the few pounds of copper and add nearly twelve times the
weight of aluminium. The metal would have to be heated so much to persuade the
large bulk of aluminium to dissolve that gases would be absorbed, leading to
unsoundness. In this, as in many other cases, the alloying is done in two
stages. First an intermediate 'hardener alloy' is made, containing 50 per cent
copper and 50 per cent aluminium, which alloy has a melting point considerably
lower than that of copper and, in fact, below that of aluminium. Then the
aluminium is melted and the correct amount of the hardener alloy added; thus,
to make l00lb of the aluminium-copper alloy we should require 84lb. of
aluminium to be melted first and 16lb of hardener alloy to be added to it.
In a
few cases, the melting point of the alloy can be worked out approximately by
arithmetic. For instance, if copper (melting point 1,083�C) is alloyed with nickel (melting point 1,454�C) a fifty-fifty alloy will melt at about halfway between the two
temperatures. Even in this case the behaviour of the alloy on melting is not
simple. A copper-nickel alloy does not melt or freeze at one fixed and definite
temperature, but progressively solidifies over a range of temperature. Thus, if
a fifty-fifty copper-nickel alloy is liquefied and then gradually cooled, it
starts freezing at 1,312�C, and as the temperature falls, more and
more of the alloy becomes solid until finally at 1,248�C it has completely solidified. Except in certain special cases
this 'freezing range' occurs in all alloys, but it is not found in pure metals,
metallic, or chemical compounds, and in some special alloy compositions, referred
to below, all of which melt and freeze at one definite temperature.
The
alloying of tin and lead furnishes an example of one of these special cases.
Lead melts at 327�C and tin at 232�C. If lead is added to molten tin and the alloy is then cooled, the
freezing point of the alloy is found to be lower than the freezing points of
both lead and tin (see figure 1). For instance, if a molten alloy containing 90
per cent tin and 10 per cent lead is cooled, the mixture reaches a temperature
of 217�C before it begins to solidify. Then, as
the alloy cools further, it gradually changes from a completely fluid
condition, through a stage when it is like gruel, until it becomes as thick as
porridge, and finally, at a temperature as low as 183�C, the whole alloy has become completely solid. By referring to
figure 1, it can be seen that with 80 per cent tin, the alloy starts
solidifying at 203�C, and finishes only when the temperature
has fallen to 183�C (note the recurrence of the 183�C).
What
happens at the other end of the series, when tin is added to lead? Once again
the freezing point is lowered. An alloy with only 20 per cent tin and the
remainder lead starts to freeze at 279�C and
completes solidification at the now familiar temperature of 183�C. One particular alloy, containing 62 per cent tin and 38 per cent
lead, melts and solidifies entirely at 183�C.
Obviously this temperature of 183�C and
the 62/38 per cent composition are important in the tin-lead alloy system.
Similar effects occur in many other alloy systems and the special composition
which has the lowest freezing point of the series and which entirely freezes at
that temperature has been given a special name. The particular alloy is known
as the 'eutectic' alloy and the freezing temperature (183�C in the case of the tin-lead alloys) is called the eutectic temperature.

By a
careful choice of constituents, it is possible to make alloys with unusually
low melting points. Such a fusible alloy is a complex eutectic of four or five
metals, mixed so that the melting point is depressed until the lowest melting
point possible from any mixture of the selected metals is obtained. A familiar
fusible alloy, known as Wood's metal, has a composition:

Bismuth

4 parts

Lead

2 parts

Tin

1 part

Cadmium

1 part

and its
melting point is about 70�C; that is, less than the boiling point of
water. Practical jokers have frequently amused themselves by casting this
fusible alloy into the shape of a teaspoon, which will melt when used to stir a
cup of hot tea.
These
low melting point alloys are regularly in use for more serious purposes, as for
example, in automatic anti-fire sprinklers installed in the ceilings of
buildings. Each jet of the water sprinkler system contains a piece of fusible
alloy, so that if a fire occurs and the temperature rises sufficiently high,
the alloy melts and the water is released through the jets of the sprinkler.
(From Metals
in the Service of Man by W. Alexander & A. Street.)
Electricity
Helps Chemistry: Electro-plating
A
liquid which is decomposed when an electric current passes through it is called
an electrolyte. The process is called electrolysis, and
the two wires or plates dipping into the electrolyte are called electrodes. The
electrode which is connected to the positive terminal of the cell or battery is
called the anode. The electrode which is connected to the
negative terminal of the battery is called the cathode.

Let us
examine what happens when two copper electrodes are used in a solution of
copper sulphate. The circuit is shown in the diagram. The right-hand diagram
shows the two copper electrodes dipping into the copper sulphate solution
contained in a glass jar. The current enters by the anode (+), passes through
the solution, enters the cathode (-), and then leaves the cathode as shown by
the arrow. In the left-hand diagram, V represents the glass vessel containing
the copper sulphate (electrolyte), and the two electrodes are marked + for the
anode and - for the cathode. When the switch S is closed, the current flows
from the - terminal of the battery B in the direction of the arrow to the anode
(+) of V, through the solution to the cathode (-), then round the circuit
through S back to the negative terminal of the battery B.
Before
starting this experiment the weights of the two copper plates which are to be
used for the anode and cathode must be written down carefully for future
reference. Next, place the anode and cathode in the copper sulphate solution
and connect them up to the battery B and switch S. The switch is then placed in
the 'on' position and the current is allowed to flow through the circuit for
about half an hour. The anode and cathode are then removed and dried carefully
in blotting paper before being weighed a second time.
You
will find that a surprising thing has happened. The anode now weighs a few
milligrams less than before and the cathode weighs a few milligrams more than
before. The weight lost by the anode is exactly equal to the gain in
weight by the cathode. In some strange way a few milligrams of copper
have been removed from the anode and carried through the electrolyte by the
current and have finally become firmly attached to the cathode. This is a most
exciting discovery, for we have learned how to use an electric current to transfer
tiny particles of copper from the anode to the cathode.
Nineteenth-century
industry soon found out how to apply this exciting discovery to our everyday
lives. Scientists found that many other metals could be transferred from anode
to cathode. The anode had to be made of the metal which it was desired to
transfer to the cathode, and the electrolyte had to be a suitable solution or
salt of the metal. Then the cathode always became plated with metal from the
anode. Copper, silver, gold, nickel, zinc and chromium can all be used in this
process, which is called electro-plating. Electro-plating is used widely in
industry for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is used for decoration. Coatings
of nickel, gold, silver or chromium give a nice shiny appearance to articles
and make them look much more expensive. Watch-cases and cutlery are often
plated with silver or gold to give them a smart appearance so that they become
attractive to intending buyers. Handlebars of bicycles and the shiny fittings
of cars are also made attractive by means of nickel and chromium plating.
This
leads us to the second reason for electro-plating - as a protection against
rust or corrosion. Iron and steel corrode easily when exposed to the
atmosphere. Car fittings and the shiny parts of bicycles are electro-plated
chiefly for this reason, so that they may stand up to the hard wear and tear of
daily use. Zinc is formed into a protective layer for iron sheets by the
electroplating process which we now call galvanizing. Galvanized iron sheets resist
the effects of wind and weather much better than sheets made of iron. Tin is
also used as a protective agent. Sheets of thin iron are plated with tin and
used for canning fruit and jam, and for all kinds of 'tin' cans used in
industry and trade. We may sum up by saying that industry has used the process
of electro-plating first to protect metal surfaces which would otherwise
corrode; and secondly to provide a beautiful and attractive finish to useful
articles. As a result, our bicycles and cars, our watches and cutlery, our
building and manufacturing materials last much longer and are much more
pleasant to look at.
The
process of electrolysis is used for the production of very pure specimens of
metal. Most metals in industrial use contain many impurities. About 1 million
tons of refined copper are produced each year by electrolysis. In this case the
anode consists of crude copper and the cathode of thin sheets of pure copper.
As the current passes, pure copper from the anode passes over to the cathode,
and all impurities fall off the anode as a kind of mud. In this way pure copper
is collected at one electrode and the muddy residue, which falls off the
cathode, sinks to the bottom of the vat and is periodically removed.
Aluminium
is so widely used today that we can scarcely think of times when it was not
available. Yet a few years back it was a costly metal because no satisfactory
method had been found of producing it commercially. Aluminium ores are so
common in nature that scientists and engineers made many attempts to find a
cheap and convenient method of refining them. The problem was finally solved by
electrolysis, using a carbon anode and aluminium ores, which had been melted at
a temperature of about 1,000�C, as the electrolyte. Aluminium is now plentiful and it is being
put to fresh uses every day.
Electrolysis
has an important industrial application in the printing trade, for it is often
used to make the 'blocks' from which pictures and type are printed. A wax mould
is first made of the printing block which is to be reproduced. Since wax is a
non-conductor of electricity it is dusted over with graphite so that the
surface becomes a conductor and can act as a cathode. This mould then becomes
the cathode upon which copper or chromium is deposited from the anode. When the
wax is taken out of the electrolyte it is coated with a fine shell of metal.
The wax is removed by heating and the metal shell acts as a mould into which
molten type metal can be poured. Plates made in this way are very hard-wearing
and can be used to print many thousands of copies of newspapers, journals and
magazines.
(From General
Science by N. Ahmad, W. F. Hawkins And W. M. Zaki.)
THE
CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
The
first requirement for an understanding of contemporary economic and social life
is a clear view of the relation between events and the ideas which interpret
them. For each of these has a life of its own, and much as it may seem a
contradiction in terms each is capable for a considerable period of pursuing an
independent course.
The
reason is not difficult to discover. Economic, like other social life, does not
conform to a simple and coherent pattern. On the contrary it often seems
incoherent, inchoate, and intellectually frustrating. But one must have an
explanation or interpretation of economic behaviour. Neither man's curiosity
nor his inherent ego allows him to remain contentedly oblivious to anything
that is so close to his life.
Because
economic and social phenomena are so forbidding, or at least so seem, and
because they yield few hard tests of what exists and what does not, they afford
to the individual a luxury not given by physical phenomena. Within a
considerable range he is permitted to believe what he pleases, he may hold
whatever view of the world he finds most agreeable or otherwise to his taste.
As a
consequence, in the interpretation of all social life there is a persistent and
never-ending competition between what is relevant and what is merely
acceptable. In this competition, while a strategic advantage lies with what
exists, all tactical advantage is with the acceptable. Audiences of all kinds
most applaud what they like best. And in social comment the test of audience
approval, far more than the test of truth, comes to influence comment. The
speaker or writer who addresses his audience with the proclaimed intent of
telling the hard, shocking facts invariably goes on to expound what the
audience most wants to hear.
Just as
truth ultimately serves to create a consensus, so in the short run does
acceptability. Ideas come to be organized around what the community as a whole
or particular audiences find acceptable. And as the laboratory worker devotes
himself to discovering scientific verities, so the ghost writer and the public
relations man concern themselves with identifying the acceptable. If their
clients are rewarded with applause, these artisans are qualified in their
craft. If not they have failed. However, by sampling audience reaction in
advance, or by pretesting speeches, articles, and other communications, the
risk of failure can now be greatly minimized.
Numerous
factors contribute to the acceptability of ideas. To a very large extent, of
course, we associate truth with convenience - with what most closely accords
with self-interest and individual well-being or promises best to avoid awkward
effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what
contributes most to self-esteem. Speakers before the United States Chamber of
Commerce rarely denigrate the business man as an economic force. Those who
appear before the AFL-CIO are prone to identify social progress with a strong
trade union movement. But perhaps most important of all, people approve most of
what they best understand. As just noted, economic and social behaviour are
complex and mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those
ideas which represent our understanding. This is a prime manifestation of
vested interest. For a vested interest in understanding is more preciously
guarded than any other treasure. It is why men react, not infrequently with
something akin to religious passion, to the defence of what they have so
laboriously learned. Familiarity may breed contempt in some areas of human
behaviour, but in the field of social ideas it is the touchstone of
acceptability.
Because
familiarity is such an important test of acceptability, the acceptable ideas
have great stability. They are highly predictable. It will be convenient to
have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability,
and it should be a term that emphasized this predictability. I shall refer to
those ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.
(From The
Affluent Society by J. K. Galbraith)
MARKETS
A
market is commonly thought of as a place where commodities are bought and sold.
Thus fruit and vegetables are sold wholesale at Covent Garden Market and meat
is sold wholesale at Smithfield Market. But there are markets for things other
than commodities, in the usual sense. There are real estate markets, foreign
exchange markets, labour markets, short-term capital markets, and so on; there
may be a market for anything which has a price. And there may be no particular
place to which dealings are confined. Buyers and sellers may be scattered over
the whole world and instead of actually meeting together in a market-place they
may deal with one another by telephone, telegram, cable or letter. Even if
dealings are restricted to a particular place, the dealers may consist wholly
or in part of agents acting on instructions from clients far away. Thus agents
buy meat at Smithfield on behalf of retail butchers all over England; and
brokers on the London Stock Exchange buy and sell securities on instructions
from clients all over the world. We must therefore define a market as any area
over which buyers and sellers are in such close touch with one another, either
directly or through dealers, that the prices obtainable in one part of the
market affect the prices paid in other parts.
Modern
means of communication are so rapid that a buyer can discover what price a
seller is asking, and can accept it if he wishes, although he may be thousands
of miles away. Thus the market for anything is, potentially, the whole world.
But in fact things have, normally, only a local or national market.
This
may be because nearly the whole demand is concentrated in one locality. These
special local demands, however, are of quite minor importance. The main reason
why many things have not a world market is that they are costly or difficult to
transport.
The lower
the value per ton of a good, the greater is the percentage addition made to its
price by a fixed charge per ton-mile for transport. Thus, if coal is �2 a ton and tin �200 a
ton at the place of production, a given transport charge forms a percentage of
the price of coal a hundred times greater than of the price of tin. Hence
transport costs may restrict the market for goods with a low value per ton,
even if, as is often the case, they are carried at relatively low rates. It may
be cheaper to produce, say, coal or iron ore at A than at B, but the cost of
transporting it from A to B may outweigh the difference in production costs, so
that it is produced for local consumption at B, and B does not normally form
part of the market output of A. For example, coal is produced much more cheaply
in the United States than in Europe, but, owing to the cost of transporting
coal by rail from the inland mines to the Atlantic seaboard of the United
States, American coal seldom finds its way to Europe.
Sea
transport, however, is very much cheaper than land transport. Hence commodities
of this type produced near a port can often be sent profitably quite long
distances by sea. Thus Swedish iron ore comes by sea from Narvik to the Ruhr,
and British coal is exported to Canada and South America.
The
markets for real estate are local. Soil has been transported from French
vineyards to California, and historic mansions have been demolished in Europe
to be re-erected in the United States, but as a rule land and buildings are not
transported.
Some
goods, like new bread and fresh cream and strawberries, must be consumed very
soon after they have been produced, and this restricts their sale to local
markets. Other goods do not travel well. Thus many local wines which cannot
stand transport can be bought in the district more cheaply than similar wines
which have a wider market. The development of refrigeration, and of other
devices which enable foodstuffs to be preserved and transported, has greatly
widened the market for such things as meat and fish and some kinds of fruit.
But such devices often transform the articles, from the standpoint of
consumers, into a different commodity. Condensed milk is not the same as fresh
milk, and chilled meat or frozen butter has not the same taste as fresh.
Many
workers are reluctant to move to a different country, or even to a different
part of their own country, to get a higher wage. This should
not be exaggerated. Before the war of 1914, over a million persons a year
emigrated overseas from Europe. Following it, there were considerable movements
of population within Great Britain away from the depressed areas towards the
more prosperous South. Employers may take the initiative. Thus girl textile
workers have been engaged in Yorkshire to work in Australia, and during the
inter-war years French employers engaged groups of Poles and Italians to work
in the coal-mines and steel-works of France. Nevertheless labour markets are
mainly local, or at any rate national.
Transport
services by rail or tram are obviously local in that passengers or goods must
travel between points on the fixed track. A firm may charter, for example, a
Greek ship rather than an English ship, if it is cheaper, but low railway rates
in Belgium are no help to the firm which wishes to send goods across Canada. In
the same way, such things as gas, water, and electricity, supplied by means of
pipes or wires, cannot be sold to places not connected with the system of pipes
or wires.
(From Economics by
Frederick Benham)
INVESTMENT
Of the
various purposes which money serves, some essentially depend upon the
assumption that its real value is really constant over a period of time. The
chief of these are those connected, in a wide sense, with contracts for
the investment of money. Such contracts - namely those which
provide for the payment of fixed sums of money over a long period of time - are
the characteristic of what it is convenient to call the Investment
System, as distinct from the property system generally. Under this
phase of capitalism, as developed during the nineteenth century, many
arrangements were devised for separating the management of property from its
ownership. These arrangements were of three leading types: (i) those in which
the proprietor, while parting with the management of his property, retained his
ownership of it - i.e. of the actual land, buildings, and machinery, or of
whatever else it consisted in, this mode of tenure being typified by a holding
of ordinary shares in a joint-stock company; (ii) those in which he parted with
the property temporarily, receiving a fixed sum ofmoney annually in
the meantime, but regained his property eventually, as typified by a lease; and
(iii) those in which he parted with his real property permanently, in return
either for a perpetual annuity fixed in terms of money, or for a terminable
annuity and the repayment of the principal in money at the end of the term, as
typified by mortgages, bonds, debentures, and preference shares. This third
type represents the full development of Investment.
Contracts
to receive fixed sums of money at future dates (made without provision for
possible changes in the real value of money at those dates) must have existed
as long as money has been lent and borrowed. In the form of leases and
mortgages, and also of permanent loans to Governments and to a few private
bodies, such as the East India Company, they were already frequent in the
eighteenth century. But during the nineteenth century they developed a new and
increasing importance, and had, by the beginning of the twentieth, divided the
propertied classes into two groups-the 'business men' and the 'investors' -
with partly divergent interests. The division was not sharp as between
individuals; for business men might be investors also, and investors might hold
ordinary shares; but the division was nevertheless real, and not the less
important because it was seldom noticed.
By the
aid of this system the active business class could call to the aid of their
enterprises not only their own wealth but the savings of the whole community;
and the professional and propertied classes, on the other hand, could find an
employment for their resources, which involved them in little trouble, no
responsibility, and (it was believed) small risk.
For a
hundred years the system worked, throughout Europe, with an extraordinary
success and facilitated the growth of wealth on an unprecedented scale. To save
and to invest became at once the duty and the delight of a large class. The
savings were seldom drawn on, and, accumulating at compound interest, made
possible the material triumphs which we now all take for granted. The morals,
the politics, the literature, and the religion of the age joined in a grand
conspiracy for the promotion of saving. God and Mammon were reconciled. Peace
on earth to men of good means. A rich man could, after all, enter into the
Kingdom of Heaven-if only he saved. A new harmony sounded from the celestial
spheres. 'It is curious to observe how, through the wise and beneficent arrangement
of Providence, men thus do the greatest service to the public, when they are
thinking of nothing but their own gain': so sang the angels.
The
atmosphere thus created well harmonized the demands of expanding business and
the needs of an expanding population with the growth of a comfortable
non-business class. But amidst the general enjoyment of ease and progress, the
extent to which the system depended on the stability of the money to which the
investing classes had committed their fortunes was generally overlooked; and an
unquestioning confidence was
I
apparently felt that this matter would look after itself. Investments spread
and multiplied, until, for the middle classes of the world, the gilt-edged bond
came to typify all that was most permanent and most secure. So rooted in our
day has been the conventional belief in the stability and safety of a money
contract that, according to English law, trustees have been encouraged to
embark their trust funds exclusively in such transactions, and are indeed
forbidden, except in the case of real estate (an exception which is itself a
survival of the conditions of an earlier age) to employ them otherwise.
As in
other respects, so also in this, the nineteenth century relied on the future
permanence of its own happy experiences and disregarded the warning of past
misfortunes. It chose to forget that there is no historical warrant for
expecting money to be represented even by a constant quantity of a particular
metal, far less by a constant purchasing power. Yet Money is simply that which
the State declares from time to time to be a good legal discharge of money
contracts. In 1914 gold had not been the English standard for a century or the
sole standard of any other country for half a century. There is no record of a
prolonged war or a great social upheaval which has not been accompanied by a
change in the legal tender, but an almost unbroken chronicle in every country
which has a history, back to the earliest dawn of economic record, of a
progressive deterioration in the real value of the successive legal tenders
which have represented money.
(From A
Tract on Monetary Reform by J M. Keynes)
BARTER
The
existence of pure barter does not necessarily indicate a very primitive form of
civilization. Often the system survives long after the community has progressed
considerably in other respects. This may be due to conservatism, since
primitive peoples are reluctant to change their trading methods, even though
they be sufficiently intelligent and advanced to adopt more convenient methods.
In some cases there is prejudice against the adoption of a monetary economy,
though such prejudice is usually directed against the use of coins rather than
against primitive money. In many cases barter continues to be the principal method
of trading long after the adoption of some form of money, for the simple reason
that there is not enough money to go round. And a decline in the supply of
money often causes a relapse into barter. Distrust in money has also been
responsible for reversion to the barter system; such distrust may have been
caused by debasement or inflation.
In the
light of the stock phrases used by many economists about the inconvenience of
barter it may appear puzzling to the student that any community which was
sufficiently advanced to realize the possibilities of a monetary system should
continue to practise such an inconvenient method. The explanation is that in a
primitive community barter is not nearly so inconvenient as it appears through
modern eyes. Economists are inclined to exaggerate its inconvenience because
they look at it from the point of view of modern man. The instances-real or
imaginary-they quote are calculated to make their readers wonder how any
community could possibly have existed under barter except in extremely
primitive conditions. Some of them seek to demonstrate the absurdity of barter
by describing the difficulties that would arise if our modern communities were
to attempt to practise it. It is, of course, easy for a lecturer to earn the
laughter of his audience by telling them about the pathetic efforts of some
market gardener who has to find a barber in need of radishes before he can have
his hair cut. What the lecturer and his audience do not realize is that in a
primitive community the grower of radishes usually cuts his own hair, or has it
cut by a member of his family or household; and that even in primitive
communities with barbers as an independent profession the barber and the
gardener have a fair idea about each other's requirements, and have no
difficulty in suiting each other. If the barber does not happen to require
to-day any of the products the gardener is in a position to offer, he simply
performs his service in return for the future delivery of products he is
expected to need sooner or later.
Even
the genuine instances quoted by economists to illustrate the absurdity of
barter are apt to be misleading in their implication. There is, for instance,
the well-known experience of Mlle. Zelie, singer at the Th��tre Lyrique in Paris, who, in the course of a tour round the world,
gave a concert on one of the Society Islands, and received the fee of three
pigs, twenty-three turkeys, forty-four chickens, five thousand coconuts and
considerable quantities of bananas, lemons and oranges, representing one-third
of the box office takings. In a letter published by Wolowski and quoted to
boredom by economists ever since, she says that, although this amount of
livestock and vegetables would have been worth about four thousand francs in
Paris, in the Society Islands it was of very little use to her. Another
much-quoted experience is that of Cameron in Tanganyika, when in order to buy
an urgently needed boat he first had to swap brass wire against cloth, then
cloth against ivory and finally ivory against the boat.
What
the economists quoting these and other similar instances do not appear to
realize is that the difficulties complained of are not inherent in the system
of barter. They are largely anomalies arising from sudden contact between two
different civilizations. A native singer in the Society Islands would not have
been embarrassed at receiving payment in kind, since she would have known ways
in which to dispose of her takings, or store them for future use. Nor would a
native of Tanganyika have found the system of barter prevailing there at the
time of Cameron's visit nearly so difficult as Cameron did. Knowing local
conditions, he would have been prepared for the difficulties, and, before
embarking on a major capital transaction such as the purchase of a boat, he
would have made arrangements accordingly. In any case, the fact that the goods
required could not be obtained by a single transaction would not have worried
him unduly. The majority of primitive peoples enjoy bartering and bargaining,
and the time lost in putting through three transactions instead of one would
not matter to them nearly as much as to modern man living at high speed,
especially to an explorer in a hurry to proceed on his journey. And while
Cameron must have suffered a loss in each of the three transactions, a local
man with adequate time at his disposal and with a thorough knowledge of his
market would have chosen the right moment for effecting the necessary exchanges
on terms reasonably advantageous to him.
(From Primitive
Money by Paul Einzig)
PRODUCTIVITY
AS A GUIDE TO WAGES
Through
defective presentation the Government has allowed the wages pause to be
interpreted as involving a substantial sacrifice by all concerned, and
especially by those least able to afford it. The very reverse is true. In fact,
substantial benefits would accrue to everybody by maintaining existing wages
levels, because if this were done for a reasonable time, real earnings, or
purchasing power, would improve. And if thereafter reasonable restraint were exercised
in asking for, or giving, wages increases, there would be a real hope of
recapturing the habit of price reduction and so of still further improving
purchasing power.
It is
not true that prosperity must be equated with 'gentle' inflation-whatever that
means. And while lip service is paid to the concept that inflation is caused by
wage increases outstripping increases in productivity, few people are willing
to do something positive about it. There is already active opposition to the
wages pause, and no discernible determination by any sections of the community
concerned with wage negotiations to devise a logical wages policy.
It was,
of course, unfortunate for the climate of industrial relations that the wages
pause was presented to both managements and workers without the most careful
preparation and education. Too much emphasis was, and still is, placed on
actual wage rates and earnings, whereas what matters most is real earnings, or
purchasing power. Charts comparing, for example, wage rates, earnings, and
profits are unrealistic unless we add the line for real earnings. When this is
added, and also the line for productivity, it becomes startlingly clear that
however great the total wage claim and the eventual settlement, real earnings
will always follow much the same course as productivity. When substantial
claims are substantially met real earnings may for a little time rise above the
line of productivity. But eventually they come together again.
In
spite of some sizeable variations profits have followed much the same course as
weekly wage rates though they have been almost consistently below them. Thus
all the tough bargaining by the unions on the basis of rising profits has only
effectively raised real purchasing power by about the same factor as rising
productivity would in any case have achieved had wages merely kept pace with
it.
Of
course, it is easy to see what is wrong. Put in its simplest terms it is that
we have lost the habit of price reduction. Everyone wants it but few achieve it
in the face of ever rising costs.
At
present we are importing too much and exporting too little. The reasons for
this are complex. Design, salesmanship, after-sales service, and many other
factors enter into it. What is certain is that it will be even more difficult
to sell abroad after the next round of wage claims have been met and
incorporated into the price of the product. What would the picture look like
now if wage increases had more nearly been associated with the increase in
productivity? Certainly our products would have cost overseas and home
customers fewer pounds, shillings and pence without the purchasing power of the
workers having been at all impaired.
It has
long seemed to me that the alternative is a rationalized wage policy for
industry, maintaining the existing bargaining machinery, but avoiding the
bitterness and acrimony that is engendered at present, and also avoiding the
time-wasting strikes and deflection of management from its principal purpose.
It may be argued that to base wage rates on a productivity index would weaken
the trade unions. I do not think so. If there were bargaining committees of
trade unions and employers for each industry and they based their negotiations
annually on whatever was the national increase in productivity, then I feel
quite sure that much more time would be left for the more important things -
such as raising productivity itself and improving working conditions and the
training of craftsmen to adequate standards.
If
workers knew that every year wage increases would be automatically considered
without their having to demand them, then this would remove the present
acrimonious preliminaries to negotiations and would guarantee that the result
could never be inflationary - that is, wage increases would be real increases
in terms of purchasing power. It would also give workers a more direct interest
in raising productivity by relating it to their wage packets. As wages would
never exceed productivity, the cost of production could not rise from this
cause; in all probability it would fall. This would encourage price reduction
and tend to give a lower retail price index, so that real wages would increase,
and any increase in the money rate would be worth still more. This would solve
the problem of the pensioners and other people with fixed incomes. Furthermore,
I am convinced that such a wage policy, when clearly understood, would create a
new spirit of collaboration between management, supervision, and workpeople.
(J. J.
Gracie From an article in The Guardian, December 7th, 1961)
THE
FAILURE OF THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF COMMERCIAL POLICY
Let us
try to sort out in appropriate groups the various influences which have been
responsible for these developments.
If we
are to preserve a proper sense of proportion, I have no doubt whatever that
right at the top of the list we must put the direct impact and influence of
war. This is a matter which is so obvious that we are very apt to forget it.
Yet whatever may be the importance of the political and ideological tendencies
which I shall shortly proceed to discuss, we get the perspective wrong if we
regard them as more important than the brute disruptive effects of the military
convulsions of our age. It was these convulsions which, by bursting the cake of
custom and compelling the supersession of the normal institutions of peace,
created the states of mind in which restrictive and disintegrating policies
seemed legitimate. It may be said that if adequate measures had been taken, the
difficulties of disequilibrium would have been less; and that if fundamental
attitudes had not been disturbed by illiberal ideologies, the chances of
applying appropriate measures would have been greater. Doubtless there is truth
in this. But we are not dealing with communities of angels whose errors are
always deliberate sins against the light. We must not expect too much of the
human spirit under strain; and we simplify history unduly if, in the
explanation of the policies of our time, we do not allot to the shock of war
something like autonomous status.
For somewhat
similar reasons I am disposed to list separately the influence of mass
unemployment or imminent financial crisis. Of course, unemployment and
financial crises are not to be regarded as acts of God: there are often
occasions when they are to be attributed to wrong economic policies, in some
cases perhaps springing from the same ideologies as the overt resistance to
liberal commercial policies. But here again, I think we oversimplify if we make
our history monistic. In the explanation of how this or that community came to
adopt policies of commercial restriction, we do well to treat unemployment and
financial crisis as at least semi-independent causes. After all, we know that,
in such circumstances, commercial restrictions may actually have a favourable influence
for a time: unemployment may be diminished, a drain of gold or dollars
arrested. And experience shows that it is just at such times that liberal
commercial policies are most in danger. Take, for instance, the final
abandonment of free trade by Great Britain in the early thirties. No one who
lived through the crisis of those days will be disposed to deny the influence
of ideological factors. The advocacy of tariff protection by Keynes, hitherto
an outstanding free trader, had an impact which should not be underestimated.
But perhaps Keynes himself would not have gone that way had there not been a
depression. And certainly his influence would have been less if people had not
felt themselves to be in a sort of earthquake in which all the old guide posts
and landmarks were irrelevant.
Having
thus recognized the catastrophic elements in the evolution of policy, we may
now go on to examine the more persistent and slow-moving forces. And since we
are proceeding all the time from the simpler to the more complex, we may put
next on our list the influence of producer interest. This is an influence which
I am sure should be disentangled from those which we have already examined. I
know that it is sometimes argued that it is only because of under-employment or
financial dislocation that the pressure groups are effective; and I willingly
concede that in such situations they have, so to speak, very powerful allies.
But I am not willing to admit that it is only in such situations that they are
successful. Producer interest is ceaselessly active, seeking to protect itself
against competition and the incidence of disagreeable change. The influence of
the agrarian interest in Europe which, while tending to keep down the real
incomes of European consumers, has wrought such havoc among agricultural
producers overseas, has certainly not been confined to times of general
unemployment. Nor - to allot blame evenly all round - have the many abuses of
the infant industry argument on the part of manufacturing interests. Much attention
nowadays is given to the alleged influence on history of the struggles between
different classes, conceived on a social basis. In my judgment, a more
realistic view would pay more attention to the struggles of different groups
organized on a producer basis. These were the first foes of Classical
liberalism and they may very well be the last.
(From The
Economist in the Twentieth Century, by Lionel Robbins)

file_name: Academic reading texts.docx

alt: Academic reading texts hat Is

alt: So the child confronts duckings, falls, dousings of cold water, or entanglements in slimy seaweed, but he never meets with the type of accident which…

alt: What the anthropologist does in the study of moral systems is to examine for particular societies the ideas of right and wrong that are held,…

alt: If it is moonlight, groups of young men, women by twos and threes, wander through the village, and crowds of children hunt for land crabs…

alt: From the purely economic point of view, the system has no advantage, since each man could quite well hoe his own ground and the preparation…

alt: What is perhaps even more important for the anthropologist's work is the fact that he is all alone, cut off from the companionship of men…

alt: He is interested in human behaviour, not as it is shaped by one tradition, our own, but as it has been shaped by any tradition…

alt: The extraordinary and subtle lengths to which some animals go to overcome this problem, and the surprising behaviour patterns which arise as a result, were…

alt: Fairly recent studies of coalminers, for example, have shown that in spite of their phenomenally high daily energy output they spend about seventeen hours sitting…

alt: Our companions learn a great deal about us from these 'personal' actions - not merely that we are scratching because we itch or that we…

alt: If, after reading these rival claims, you feel that all you have really learned is the meaning of the phrase 'cock-and-bull story', you can be…

alt: From Manwatching by Desmond

alt: Even educated man, choosing between the

alt: He called these peas the second filial generation (F 2 ), and on counting the two kinds found that there were 5,474 round and 1,850…

alt: On July 6 Banting and Best chloroformed two of the dogs whose pancreatic ducts they had tied seven weeks earlier, and were disappointed to find…

alt: They fed on seaweed, a fact that

alt: Wilson, a surgeon on holiday in

alt: The managers' dilemma is that, while they must accept the individual differences that exist among their staff, organizational (and particularly personnel) practices assume that such…

alt: Latin root with which we were working

intro: Reading academic texts and retelling them

title: Academic reading texts and how to use them in speech.