Perfectly Natural

THERE are certain types of behavior that we ordinarily explain as perfectly natural. We are so constructed that behavior of this sort is inevitable, we say. Because we behave in a particular fashion, we assume that all men do. I hope to demonstrate otherwise: that there is no more overworked excuse for our peculiar ways than to say that they are ‘perfectly natural.’

I remember distinctly a frosty morning in the White Mountains of Arizona. Saddling my horse, I jammed my finger in the latigo strap. I hopped up and down with pain and, of course, stuck the finger in my mouth. When the paroxysm was over, I looked up to find my Apache guide leaning over his saddle. ‘What for you do that?’ ‘Do what?’ ‘Why does a white man stick his finger in his mouth?’ ‘Don’t you?’ ‘No, Indians never do that.’ (Apaches alone, he meant.)

Here was a new twist of human nature. I suppose I have always stuck my finger in my mouth, just as everybody does; or at least so I thought until Friday, my Apache, brought me up short. One does not have to be taught the habit: it is just natural. A rational enough explanation can be given: the warmth of the mouth mitigates congestion in the blood vessels, and the sucking, acting on the pressure buds in the skin, substitutes another feeling for pain. But Friday’s observation makes me think that this explanation is not so much the reason for the reaction as a rationalization of it. For certainly an Apache’s crushed finger hurts quite as much as ours and he has surely had as much experience in sticking it into his mouth. The act is habit with us, not with him.

The next Indian tribe I lived with that summer was the Havasupai, and I took occasion to inquire about this. No, no one ever stuck his injured finger in his mouth there — it was unheard of. How far this prevails generally among Indians and other peoples I do not know, but I am convinced that sticking a crushed finger in the mouth is by no means the perfectly natural reaction I had thought it.

Among the same Havasupai we were playing a game — rolling a hoop and casting poles after it. While waiting my turn, I balanced one of the poles on the tip of my finger. No trick at all, especially with a heavy pole. But there were my Havasupai pop-eyed with astonishment. They had never seen it done before. Not that they could not do it: in fact, their hands were steadier than mine, and within a few minutes all the young men were more or less adept at a new and fascinating game.

Years ago, at Zuñi Pueblo in New Mexico, Dr. A. L. Kroeber called my attention to the way the Zuñi sneezed. They stuck their tongues out, or at least popped the tip between the open lips. One would suppose they would bite it off, but somehow they manage not to. It is certainly different from our way of sneezing, but it comes to the same end. For no one but a boor among us allows a sneeze to go loud and unrestrained. We cover it with the hand or stifle it by sheer might. Whether we constrain the muscles of throat and mouth to react against the spasmodic ejaculation in our fashion or follow Zuñi habit, it comes to the same thing: good taste demands that the paroxysm be repressed, and habits condition how it shall be done.

We do have to learn that. We admonish our children to cover up a sneeze and we usually tell them outright how it is to be done. But whether we are deliberately taught or as children imitate our elders, we learn more or less unconsciously to follow the stereotyped behavior of our kind.

Yet another example to make this learning of behavior patterns clear. Some of us use a wink significantly; by this I mean that we signal someone or call attention to a hidden meaning. I discovered that the Havasupai simply did not understand a wink. Here is another ‘perfectly natural’ action which ‘everybody would understand,’ but which with this Indian tribe simply did not take effect.

The fact is that a deliberate wink is by no means natural. I have watched my own youngsters learning to wink; yes, learning. As babies they could imitate a blink, and when old enough to understand they would blink on command. But wink with one eye — not a bit! At first when they closed both eyes they opened their mouths. A little later they controlled that. But it was not until they were four that they could manage to wink with one eye without screwing up the other side of the face. As a matter of fact, if my gentle reader will try it at this moment, he will discover that with one eye he is adept, while the other cannot be used quite so well. We develop a set of muscular habits for one eye quite different from those for the other.

The situation is quite analogous to learning to tie a knot or fasten a button. We have to learn how. So far as I am aware, every people in the world, primitive or civilized, knows how to tie knots. It is by no means obvious that this should be so, for knot tying is not natural in the sense of being inborn; it must be learned. A knot is a simple enough construct, but manipulating the fingers to tie it is a complex series of coördinated movements. Knot making may well be part of the ancient heritage of man, carried over the globe as he settled the outlying lands. At any rate, someone discovered the manipulation and others followed suit, but only by deliberate learning.

Fastening a button is of the same order. Little children have difficulty in managing it. Their hands are all thumbs. Their clumsy attempts to get the button through the stubborn cloth are only gradually transformed into that skillful thrust of the thumb that drives the button through the hole, as the fingers swiftly manœuvre the edges. These habits, as with tying knots, become automatic, and being automatic are swiftly executed, and executed without thought or watching. Given an unfamiliar situation and the process requires concentration — don’t those of us who are accustomed to four-inhands have a devil of a time managing bow tics? And, as a matter of fact, the mirror does not help much; we rather fall back on the automatic movement of the fingers, only checking the result in the mirror or the eyes of a wife.

We recognize that all these cases are complicated enough to demand training. The little child is plastic in its activities: all sorts of random movements are presents to be trained, moulded, into set forms. The particular personal habits that develop are those that are customary in the social group in which the child grows, and these vary widely the world over. But this is no less true of seemingly simple actions, such as walking, posturing, gesturing. Again, what is ‘perfectly natural,’ ‘the only possible way,’ turns out to be fixed by convention — that is, by learning.

Let us take a simple problem: we wish to point out something. The ‘natural’ way — the ‘only’ way, we might say, is to lift the hand and stretch out the index finger. But the Zuñi, for example, solve the problem otherwise; for them, pointing with the finger is in the grossest taste, as too ostentatious. They protrude the lips, barely turning the head; a swift, fleeting gesture, but enough. This is a common behavior pattern among Indians generally, although varying conventionally from the rather prominent protrusion affected by the Zuni.

Gestures in general follow conventional forms. Northwest Europeans and Americans make far less use of gestures in conversation than southern and eastern Europeans. It is nonsense to hold an excitable Latin or Slavic temperament responsible. Italians growing up in thoroughly American communities show none of this. We too indulge in gesticulation under set conditions, and that always of a stereotyped sort. Compare the flamboyant gestures of a spread-eagle speech with the restrained movements of a man in a business conference. Not only is their general character fixed by the occasion, but the particular motions are a matter of convention. There is nothing more amusing than to read in an old-fashioned manual of public speaking how by waving the arms the ‘future,’ ‘abnegation,’ ‘resignation,’ ‘on the one hand and on the other,’ are to be indicated.

What of posture and gait? Here are traits that should be fixed by anatomical structure and physiological limitations, if any. But let us see. When a Pueblo Indian woman sits on the ground, she stretches her legs out straight before her. For a plains woman such a position would be the height of indecency: she sits with her legs drawn back under her to one side. Adult Americans cannot easily manage either, because of our chair-using habit. The position of ease of one people is intolerable for another. At the command ‘At ease!’ our infantryman slouches, leaning on his gun, shifting his weight from one foot to the other (and, watching the R.O.T.C. drill at this moment from my window, I observe that the student rookies are deliberately imitating one another). In Africa the comparable position is for the warrior to stand stork-like on one leg, leaning on his spear, with his lifted foot resting behind the other knee. Curiously enough, Dr. F. G. Speck came on this posture transplanted among the Nanticoke Indians of Delaware, where an appreciable admixture of Negro slave blood is known.

How old are such conventional habits is difficult to say. They are old enough at any rate to have become characteristic over wide areas and to be unconsciously assumed. That an Indian of both Americas, so far as I am aware, always whittles toward himself like an east Asiatic is suggestive that this trait goes back to that remote time when the ancestral Indians migrated across Bering Strait. This brings to mind a painting in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which depicts a group of neolithic hunters resting. Some of these stoneage European ancestors of ours are shown seated on logs; others stand about slouching as we should. Apparently it never occurred to the painter, Mr. Charles Knight, nor to Dr. H. F. Osborn, under whose direction he worked, to inquire whether neolithic men would have held just these poses. We do not know. It may well be that our present-day habits are as old as neolithic times (some ten thousand years). But we cannot assume that what we do to-day is the ’natural’ way, which we must have followed since time immemorial.

If postures are fixed by customs, so are gaits. They tell me that college professors ‘clank’ when they walk. I see for myself that business men affect a quick, choppy stride, although it differs enormously in New York and Oklahoma City. Just as the budding engineer invariably wears a bow tie and demonstrates with a pencil, while the embryo medic takes on a bedside manner, the young lawyer the flapping characteristics of his guild, the duderanch cow-puncher the get-up of the real thing, so gaits are assumed. Among ourselves they are all variants of a single style. It is not easy to define how we walk in so many words, but the manner is clear if we contrast it, for instance, with the curious heel-toground shuffle of the Japanese. One can almost always spot in our streets a Japanese born on the islands, despite his American garb, by the way he strikes his heels to the pavement. American-bred Japanese do not have the trick. Gaits are learned, imitated in early childhood.

Motor traits of the type we have been discussing are as much the subject of learning as the acquisition of the alphabet or the Lord’s Prayer. By little children these acquired skills are learned perhaps largely unconsciously; in later life, the modification to a new habit may have its inception in a more deliberate attempt, but even then, it seems to me, the subject is usually only vaguely aware of his imitation. It is quite disconcerting to discover the youngster in the corner imitating my laugh or other mannerism. He does it spontaneously and adopts it wholeheartedly. When he walks beside me he more self-consciously attempts to match my stride. In a thousand and one things — habits, attitudes, modes of thought and expression — he soaks up unconsciously what is set before him.

The essential point is that our common activities are fixed by the social mould just as our ideas, our language, and our use of things mechanical. No one doubts that we go to church, keep a bank account, join a service club, because we are members of a particular society. But to find that common bodily actions are also cultureconditioned is eye-opening. It looks very much as though culture made serious inroads on the core of personality; little is left which is surely natural in the sense of being inborn.