Feast of the Weird

There were 10 at my Thanksgiving table on Thursday. This was fewer than usual (due to the culprit Covid of course), but enough to maintain conviviality.
 
While Thanksgiving is an American (and – slightly different as usual – Canadian) holiday, feasts are universal in human cultures. The timing and purpose of them varies, but most of them are seasonally related – post harvest being a common but far from exclusive time for them. They predate agriculture. Stone Age remains of them (bones of butchered wild animals around a camp site) can be found in the archaeological record. There is even an argument that the need to provide feasts for large gatherings, such as the Mesolithic ones around Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia, helped prompt the development of agriculture.
 
Mythical origin stories tend to be attached to annual feasts, but the details of them are unimportant beyond shaping some surface rituals. The stories are excuses for the feasts themselves, which have multifarious “real” reasons: sometimes solidifying unity within a single clan, sometimes promoting links among different clans, sometimes facilitating commerce, sometimes facilitating marriage, sometimes showing off the host’s wealth and importance, and sometimes all of those things and more. Writes researcher Chloe Nahum-Claudel of the University of Cambridge, “Feasts mobilise people’s values, their morality, and understanding of the world of which they are a part. They have particularly powerful world-making effects because they are both irreducibly concrete – satisfying hunger, exciting pleasures, coordinating the political-economy, and embedding themselves in the organization of time and memory – and expansively meaningful, simultaneously expressing and generating deeply held values.” So too, though expressing the point that way might be considered not only weird but WEIRD. Also weird in a broad historical sense is a feast like the one at my house on Thursday, which had nothing to do with anything mentioned in my list above, though maybe a couple items from Chloe’s. Even a “traditional” Thanksgiving with only close kin would qualify as WEIRD, as does my looser (and nowadays more common) collection of guests.
 
WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The term was invented by social psychologists Joseph Heinrich, Ara Norenzayan, and Steve Heine more than a decade ago. Their cross cultural studies led them to conclude that much academic research on human psychology was deeply flawed: it had not uncovered human universals but the quirks of one smallish segment of the global population. Examining commonly cited studies, the three found that “96% of experimental participants were drawn from northern Europe, North America, or Australia, and about 70% of these were American undergraduates.” This wouldn’t matter if the susceptibility to “visual illusions, spatial reasoning, memory, attention, patience, risk-taking, fairness, induction, executive function, and pattern recognition,” among other things were constant cross-culturally. Studies that explicitly tested this question, however, showed it is not. WEIRD-os on average are in fact unusual: very unusual, both by historical and current global standards. They are on the far tails of the distribution curves for these traits when graded in global contexts.
 

An interesting book on the subject is The WEIRDest People in the World by Joesph Henrich, chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. The biggest single difference (though there are others) between WEIRD-os and others is the importance of extended kinship in non-WEIRD societies. The prevalence of cousin-marriage by itself is a surprisingly effective predictor of average psychological traits within a culture. Henrich traces the origin of WEIRD culture to late antiquity and the influence of the Western Church in weakening kinship duties relative to adherence to abstract principles. Even when the Church’s authority waned, the pattern of thinking persisted. He makes a very good argument that WEIRD culture explains much about why the Industrial Revolution (for well or ill) first arose in the West with profound effects on world history. Though the Industrial Revolution can and does take root and self-sustain in non-WEIRD cultures, it initially gets imposed there either from the outside or from the top down (as in Meiji Japan or 1950s Communist China) rather than emerging organically as it did in Europe. Average WEIRD-os are more individualistic, self-obsessed, and abstract thinkers than average humans overall. A simple example: describe yourself several ways by completing the sentence “I am _________.” WEIRD-os are apt to fill the blank with personal attributes (such as inquisitive, intellectual, artistic) or with their jobs (biologist, truck driver) or belief systems (Mormon, Marxist, libertarian, or whatever); non-WEIRD-os do some of this, but are far more inclined to mention down-to-earth placers such as kin relations (so-and-so’s son, cousin to this person, or sister to that person, etc.) or place in the social order. Both ways of answering are legitimate, but they are different.
 
As that may be, today I’m still (over)eating leftover turkey as I will be for a couple more days – alone rather than in company. That isn’t weird by American standards. It might well be by global historical standards. That’s OK. I’ve been called worse.

 

Veruca Salt - So Weird