Meggers' Law of Environmental Limitation on CultureAuthor(s): Richard I. Hirshberg and Joan F. HirshbergSource: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 5 (Oct., 1957), pp. 890-892Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/665858 .Accessed: 25/04/2011 23:41

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890 American Anthropologist [59, 1957]

situation on the Gulf Coast of Mexico is of particular significance. I am as interested as he in what detailed archeological investigations in this and other little known regions will reveal about environmental limitation on the development of culture.

BETTY J. MEGGERS, Smithsonian Institution

REFERENCES CITED

COE, WILLIAM R. 1957 Environmental limitation on Maya culture: a re-examination. American Anthro-

pologist 59: 328-335. MEGGERS, BETTY J.

1954 Environmental limitation on the development of culture. American Anthropologist 56:801-824.

NEWCOMB, WILLIAM W., JR. 1956 A reappraisal of the "cultural sink" of Texas. Southwestern Journal of Anthropol-

ogy 12:145-153. SEARS, PAUL B.

1955 Changing man's habitat: physical and biological phenomena. Yearbook of Anthro- pology 1955:31-46. WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York.

MEGGERS' LAW OF ENVIRONMENTAL LIMITATION ON CULTURE

Sir:

Three years ago Betty J. Meggers published an article entitled "Environmental Limitation on the Development of Culture" (Meggers 1954). The article has since been referred to several times; in particular, Gordon R. Willey has cited it on three occasions (Willey 1955, Willey and Phillips 1955, Willey 1956), and William R. Coe recently published a brief note in this journal discussing that part of Meggers' article which related her "law of environmental limitation" to Maya culture (Coe 1957).

Without discussing the merits of other parts of the paper, we would like to call attention to the section of Meggers' article subtitled the law of environmental limitation on culture (1954:814-817), with the intention of demonstrating a basic weakness in the form of her law. In doing this we are also raising a fundamental objection to that por- tion of her subsequent argument which relies on the law.

The law proposed by Meggers is: "the level to which a culture can develop is

dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies." She continues, "As this potentiality is improved, culture will advance. If it cannot be im-

proved, the culture will become stabilized at a level compatible with the food re- sources" (ibid: 815). The proposition will be examined on two points: first, we will dis- cuss whether the law as stated has content; and second, we will see if the law can be tested.

As far as content is concerned, note that the second quotation indicates that the agricultural potentiality of a region depends on the technology of the culture. The statement then becomes one to the effect that the level to which a culture can develop depends on the culture. Although this may be true, it is neither interesting nor useful.

We will now consider our second point. Before a law can be accepted and used as a basis for prediction or analysis, it must be tested to see if it is true. There are at least two reasons why a law cannot be tested. It may happen that we do not know how to measure one or more of the quantities involved in the law. That is to say, we feel these things are essentially measurable but we have not yet thought of a way to do it. In this case, it is probably worth while to keep the law in storage until such time as some-

Letters to the Editor 891

one discovers a way to measure. On the other hand, it may happen that the quantities involved are of such a nature that they are, in principle, not measurable. For instance, "the effect on world history if the Spanish Inquisition had not been held" is a quantity which can never be measured. We can guess what the effect would have been, but we can never know by trying the experiment. If a proposed law is untestable in this second sense, it is useless. We now examine Meggers' law for measurement difficulties of this second kind.

Consider "the level to which a culture can develop." In order to see if Meggers' law is valid, we must be able to examine cultures and see to what level they "can develop." But we are riot able to measure what can happen, only what does happen. As long as the law uses the word can, it is untestable in the second sense. The only hope, then, of making Meggers' law testable is to change it to "the level to which a culture does develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environ- ment it occupies." Of course this does not mean that the level to which a culture develops is supposed to be independent of everything else, such as foreign invasion or disease or the availability of iron. In order to test the law in this form, we must find a culture for which we may eliminate causes other than "agricultural potentiality" that limit its development. This is a difficulty of testing of the first kind, and we will imagine that it can be overcome. Assuming that such a culture has been found, and having somehow measured the cultural level (difficulty of the first kind), we must now measure the "agricultural potentiality." This term is not well defined in Meggers' article. She says "In reality, the level to which a culture actually does develop, or did develop aboriginally in many parts of the world, depends on the success with which the full potential of the environment is utilized" (ibid: 815). From this statement and others we must conclude that the "agricultural potentiality" means what the land could produce if it were used as well as possible.

If for the moment we adopt this meaning, we come up against a measurement difficulty of the second kind. We do not know what land could produce. The best we can do is see what we could do with it with our present plants and technology. We cannot say that no plant or farming method could have been found that would have turned that environment into a Garden of Eden. Something very simple might have done so. Under this definition, then, we can never come to a conclusion about the amount of agricultural potential of a region, since the amount measured for the culture under study will change with future inventions of the people doing the measuring.'

However, a second definition of agricultural potentiality presents itself. That is, that the agricultural potentiality is the amount of food the people actually did get out of the ground. The statement then reads, "the level to which a culture develops is dependent on the amount of food the people know how to raise." As far as the authors of this note can see, all the measurements necessary to test this statement involve difficulties of the first kind only. We now return to our first objection, lack of content. The amount of food a people know how to produce from their land is obviously part of their culture. To say that the level to which a culture develops depends on the culture is not to say very much.

RICHARD I. HIRSHBERG AND JOAN F. HIRSHBERG, Syracuse University

NOTE

1 In one place (ibid: 804) Meggers actually states that "For purposes of practical ease in identifying an area as to [agricultural potential] type, the year 1950 can be taken as a base line." She then looks to see if it is ". .. improvable by modern agricultural techniques .. ." As we have

892 American Anthropologist [59, 1957]

shown, the year 1950 is not arbitrary, as Meggers implies. Whatever year is taken as a base line, the law becomes time-dependent; that is, the measure of agricultural potential would differ markedly if based on 1950 B.c. rather than 1950 A.D. (new insecticides, artificial fertilizers, recent hybrids, modern farm machinery).

In other places, however, Meggers seems to think of agricultural potential as a fixed function of such environmental factors as rainfall, temperature, and chemical content of the soils. For example, she states, "The basic or primary factor, agricultural potentiality, has been deduced or abstracted from the unique or variable features, temperature, rainfall, flora, topography, that are present in any given area" (ibid: 805). It is of course quite inadmissible to make the agricultural potential independent of culture in this way when we recall that elsewhere the potential may be improved by technology;

BIBLIOGRAPHY

COE, WrLLIAM R. 1957 Environmental limitation on Maya culture: a re-examination. American Anthro- pologist 59: 328-335.

MEGGERS, BETTY J. 1954 Environmental limitation on the development of culture. American Anthropologist

56:801-824. WILLEY, GORDON R.

1955 The prehistoric civilizations of Nuclear America. American Anthropologist 57:571- 593.

1956 The structure of ancient Maya society: evidence from the Southern Lowlands. American Anthropologist 58:777-782.

WILLEY, GORDON R. and PHILIP PHILLIPS 1955 Method and theory in American archeology II: historical developmental interpreta-

tion. American Anthropologist 57:723-819.

UNILINEAL, BILINEAL, AND THE MUNDURUCOT Sir:

This note is intended primarily to raise a question about unilineal and bilineal groups, prompted by Murphy's paper, "Matrilocality and Patrilineality in Mundurucfi Society" (A.A. 58:414-434). It appears necessary to begin with some definitions. Patrilineal and matrilineal descent need no special comment here. A bilineal system is one in which two lines of descent, matrilineal and patrilineal, are both socially sig- nificant. Succession, inheritance, and so forth, is for some things patrilineal, and for others matrilineal. A person is a member of two unilineal descent groups, and residence generally follows one of them. This type of system is not uncommon, and has been found in Africa, Oceania, and Australia. Although such systems have long been recog- nized, there is still a tendency for anthropologists to assume only three possibilities for kinship reckoning-patrilineal, matrilineal and bilateral.

There are some points in Murphy's interesting paper which suggest that his analysis has eliminated the possibility of the Munduruci having a bilineal system. He states (p. 425) that the residential pattern was of matrilocal extended families, and that this group "can hardly be called a matrilineage for lineal descent among the Munduruci was reckoned in the father's line, whereas the members of the household were related through their mothers." This denial of local matrilineages leads him into a discussion of the evolution of social systems in which a patrilineal, patrilocal society first becomes matrilocal and then, perhaps, matrilineal.

If we consider the Mundurucfi to have had dispersed patrilineal clans with pri- marily ritual functions, a men's organization centered upon a village clubhouse, and