Awakening undergraduates to cultural reform

At about this time you got involved in setting up the undergraduate Human Sciences Program at ANU.

That’s right. It was about the same time as the Hong Kong project was getting going. As I have mentioned, I realised that the structure of the academic world didn’t acknowledge that human situations involve continual interplay of the different aspects of reality. The courses offered to the students at the undergraduate level contained nothing which focused on the interplay between cultural aspects and biophysical aspects of human situations. And so, although I was in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the time and therefore had no direct undergraduate responsibilities, I wrote to the Vice-Chancellor proposing a course – actually, a whole degree course, but I didn’t get it – looking at the interplay between the cultural and the biophysical aspects of the system in human history and also the present day. A committee was set up to discuss it, but there was a lot of opposition to the idea. It was seen by some people as a soft option, though it isn’t if you do it properly. It is much easier to be a good specialist than a good integrator.

Anyway, some people began to understand what I had in mind and we won the day: the Human Sciences Program came into existence. It was not a full degree program in its own right, but people could ‘major’ in human sciences. We had a second-year unit where the focus was on the ecology of the human species in the past and the present, but in terms of relationships – not only patterns of energy use and so on but also the cultural influences on those patterns. And then the third-year unit, on human adaptability, looked at the capacity for humans to adapt to new situations, both biologically and culturally.

We recognise the capacity of human culture to sometimes embrace quite nonsensical assumptions which lead in turn to nonsensical behaviours which can have very adverse effects on living systems, either around or within us. There are countless examples in history of this ‘cultural maladaptation’, where a culture develops a world view containing assumptions which result in maladaptive behaviour which then results in undesirable consequences in living systems. That is occurring even at the present time.

Fortunately, however, we have the potential, through our capacity for culture, to overcome these maladaptations. We used to call the exercise of this potential ‘cultural adaptation’, but that term has been used by anthropologists in a slightly different way. So we now talk about ‘cultural reform’. If society wakes up to the fact that there are undesirable consequences of certain human activities in the system, it can make use of improved understanding of the situation to introduce measures aimed at overcoming those undesirable consequences.

The pattern of cultural maladaptation followed by cultural reform is a very important area of study. We have put a lot of effort into it over the years, and it is extremely relevant to the understanding of our present, ecologically unsustainable, situation in society, and also of the inequities in human populations and so on. In other words, there are undesirable things happening now as a result of human activities, and the future wellbeing of humanity depends upon effective cultural reform. And we can learn a lot from those patterns in the past, in relation to the present.

Focus questions

• How would you define the term ‘human ecology’?
• Boyden says that a human culture may develop behaviours and attitudes which result in undesirable consequences for all living systems. He calls these developments ‘cultural maladaptations’.  Can you identify any maladaptations in your own human culture?