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To acknowledge that biology matters has not been so common in the humanities and the social sciences as one might have expected. While it is rather obvious that we all have a body, the exact role of biology in human development is not so obvious. Is human nature so flexible that by all practical purposes it can be neglected in the study of humans as social and cultural beings, or are in fact humans determined by their biological heritage? This question is of high relevance to any contemporary theory and description of music therapy, while it may also be said that it is of relevance for any person reflecting upon what it means to be human:

Ever since the cave dwellers of Lascaux and Chauvet posed the question 'How do we relate to the rest of the animal kingdom?' Homo sapiens has been divided on the answer. Are we driven by basic instincts, the Hollywood three - sex, power and money? Or are we ruled by our higher cultural faculties, the Platonic three - truth, beauty and goodness? Cro-Magnon people were exercised, as we are, by this perennial question, as can be seen in their beautiful cave paintings. These contrasted images of ferocious mammoths, bears and bison - nature red in tooth and claw - with paintings of little stick figures running about, noble, if Giacometti-like portraits, of shamans casting spells or groups dancing in order to propitiate the spirits of nature - make the rain fall or the Ice Age recede. There you had it, 30,000 years ago, the basic alternatives.

Their realistic art posed the metaphysical question in the starkest terms: is the world ruled by animal nature or human spirit? (Jencks, 2000/2001, p. 28).

This quote is taken from a relatively recent (critical) discussion of the relationships between Darwinian heritage and culture, and Jencks's intention in writing a rather ironic essay is probably not to give any ultimate answers, rather to challenge the scientism he sees in the arguments of some contemporary sociobiologists. I will examine the direction he indicates when he later in the essay quotes the Rabbi who is supposed to have said to his youngster: "Son, whenever faced with two extremes, always pick a third." Jencks's elaborates in the following way on the possibility of avoiding the choice of dualism:

As everyone over sixteen knows, it is the Existentialists who made such a fuss with the answer to the dilemma: 'We are condemned to be free.' Freedom, obviously that's the third way, not the third way of Tony Blair nor that of the Fascists (who coined the phrase in the 1930s), but the third way of romantic novelists, Nietzscheans and complexity theorists. It is the last who tell us that freedom can emerge when self-organising systems are placed between competing orders (Jencks, 2000/2001, p. 30).

The competing orders Jencks have in mind are, as illuminated by his reference to the cave art from Lascaux and Chauvet, biological determinism versus cultural determinism. Whether his interpretation of this old cave art makes sense or not, the act of challenging the conventional nature versus nurture dualism is of relevance to a discussion of humankind and music in relation to music therapy. While some music therapy theorists have tried to hook music off from nature (by rejecting the relevance of biology) and others from culture (by focusing upon music as a stimulus or as a culture-free medium of communication), such dualistic choices are hard to defend if they are examined more carefully. While reductionism may be helpful for examination of specific questions, it is obvious that say a focus upon the individual as an organism - with neglect of personal, interpersonal, and sociocultural processes - would be narrow and too restricted for a theory of music therapy. If this is true, it is also probable that ideas of say sociocultural autonomy would be restraining. The interplay of biological, psychological, social, and cultural processes in human life seem to be of relevance for an understanding of the human condition, and thus of music therapy.

An organism, a person, a group, a community (etc.) may be considered different systems and as such they may request different levels of analysis. A crucial issue is then of course how to define and describe the relationships between these levels of analysis. Are some levels more basic than others? Are, for instance, social and cultural processes determined by biology, or is biology more or less irrelevant for a deeper understanding of human beings? While I suggest that culture-centered perspectives on music therapy need to be explored, I am not advocating sociocultural autonomy, which would support a tabula rasa conception of the newborn infant, that is, it would buttress the idea that (to the degree that a mind may be compared to a computer) a newborn baby's mind would be like a general-purpose "computer," giving society and culture the responsibility of installing all the software. A simple counterexample is the broad range of competencies that researchers have shown that newborn infants possess. Not only are they capable of engaging in interaction with other human beings, they are born with a motivation to do so. As Colwyn Trevarthen (1995, 1997) has expressed it: A child is born "cultural," that is, born with a disposition for engagement in intense emotional interaction with other human beings, which then immediately activates a process of enculturation.

"Nature or nurture?" is not the question then, but "Nature and nurture, how do they go together?" As Jencks (2000/2001) argues, there may be reasons to reflect upon the meaning of the many hybrid creatures that have been so common in the mythology of so many cultures; think of the sphinx, the centaurs, and the dog-god Anubis. Using the rabbi's advice to his son, the third extreme advocated by Jencks as an alternative to biological and cultural determinism is freedom. It may be less than surprising that he suggests this, if one knows that he has been an advocate of postmodernism, but the suggestion can hardly be rejected as mere rhetoric cleverness. Humans differ from other animals not only in having cumulative culture, but also in the relative importance of individuality and creativity. This is something music therapists usually stress quite strongly, one central approach to music therapy even being labeled Creative Music Therapy (Nordoff & Robbins, 1977). The creativity of the here-and-now - the musical meeting as micro-moment and micro-event - is very often considered to be a core quality of music therapy processes, and a conception of music therapy that neglects this aspect would be less than satisfactory. One challenge for music therapy theory, then, will be to construct plausible links between the microgenesis of the moment-to-moment experience in music therapy with human biology as well as human culture.

References

Jencks, Charles (2000/2001). "EP, Phone Home." In: Rose, Hilary & Steven Rose (Eds.). Alas Poor Darwin. Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology. London: Vintage.

Nordoff, Paul & Clive Robbins (1977). Creative Music Therapy. New York: John Day.

Trevarthen, Colwyn (1995). "The Child's Need to Learn a Culture." Children and Society, 9(1), pp. 5-19.

Trevarthen, Colwyn (1997). "Music and Infant Interaction." Colwyn Trevarthen interviewed by Brynjulf Stige. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy, 6(1), pp. 61-65.

How to cite this page

Stige, Brynjulf, 2003 Beyond Biological and Cultural Determinism?. Voices Resources. Retrieved January 14, 2015, from http://testvoices.uib.no/community/?q=fortnightly-columns/2003-beyond-biological-and-cultural-determinism