Culture, Altruism, and Conflict Between Ancestors and Descendants

Abstract

This enduring transfer, with one generation transferring intellectual and strategic resources to the next over many generations, has a number of requirements. Traditions are fragile; if one generation fails to repeat a tradition, it can be lost forever. Several things must be in place if this system is to endure; rules must be in place to not only tell children that they must cooperate, and with whom they must cooperate, but rules must also encourage those children to transmit what they learned to their own offspring. These rules will include moral injunctions – cooperate with distant kin as if they were close kin – and the acceptance of a hierarchical relationship between parent and child, with the child willing to learn and the parent willing to guide. Further, one’s kin must be identifiable as kin, that is, as an individual with whom one is taught to cooperate. In regard to implications, individuals who accepted these conditions and who shared a common ancestor were likely to share traditions – the same moral rules and similar body decoration, or “tags” (Holland 1993) – inherited from that ancestor, transmitted to them through their parents, grandparents, and other close kin. As the ethnographic record makes clear, individuals who inherit ancestral names or body decorations were regularly encouraged by moral traditions, in their interrelationships with the arts, storytelling and the plastic arts, to behave altruistically towards one another, to treat one another as if they were close kin (e.g., Murdock 1949; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Coe 2003; Steadman and Palmer 2008).