In this paper I will be reviewing literature, mostly from cognitive science, related to the human brain’s processes of categorization

V.Are Torguuds essentialists?

To find out whether Torguuds are essentialists we need data that will reveal their cognition of groups such as ‘Kazakhs’ and ‘Mongols’ to share important similarities with the features of essentialism described above, provided we can agree the preceding section presents a plausible picture of essentialism.

A.Torguuds on development

The research reported earlier was conducted in the summer of 1997. A replication was attempted in 1998 with an entirely new sample. The categories were crossed (the biological father was a Mongol, the adopters were Kazakhs), the order of the questions was randomized, and the sex of the child was changed to female. Not only did the earlier results replicate, the proportion of primordialists went up considerably (Gil-White, forthcoming). This is consistent with my hypothesis that the original study had a task demand where the order of the questions suggested to subjects that the ‘right’ answer (or the answer I, the researcher, wanted to hear, at any rate) was one where the environment of enculturation conferred ethnic ascription. For those subjects whose first chronological question is question 2 or question 3, the effect disappears and they are more comfortable giving answers in line with their beliefs.

In addition to the above manipulations, a sample of ‘hard’ primordialists (i.e. of those who, even in question 3, believed that the child’s ascription would depend only on the ethnicity of the biological parents) were asked an additional question. First, the details of question 3 were reviewed, and then I asked the following: “This adopted child, will he become exactly like the Kazakhs, or will he be somewhat different?” (Remember, in this second study, it is the Kazakhs who are the adopters.)

If they answered that the child would be somewhat different (a common locution was “No, he can’t/will not become exactly like the Kazakhs”), then I followed up with the question, “How will the child be different?” Almost invariably, the response to this was that the child’s features would be like those of a Mongol, revealing that subjects had understood the question as it was intended, in terms of similarity to Kazakhs as a group, and not to the adoptive parents in particular. Then I followed up with the question: “And how will the child behave? Will the child behave exactly like the Kazakhs or will he behave somewhat differently?” A majority of respondents replied that the child would behave somewhat different, that he would not behave quite like the Kazakhs, but somewhat like a Mongol. Note to brown-bag people: the table is not ready, I will present it in the talk.

The same was done with a sample of non-‘hard’ primordialists (i.e. those who did not give a primordialist answer in question 3). Most of these responded that the child would be exactly like the Kazakhs, but a few responded essentialistically. Thus, one’s views of ascription do not rigidly determine one’s answer to the essentialist question, though they certainly bias it heavily.

What these results reveal is that, in addition to having a biological ETAM (Ethnic Transmission and Acquisition Model; Gil-White 1999), Torguuds think that this carries meaning beyond just a label that marks your biological descent. Apparently, being a ‘Mongol’, or being descended biologically from Mongols, implies that a person will resist enculturation into an outgroup to a certain degree, even when such enculturation is the only one the person knows, and even when she has had no contact with the group she is biologically descended from. This is consistent with believing that a ‘Mongol’, by virtue of being descended biologically from other Mongols, has a Mongol ‘essence’ which confers an innate potential that will play itself out developmentally ‘on its own steam’, as it were (as in Gelman & Wellman 1991). The intuition that the adopted child will be somewhat different remains despite the fact that my subjects accept the extreme premise, namely, that the child in question 3 will have learned Kazakh language, norms, habits, and customs, and that he will have not the slightest bit of exposure to Mongols and will in fact be ignorant of having been born to Mongol parents.

B.Conscious theories and intuitive ‘theories’

As my fieldwork progressed, and I experienced people’s beliefs outside the rigid context of the interview format, I came to believe that my questionnaires were good tools for revealing people’s conscious theories, but not their intuitive ‘theories’. I use the term ‘intuitive theories’ to substitute for ‘theory’ or ‘naïve theory’ as the term is used in cognitive psychology, where it refers to the organizing and constraining (but subjectively unnoticed) content that underlies human concepts and categories. By ‘conscious theory’ I mean an elaborated belief that organizes knowledge and that the individual is aware of having. The responses my questions elicited, I submit, result from an interview context that forces people to use their conscious theories in a very explicit way. Such conscious theories are presumably the joint result of their cultural upbringing and their personal experiences. In a previous paper (Gil-White 1999) I called such conscious theories regarding the transference of an ethnic status ‘Ethnic Transmission and Acquisition Models’ (ETAM). That my questionnaire investigates conscious but not intuitive theories is not cause for despair, for they are far from irrelevant. Conscious theories are important, and a theory that human cognition is designed so as to naively process ethnies as natural living kinds makes the non-trivial prediction that a majority of cultures in the world will turn out to have blood-based ETAMs. However, if the design of the human brain is what we are after, conscious theories can be misleading, and I shall illustrate with two anecdotes.

My friend Tsoloo (Tsoh-lóh) is a bright 21-year-old Torguud who served as my guide in one of my brief forays into Kazakh territory. Although he was never formally subjected to my questionnaire (except for the essentialism questions), he developed a keen interest in my research; he witnessed as I administered it to many Torguuds, Oryankhais, and Kazakhs; and he shared his views of their answers with me. Tsoloo is what I call a ‘circumstantialist’, and a vociferous one. To him, the right answer to question 3 is that the child is a member of the adopting ethnie. He also insisted repeatedly that the right answer to my question “Will this adopted kid be exactly like the [adopting ethnie], or somewhat different?” is that the kid will be exactly like the adopting ethnie. How could it be otherwise? It bothered him considerably that many people give essentialist answers. To him it was all quite simple: if you have the customs of an ethnie and live with them, you are a member of that ethnie, and if you are raised by that ethnie from birth you won’t be any different from them no matter who your parents are. He is even a ‘hard circumstantialist’, that is, a rational-choice theorist, who maintains that adults can choose to make the ethnic shift by living with, and acquiring the customs of, an outgroup ethnie.

But this is when we were talking about my questions. When discussing other topics, he often seemed like an essentialist. For example, he is very afraid of the Uryankhai because he believes they can all cast curses. The Kazakh can also cast curses, according to him, but cannot be touched by anybody’s curses because of their strong religion, Islam (this makes them theoretically more dangerous than the Uryankhai, but in fact they are supposedly less prone than the Uryankhai to cast curses because they are not bad people). Now, of course, one could argue that this is all compatible with his circumstantialism because he may believe that being able to cast curses like an Uryankhai or a Kazakh, and being more or less well-disposed towards others, is a matter of being a good Uryankhai or Kazakh performer in cultural terms, and of being reared amongst people with certain views. In fact, he listed the impossibility of putting curses on the Kazakh as an example of them being buruu nomtoi [‘with the wrong book’, where ‘book’ is a euphemism for ‘culture’]. But our these conversations somehow never felt circumstantialist to me.

I was wondering about these things one day as Tsoloo, his friend Tulgai (also a circumstantialist), and I crept on our horses up to the barren and rocky mountaintops in order to cross back into Torguud country. To investigate the matter, I initiated the following exchange,

“Tsoloo, I have a question: if I learn the Uryankhai customs can I then put curses on people like an Uryankhai?”

“No, you can’t.”

“Why not?”

He paused. “You have to be Uryankhai.”

“But you said that if I had the customs of an ethnie I would be a member of that ethnie. So why can’t I put curses like an Uryankhai if I learn all their customs?” I was explicitly reminding him of the model he had resorted to when considering my questionnaire, and therefore stacking all the odds against him persisting with an essentialist answer.

“You can’t,” he said.

“That’s right, you can’t,” joined Tulgai.

“Well why not?”

Tsoloo paused for a second and said, “You…have to be born to an Uryankhai.” They were both agreed on this point.

“So unless one of my parents is Uryankhai, I can’t put curses on people?”

“True.”

“That means that if I was adopted at an early age by the Uryankhai, I would be just like them but I would not be able to put curses…”

“True.”

“Is it the same with the Kazakhs?”

“The same.”
At this point Tulgai rode off because he wanted to kill a marmot, and Tsoloo and I were left alone to continue our conversation. I paused for a second in order to consider what a tantalizing contradiction Tsoloo had just provided, and how completely unaware he was of it. Had it been any other circumstantialist it would have been striking but not this striking. Tsoloo had seen me administer the same questionnaire at least a good dozen times, we had discussed it together and thought a lot about it. And only a few hours before I had administered the questionnaire twice. Yet, he was completely unaware that his current answer was at variance with the position he had been explicitly maintaining all along, and the fact that my last question closely mimicked the question I actually use to probe essentialism did not clue him to what was going on. Tsoloo was not thinking theoretically, he was thinking intuitively. I was very excited but instead showed myself mockingly upset.

“Tsoloo, you lied to me,” I said with a wink and a smile.

“Why?”

“Because you have been telling me all along that if a kid is adopted from birth into another ethnie he will be just like the adopting ethnie. But that is not what you think. Suppose that the child born of Mongol parents and adopted by Kazakhs was a Torguud Mongol. Well, then he would be a lot like the Kazakhs but not exactly like them, because he would not be able to throw curses. You see?”

“Oh…!” He looked down at his horse and took his free hand to his mouth in a thoughtful expression I had seen many times. An embarrassed smile crept over his face and then he looked at me, nodding with a smile that he accepted defeat graciously.

“You actually think that kid would be a little bit different, but that is not what you told me when we talked about my experimental questions.”

“Yes…yes, I see. Aha…” He looked up the road with a curious expression. He seemed to be pondering the intricacies of his own mind.

“Let me ask you this: if an Uryankhai child was adopted by the Torguud, just like in question three, would he be able to cast curses or not?”

“Well…[a significant pause]…that child doesn’t know that his real parents are Uryankhai…so…he would be able to, but he wouldn’t know it.”

“I see. If he knew, he might cast curses, but since he doesn’t, he won’t.”

“True.”

I paused again, then explained a difficulty, “This is a problem for my research, Tsoloo. You gave an answer based on customs when I asked you the experimental question, and said the kid would be exactly like the adopting ethnie. But that’s not what you really think. What if other people who answered like you also think like you? You seem to believe the adopted child will look and talk exactly like the adopting ethnie, and yet…and yet, you believe that the kid…inside…is somehow still different…”

“Yes, yes. That’s right!” He seemed excited that I had chosen just the right words to explain his thoughts. I had of course carefully chosen those words on purpose.

“Maybe some of the people who answered like you also think this way, that the kid is somehow still different inside…”

“That is what they all think,” he said very convinced.

“You think so?”

“I am sure.”
Notice that in Tsoloo’s mind, in order to have that thing which confers the hidden potential of an A, and which is ‘inside’, you have to be a biological descendant of an A.

My data on Kazakhs is of much lower quality than that for the Mongols because I didn’t spend much time with them and at first I didn’t realize one had to remind them explicitly that the child in question 3 would acquire both Kazakh culture and religion. However, I think I can safely claim that Kazakhs are by-and-large circumstantialists (as measured by my questionnaire) so long as they understand that the adopted child will become a Muslim in addition to the other aspects of Kazakh culture. This is consistent with Bessac’s (1965) work with Kazakhs in Xinjiang. Since the Kazakhs I worked with immigrated only a generation or so ago from neighboring Xinjiang, in China, I am not surprised.

However, here too I found a discrepancy between the conscious models my questionnaire elicits, and people’s intuitions. When I asked Kazakhs alone, the overwhelming majority of them were circumstantialists. On one occasion, however, at a bayr (party), a large group of Kazakh old men took interest in my research and I asked the questions publicly, to the whole group. The old men answered in chorus and they turned out to be heavily circumstantialist, and not at all essentialist. However, there was one lone dissenter, a young man, who protested furiously and gave contrary, primordialist and essentialist answers each time. As the old men went quietly back to their old guy things, I was pondering how interesting it was that the Kazakhs should be ascriptive circumstantialists, and not the least bit essentialists. However, these musings were immediately interrupted by a large circle of young guys, who were sitting to my right, and who began protesting furiously to me that what the old guys were saying was not true. Prominent among them was the lone dissenter from the earlier choruses and shows of hands. Apparently he was nowhere near being alone, merely the only one who had the guts to override the embarrassment of appearing publicly as a deviant. Another guy, who was also quite mad, was also doing a lot of talking. The argument was familiar: the girl is a Mongol because the biological parents are Mongol. The girl’s culture didn’t matter in the least. I turned to them and said,

“So I for instance can never become a Kazakh? If I stayed here, and learned Kazakh, and Kazakh customs, married a Kazakh girl, and became a Muslim, I would still not be a Kazakh?”

One guy spoke for all of them when he replied,

“Even if you do everything like a Kazakh, and everybody says you are a Kazakh, you still aren’t a real Kazakh because your parents are not Kazakh. You are different inside.” And he pointed to his chest. All others were nodding. “That girl in your question, you know? Everybody would say that she was a Kazakh, but she would not be a real Kazakh.”

My main interlocutor and I talked about other things for a while, and then I brought us back.

“Can I ask you another question?”

“Okay.”

“You say that I can never become a Kazakh even if I convert and do everything like a Kazakh, because my parents are not Kazakh, right?”

“Right.”

“But is this also true for the girl in my last question? Is it true for a girl who is adopted at a very young age?”

“Yes. People will say that she is a Kazakh, but she is not a real Kazakh.”

“Because her parents are not Kazakh?”

“Right.”

“She is also different inside?” I pointed to my chest.

“That’s right.”
This time I had not been the one to supply the word ‘inside’. And this time too, being an A ‘inside’ was a matter of being descended biologically from A.

When I was back at Xurmet’s (my 22-year-old Kazakh hosts’s) yurt, I had him alone in the yurt for a second, so I asked him,

“Isn’t it interesting that the young guys thought so differently from the old guys?”

“Yes,” he said with a quizzical smile.

“Tell me something: when I asked you my three questions the other day, you answered like the old guys. The young guys told me it was true that the adopted girl would be called a Kazakh, but did not agree that she would be a real Kazakh because she was different inside. What do you think? Do you think the girl will be a real Kazakh?”

He thought for a second and then said,

“This is what I think: I think that the girl is Kazakh ündecten like I said before…”

“But is she jinxene [real] Kazakh ündecten?”

“Yes. I think she is jinxene Kazakh…”

“And you think she will be exactly like Kazakh people?”

“Yes. She will be exactly like Kazakhs…but…I also think, you know…that she will be different inside.” He pointed to his chest just like the other man had done. “Inside she is a Mongol,” he concluded.
This was truly astounding. Xurmet thought she was a real Kazax but a Mongol ‘inside’. A contradiction? Perhaps. Apparently Xurmet has a conscious theory of what it takes to be a real Kazax. But this is not in line with his intuitions, which tell him that the girl in my example would still somehow be different ‘inside’, despite all outward appearances and ascriptive practices. These experiences convince me that the formal questionnaires probably significantly underestimate the degree to which people are intuitively inclined to think about ethnies in essentialist terms.