Page 250 - Contribution To Phenomenology

ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 243

genetically determined for men to protect women and children. Human
behavior is far more plastic than that of lower animals.
Many naturalistic determinations are artifactual, not biologically
inherited, but shaped during the lives of individuals and above all through
social interaction. These include language, religion, food and dress habits,
but it also includes learned ways of walking, standing, sitting, making love
(How did "the missionary position" get its name?), gesturing, facial
expressions, etc., which are not purely somatic, as they can appear in a
physicalistic attitude, but rather what I Uke to call somato-psychic. I have
no scientific typology or terminology to offer at this time, but I have seen
more than enough German glares, French shrugs, and ingratiating head
movements pertaining to various ethnicities, not to speak of ways of
waving hands, to believe such gestures are cultural and can be classified.
Attachments to place, to technological and ecological systems (railroad
men and fishermen earn those titles in ways akin to those by which the
ethnicities they specify are constituted, it seems to me), and also ease
and its lack in types of social relationships, e.g., with mothers-in-law, I
would also consider artifactually naturalistic psychic determinations.
There seems a tendency to refer in speech to the naturalistic
determinations that cultural characteristics are founded upon. But of
course we learn to be aware of somatic characteristics as relevant for
racial classifications. Puerto Ricans whose so-called Negroid characteris-
tics are noticed by Whites in New York might well have learned back
home to pay more attention to postural and linguistic subtleties indicative
of ethnic or class membership. One might believe that naturalistic
determinations are equally noticed by both insiders and outsiders of a
group, but I wonder about that.
Only a little reflection discloses that naturalistic determinations are
believed in, valued, and, in a broad signification, willed as well as
"awared." This may be clearer concerning psychic determinations. To say
that most Faubokians are lazy is literalistically to assert affirmatively that
members of that tribe typically have that character trait and one is able
to do this because one has come, with or without a foundation, to
beheve in that trait as belonging to them. But we readily comprehend
such a seemingly cognitive assertion as additionally if not originally a
value judgment that could be expUcated with "and are thus despicable,
i.e., negatively valued" (or, if the predicate was instead "prefer a leisurely
life," it could be exphcated with "and are thus admirable, i.e., positively
valued"). Similarly, "Italians are great lovers" might be not merely a
cognitive or even a value judgment but rather a practical recommenda-
tion, even though the statement has the form of a factual assertion. If
it is a recommendation, it relates to willed purposes and thus the use
of members of one ethnic group for a specified purpose, use, including