Robert B. Edgerton

“there is a pervasive assumption among anthropologists that a population’s long-standing beliefs and practices—their culture and their social institutions—must play a positive role in their lives or these beliefs and practices would not have persisted. Thus, it is widely thought and written that cannibalism, torture, infanticide, feuding, witchcraft, painful male initiations, female genital mutilation, cermonial rape, headhunting, and other practices that may be abhorrent to many of us must serve some useful function in the societies in which they are traditional practices. Impressed by the wisdom of biological evolution in creating such adaptive miracles as feathers for flight or protective coloration, most scholars have assumed that cultural evolution too has been guided by a process of natural selection that has produced traditional beliefs and practices that meet peoples’ needs.”
― Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies

“Anthropologists have long debated whether their field is or ought to be a science or one of the humanities; some are fond of pronouncing that it must become history or nothing or that biology and psychology have no explanatory power in the study of cultural man. These exchanges, as regular as the seasons, can be entertaining or infuriating, depending on one’s tastes, but they do little to advance knowledge. What is needed, I believe, are fewer manifestos about the paradigmatic status of the discipline and better questions for scholars to pursue in whatever fashion they believe will lead to falsifiable answers. I am proposing several questions. First, can we identify valid criteria for determining whether one sociocultural system is more adaptive—or less harmful to its members—than another? Second, do maladaptive or useless beliefs or practices occur even in societies that have survived in the same ecosystem for many years? Finally, if maladaptive beliefs and practices can be identified, why do they occur?”
― Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies