extract both cultural information and fundamental insights into their thought patterns and “codification of reality”. She did not assume that reality is relative; she did assume that different cultures can categorize or perceive reality in different ways, and that language provides clues to this perceptual approach.
The Trobriand language has no adjectives; each noun contains a suite of implicit attributes, and changing an attribute changes the object or noun. The Trobriand language has no change, no time, no distinction between past and present. Lacking these, it also lacks a basis for causality, and indeed there is no cause-and-effect. Absences of adjectives, change, and time distinctions are aspects of a broader characteristic: the virtual absence of comparisons of any kind in Trobriand language or world-view. There is no lineal connection between events or objects.
The Trobriand culture functions well without any of these traits that we normally consider essential and implicit to human perception. So implicit are these assumptions that Bronislaw Malinowski studied the Trobriand Islanders without detecting how fundamentally different their worldview is. Not surprisingly, he was sometimes frustrated and confused by their behavior.
The Trobriand people use a much simpler and more elegant perceptual basis than the diverse assumptions of change, time distinctions, causality, and comparison. They perceive patterns, composed of “a series of beings, but no becoming” or temporal connection. When considering a patterned whole, one needs no causal or temporal relationships; it is sufficient merely to identify ingredients in the pattern.
“Trobriand activity is patterned activity. One act within this pattern brings into existence a pre-ordained cluster of acts. . . pattern is truth and value for them; in fact, acts and being derive value from the embedding pattern. . . To him value lies in sameness, in repeated pattern, in the incorporation of all time within the same point.” [Lee, 1950]
During the last 12,000 years an ice age has waned, sea levels have risen, and climates have changed drastically. Plant and animal species have been forced to cope with these changes. Since the development of agriculture about 12,000 years ago, human progress has been incredibly fast. Biological evolution cannot account for such rapid human change; cultural evolution must be responsible. Perhaps the Trobriand example lends some insight into these changes. A Trobriandesque world-view, emphasizing adherence to pattern, might have substantial survival value in a stable environment. In contrast, climatic stress and changing food supplies favored a different worldview involving imagination and choice. Only in rare cases, such as the Trobriand tropical island, was the environment stable enough for a Trobriand-style perspective to persist.
The Trobriand world-view is in many ways antipodal to that upon which scientific research is based. Yet it is valid, in the same sense that our western world-view is valid: it works (at least in a stable environment). And the viability of such an alien perspective forces us to recognize that some of our fundamental scientific assumptions are cultural: our concepts of causality, comparison, and time may be inaccurate descriptions of reality.
Scientific causality transcends all of these restricted concepts of causality. It does not abandon concern with inevitability or with underlying mechanisms. Instead it accepts that description of causal associations is intrinsically valid, while seeking fundamental conceptual or physical principles that explain these associations.
Different sciences place different emphases on causality. The social sciences in general give a high priority to identifying causal relationships. Physical sciences often attempt to use causality as a
