• DOI:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1947.tb31729.x
• Corpus ID: 83994228

SEX AND CULTURE

@article{Bateson1947SEXAC,
  title={SEX AND CULTURE},
  author={Gregory Bateson},
  journal={Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences},
  year={1947},
  volume={47}
}

• G. Bateson
• Published 1 May 1947
• Psychology
• Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

It is certainly too early to try to introduce rigor into those anthropdlogical hypotheses which mention sex as a causal factor, or which seek to explain the diversities of sexual behavior by referring to the cultural milieu. Even the word, sex, is used by us in a series of different senses, varying from observable and definable copulatory behaviors to a hypothetical drive, or drives, which are believed to influence a very wide and undefinable category of behaviors. It is even doubtful whether we should, at this time, attempt to sharpen our definitions, and not rather wait until some clarity begins to appear, as we amass more data. Definitions and abstractions are, after all, only “right” or “wrong” in so far as they form part of hypotheses which experience can test. Such hypotheses as we have today, relating sex to culture, are still so vague that very much more exploratory work will be needed before the abstractions involved can be sharply defined. There is, however, a serious drawback to such a laissez faire attitude towards theory. It is, unfortunately, easy to construct hypotheses with vague concepts, and such hypotheses are usually impossible t o prove or to disprove. The current theories of personality and character formation already contain an excessive number of parentheses (compensation, bisexuality, etc.), any one of which can be invoked to explain why behavior in a given case does not conform to hypothetical expectation. This building-up of parenthetical variables has reached such a point that today it is almost unkind to demand of any theorist : “What conceivable fact could disprove your hypothesis?” There are, however, two possible approaches which may be of use: not to introduce rigorous hypotheses before the science is ready for them, but rather to suggest the sorts of question which we ought to be asking; and to delimit the orders of hypothesis to which we should look forward. The first of these approaches will only be mentioned at this stage.