Human Bonding
1039 words. About a 4 minute read
Today is Monday, so my article is on “Human Bonding”. Many articles and publications on various aspects of human bonding already exist. Most cover the human psychology of relationships between family members, friends, people with whom we compete and associate. These Psychosocial Relationship (“PR”) bonds also include loneliness which is essentially a condition we experience when those bonds are absent or deteriorating. In a recent television interview Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy said many psychologists and sociologists consider the occurrence of loneliness as having reached epidemic levels with serious health consequences. In a future article I’ll address the topic of loneliness and its benevolent twin, solitude.
Being an anthropologist I hope to add to the thinking about human bonding, focusing primarily at how people around the world and through time have bonded through practices, values, and organizations. For simplicity we will refer to these relationships as PVO (Practices-Values-Organizational) bonds. We’ll see how the many different ways of PVO bonding have grown in complexity and size, to the point that they have created the large complex institutional and social mosaic that we call modern society. The complexity of today’s modern human societies around the world are the culmination of their organizations, institutions and practices, which in turn are outcomes of human bonds. Though human organizations and cultural practices are diverse, they’re all based on the same human values and social needs people feel all over the world. If you can look through the organizations and cultural practices and understand the needs that are behind them, you will easily navigate societies and communities with which you are not familiar. Just as a tourist uses a map to navigate around an unfamiliar town, the anthropologist uses a knowledge of human bonds and the organizations and cultures on which they’re built to navigate with, and interact within, a new society.
PR bonds are relational whereas PVO bonds are transactional. PR relationships generally don’t grow in value through transactions though there are some important transactions such as inheritance and bridal showers- however those are transfers of wealth and generally not transactions (e.g. in which things of value are traded) in the traditional sense of the word. On the other hand, even the simplest PVO bond tends to be highly transactional.
Let’s have a look at some anecdotal descriptions of the most basic PVO bond, social capital.
In many traditions, social capital transactions also allow for an intermediary or broker. For example, a matchmaker or marriage broker earns recognition for bringing a couple together in marriage. That recognition is a form of social capital, but it would probably fall in value if the marriage fails. In some societies those intermediaries are paid but in most cases they are owed favors or recognition by the married couple or their families.
In many American communities when people introduce themselves to each other they usually give their name and state what they do for a living. Think of two people meeting at a bar at a typical US airport between flights. “Hi I’m Joe. I’m a plumber from Miami. I sure hope the connection to Atlanta isn’t late.” Response: “Hi, I’m Jane. I work in banking. Your flight’s probably ok. You’re lucky it isn’t Thanksgiving.” Any subsequent conversation, if there is one, would likely proceed around a discussion about the weather or travel nightmares. But in much of the world outside the USA, people introduce themselves by stating where they are from, where they went to school, something about their parents or siblings and a description of their social activities: “Hi I’m Jacob. I’m from Kenawha and a member of the Feather clan. My brothers and sisters went to school at Kenawha High School and my parents raise sheep in Kedugu.” That personal introduction provides many points where the listener can make a social connection: “No kidding! My sister-in-law went to Kenawha and I go to Kedugu market often. I wonder if I’ve ever come across your parents!”. This would be a very ordinary type of conversation between strangers in Latin America, Africa and Asia. This is done spontaneously. People in those societies are not “glad-handing” but the tradition opens them to ways to connect and enrich social networks. They easily make a wide range of social connections that enable them to engage in a wide variety of relationships and social transactions, quickly finding where they have common interests and can do each other favors. They build social capital.
As transactions in PVO-type human bonds are based on social capital, the proceeds of the transaction are “banked”, or housed in the relationship between the transactors. Look at the relationship as an online bank. As long as the relationship is healthy, the social capital is safe and probably even grows in value. And, as the transactions or exchanges of social capital are worth whatever value the transactors agree to be, social capital is the simplest and most easily “convertible” unit of currency.
There are three types of capital: social, economic, and political. They are often converted. A highly social person with several strong relationships can use his connections to find work or business opportunities. In so doing, he is converting some of his social capital into economic capital. The transaction can go in the opposite direction, where someone with business connections can use those connections to make friends, do favors, and build a social network.
Both social and economic capital can be used to build political capital. Political candidates are constantly seeking endorsements from individuals with standing in certain communities, which is a form a social capital. Politicians use friends with economic capital (financial resources) and social capital (reach into interest groups and reluctant voters) to build their support. In the other direction, those lending their economic or social capital to political players are building their own political capital. There are traditions, rules and institutions that oversee these transactions to guard against corruption and abuse. For example, though there are many ways that economic capital helps politicians, buying votes is unacceptable. Conversely holders of political office are not able to reward financial supporters with no-compete contracts or hire “community leaders” to coerce residents to vote for them. Oversight of the transactions between social, economic and political capital is performed by a mix of social and cultural attitudes, civil society watchdog groups, the media, and laws that provide strict guidelines to keep the transactions transparent and eliminate corruption and abuse. Pubic institutions such as electoral commissions organize and administer elections and the Securities and Exchange Commission oversees financing of political campaigns. Social capital, how it is built, and its relationship to economic and political capital have arguably been the raisons-d’être for the large complex institutional and social mosaic that we call modern society and that define human society today.
Visit this series again next Monday for an article on gifts and how they don’t always have the intended effect on human bonding.