Man the Hunter, Man the Hunted: Violence and the Animal Inside

“What is human about human beings? How did they get that way? How can they be made more so?” These questions formed the basis of a fifth-grade social studies curriculum project developed in the 1960s called Man: A Course of Study, or MACOS. Shortly after MACOS became public, a Republican Congressman from Arizona led a campaign against its widespread adoption in public schools. He claimed the anthropological materials included in the course, based on the pre-contact lives of the Netsilik people, provided a bad moral model for learning about humanity. The Netsilik were too violent, too “primitive,” and would break down the “traditional American values” good families were struggling to instill in their children. Certainly, the conservative reaction to MACOS reflected a fear of the violence they perceived as inherent to many so-called “stone age” cultures. Yet in the years following Civil Rights activism and the counter-culture movement in the U.S., cultural relativism was a domestic issue as much as an international one. In addition, Americans were simultaneously consuming scientific ideas that animal instincts defined human behavioral patterns from popular ethology and anthropology texts. Social and natural scientists in the 1960s and ‘70s worried about each man's struggle with the animalistic passions that threatened to overcome his rational mind. These negotiations of the emotional (inherently violent) animal inside the rational human mind framed reactions to MACOS. While liberals were wary of the possibly racist overtones in using a modern culture as a stand-in for early humanity, conservatives objected to claims that all cultural solutions to biological problems were morally equivalent. In only five years, public and federal support for MACOS had collapsed. The legacy of the program, then, can be seen in the lasting cultural authority of biology, rather than anthropology, as the key to human nature.