The People Prof : What Do Yuppies, Gangs Share? A UCLA Anthropologist Knows

Walter Goldschmidt lives worlds away from the violent streets of South-Central Los Angeles. He has a house and study in an idyllic setting high above Bel-Air--trees and flowering bushes line the lane, goldfish and water lilies float in a brick-lined pool, a waterfall quietly trickles down a rocky hillside. Yet the professor emeritus of anthropology at UCLA finds himself in accord with the judgments that residents of South Central have been passing on “Operation Streetsweep,” the recent nationwide roundup and arrest of scores of suspected gang members.

“Those guys are right. It’s not the way to tackle the problem,” Goldschmidt says, adding that he was not against the arrests per se, but that they are ineffective in the long run. The actions of gang members are often antisocial, but the motivation behind them, he says, is the universal need for acceptance.

“We have to create an environment to which boys, and to some extent girls, are drawn, where they can see positive opportunities, the possibility of being part of the mainstream culture that many of them want to be in.”

Goldschmidt says all people have the same need for recognition, validation and acceptance from their culture and subcultures. Getting it constitutes what he calls the “human career.” As with gang members, so with yuppies on the career ladders of corporate America, so with faculty members aiming for tenure and departmental chairs, so with the Tlingit Indians of southeastern Alaska, giving away their worldly goods to rival clans in order to demonstrate the power and prestige of their tribe over others.

“Every man and every woman in every human society is engaged in the pursuit of career,” Goldschmidt says, and while the nature of the pursuit varies with each group, the basic drive is the same: “the need to validate oneself, the desire for acceptance and prestige.”

He does not mean career in a narrow sense--the “human” career includes such activities as creation of a family, public conduct, even the making of one’s living space--all the things that “the people of his or her community think makes a good person.”

Goldschmidt calls this need for a positive response “affect hunger,” and he traces it to both biological and cultural programming. Affect hunger can be seen in various species of animals as they groom each other in the forest and care for their offspring.

Much of Goldschmidt’s own human career as an anthropologist has been spent researching and developing that view of human nature. Recently he pulled his ideas together, using his own and others’ field research, in a book titled “The Human Career: The Self in the Symbolic World,” published by Basil Blackman.

Now 77, Goldschmidt, who first joined the UCLA faculty in 1946 after receiving his doctorate from UC Berkeley and working for the Department of Agriculture, has made it his life’s work to make anthropology more relevant to contemporary society and problems.

He talks about his life’s work--which includes studies of the Sebai people in Uganda, Indian tribes in Northern California, and an agricultural community in California’s Central Valley--first in his living room filled with Chinese furniture and antiques, then in his study, a light-filled book-and-memorabilia-lined place overlooking the garden.

Operation Streetsweep is not the first time he has thought about gangs.

When Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates announced in 1988 that the department was declaring war on gangs, Goldschmidt predicted the violence would increase, the killings would go up. Which they did. That year, gang-related killings increased by 25% over 1987.

“It served only to challenge them,” he says. In “The Human Career” he writes of Gates’ action and choice of the war metaphor, saying it “feeds directly into the central values of the gang, (machismo and loyalty) inevitably evoking a spirit of revenge.”

“I think the solution is obvious and expensive,” Goldschmidt continues. “We have to offer real career opportunities to underclass youth. Getting them to play football and basketball against each other is not enough. We’ve got to make it clear at the ground level that there really are opportunities, and get these children being courted by the gangs. Get them to see the payoff may not be as fast but it’s more certain and satisfying.

“It’ll be expensive, but not as expensive as what we’re paying now. We are spending a lot of money on the problem. We’re spending it on police; we’re building jails like crazy rather than schools and teachers salaries. It’s not a simple solution but it’s the only one.” Gangs are not the only element of society where the values of the group work negatively against the values, or welfare, of the larger society. Goldschmidt sees a similar dynamic in the Chernobyl and Challenger disasters.

“If there’s a disaster, like a plane crash,” he says, people always ask, ‘Was it a human error, or was it a technological error?’ But there’s a third question: ‘Was the error at the organizational level, the institutional level?’ ”

That was the case with the Challenger and Chernobyl incidents, he says. In both the American and Soviet disasters, overzealous bureaucrats were working to make their boss, their company, their division, their politicians look good.

“There were people performing responsible acts, acting with the best of motives, or motives viewed as best. And yet, (the disasters) proved such people could be just as destructive as those feathering their nests. The institutions were inadequate. They did not create a moral environment to meet the situation.”

Whether gang members, bureaucrats or aborigines, he says, the task for society is the same: to provide institutions and rewards that harness selfish motivations so they can serve the common good. “That’s what totemism is all about.”

Totems, objects that are emblems or symbols of a group and which frequently serve some sort of mystical function, are crucial to him--and to us. Whether the flag, a monument, a sacred relic of the past, or individual status symbols--the sports car, the Phi Beta key, the club membership, the regimental tie or the gang’s colors--they help define a person’s status and achievement in a culture.

In Goldschmidt’s career there have been an abundance of such markers, some of them predictable: the chairmanship of UCLA’s anthropology department, grants and fellowships from Fullbright, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, presidency of the American Anthropological Assn. and the American Ethnological Society.

Twice his former students honored him with an old academic custom, presenting him with a limited edition of bound copies of essays they had written in his honor. In February, on the 30th anniversary of the founding of the African Studies Center at UCLA, which coincided with Goldschmidt’s 77th birthday, the academic community honored him for his leading role in establishing the center by throwing him a “thousand moons” party. (Based on a lunar calendar, he was 1,000 moons old.) Emeritus since 1983, he still teaches several classes for the department, “elementary Goldschmidt and a seminar.”

Closer to home, there is his family. Saying, “there’s no fool like an old fool,” Goldschmidt reaches for some photos “at the ready” on an end table and shows off his first grandchild, marveling at his pleasure in having people tell him she looks like him.

He has two sons, Karl and Mark, both in Los Angeles. He married his wife, Gale, in 1937. They spent their honeymoon among the Hupa Indians in the Pacific Northwest, watching the White Deerskin Dance, and spent much of their life together working closely, collaborating in research but not writing, with Gale taking many of the photographs that illustrate his books. For the past few years she has been hospitalized with Alzheimer’s disease.

Goldschmidt, who was born in 1913 to German immigrant parents in San Antonio, Tex., received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Texas, before going to Berkeley in 1935.

Although most of his professional reputation is as an Africanist and derives from the work he did among the Sebai people in Uganda, his early research focused on Indian tribes in the Pacific Northwest, the Nomlaki and the Hupa.

His doctoral research, studying the effects of industrialization on an agricultural community--Wasco, Ca.--led to his work with the Department of Agriculture, conducting a comparative study of two rural communities: one composed of traditional, small family farms; the other adapting to large-scale industrialized farming.

All of that research may be eclectic, but it does not mean it is without a pattern, all of it sharpening and focusing the fundamental questions and hunches about why we are the way we are and how we got to be that way. And, Goldschmidt says, with a long list of books and publications along the way, it all led to “The Human Career.”

“I think anthropology has a lot to say about human nature,” he says, going on to describe what he attempts in his latest book. “It’s an effort to bring together ideas of our biological heritage as animals and what we’ve done with it through the process of creating a second world, a symbolic world. We live in two worlds at the same time.”

For the individual, he says, the process begins in infancy. There is a dynamic between biology and culture, he says, and what starts out as infantile programming becomes the process by which all human experience of things is transformed into the symbolic world.

“The child is inducted into this world,” he says, and, driven by affect hunger, endeavors to evoke a positive response from his environment.

Goldschmidt has spent his academic life studying what makes man a social, morally responsible being, immersing himself in the symbols, rituals and beliefs that form societies and hold them together.

Ironically, he says, it was probably atheism that got him into anthropology.

“I was raised an atheist with a high sense of morality, too much morality. That’s what gave me the questions.”

Somehow or other, he says, human beings evolved into something more than a band of monkeys. The somehow has to do with the creation of symbols, shared values and beliefs.

“You have to get people to feel the clan is important, and to feel strongly about each other. I’ve come to the conclusion . . . that the ability to believe, the suspension of disbelief, is an essential ingredient in the transition of the prehuman to the human. . . . To me, religion is all a great metaphor for the human capacity to have empathy for a fellow human being.”

Human nature is nothing if not fascinating, and, sounding as if, overall, he rather likes it, he says of his lifelong pursuit: “This was the genesis of it--wanting to know how human beings got to be the crazy animals they are.”