With Nudity, Culture

One school of anthropologists argues that the highest forms of civilization must develop in temperate climates. If a country is too cold, they say, its people have to struggle too hard just to stay alive. If it is too hot, they relax into slow-moving lassitude. Chief exponent of this theory was Yale's Professor Ellsworth Huntington, who lived in New Haven, Conn. He decided that the climate of Connecticut is ideal for culture.

Huntingtonism was seldom well received by anthropologists or by real-estate promoters of hot countries. In the Florida Anthropologist, Anthropology Professor Frederick R. Wulsin of Tufts (in cool Massachusetts) comes to the defense of the tropical and semitropical climates. It's not either the heat or the humidity, Dr. Wulsin says: it is over-dressing that robs tropical residents of their energy.

Dr. Wulsin explains with much mathematics how the human body keeps itself at the proper temperature. Heat escapes by radiation, by convection and conduction to the air and through the cooling effect of evaporation. When it does not escape fast enough, the temperature of the internal organs rises. The heart pumps harder to carry more blood to the surface. Sometimes so much blood is needed for carrying heat that not enough remains to make the body work properly.

Defensive Lassitude. In warm weather or during exercise, the evaporation of sweat does most of the final cooling, but the body cannot produce an unlimited amount of sweat, and if it is forced to do so, there are various ill effects. So the natural reaction of the overheated human is to sit still until his temperature falls. In the long run, this defensive lassitude lowers the cultural level.

Dr. Wulsin describes experiments, some of them for the Army, on how clothes hamper the body in keeping itself cool. They act as insulators, checking heat loss by radiation. More important, they create near the skin a layer of hot, moisture-saturated air. Sweat cannot evaporate until it has soaked through the clothing, and then its cooling effect is largely wasted. Dr. Wulsin ridicules the idea that Europeans in tropical climates should wear helmets and heavy clothing to keep from being felled by the tropical sun. The less clothing they wear, he says, the better off they are.

Climate Next the Skin. Having proved the evils of clothing, Dr. Wulsin considers the alleged inferiority of hot-country civilizations. It is largely a myth, he says. He derides the contention of Professor Huntington that the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Mayans and Indonesia were developed under climates cooler than at present. There have been no significant changes of climate-- except in the climate next to people's skins.

In the old days, people in the tropics wore little clothing, usually nothing above the waist. Now tropical people of European culture, clinging to European customs, go clothed as if they were dressing for a chilly British spring. The natural result is lassitude and a lowered cultural level. Dr. Wulsin implies that if modern tropical people, such as his Florida hosts, could learn to go bare as the Balinese, they might support as lively a culture as Professor Huntington's Connecticut.

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