Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities

Imagined Communities is often cited as the single volume that changed the way that a range of disciplines view nationalism. Written as a response to the failure of Marxist scholars to account for why (typically) men were willing to lay down their life for their country, Anderson equates the nation to a modern religious force in most people's lives, providing them through print and other media technologies with a community that they imagine are carrying out the same activities at the same time in countless locations in the same nation.
I read the whole book (229 pages), from the perspective of critiquing Identity studies, so that I could use this quote: "Out of this estrangement [from one's own unremembered childhood past] comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and that naked baby are identical) which, because it cannot be 'remembered,' must be narrated. Against biology's demonstration that every single cell in a human body is replaced over seven years, the narratives of autobiography and biography flood print-capitalism's markets year by year." (p.204) and write this statement: Anderson (2006) explains in glorious detail how one of the most apparently stable forms of identity - Nationalism - is the product of a particular historical moment, conducive to the economic transformation from imperial state, supported by divine right, to capitalist state, supported by economic might, enabled by mass education, print literacy and linguistic imperialism.
So worth it!!
(This last bit is from my Goodreads.com review)
As a footnote, I found this obituary on the author, but there are plenty of others.

Svenbro - Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece

Some modern theorists on reading in the modern and ancient world want to view the act, process and social position of reading from a modern position. What Svenbro manages in this volume is to make clear just how different the social position of reading was in ancient Greece. The debate around silent reading seems to produce violent reactions because, I believe, modern theorists do not want their heroes viewed as somehow deficient, and maintaining that Plato or Plutarch had to, at least, subvocalise when reading or, at worst, always read aloud is liking calling them dunces (put on the cone-shaped hat & stand in the corner Plato!). Svenbro makes very clear that the social stigma attached to reading aloud simply did not exist in ancient Greece. In fact, writing was only seen as a (poor) replacement for the voice. The role of the written word was to produce a voice, and only when the ear caught the words could a meaning be reproduced. This was so important to the Greeks that myths were developed to separate Greek writing from its Phoenician roots. Unlike other commentators, however, Svenbro disagrees that the ancients could not read silently. It was possible (although the form of writing in scriptura continua made it far less efficient than modern spaced writing), but it was very unusual and was only practiced by scholars, playwrights or poets that had to read a lot of text. Svenbro deduces all of this from original documents, placing particular emphasis on inscriptions on statues that announce themselves to the reader as well as extracts of plays and poetry.

Yep. You guessed it - also available as a Goodreads review.

Everett Update

Dan Everett's been busy of late. He has been involved in a documentary about his beloved Pirahã, and has a new book out. The documentary is called "The Grammar of Happiness" and the book is called "Language The Cultural Tool." Naturally, all this activity is firmly directed against the school of Chomsky and against Pinker's multi-million best-sellers. Everett appears intent intent on publicly discrediting the generativist/minimalist school. 

Trailer for "The Grammar of Happiness"

The debate rages on about whether the Pirahã language has recursion or not (and if it does not, does it really matter), but just to stoke the fires  higher, Everett has published a new book, called "Language The Cultural Tool." Yes, that's right. You would be hard pushed to pick a phrase that more succinctly says "No. Syntax is not autonomous." For years, generativists have been misrepresenting the ideas of Whorf and Sapir, not least in combining them into a mythical Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that simply does not exist. I hope that Everett is able to bring the debate back onto neutral ground and really tackle the question of how our language construes our perception of the world. For all his image as a 'radical' or 'the U.S. dissident', Chomsky's linguistics is deeply ideologically conservative (Chris Knight explains this very well in Weekly Worker 655, 656 and 657). Maintaining that you do not need to analyse language linguistically in order to identify its power structures, or that habitual language use does not blind one to the legitimacy of incumbent power structures, contributes to the obscuring of the ideological role of language.

You can find reviews of the new book from New York Times and The Guardian, among others.

On a separate but related note, I was on DubaiEye's 'Talking of Books' programme on June 9th, where I  championed Everett's earlier popular book "Don't Sleep there are Snakes" (reviewed in an earlier blog). You can hear most of that segment of the show on Grooveshark.

Help the Apes

You may have heard about Kanzi, Panbanisha or other apes at The Great Ape TRUST, you may have heard about the enormous advances made by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues in communicating with another species, or you may have seen a talk on the amazing developments made in reducing the misunderstanding that many people have about what makes human language different from communication systems of other genetically closely-related species. If not, please check out the TED talk by Sue here and on an earlier blog entry here and from The Great Ape TRUST.

Did you know that despite the amazing breakthroughs that they have made, this exemplary research centre is under threat due to a lack of funds? They are asking people to make donations, small or large, to help with research projects, day-to-day running of the centre and feeding programmes. This is hopefully a temporary situation as the centre makes the transition from depending on a few benefactors to a wider range of donations and sources of funding. You can find out more from here, and you can make a donation by clicking on the small window on the right of the home page for  The Great Ape TRUST. It looks just like the one on the left.

The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

by Terrence W. Deacon

In answer to central questions such as "What makes humans different?", "Is it brain size that gives humans speech?", "How did consciousness and language evolve in humans?", and "What is consciousness?", Deacon provides an elegant solution. We are a symbolic species. Language, and as a consequence consciousness, are made possible by the use of an ability to process symbols. I will try to explain how the symbolic process works, why it is important, how it evolved, and what effect it has on consciousness following Deacon's arguments.

Let us make a few important points to start with. The approach here is truly inspirational and revolutionary. This is not a repetition of tired and discredited views of 'language areas of the brain' or the left-right split for thought and language. This book does not spend 450+ pages supporting the tired hackneyed conjecturing of Chomsky, Pinker & their followers. Ever since Chomsky first announced some kind of language acquisition device, more and more physical evidence has been amassed about how the brain functions and is structured to show how misguided the original idea was. Instead of retreating, the Chomsky camp has only tried to obscure this basic belief behind formalisms and frauds. Deacon puts the problem clearly. It is nonsense to talk about brains being specifically designed to cater to language from birth, as if language is fixed and brains change to suit language. Whatever language is, it must have evolved to cater to the proclivities of human brain structures and patterns. Language has evolved to the human brain, not the other way.

The core principle of Deacon's approach is a neo-Piercean symbolism. While a real-life object may have a referent, the referent can quickly become an icon that stands separately from the object itself. In the animal world, alarm calls have a direct relationship between a threat and the sound made by a group of animals. These references rarely become iconic in the way that a pet dog may be able to associate any kind of round object with the sound of 'ball' and behave accordingly. None of these, however, represent the way that humans use language. The extra step that animals do not seem to make is to then re-associate icons with each other in novel combinations to the extent that meaning is derived more from the relationships between icons than between the icon and the original object. That this ability is not beyond animals, in particular bonobos, has been demonstrated by the great work carried out by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues at the Great Ape Trust, referred to by Deacon.

The question that we must answer is why humans have come to depend so heavily on symbols. Or, more precisely, what evolutionary advantage did symbolic thinking offer early humans? To answer this question Deacon suggests that to look for the source of humans' unique linguistic abilities we should look at their unique evolutionary adaptations. Fundamentally, human societies are all WRONG for two reasons. The first is that human growth patterns work against survival. At precisely the time that mothers and infants need the most food they are at their most incompetent at foraging and feeding. The only way that the mother and child can be assured of having enough food is to share with others, either with other potential mothers or with the father. Potential mothers must make the symbolic connection between exchanging food in their hand for a promise of assistance when they are in need. Thus reciprocity, a human cultural universal, is a symbolic act - it is an exchange of material goods for a promise. Even animals capable of symbolic reasoning find this a difficult leap to make. A father will only share food if he is certain that the child is carrying their genes - and this leads us to the 2nd reason why human societies should not really work when compared to other animals' responses to the reproduction of an individual's genes. Typically animals will either pair-bond or congregate in exclusive mating groups. That is pair-bonds will have a way of showing other potential mates that they are no longer available for reproduction and may even withdraw from potential contact with other suitors to ensure the continuation of their genes. Outside crowded colonies, this is a typical response for many bird species. The other response is typified by the lion pride. A small number of (often related) males will mate with a 'harem' of females who are then given the responsibility of child-rearing and feeding. Thus, when a new lion takes over the pride he will normally kill all the infant lions so that the lionesses are not spending effort on raising another lion's cubs. The same dilemma of 'wasting' valuable resources on another man's genes faces humans, but the response of human social groupings is 'perverse.' Human groups typically consist of a variety of potential male and female mates. In order to ensure a pair-bond humans must again use a symbolic process to pair-bond: they must promise themselves to each other. Thus another human cultural universal becomes ritualised in the myriad forms of marriage ceremony that exist to announce to the community that a pair bond has been established.

So if Deacon can tie the genesis of language down to the end of Australopithecus and the start of homo habilus, what has happened to language since? Whatever language was at the start, it is no longer. We cannot expect our current linguistic abilities to have appeared in total at once. Deacon suggests that a lot of original language was multi-modal, involving body movements, pitch and volume. All of these aspects of communication are still present, but are often ignored by linguists obsessed with predicate logic. We cannot communicate without moving parts of our bodies and Deacon points out that while the 'words' that we concentrate so hard on are being transferred by speech, prosodic features of language are working hard to provide emotional cues. He then describes how the brain probably works in parallel across the two hemispheres to chunk incoming linguistic information so that while one half works on the segmented sounds that constitute lexis and grammar the other tries to unravel the cues provided by prosody. That is, neither hemisphere is exclusively related to language but the two hemispheres simultaneously process different types of linguistic information - and this can be learned by either side of the brain.

This is a superb book. It is almost impossible to do it justice in any length of review. In fact it is 3 superb books - one on linguistics, one on neurology and one on evolution. No make that 4 - it is also fundamentally an anthropological book. While this is its great strength, it is also what makes it a difficult read for most people. Few others could write this book, and most readers will have background knowledge in one or maybe two of these areas. Alongside Deacon's more typical anthropological interests in culture and language (and more than a passing interest in evolutionary theory), his expertise stretches to neurology and experimental biological anthropology. One might call him a renaissance man, but that probably betrays how narrowly-focused many disciplines and specialities have become as much as it celebrates the breadth of Deacon's knowledge.

View all my reviews at Goodreads.com. Yes, another cut-and-paste from goodreads.com.

See more of Terrence Deacon on this blog entry, visit Terrence Deacon's homepage  and access a great article from PNAS outlining his views.

Daniel Everett: Don't Sleep, There are Snakes

What's not to like? A passionate description of an exotic culture. Wild jungle, wild animals and wild times. Stories of learning by an 'educated' white guy from 'uneducated' natives. And as if that wasn't enough - there's enough fieldwork data to severely rock Chomskian linguistics to the core.

Dan Everett spent 20 years or more living with the Pirahã on the banks of the Madeira river in the Amazonian rainforest. His mission – in more ways than one – was to learn the language of these ‘primitive’ people in order to translate the bible into their language so they could be converted – presumably into ‘civilised’ people who fear and worship God. As Dan learned more about the Pirahã, anthropology and linguistics it became clear to him why his mission was pointless. The ‘primitive’ Pirahã, it seems, have a core value which dictates a large part of their lives: they are pure empiricists. They do not believe anything that they have not witnessed themselves – or, at a stretch, what is reported by a reliable witness. So, when Dan the missionary is asked how he knows Jesus, the good book just doesn’t cut it with these people. Apparently, these primitive people do not believe when someone tells them about what someone wrote down thousands of years about someone else they had never met in another language in another country. Funny that – well, funny that we should believe it. In fact, they do not believe in any mythical metaphysical explanation for why we were put on earth. They just get on with it.

So, why is that important for linguistics? Bear with me for a moment. According to the generative school of linguistics, created by Noam Chomsky over 50 years ago, language is pre-wired into human brains. Chomsky and his followers, including Pinker, have spent enormous time, energy and research dollars trying to prove exactly what it is that unites ALL human languages – if language is innate, as they claim, one would expect to find a wide range of common features across all languages past and present. Well, it seems that they have only been able to find one common feature – it’s called recursion. Recursion is generally agreed to cover aspects of language which repeat themselves inside themselves. A great example is (This is the cat that chased the mouse that ate the malt that stood in) ‘The house that Jack built’. We see here how a structure in language can repeat itself inside itself – in English this can be accomplished using relative clauses – presumably ad infinitum. We can also see how, using conjunctions for example, clauses can be added to each other, and added to each other, and added to each other, and added to each other… etc. So, let’s get back to Everett. What Everett found that has upset generative grammarians is that the Pirahã language appears to have no recursion at all. There is no embedding of ideas inside other ideas. There is no joining of sentences to make longer sentences. Each idea is separate and self-complete. This claim, and the claim that the Pirahã cultural value of empiricism affects their language as well as their culture, has been tested by other anthropologists and linguists. In general, they confirm Everett’s analysis.

Just as in horticulture, the Amazon rainforest has provided us with an exotic species that turns our understanding of medicine, biology or horticulture on its head. In this case, an Amazonian culture and language has demanded that the inductive-driven linguistics of the late 20th Century rethink its fundamental principles. If recursion is the only factor common to all human languages, and recursion is not common to one language, then there is no common factor and so the assumption that humans come ‘pre-loaded’ with language can no longer stand the weight of evidence.

There is one thing that I do not like about the stories that Everett provides. It seems tragic that anyone wanting to become a missionary, even in the 20th-21st centuries, is provided with all the necessary resources to live with an indigenous group of people. Meanwhile, anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists can barely find the money to study language groups in their own countries. The happy ending for us (but not for Dan, who is now divorced from his missionary wife) is that Everett makes the transition from missionary to linguist and anthropologist as a consequence of his encounters with the Pirahã.

Thanks to Phyllis & Alistair Burns who gave me the book for Christmas.
Another lazy cut'n'paste review from my Goodreads site