In any situation when two people are talking, they create a cultural structure. Our task, as anthropologists, will be to determine what are the potential contents of the culture that results from these interpersonal relations in these situations.
Edward Sapir
IN THE COLONIALIST EXPANSIONS and explorations of European nations, communities very different from Europe were discovered. These newly discovered communities shocked ethnocentric Europeans. Their radically different appearances and ways of life raised the issue of whether all creatures that look like humans are indeed fully human. Do they all have souls? Many Europeans thought not. At least they believed in the inferiority of these people they had just ‘discovered’, leading to their justification for exploitation, colonialism and enslavement of them. Did they all come from the same source as us, God? Are some varieties of humans superior to others? Anthropological and comparative linguistic studies arose from such questions, questions fundamental to the understanding of language evolution culturally and biologically. And these issues continue to be questioned by some.
One prominent example of European thought about cultural and linguistic differences was Sir William Jones, who served the British Raj as legal counsel in the late eighteenth century. Jones was more than a common solicitor, however. For one thing, he was a man of radical politics, strongly supporting the efforts of his friend and one-time co-author Benjamin Franklin for American independence. Jones also studied the social systems of India. But most importantly for intellectual history, Jones was a linguistic prodigy, speaking thirteen languages fluently and another twenty-eight reasonably well, as the story goes. He put this linguistic brilliance to use not only by talking different languages, however. He also wanted to understand these languages scientifically. Most importantly for our story here, Jones also searched for evidence about the historical connections between these languages.
During Jones’s survey of data from various sources, he experienced one of history’s most important ‘Eureka’ moments. He had rediscovered a fact first noticed more than one hundred years earlier by German Andreas Jaeger in 1686 and again in 1767 by the French Jesuit missionary to India, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux. Though the work of Jaeger and Coeurdoux was largely ignored, Jones’s independent observation of the same fact was to reverberate through the centuries as one of the most important findings in the study of human communication. This insight was that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic (German-related languages) and Celtic all traced their origin back to a common ancestor. They were sister languages. Their mother language – also the mother of many other sibling languages awaiting their turn to be discovered or otherwise enter the family tree – came to be known as Proto-Indo-European. With Jones, Jaeger and Coeurdoux the study of language origins began in earnest.
Then almost one hundred years later, near Weimar, Germany, another important tool was developed for researching language origins. In 1850 twenty-nine-year-old German philologist August Schleicher published a book in which he claimed that human languages should be studied as organisms, on a par with biological organisms, related to one another by genus, species and variety – the same sorts of relationships we now understand to hold between all flora and fauna. Schleicher made the case that the best way to represent the evolutionary relationships between languages was by ‘tree diagrams’. With this proposal he not only made an enormous contribution to the history and evolution of languages but also introduced the concept of ‘natural descent’ – nine years before Darwin published his Origin of Species.
Schleicher’s and Jones’s work inspired others to think deeply about the relationships between languages. It became apparent that, using the method of constructing language trees that began to be developed in India, Germany, France, England and elsewhere, we could look back into time in our search for where and when specific languages originated. It was eventually discovered that Indo-European was the mother of most European languages. And it was then discovered that this was also the mother of non-European languages such as Farsi, Hindi and many others. The question thus naturally arose whether we could discover the mother of Indo-European itself. We know now that Indo-European began to split into the modern European languages approximately 6,000 years ago. Can we go further? Ten millennia? A hundred? Could we actually use the methods of comparative and historical linguistics to reconstruct the first language ever spoken?
Most contemporary linguists respond to this question with a firm ‘No’. The methods Jones’s work called attention to seem to hit the wall at about 6,000 years. To go deeper we will need the methods of other fields, such as palaeontology, archaeology and biology – and we’d need what we probably can never have, preserved samples of languages.
But the question remains. If we were able to travel back further than those 6,000 years, where would we end up? Would the quest of Jones, Schleicher and others take us back to a single language at the root of one enormous tree of human languages? Some people think so. The late Stanford professor Joseph Greenberg claimed that we could trace all human languages back to a single source, which he and his followers labelled proto-sapiens. But other scholars say no. They maintain that there are many trees all going back to different prehistoric communities of hominids. Greenberg and his disciples believe in monogenesis, the hypothesis that there is only one beginning – one mother tongue – for all human languages. Others advocate polygenesis, that there are multiple evolutionary beginnings for modern human languages. These people argue that the ancestors of modern humans left Africa speaking different languages. Different communities of speakers developed different languages that in turn are the sources of all modern languages. Choosing the best hypothesis, monogenesis vs polygenesis, is just one of myriad problems we face in trying to reconstruct the evolution of human languages.
We know that other methods, other sciences beyond linguistics, can take us further back in time. But can they transport us to the beginning of human language? Can we know anything about who told the first story? Or who first said, ‘I love you’? The romance and the science come together in this story of the search for human language origins. It is a tale replete with scientific controversy and marked by frustratingly slow progress towards the ultimate goal of knowing how humans, but no other species, moved from mere communication to language. Although historical linguists believe that the methodology of their field is unable to reveal much once we go beyond 6,000 years ago, its major insight, that languages change over time due to a combination of cultural and linguistic reasons, is essential to an understanding of language evolution.
Historical (or ‘diachronic’) linguistics, the field virtually launched by Jones’s work, is the field dedicated to understanding how languages change over time. For example, English and German were once the same language (‘Proto-Germanic’), as were Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and French (Latin). And we know that Latin and Proto-Germanic were themselves one language some 6,000 years ago, Indo-European. The science of how languages drift apart as these languages have is one of the oldest branches of the study of language and it is relevant to the field of language evolution. After all, if Homo erectus underwent evolution to become Homo sapiens, maybe the language of Homo erectus also changed into the languages presently spoken by Homo sapiens. Any change in erectus languages, however, would be beyond the science of historical linguistics. That is because erectus lived much longer than 6,000 years ago. Even one of the main tools used by historical linguists for dating when one language in all likelihood split to become another, glottochronology (literally, ‘tongue time’; referred to by some as ‘lexicostatistics’) is of no assistance to here. Glottochronology, invented by linguist Morris Swadesh, assumed that there were some vocabulary items (such as parts of the body, words for sun, moon and others) that were less likely to be borrowed. He therefore came up with a list of two hundred words or ‘lexical items’ which he considered represented the words least likely to change. A mathematical formula was proposed and developed, based on the rate of change of the words in his list, to predict the rate at which these most resistant-to-change words might in fact change over time. The formula was tested and deemed to have 87 per cent accuracy in known cases, such as the Indo-European languages. Though many linguists still are highly sceptical of the method, it does seem to be useful. But it is not able take us back further than the 6,000 years wall. So it is not a tool for language evolution.
What it and the entire field of historical linguistics do show, however, is that languages continue to change. In fact, linguists recognise that change in modern languages is largely the result of a form of linguistic natural selection that would have certainly been operative in the first languages ever spoken. All languages change all the time. They change because of geographical separation (think ‘genetic drift’), or from differing preferences of age, economy, race and many other factors. And these forces in one form or another mean that the languages of Homo erectus began to change as new communities were formed. Much of historical linguistics boils down to the idea ‘You talk like who you talk with.’ Once you stop talking to a group of people, you will eventually stop talking like them. Or at least your group will. This is why each time we reach a major river or mountain range in Europe, we are likely to find distinct languages on each side that were once the same language. As for English and German, English was born from German after the crossing of the English Channel by the Saxons.
Because language is a cultural artefact, we must understand what culture is in order to understand language. So what is a culture, then? Is a culture like a football team? Or perhaps like an orchestra? Or is culture simply the overlap in values, roles and knowledge of individuals who live together and talk together? The larger issue is how cultures hang together at all. In other words, in what sense might the American motto E pluribus unam * describe American culture? Since I claim that culture is an abstraction, it can only be found in the individual. It is the result of a ‘gestalt’. From its various individual members, a culture emerges which is greater than the sum of its parts. Understanding culture has profound implications for understanding language evolution.
I have in my own work developed a theory of culture in which the individual is the bearer of culture and the repository of knowledge, rather than the society as a whole. I want to look at the effects of culture on the nature of national and local societies and individuals and their languages, via examples such as the role of the teacher in the classroom, the organisation of businesses and the organisation of societies. The three ideas of my work that are most important for language evolution are values, knowledge and social roles.
As a further illustration of the importance of culture in language, consider the following interactions between two linguists:
A. ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.’
B. ‘They sure do.’
The general population of English speakers may have no idea what A’s utterance means. But if A and B are members of the culture of linguists, then they know that this is a famous example sentence in Chomsky’s early writings that is designed to show that a sentence can be grammatical yet meaningless. For the two linguists, A’s sentence is an insider joke and B’s response a humorous rejoinder. The function of the exchange might be largely phatic, simply to say, ‘Hey, we are both linguists.’ What is often overlooked, though, is that B’s reply shows that ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ is not, in fact, meaningless. It tells us that, whatever green ideas are, they sure do sleep furiously. In other words, because of the cooperative principle, all people will believe that an utterance has meaning and will work to attribute meaning to it, regardless of what words it is composed of.
Now consider the following. Persons C and D are watching the New England Patriots play the Miami Dolphins. The Patriots take the lead. C and D both yell, ‘Yes!’ and ‘high five’ one another. In this joint action they show knowledge that there is a game of football, knowledge of how this game is scored, shared value-ranking for the Patriots relative to the Dolphins, knowledge of what ‘high fives’ are like and what they are for, knowledge that they are both ‘rooting’ for the same team and reinforcement of all of the above.
From such culture activities come knowledge, community belonging and shared communication. These exemplify the role of living in a culture and speaking a language in constructing our identities and our societies. From these actions the individual assembles his or her own experiences and an ability to understand the actions and speech of their fellow culture members. As an example of how unspoken much of culture is, it is worth reviewing one of the many failed treaty attempts between North American indigenous peoples and their European-immigrant conquerors.
A historical incident, the famous Treaty of Medicine Lodge, signed in 1867 between the Arapaho, Kiowa and Comanche peoples and the US government at the Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas, was simply one of many failed communications between European and indigenous communities based on misunderstandings caused by the tacit cultural information that is required to interpret what language leaves unsaid. A serious and war-threatening misunderstanding grew out of two distinct cultural interpretations of this deceptively simple-looking treaty. The indigenes expected one thing. The government expected another. And both were right according to the language. This is a common source of misunderstanding between individuals, across cultures and internationally. Such misunderstandings boil down to culture’s role in filling in the gaps that language is missing and underlying the interpretation of language itself. I want to look at the Medicine Lodge misunderstanding in more detail.
For more than a century, anthropologists have bickered about the definition of culture. The members of a given family, community, society, or nation clearly share some knowledge, some values and some relationships. They may talk alike. They may dress alike. They may show disgust at similar things. They may all drink coffee from their saucers.
So the question arises naturally, ‘What is culture?’ Culture is the tacit knowledge and overt practice of social roles, values and ways of being shared by a community. Each of us has many different roles. I am a father, a teacher, an administrator, a husband, a shopper, a patient and a researcher. Each one of these roles is recognised by most members of my community. To the degree that they are recognised, my community shares knowledge of these components of culture with me. Culture distinguishes and shapes us, even when our roles may seem universal, such as ‘father’, and so might appear independent of culture on the surface. But although there are Italian fathers and American fathers, the concept of ‘father’ is not identical in every culture. It seems likely that between any two cultures, fathers will have overlapping but never identical roles. Even fathers of ostensibly the same cultures vary in the nature of their roles at different times.
Some societies may believe that fathers should support their families. In such a society, it may be assumed that fathers have a responsibility to provide food, clothing and shelter for their children. And, in Western societies at least, both the society and many fathers themselves believe that it is good for fathers to help their children with schoolwork, heavy lifting and tasks in general too difficult for children to do alone. Fathers of other generations may share exactly these beliefs and values. But these values are not identical across different cultures. A Pirahã father will not often pick up a child that has injured itself to offer comfort. He will expect the child to work hard and not complain on long treks through the jungle and will not offer assistance in many cases that the American father would. And his individual values emerge partly from the values of other members of his society.
And, of course, across different generations, fathers may differ profoundly. Values shared by many of my father’s generation included corporal punishment, the expectation that women did the bulk or all of the housework, the belief that their wishes and orders would be carried out without question and the attitude that their children were not deserving of respect or of a voice in family affairs. These fathers might regularly side with teachers against their own children in disputes. They considered the child and all its resources as mere extensions of themselves or their possessions. The fathers of the generation of my children, on the other hand, usually avoid corporal punishment, see their family as a unit of equals, know they ought not to believe that their desires should be the only or even the main ones heard, often help clean the house, would almost always take their children’s side in a school dispute and so on. Being a father in the 1950s was considerably different from being a father in the twenty-first century. This is because the cultural role of ‘father’ is defined by shifting cultural values.
If my quick summary of the evolution of fathering over the past few years is on the right track, then the fact that the changes affect entire generations similarly indicates sharing of values – culture. This is part of what it means for a group to have a culture. All cultural roles show similar diachronic, geographic, economic and other shifts across time, space, or populations. If we move from roles to beliefs or from beliefs to shared concepts, to shared phenotypes (a phenotype is the visible appearance and behaviour of an individual), shared food and shared music, we will find many examples of shared knowledge producing distinct cultures.
In part these shared mental items emerge because over the course of one’s life, each accumulates experiences, lessons and relationships. These are all in a sense assimilated into our bodies and minds. People who grow up in the same community have similar experiences – climate, television, food, laws and values (such as fat is bad, honesty is right, hard work is godly). Episodic and muscle memories hold our various experiences together as cultural experiences embed themselves within us. Arguably our ‘self’, or at least our ‘sense of self’, is no more than this accumulation of memories and apperceptions.
How does one recognise another as part of the same culture? Indexes are readable by members of any culture, in fact by members of most species. They are clues to the environment necessary for survival across many life forms. And thus it is known that the ability to connect a representation to a form is an ancient ability of the genus Homo. Humans were never without it. Icons, on the other hand, require more. Whether making an icon or simply collecting one, the reader of the icon must understand that it physically resembles what it represents. Understanding, whether indexes, icons, or symbols, is an intentional act, directly or indirectly. (This is because to understand requires at least tacit recognition of connections between the sign and the thing it refers to.) An index is itself, however, non-intentional. One doesn’t plan for a footprint to be connected to man. It just is.
The ability to interpret cultural information comes slowly. Everyone is born outside of culture and language. We are all partially aliens as we emerge from our mothers’ wombs (‘partially’ because learning about our new culture and language begins in the womb). When we are born, we are outside our mother’s culture looking in. Our senses provide information. But it takes time to interpret what we are seeing, feeling, tasting, touching and hearing.
Examples of misunderstandings caused by culture are plentiful in the history of the Native American and ‘manifest destiny’ in the nineteenth century. Communication between them failed many times due to an inadequate appreciation for each other’s culture, just as communication between governments in the twenty-first century often do.† An example alluded to earlier is the 1867 Treaty of Medicine Lodge.
This treaty was ineffective from the beginning. For once at least an official treaty with the Indians was invalidated not because of dishonesty on the part of the government but because the signatories failed to realise that language, whether spoken or written in treaties, is merely the visible portion of an invisible universe of understanding that derives from the values, knowledge and experiences – the cultures – of individual communities. Though people might read the same words in a treaty, as in all communication our interpretations are slaves to our assumptions, based on background beliefs and knowledge that the literal meaning of the words rarely conveys.
In this case, the treaty called for the government to provide food to the Indians so that they could feed their families through the winter months. The Indian agency was responsible for providing the food. Congress was responsible for ratifying the treaty that was signed. Each in turn depended on other cultural institutions, all with their own deadlines and priorities. The Indians gave no thought about ratification. But they should have, because when they arrived to collect their provisions, prior to ratification of the treaty, the pantry was bare. The government had provided nothing because the treaty had not yet been approved. Regardless of the reason, the Indians felt betrayed.
On the other side, the government thought that the Indians, when they had agreed to live in the reservations, would now consider themselves bound to stay there in perpetuity and to forever abide by the ‘law’. Perpetual obligations to anyone other than their own families were foreign to the Indians’ values and understanding of the way the world worked. They could never have legitimately made the commitment expected of them. It made no sense. The government could not have cared less about Indian interpretations rooted in their very different cultures. But it should have. Comanche chief Quanah Parker, present at this ill-fated gathering, at least learned from the experience. In his future dealings with whites he learned to respect the importance of the dark matter of the unsaid. He subsequently inquired about every potential assumption that he thought whites might be making before signing future treaties (though no one outside a culture can ask all the right questions).
Treaties often break down over cultural misunderstandings. But there are plenty of everyday examples of culturally induced language breakdowns as well. If you tell someone, ‘We should do lunch sometime,’ what do you mean? In your community this might literally mean that we should now, the two of us, plan a meeting for lunch at a restaurant. Or it could mean instead, ‘I have to go now. I don’t have time for this conversation.’ The interpretations of the interlocutors will be based on their relationship, their knowledge of each other’s cultural and personal expectations and by monitoring of the looks of anyone else standing around, as well as each other’s expressions and gestures. The meaning of what is said is never based merely or even mainly on the words spoken in a conversation.
The point is that human language is not a computer code. Humans did not gain a grammar first and then figure out its meaning in a particular culture. Culture, grammar and meaning each imply the others in human language. Languages and psychology run their wells deep into cultures. No artefact in human languages or human societies can be understood except by means of the culture in which it is interpreted. Understanding the nature and role of culture in human behaviour, language and thinking is essential for comprehending the evolution of human language.
There are various arguments that modern researchers occasionally employ to deny the existence of culture and omit it from the construction of their theories of human thinking, behaviour and language. This may be because of their training or their adopting a poor definition of culture. Some theorists, both in linguistic theory and in language evolution, disregard more than a century of anthropological studies making a powerful case that culture is necessary to explain the human animal.
Each community of erectus, sapiens and neanderthalensis would have developed familiarity with one another, a sense of ‘togetherness’, leading to shared values, social roles and structured knowledge (‘structured knowledge’ means knowing not only lists, but also how things on the lists relate to one another). Sharing such things would have brought them to a degree of cultural homogeneity. Perhaps they had a common symbol that was used in times of difficulty, such as an emergency warning, either spoken or some sort of signal (smoke signals helped identify some Native American communities). Perhaps not. But each band of travellers necessarily shared a spirit and a culture that underwrote their communication.
Modern organisations work hard to develop slogans, chants (such as the 2016 Republican chant ‘Lock her up!’ directed against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton), anthems, phrases for the population as a whole. When the group proclamation becomes individuals’ value, the social and the individual become linked. This forms culture and alters language. Words take on new meanings or new words and new meanings are born. Culture changes bring language changes.
Culture, patterns of being – such as eating, sleeping, thinking and posture – have been cultivated. A Dutch individual will be unlike the Belgian, the British, the Japanese, or the Navajo, because of the way that their minds have been cultivated – because of the roles they play in a particular set of values and because of how they define, live out and prioritise these values, the roles of individuals in a society and the knowledge they have acquired.
It would be worth exploring further just how understanding language and culture together can enable us better to understand each. Such an understanding would also help to clarify how new languages or dialects or any other variants of speech come about. I think that this principle ‘you talk like who you talk with’ represents all human behaviour. We also eat like who we eat with, think like those we think with, etc. We take on a wide range of shared attributes – our associations shape how we live and behave and appear – our phenotype. Culture affects our gestures and our talk. It can even affect our bodies. Early American anthropologist Franz Boas studied in detail the relationship between environment, culture and bodily form. Boas made a solid case that human body types are highly plastic and change to adapt to local environmental forces, both ecological and cultural.
Less industrialised cultures show biology-culture connections. Among the Pirahã, facial features range impressionistically from slightly Negroid to East Asian, to Native American. Differences between villages or families may have a biological basis, originating in different tribes merging over the last 200 years. One sizeable group of Pirahãs (perhaps thirty to forty) – usually found occupying a single village – are descendants of the Torá, a Chapakuran-speaking group that emigrated to the Maici-Marmelos rivers as long as two centuries ago. Even today Brazilians refer to this group as Torá, though the Pirahãs refer to them as Pirahãs. They are culturally and linguistically fully integrated into the Pirahãs. Their facial features are somewhat different – broader noses, some with epicanthic folds, large foreheads – giving an overall impression of similarity to East Asian features.‡ Yet body dimensions across all Pirahãs are constant. Men’s waists are, or were when I worked with them, uniformly 27 inches (68 cm), their average height 5 feet 2 inches (157.5 cm) and their average weight 55 kilos (121 pounds). The Pirahã phenotypes are similar not because all Pirahãs necessarily share a single genotype, but because they share a culture, including values, knowledge of what to eat and values about how much to eat, when to eat and the like.
These examples show that even the body does not escape our earlier observation that studies of culture and human social behaviour can be summed up in the slogan that ‘you talk like who you talk with’ or ‘grow like who you grow with’. And the same would have held for all our ancestors, even erectus.
People unconsciously adopt the pronunciation, grammatical patterns, lexicon and conversational styles of those they talk with the most. If one lives in Southern California, they might say, ‘My car needs washing,’ or, ‘My car needs to be washed.’ But in Pittsburgh, they are more likely to say, ‘My car needs washed,’ or, ‘My car needs to be washed.’ There is a grammatical contrast between the two dialects. The Southern Californian dialect requires the present participle form of the verb, whereas the Pittsburghese dialect requires the past-tense form of the participle. Both cultures converge in the ‘to be’ construction. As another example, if you talk to people of my generation you are likely to say, ‘He bought it for you and me,’ whereas if you talked mainly with members of a more recent generation, you might say (ungrammatically), ‘He bought it for you and I.’
Although imitation is a major cultural force, always pressuring a society towards homogeneity, it is not the only force. There is also innovation, which pressures societies to change. Imitation, though, is the seed of culture. The structures and values constitutive of culture take time to evolve. These structures and values emerge partially through conversational interactions, which include not only the content of speech, but also perspectives on right and wrong actions or thoughts, acceptable levels of novelty of information or form of presentation and levels and markers of conformity. This happens as people talk like who they talk with.
In other words, people who interact become more alike. Raise two children together and they will be more alike than had they been raised apart. They will share values that children raised apart do not share and they will, at least early on, share knowledge structures that are more similar than had they been raised apart. The more people talk together, the more they talk alike. The more they eat together, the more they eat the same foods in the same way – the more they eat alike. The more they think together, the more they think alike.
The more people’s values, roles and knowledge structures overlap the more connections they share and, therefore, the stronger is their connection in a cultural network. Thus they can form a generational network, a CEO network, a rap-lovers network, a ‘Western culture’ network, a stone tool flakes network and an industrialised society network, or even a Homo sapiens network, so long as they share values, knowledge, or roles.
This is recognised by many people when they claim that ‘people are all alike’. This is a common truism. Culture is only superficial, it is thought. We do all share some values. Likewise the other extreme, represented by cultural relativists, is also right when it claims that no two cultures are alike. No two cultures or individuals share all the same values, all the same social roles, or all the same knowledge structures.
What were the components that were changing early Homo from bands of individuals into cohesive cultures? First, there were values. These are the assignment of adjectives of morality for the most part (more clarification of values will come directly) to specific actions, entities, thoughts, tools, people and so on. They are also statements about how things should or should not be. To say, ‘He is a good man,’ expresses a value. This can be broken down into finer-grained values such as, ‘He treats his children well,’ or, ‘He is kind to stray animals,’ or, ‘He gave me a ride home,’ or, ‘He is polite,’ etc. Values are also seen in the tools we choose – a bat instead of a gun for home defence or a machete instead of a hoe for digging vegetables in the garden. They are seen in the use of our time. Value sets are vast and varied.
My definition of culture also includes the phrase ‘hierarchical knowledge structures’, which refers to the idea that human knowledge, at least – perhaps this also applies to other animals – is not an unordered set of ideas or skills. What we know is broken down in various ways according to context. All is structured in relation to all. And this hierarchy inescapably produces a gestalt output, meaning that the sum of what we know forms a system that is greater than merely all the things we know put together. Just as a symphony is greater than a mere list of all of its notes.
In my understanding of culture the idea of ‘social roles’ is useful to describe actions as conforming to a particular position one occupies in a culture. Any grouping of people will be defined by its values, the knowledge structures it devolves from and develops and the expected duties of each of its members by virtue of their membership classification.
To take an example from business managers in North America, China, or the United Kingdom, these folks will differ in many of their values, administrative knowledge and more, but in their social roles (independent of what they are called), they will necessarily share some aspects of administrative knowledge and values. In a sense, then, there is an international management culture, broken down into national and company-specific, local subcultures. Likewise, in higher education there is careful watch over expected cultural values in the form of different accrediting bodies. Accreditors allow schools to operate insofar as the schools share and implement the agencies’ values.
As Homo species traversed the earth, they too shared values with all of those in their species. In fact, given the relative homogeneity in erectus lives – all were hunter-gatherers – the cultures of different erectus communities would have been, superficially at least, quite similar. Of course, there were also important differences. Some of these differences would have resulted from the different ecologies of separate Homo erectus bands. Some lived in cold climes, others in the tropics, while still others braved the sea to live on islands. These were the forces that led the original immigrants from Africa to the formation of distinct cultures.
Most studies of values fail to provide a theory of the relationships between values and because they do, they too often assume that all values are universal, though aside from biological values there is no evidence to support this.
The ranking or prioritisation of values is easy to illustrate. Suppose that we are comparing the values of the inhabitants of two cities, say Paris and Houston. Let us further assume that Parisians and Houstonians value ‘good food’, however they define ‘good’ and ‘food’ locally. And let us suppose that both of them value being in good shape. Now, for the sake of discussion let’s assume the following rankings (the symbol ‘>>’ means that the value on the left ‘outranks’ the value on the right):
Parisians: Good shape >> Good food
Houstonians: Good food >> Good shape
In this hypothetical scenario, it is more important to Parisians that they be in good shape than that they enjoy good food. Though they do enjoy good food, they will not overeat if that causes them to no longer be in good shape. Good food takes a back seat to health and the waistline. To the made-up Houstonians, however, being in shape is not as important as the enjoyment of good food. Abs and glutes are less important, say, than batter-fried okra and chicken. It seems fair to say that these value priorities would produce different body shapes, especially if we add to this ranking a finer analysis of what each group considers to be ‘good food’. Houstonians might prefer fried chicken and mashed potatoes. The French might like instead coq au vin, etc. But it would be correct to say that the two cities have the same values. In this case it is not the values but their relative ranking that makes the difference. So we need some idea not only of what a group’s values are, but also of the prioritisation of the values. One cannot say what a group’s values are, though, without studying them carefully. So we cannot infer much about the culture of Homo erectus communities. But they would have had values and their values would have shaped their daily lives, and some of these would have been more important than others.
In the 1950s Kenneth Pike began work on a ‘grammar of society’. He suggested that the principles of human grammars are the organising principles as well for ‘grammars of culture’. In this sense, a culture is partly grammar-like. Like any grammar, a culture-grammar can only be proposed based on solid methodology and rigorous testing of hypotheses.
Society and culture are, of course, more than merely grammars – but they are connected and constructed in grammar-like ways and especially in their local contexts, groupings and actions. A Bostonian investment banker and an Amazonian hunter or an erectus sailor find their place and the role they occupy in society. These roles are not usually invented by the individual. They emerge or are blocked from emerging by a particular culture. One knows that there were no full-time Homo erectus musicians because there can be no such roles without an entire technology, social role and payment structure produced by society over time. And the structures and roles of the cultural-grammatical system into which we are born themselves emerge from the values and beliefs of a culture. In this sense, if we take culture as beliefs, knowledge and values, and society as roles and structural relationships between them, with members of society filling particular slots created by the culture, then at times it becomes easier to understand or at least visualise what people do as members of their culture.
Therefore, one may conceive of all the individuals of a society as ‘fillers’ for slots in a culture-grammar. One example is the college classroom. The fillers of the different classroom slots are easy – these are the students and the professor.
What kinds of roles and structures would an erectus society have had? Or what kind of roles and structures would another kind of primate society have? If we take an ‘alpha-male’ society of, say, gorillas, the typical social structure would be a silver-backed male (the alpha-male), pre-adult males and females, and females of mating age or beyond. In more complex gorilla societies there can be more than one silverback, but the typical arrangement is one silverback and many females and children. The male has a variety of duties, including decision-making for the group, resolution of conflicts, mating for the reproductive survival of the group, deciding when the group should sleep and defending the group. Erectus societies would have had at least this level of organisation. In fact, as hunter-gatherers with Homo brains, they would have had a social structure simpler than, perhaps, but comparable to that of some modern hunter-gathers. Consider an Amazonian society such as the Pirahãs. That society will be manifested by its individuals and form larger subunits that will include families, men, children, adolescents, women and so forth. A different tribal society group might instead be broken down into more structured kinship hierarchies, including families, clans, lineages, or more professional specialisations.
To act together, a society must in some way share the intention that our individual actions produce a result of the group. Voting is arguably such an action. Participating in a classroom lecture is another. These are all actions in the grammar of culture in which each person occupies a role, alone or jointly. In the social organisation exemplified above, the students are the object, not the subject matter. We are describing their social roles in this moment in time relative to a particular teacher. Their roles may shift slightly with their next class. Certainly, students and teachers will change their roles at parties, at their homes and in their careers. Roles are like apparel, worn for specific situations.
When participants are from different cultures, as in the Treaty of Medicine Lodge example, they often assume that everyone shares a similar understanding of roles, structures and meanings of the joint act they are engaging in. But they rarely realise that each participant possesses a separate interpretation of their joint activity. In my view of the entire situation, this is what happened: the Comanches interpreted the promises made by the US government at the Medicine Lodge event as effective immediately and unconditionally. To them everyone speaking was a plenipotentiary representative of their people. The US negotiators, however, saw themselves as subordinates to Congress and perceived the Indians as a group that should accede to this greater authority. They understood the joint act of treaty-signing as entering into a conditional, time-delayed initial offer. (They also saw the Indians as inferior beings whose opinions and understanding mattered less.)
The societies of Homo erectus would have included criteria for membership in each community, the duties of each community member, relationships between members, such as children and adults, activity-planning and other needs.
Perceptions and the range of thought are shaped significantly by a cultural network. This turns out to mean in European societies that the dualism of Descartes and the mind-as-computer idea of Alan Turing represent the core of cognition. But this seems misguided.
Since the earliest days of artificial intelligence, eminent proponents of the idea that brains are computers have proposed, often quite emotionally, that of course machines can think. John McCarthy says the following: ‘To ascribe certain beliefs, knowledge, free will, intentions, consciousness, abilities, or wants to a machine or computer program is legitimate when such an ascription expresses the same information about the machine that it expresses about a person.’1
But this kind of statement is built on a faulty understanding of beliefs as well as a faulty understanding of culture. And the personification of computers by attributing beliefs and so on to them one often hears suggested is too powerful. It could be extended in humorous, but no less valid, ways to circumstances no one would ascribe beliefs to. One could say that a thermostat believes it is too hot so it turns on the air-conditioning. Or that toes curl up because they believe it is warm. Or that plants turn towards the sun, because they believe they should. In fact, there are many cultures, the Pirahã’s and Wari’s, in which beliefs are regularly ascribed to animals, to clouds, to trees and so on as a convenient way of talking. But the tribes I have worked with don’t usually mean these ascriptions literally.
Beliefs are states which occur when bodies (including brains) are directed towards something, from an idea to a plant. Beliefs are formed by the individual as she or he engages in language and culture.
As one contemplates erectus culture, values, beliefs and social roles, some subsidiary issues come to mind: the role and emergence of tools in any culture. How is one to characterise tools culturally, things that are used to aid individual cultural members in different tasks? Tools are dripping with cultural knowledge. One could even conceive of tools as congealed culture. Examples include physical tools, such as shovels, paintings, hats, pens, plates and food. But also non-physical tools are crucial. Perhaps humans’ most important tool is language. In fact, culture itself is a tool.
The tool-like nature of language can be seen easily in its stories. Stories are used to exhort, to explain, to describe and so on, and each text is embedded in a context of dark matter. Stories, including books, are, of course, unlike physical tools in the sense that as linguistic devices they could in principle have revealed something about the dark matter from which they partially emerge, though generally very little is conveyed. And the reason for that is clear. People talk about what they assume their interlocutor does not know (but has the necessary background knowledge to understand). And tacit knowledge, or dark matter, which people are usually unaware of, is simply overlooked.
That language as a tool is also seen in the forms of stories. Consider a list of principles that anthropologist Marvin Harris provided to account for the Hindu rules governing defecation in Indian rural areas:
A spot must be found not too far from the house.
The spot must provide protection against being seen.
It must offer an opportunity to see any one approaching.
It should be near a source of water for washing.
It should be upwind of unpleasant odours.
It must not be in a field with growing crops.2
The first line uses the indefinite article ‘a.’ In the second line the definite article ‘the’ is used. From that point onward, ‘spot’ is pronominalised as ‘it’. This is because of English conventions for keeping track of a topic through a discourse. The indefinite article indicates that the noun it modifies is new information. The definite shows that it is shared information. The pronoun reveals that it is topical. As the single word is referenced and re-referenced throughout the discourse its changing role and relationship to shared knowledge is marked with specific grammatical devices. This is shared but unspoken and largely ineffable knowledge to the non-specialist.
How does the understanding of culture promoted here compare to the wider understanding of culture in a society as a whole? It is common to hear about ‘American culture’, ‘Western values’, or even ‘pan-human values’ and so forth. According to the theory of dark matter and culture developed above these are perfectly sensible ideas, so long as we interpret them to mean ‘overlapping values, rankings, roles and knowledge’, rather than a complete homogeneity of (any notion of) culture throughout a given population. From laws to pronunciation, from architecture to music to sexual positions and body shape, the actions of individual humans as members of communities (‘likers of Beethoven’, ‘eaters of haggis’ and on and on) in conjunction with an individual’s apperceptions and episodic memory – all are the products of overlapping dark matters.
Just so, values can produce in an individual or in a community a sense of mission – such as the Boers, the Zionists, the American frontiersmen and settlers who subscribed to manifest destiny, or the National Socialists who dreamed of a thousand-year Reich. This sense of mission and purpose is what many businesses are after today as the use of the term culture has been adopted by companies as ‘what they are all about’. Did erectus communities have any sense of mission?
Although there are most certainly general principles of human behaviour and the formation of dark matter, the combination of individual apperceptions with exposure to mere subsets of larger value, knowledge and role networks means that no two people will be exactly alike in any way. And certainly no two cultures will be.
There are better examples of knowledge that is unspoken, though. Non-human animals present superior examples in some ways. These animals have beliefs, desires and emotions, learn complicated behaviours and ways of interacting with the world. Yet they lack language altogether and so, by definition, cannot talk about their knowledge. Almost all non-human animal knowledge is therefore dark matter. Most people wave their hands at these fascinating phenomena, sweeping them all under the label of ‘instincts’ rather than knowledge.
Dogs, humans and other animals go through an attachment period, are driven by emotions, learn tricks, learn to obey a range of commands, come to sense ownership/relationship/belonging to certain items in their environment and so on. My 140-pound Fila Brasileiro barks when even slight changes are added to the environment – a stack of books in a strange place, cushions from the sofa piled for cleaning, a new car in the driveway and so on. While my dog cannot ‘tell’ me about this in English, through her barking and body posture she communicates relatively well, though many of her actual feelings remain ineffable. Her dark matter in this sense has both ‘communicable’ (via actions and barking) and ineffable components, just as human dark matter does. Erectus, like sapiens, would have learned their languages through interaction with other members of their community, especially their mothers.
Still other cultural conventions include queuing. In an American store no matter how crowded, most people will, without being instructed, form a queue in front of the cash register. In some countries, without rigorous enforcement, such queuing will not occur – everyone will crowd around the cash register hoping to get served first. Queuing is thus a convention of some cultures but not others. And, as with all conventions, when we experience another culture, we will always be bothered by the absence of our culture’s conventions. The reason is that conventions make life easier by requiring fewer decisions, by bringing a sense of the familiar to the foreign.
Societies depend on conventions to be able to function. It is likely that erectus communities began to develop conventions. Who speaks first when two people meet? How do children get food in the presence of adults? Who is the first one to depart the village on a new journey? Philosopher Ruth Millikan claims that conventions share a range of properties, such as being able to be reproduced, the need for a precedent before something can become a convention, usefulness in organising actions (such as forming lines at the box office instead of everyone crowding around at once).3 She also notes that we can all violate conventions for different reasons and effects, just as Grice observed that we can flout conversational maxims. Millikan asserts that all people want, expect and seek conventions, such as using a bag to hold a seat in a waiting room.
The discussion of the importance of conventions and the individual to culture leads to an understanding of culture as the core of cognition. The argument is that without culture there can be no semantic understanding, no background, no tacit knowledge to undergird new thought.
Erectus societies had culture. From the very first, humans, with their larger brains and new experiences, built up values, knowledge and social roles that allowed them to wander the earth, sail the seas and build the first communities in the history of the earth. And from these cultures built more than 60,000 generations ago we emerged. Our debt to Homo erectus is inestimable. They were not cavemen. They were men, women and children, the first humans to speak and to live in culturally linked communities.
* Out of many, one.
† The idea that the expansion of the United States throughout the American continents was both justified and inevitable.
‡ Obviously DNA studies would be interesting and necessary scientifically before saying anything with confidence on this score, but it is difficult politically to carry out such studies because in Brazil those delegated to protect indigenous peoples are wary of anything that could be perceived as racist studies, especially studies carried out by ‘gringo’ scientists.