Widlok also noted how language itself and the Hai||om speakers’ use of spatial descriptors in conversation reinforced people’s orientation skills. The Hai||om were constantly describing space to one another; Widlok calls it “topographical gossip.” This made sense: there were no material maps, and so the Hai||om communicated in an almost continual flow throughout the day to share information about the locations of places, people, stories, and resources. When they talked about their travels to these places, they used these!hus landscape terms as cardinals. And yet none of the terms used focused on the egocentric body. The Hai||om oriented geocentrically using a shared spatial language. Did this mean they were utilizing mental maps? Widlok was suspicious of the mental map theory. Academics who attempted to understand non-European methods of orientation seemed unable to transcend the concept. They were, Widlok told me, “overmapped.” Maps require their users to use what is called nonindexical information (what the map tells them to expect) with indexical information (what they actually see), meaning navigation with them is a constant process of comparing where you are against a map, whether it is physically in your hands or in your mind’s “eye.” This wasn’t like what he observed among the Hai||om. Oftentimes landscape categories were combined with an individual’s knowledge of botany, topography, intergroup relations, and individual life history and memory; all came into play as they traveled. So while they could dead reckon their distance and speed with great accuracy, they also used a whole lot of information, including a “patchwork of landscape countries that intersect with commonly used routes between named places.”
I talked to Widlok on the phone at his office at the University of Cologne, where he is a professor of African Studies. He explained how beginning with Franz Boas in the Arctic, a significant revolution had taken place in anthropology; instead of explaining differences between people as the result of biology, anthropologists emphasized culture. But what exactly is that?
Widlok’s work is part of a second revolution that has revisited the very idea of culture and how it commingles with individuals. “We’ve moved away from the container model of culture, the idea that as an individual we are part of a singular culture that overdetermines what we are doing,” he said, “and moved on to practice and social relationships. Whatever skills we have or the San have, it doesn’t have to do with racial difference, nor is it so simple as their culture or language that determines what they are doing. We have lots of evidence that people move in and out of these systems of knowledge and we can combine them.” This social theory of culture, or what some call a relational or practice-oriented theory of culture, emphasizes that human knowledge and culture are founded in skill, ways of doing things, interactions, habits of life, learning, and embodied practice—they are generated from the individual entangled in relationships. Culture is a process; not something handed down to us as much as something we re-create through our own participation.
The idea that culture is at the heart of cognition—and that cognition is itself culturally relative—implies that Western philosophers and scientists have long mistaken their own cognitive traits as universal. “The spectrum was widened,” said Widlok. “What many people didn’t consider to be possible was all of a sudden part of the spectrum of what humans and societies have come up with.” Once we find evidence of diversity in human spatial cognition, it calls into question other assumptions that have been made about the human experience.
* * *
Anthropologists still disagree on the theoretical explanation of how humans engage in day-to-day wayfinding, a split between the mental map theory of navigation and practical mastery theory. As Kirill Istomin, an anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute, and Mark Dwyer, a geographer at the University of Cambridge, have written, “The central point of debate between these two theories is whether mental maps exist and, if they do, whether they explain human spatial orientation.”
Anthropologists who subscribe to the practical mastery theory believe the wayfinder relies on visual memory and is immersed in cultural practices, habits, knowledge, and the direct perception of the environment. The core of this idea comes from a French sociologist by the name of Pierre Bourdieu. In the 1970s, Bourdieu published a book in which he argued that mastering a spatial environment arose through familiarity with “practical” rather than “Cartesian” space. Practical space, he said, was built through the perceptions and activities of the individual. Cartesian space, on the other hand, was the absolute spatial relations between objects, independent of the viewer. In 1985, British social anthropologist Alfred Gell, the same person who wrote about traps and human evolution, used these ideas to form the practical mastery theory of navigation, which refuted the existence of maps in the mind.
To understand the debate, I spoke to a proponent of the practical mastery view, Tim Ingold, the chair in social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Ingold believes that wayfinding isn’t about abstract representations of spatial relations but occurs from the perspective of a path of observation. His definition of wayfinding is “a skilled performance in which the traveler, whose powers of perception and action have been fine-tuned through previous experience, ‘feels his way’ towards his goal, continually adjusting his movements in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of his surroundings.” The Australian Aboriginal traveler wayfinds in this way across the desert just as the Micronesian sailor does across the open ocean and the Inuit dogsledder does when crossing the sea ice.
Ingold explained that his interest in the concept of wayfinding had roots in his childhood, when he was captivated by the polar north, books about Arctic explorers, and stories of grand adventure to unknown places. When he set out to do anthropological fieldwork, he lived with the Sami in Finland as a doctoral research student, taking notes on kinship, household economics, and the Sami’s adaptations to the environment. They were a people, he quickly realized, that moved constantly. While they had permanent dwellings, their life seemed to exist completely outdoors along the extensive routes that they followed to locate their reindeer. He soon found out that they navigated by memorizing sequences of natural landmarks like trees, hills, swamps, and rocks, and the names associated with significant places. They would often orient by the direction of streams and rivers, and chains of hills. When the sun was unavailable or the stars were invisible, they would use tree branches and anthills to find north and south. Memorizing the sequences of their movements, Ingold realized, was important because the Sami could then reverse the sequence to find their way back and to relate the journey to others, to tell the story of their journey. In a paper Ingold coauthored with Nuccio Mazzullo, they described the Sami way of being as “not in but along. The path, not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming.”
According to Ingold, it was those early experiences of traveling with the Sami that first got him thinking about wayfinding, although some of the significance of what he observed and learned took many years to manifest. “Wayfinding’s not something that people explicitly talk about. When I was doing fieldwork with the Sami, I wasn’t thinking about these things at all,” he told me. “I think it took decades to actually realize what I’d learned, why I was thinking in this way and not that way.” Later, he began to see how people move and dwell in space as an essential aspect of being, and that the diversity of these behaviors challenged essential Western assumptions about the divisions between nature, society, and people. When he discovered Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, it was a revelation. Gibson’s ideas meant that perception is not the result of a mind in a body but of an organism as a whole in its environment, and is “tantamount to the organism’s own exploratory movement through the world.” Ingold saw this was a way of bringing together the biological life of organisms and the cultural life of the mind in society. We are not self-contained individuals confronting a world out there, but developing organisms in an environment, enmeshed in tangled relationships. As we move through space, our knowledg
e undergoes continuous formulation; wayfinding isn’t knowing before we go, but, as he put it, “knowing as we go.”
Lately, Ingold told me, he’s reconsidered the word wayfinding and prefers the word wayfaring. It’s an attempt to move away from the concept of navigation or mere transport to describe human travel. “I just wanted to get away from the idea of going from A to B. Wayfaring is the compound of two words. Way is like talking about a way of life, carrying along a life,” he said. “In English, the word fare is a lovely word. How are you faring? How are you getting on?”
For Ingold the notion that aspects of the structure of the world are copied onto an analogous structure in the mind in the form of a map, which is then constantly updated, is nonsensical. It not only fails to capture the dynamic complexity and the skills involved in finding one’s way through a landscape as he witnessed in places like Sami country (“an immensely variegated terrain of comings and goings, which is continually taking shape around the traveler even as the latter’s movements contribute to its formation”), but it also falls short because maps themselves are a cultural invention. Indeed, the great myth of cartography is that maps are independent of any point of view and equally valid wherever one stands when, in fact, they always take a point of view, prioritize information, choose a scale. In contrast, Ingold argues that extending the map metaphor into the domain of cognition ignores the wisdom and practical sensibility of the navigator, divorcing tradition from locality, culture from place, and traditional knowledge from the environmentally situated experience of practitioners. It is, in other words, not how most humans actually experience the world.
Ingold draws a distinction between mapping, which is what wayfinders do, and mapmaking, which is what cartographers making physical maps do. Mapping is an act of committing to memory the experience of bodily movement and reenacting it. It’s a kind of performance, like telling a story. On the other hand, in his book The Perception of the Environment, he writes that the mapmaker has no need to travel at all.
[I]ndeed he may have no experience whatever of the territory he so painstakingly seeks to represent. His task is rather to assemble, off-site, the information provided to him—already shorn of the particular circumstances of its collection—into a comprehensive spatial representation. It is of course no accident that precisely the same task is assigned, by cognitive map theorists, to the mind in operating upon the data of sense.
Ingold has described wayfinding as an act of remembering similar to how one remembers a piece of music. Just as with musical performance, wayfinding has an essentially temporal character: “the path, like the musical melody, unfolds over time rather than across space.” It struck me as not so different from Howard Eichenbaum’s description of navigation as hippocampal networks that encode “journeys through space as memory episodes defined by sequences of events and the locations where they occur.”
Why, I asked Ingold, was the debate over practical mastery and mental maps so divisive? “People on each side can hardly make any contact with one another at all,” he lamented. “In a heated argument you have to have enough common ground to stage a debate. But I find with the cognitivists that they are in their own world. It comes down to what we mean by space in the first place. I think space stands for the possibility that there can be very many stories. It’s like music. Space is the simultaneity of all these stories going on at once.”
I asked Widlock the same question. “It’s important to have Ingold’s perspective as a corrective to the Western perspective,” he said, which often treats all spatial knowledge as maplike. “But the main point to me is that humans are able to switch between perspectives. Even the San and others are doing that. They too can stand back and theorize and engage in different modes of thinking. Evolutionarily, the particular skills of humans are to manage very different perspectives. The San go tracking, and they do have the flow of perception and picking up things in the environment. But then they also stand there and compare hypotheses and practice rational, detached thinking.”
Widlok’s point seemed important for understanding human navigation, but also intelligence itself. Perhaps it is the flexibility of our thinking—of assuming different viewpoints, embodied experience, and abstraction—that has made us so unique. And perhaps our capacity for empiricism, inference, and theorizing is far older than we think.
PART THREE
OCEANIA
EMPIRICISM AT HARVARD
In the Western version of history, the origins of science are found in the work of ancient Greece’s natural philosophers, whose torch of rational inquiry was picked up by Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes and ignited the Scientific Revolution. The Greeks and their progeny are thought to have possessed an intrinsic capacity for scientific thinking, a thirst for the accumulation of knowledge, and the desire to understand the world in its entirety. According to this hegemonic view, it was the intellect and courage of these geniuses that allowed them to transcend superstition and myth. Some historians of science today concede that other cultures have made scientific contributions, but the classic narrative remains that science is distinctly Western. Other cultures can become modern and scientific, but only the West invented those things.
What if science wasn’t invented twenty-five hundred years ago, but hundreds of thousands of years ago, and the practice of navigation had something to do with it? In 1990 Louis Liebenberg, a white South African who frequently traveled with the San of the Kalahari, published a book titled The Art of Tracking in which he called tracking the “oldest science.” According to Liebenberg, the twenty-first-century physicist seeking to formulate an accurate hypothesis about the behavior of particles based on a combination of his own theoretical models and hard data isn’t far removed from the hunter-gatherer reading tracks in the ground or observing the weather to successfully hunt, and there is scant difference between the intellectual abilities of the two. “[Tracking] may well have been the first creative science practised by the earliest members of anatomically modern (a.m.) Homo sapiens who had modern intellects,” he writes. “Natural selection for an ability to interpret tracks and signs may have played a significant role in the evolution of the scientific intellect.” Liebenberg, a member of Harvard University’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, thinks that trackers
have to create a working hypothesis in which spoor evidence is supplemented with hypothetical assumptions based not only on their knowledge of animal behaviour, but also on their creative ability to solve new problems and discover new information. The working hypothesis may be a reconstruction of what the animal was doing, how fast it was moving, when it was there, where it was going to and where it might be at that time. Such a working hypothesis may then enable the trackers to predict the animal’s movements. As new information is gathered, they may have to revise their working hypothesis, creating a better reconstruction of the animal’s activities. Anticipating and predicting an animal’s movements, therefore, involves a continuous process of problem-solving, creating new hypotheses and discovering new information.
The undeniable difference between the tracker and the modern physicist is scale. Liebenberg points out that the tracker’s knowledge is limited to each individual’s observations, which are transmitted and shared through oral tradition, while the modern scientist has nearly instantaneous access to a huge body of knowledge through libraries, institutions, databases, and instruments such as computers and satellites that extend their access and reach to information. But the distinction is, he thinks, technological and sociological rather than intellectual. “The modern scientist may know much more than the tracker. But he/she does not necessarily understand nature any better than the intelligent hunter gatherer,” he writes.
I found this to be a fairly radical notion, but in Liebenberg’s view the notion that rational scientific thinking didn’t originate with the ancient Greeks but with hunter-gatherers actually solves a galling mystery in human evolution studies—why is it that despite great technological and societa
l leaps over the last ten thousand years, the hominin brain stopped growing in size long ago? In the previous several million years, our brains evolved in both size and neurological complexity, reaching an apex a few hundred thousand years ago. And then the growth stopped. One of the ways to reconcile this historical paradox is, as Liebenberg puts it, to assume that “at least some of the first fully modern hunter-gatherers were capable of a scientific approach, and that the intellectual requirements of modern science were, at least among the most intelligent members of hunter-gatherer bands, a necessity for the survival of modern hunter-gatherer societies.”
I went to Harvard University to talk to another academic whose own ideas have converged with Liebenberg’s in interesting ways. John Huth is an experimental particle physicist whose experiences practicing and teaching traditional navigation to students have led him to believe that navigation and its cognitive demands had a lot to do with the human invention of science. I took a Monday morning Amtrak train and arrived on campus just before the start of Huth’s class “Science of the Physical Universe 26” (SPU:26). As I walked across the yard to the university’s science center, there were still boulder-sized chunks of ice left over from Boston’s record-breaking winter storms, but the tips of the trees swayed in the wind, laden with new buds. I passed through the revolving door of the science center and past clusters of undergrads into Hall D, an aging amphitheater with green upholstered seats and faded violet carpets. Taking a seat in the back, I spotted Huth in front of a lectern, surrounded by an array of gadgetry and scientific detritus. Wearing well-worn hiking shoes and a button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, he looked like he bears his laurels lightly.
Wayfinding Page 22