Dark Matter of the Mind
Dark Matter of the Mind
The Culturally Articulated Unconscious
DANIEL L. EVERETT
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2016 by Daniel L. Everett
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-07076-6 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40143-0 (e-book)
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226401430.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Everett, Daniel Leonard, author.
Title: Dark matter of the mind : the culturally articulated unconscious / Daniel L. Everett.
Description: Chicago : London ; The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016013247 | ISBN 9780226070766 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226401430 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Subconsciousness. | Knowledge, Theory of. | Context effects (Psychology) | Cognition and culture. | Language and culture. | Philosophical anthropology.
Classification: LCC BF315 .E84 2016 | DDC 154.2—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016013247
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Shannon, Kristene, and Caleb
To whom I read by kerosene lamp in the Amazon
And for Linda
My companion in the woods
Real bands are made primarily from the neighborhood. From a real time and real place that exists for a little while, then changes and is gone forever. They’re made from the same circumstances, the same needs, the same hungers, culture.
—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, E Street Band induction speech, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1 Dark Matter and Culture
1 The Nature and Pedigree of Dark Matter
2 The Ranked-Value Theory of Culture
3 The Ontogenesis and Construction of Dark Matter
4 Dark Matter as Hermeneutics
Part 2 Dark Matter and Language
5 The Presupposed Dark Matter of Texts
6 The Dark Matter of Grammar
7 Gestures, Culture, and Homesigns
8 Dark Matter Confrontations in Translation
Part 3 Implications
9 Beyond Instincts
10 Beyond Human Nature
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
Preface
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
VIKTOR FRANKL, Man’s Search for Meaning
In 1959, Edward T. Hall first published The Silent Language. As he said, “It wasn’t just that people ‘talk’ to each other without the use of words, but that there is an entire universe of behavior that is unexplored, unexamined, and very much taken for granted. It functions outside conscious awareness. . . . What is most difficult to accept is the fact that our own cultural patterns are literally unique and therefore not universal” (Hall [1959] 1973, vii). Hall is not merely offering here the banal observation that there is an unconscious. He is talking about cultural tacit knowledge—a more articulated notion. It is this cultural articulation of unspoken or ineffable values, knowledge, and roles that this book addresses.
Much science has transpired since Hall wrote those words. But his prescient exploration of what we know but don’t know we know—“unknown knowns”—was one of the first to put “dark matter of the mind” on the intellectual agenda clearly enough for us to see how one might build a theory of it. The words that follow owe a tremendous debt to Hall.
My thoughts on these matters extend back nearly forty years to my initial field research in Mexico and Brazil, when I first confronted alternatives to my way of thinking I had never imagined possible. As my thinking developed, I decided to write this book in order to articulate a perspective on the unconscious, the ineffable, the unspoken, our cultures, and the structured knowledges, values, and roles of the individual. I certainly realize that all psychologists (and just about everyone else) are aware of and acknowledge the importance of the unconscious, just as I am aware that anthropologists know about culture, and all linguists language. It isn’t via the terms culture, language, or unconscious alone that this book attempts to contribute, however. Rather, this contribution is a new theory of how these things work together. In particular, it is about how our unconscious is structured and infused with meaning by our individual experiences and social living. With more than two thousand years of writing in both the East and the West on the mind, society, and the individual, the individual ideas are less likely to be novel than the way that they are fitted together.
Anyone who has lived in another culture, learning to maneuver through a different language or alternate set of cues and clues of values, knowledge, food, social interactions, smells, sights, and so on, has been at once exhilarated, exhausted, stymied, and challenged by the newness and strangeness of their novel environment. In effect, they are faced with the task of learning to live all over again. And how do we do that? How do we come to understand the cues and clues of the world around us?
For example, if you give a lecture, how might you know from people’s faces whether they are understanding you? When you use a concept, why do you believe that you understand it? Why do you like the music that you like? How do you know that the cry you heard is from your own child? How can people tell without looking whether someone is running upstairs or downstairs? How do you know what your mother looks like? What does tofu taste like? Why do you say “red, white, and blue” instead of “white, blue, and red”? We come to know these things, though often not how to express them.
There are many things, in fact, that we know but are unable to communicate effectively, if at all. Such unconscious knowledge is referred to in philosophy, psychology, computer science, linguistics and other fields as “tacit knowledge.” I refer to it here, however as “dark matter” because I believe that the phenomenon is more structured and nuanced that the more familiar term perhaps suggests. But whatever we call it, comprehending this covert knowledge is crucial for our understanding of ourselves and others. This comprehension is my goal in what follows.
Although I grew up nearly bicultural less than ten miles from the California-Mexico border, I began my first serious trek through the worlds of novel cultures as a Christian, evangelical missionary with Wycliffe Bible Translators in the Brazilian Amazon. In that peculiar role, an invisible chasm separated me from the people to whom my missionary organization had assigned me, the Pirahãs. From my middle-class, US, industrialized, evangelical society to a hunter-gatherer group of the densest rain forest on earth, I traveled with a “calling” to translate the Bible, to produce the appropriate perlocutionary effects in the receivers—that is, to do a translation so effective that it would produce the same response in the Pirahãs that it did for those hearing the message for the first time in ancient Palestine. I wanted to transmit to this group of jungle dwellers legends from the first-century, Middle Eastern culture of the Bible. I naively supposed that this material could be effectively translated into the Pirahãs’ language and culture. I was insufficiently daunted by the fact that this peaceful, semi-nomadic Amazonian community could hardly have been less like th
e violent, desert pastoralists of the first-century Middle East. The geography, climate, topography, languages, societies, and cultures of the first-century culture of Israel and twentieth-century Amazon were so different that in attempting to communicate the Bible to them, I might as well as have been delivering a letter from Mars via a beta version of Google Translate.
Theories eventually emerge in individual anthropologists, linguists, cognitive scientists, or philosophers from the experiences of their lives about what it is that they should be doing, how they should understand the world around them as this impinges upon their professional interests. Some construct grand theories. Others create little sets of theories. Others may just have hunches. There are some who gravitate toward broad generalizations, while others are content to link understandings of the particulars of their experience into narratives that are less sweeping.
In what follows, I propose a model of how we become who we are as individuals and societies, based on the acquisition and organization of particulars. But these particulars do not include the building blocks of some grander theories—I am not concerned directly with such familiar anthropological themes as totemism, animism, ethics, religion, folk theories of health and reproduction, and so on. That is because I believe that none of these are basic, but derivative, based upon more primitive building blocks that emerge naturally from living.1 Rather, these particulars require no psychic unity of man, no nativism, and, especially, they require no innate content or concepts. This is a rather bold proposal, so we should get right to it.
Acknowledgments
I spent the better part of thirty-five years conducting field research in Mexico (four months among the Tzeltales) and Brazil (mainly among the Pirahãs, but also with time spent among or with specialists working with more than a dozen other groups (including the Sateré, Banawá, Wari', Jarawara, Jamamadi, Suruí, Deni, Karitiana, and Kīsedje, among others). The days were humid, hot, and bug filled. I had typhoid fever, amebic dysentery, intestinal parasites that were never diagnosed, malaria, and more malaria; survived near misses with poisonous snakes, attacks by anaconda in the river, tarantulas and tarantula-eating vespa wasps, giant centipedes, jaguars, pumas, and ocelots; and spent nights alone in a small lean-to in the jungle, hearing the heavy steps of something walking around my small, solitary camping spot. I have seen my children nearly die from malaria. And my life has been threatened by drunken Brazilians and drunken aborigines. I often wondered why I did this. One of my highest-ranked values is comfort. Yet an even more highly ranked value is understanding. The only thing that really kept me in the jungle all those years was a desire to understand others.
I never achieved understanding of anything alone. Over the years, I have benefited from conversations with many people, from their comments on my ideas, both verbal and written, from their examples, and from the advice, help, and excellent instruction I received from members of every culture and language I have studied. In addition to the indigenous communities of Brazil where I have worked, I also want to thank a number of individuals by name.
So it is my pleasure to thank Geoffrey Pullum, Yaron Senderowicz, Sascha Griffiths, Brian MacWhinney, Caleb Everett, Robert Van Valin, Ted Gibson, Richard Futrell, Steve Piantadosi, Keren Madora, David McNeill, Nick Enfield, Daniel Ezra Johnson, Phil Lieberman, an anonymous reviewer for the University of Chicago Press, and especially T. David Brent—my editor at the University of Chicago—for his guidance, insightful comments, and encouragement throughout this project.
Introduction
When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.
SIGMUND FREUD
Why This Book?
This introduction lays out the ground rules and provides a map for the entire discussion that follows. The tripartite thesis of this book is (i) that the unconscious of all humans falls into two categories, the unspoken and the ineffable; (ii) that all human unconscious is shaped by individual apperceptions in conjunction with a ranked-value, linguistic-based model of culture; and (iii) that the role of the unconscious in the shaping of cognition and our sense of self is not the result of instincts or human nature, but is articulated by our learning as cultural beings. I refer to this more nuanced conceptualization of the unconscious as “dark matter,” which I define as follows:1
Dark matter of the mind is any knowledge-how or any knowledge-that that is unspoken in normal circumstances, usually unarticulated even to ourselves. It may be, but is not necessarily, ineffable.2 It emerges from acting, “languaging,” and “culturing” as we learn conventions and knowledge organization, and adopt value properties and orderings. It is shared and it is personal. It comes via emicization, apperceptions, and memory, and thereby produces our sense of “self.”
It sometimes happens in nature that things that are not seen may be more important than things that are seen. Atoms come to mind. And space. Astronomers claim that the matter of our universe that can be seen accounts for only some 5 percent of the material of the entire universe, whereas “dark energy” accounts for as much as 68 percent and “dark matter” some 27 percent. “We are much more certain what dark matter is not than we are what it is. First, it is dark, meaning that it is not in the form of stars and planets that we see” (Ericksen 2015). In physics there is thus a place for explanations that involve things that appear to be unseeable in principle.
As a young missionary among the Pirahãs, with unspoken and ineffable values and beliefs absorbed from my own social activities, enveloping culture, and psychology, my faith in God and my mission, I thought only that “nothing is too hard for a dedicated missionary.” Looking back, I can identify many of the hidden problems it took me years to recognize, problems based in contrasting sets of tacit assumptions held by the Pirahãs and me. A representative sample of those includes the following:
1. Pirahãs have no concept of God—certainly no “Supreme Being.”
2. Pirahãs do not like for any individual to tell another individual how to live.
3. Pirahãs do not feel spiritually lost.
4. Pirahãs do not have a concept of spirituality that matches any other I am familiar with.
5. Pirahãs do not fear (or seek) death or “the afterlife.”
6. Pirahãs do not see the messages of a foreign culture as relevant.
7. Pirahãs do not talk about or believe in things that they have not seen or for which there is no firsthand witness.
8. It is difficult for Pirahãs’ jungle culture to make space for tropes and values based on images of deserts, dryness, sand, camels, and other geographical aspects of biblical culture.
9. Pirahãs do not normally list names of dead people or find lasting lessons from the past deeds of the dead, other than in their role of transmitting culture from their generation to the new generation.
10. Pirahãs believe that their way of life is the best one for them and that non-Pirahãs’ beliefs and way of life are best for non-Pirahãs.
11. Pirahãs do not practice torture or capital punishment; for example, death by crucifixion is alien to them. Moreover, the concept of a society sanctioning punishments (especially death) for its members is incomprehensible.
12. Although most American missionaries believe that God has “prepared” every culture to understand the “gospel” (the good news, i.e., to understand that God’s son, Jesus, died on a cross for their sins), the Pirahãs find the concepts of savior, sin, and salvation incomprehensible.
13. In spite of American missionaries’ belief that people like the Pirahãs are afraid of a dark, threatening evil spiritual world and that many of them will be overjoyed at the missionary’s arrival with the news that Jesus has freed them from this fear, the Pirahãs fear nothin
g and were uninterested in the missionary message.
14. American missionaries believe that all languages will be able to understand all the concepts necessary to express the full New Testament message. It is the job of the translator to find the appropriate words and phrases in the target language and then to match them with the appropriate Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew concepts. This is false. (See chap. 8 for extended discussion of some practical problems of translation.)
15. American missionaries believe that their targeted people will (and should) respect and perhaps even love them for giving up their own homes and families to travel to tell them about Jesus. Yet the Pirahãs never put much distance or time between themselves and their families and have a hard time understanding why one would.
16. American missionaries believe that all people will or should believe the miracles recorded in the Bible, yet the Pirahãs don’t believe in the supernatural, because they have no experience of it.
More important than even these differences between the Pirahãs and me, however, is the fact that they were unspoken. All of us were guided through our encounters by the invisible hands of conflicting cultural values. Only years later did I understand that the Pirahãs’ unspoken beliefs and knowledge not only did not correspond to the beliefs of the average American missionary, but were in direct conflict with many of the values, beliefs, and knowledge that were so important for my evangelization objectives. Such considerations perhaps explain why I was a failure as a missionary in the sense that I produced no converts. This eventually led me to abandon Christianity altogether. Conflicting beliefs and values could also explain why, in my experience, so few missionaries actually produce long-lasting change (such that it survives their departure or death, for example) in the groups to which they “minister” (Hefner 1993). Pirahã values also played a role in my own conversion from Christian to atheist.
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