Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  How might this work out in practice? A C-grammar must begin with the individual. We can thus think of all the individuals of a society as “fillers” for C-grammar slots. In this regard, consider a classroom experience. First, a grammar must have slots and fillers. The fillers are easy—these are the students and the professor. The slots are “speaker,” “talk,” and “hearers.” The semantic roles of each of the slot:filler pairs are “lecturer,” “lecture,” and “class,” assembled in a simplified form like:

  College Class

  Speaker: Lecturer + Talk:Lecture + Hearer:Class

  Fillers: professional specialist, student, types of lecture

  This unit of a C-grammar is equivalent to a sentence, though it will have immediate constituents, as shown in figure 2.4. There is a cultural structure, a college class, that has at least three components: a predicate (what is being done culturally, i.e., a lecture), an actor (the lecturer), and recipients of the lecture (the class). These are the immediate constituents of the gestalt (i.e., emicized) cultural event. They are themselves broken down into constituents. So a lecture may be split between a guest speaker and the main lecturer or teacher, each contributing a portion; or between the teacher and YouTube or a film, and so on. The lecture will itself be organized into different sections, in order to facilitate more effective communication. And the students will fall into subconstituents of the class—different study groups, different majors (when relevant to the composition of the class or targets of the lecture), and so on.

  Figure 2.4

  Taking Pike’s analysis of society as a type of grammar seriously, a society will have a range of forms to express its values or meanings. We can analyze these forms as generated from a dynamic combinatorial grammar of roles, fillers, and slots, as above. Or we might instead take forms of the grammar to emerge from a more static inventory of cultural “constructions,” along the lines of construction grammar in linguistic theory (see Croft 2001; Goldberg 1995, 2006; among others), or as an OT grammar. The choice is not critical at this stage, though there could be significant empirical differences as the ideas are explored. I have chosen a simple model of the C-grammar, though of course others could be imagined—for example, constraint-based grammars. This remains as a future project.

  Different constructions or grammatical outputs will be found in different societies based on different cultures. For example, a culture that values sports may have units called sports teams, with fillers that ultimately come down to individuals called athletes. There could be an entire constituent—say, the University of Michigan football team. Such a unit would be a C(ultural)-syntagmeme. This syntagmeme will be composed of smaller units, or “immediate constituents,” such as defensive team, offensive team, special teams, bench, or coaching squad.

  A token of a C-tagmeme will be a group on the field at a particular time. This formal unit will have constituents and a meaning, namely, the function of the team on the field. Each member of the team will also have a meaning—his or her role on the team. According to Pike, society will be structured into many such teams with crisscrossing membership. This is not new, of course, since Simon (1962) argued more than fifty years ago that information is most efficiently organized hierarchically.

  But what about simpler societies? In Pike’s sense, a society will be simpler if it manifests fewer C-syntagmemes and less hierarchy. Consider, for example, an Amazonian society such as the Pirahãs. That society will be manifested by its individuals and “parsed” into its immediate constituents: village communities, families, women, men, children, adolescents, and so forth. Another group might instead be parsed into more structured kinship hierarchies: families, clans, lineages, or more professional specializations, and so on.

  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 predicates in the grammar of culture, in which each person occupies a role, alone or jointly, a slot in the C-sentence or C-discourse. For example, in the diagram above, the lecturer is the C-subject. The students are the C-object. The lecture is the C-predicate, a result of a group intention. In the linguistic act of the lecture, the topic or theme is what is being taught. But in the social organization, the students are the object, not the subject matter. We are describing their social roles in this moment in time to a particular teacher.

  When participants are from different cultures, as in the earlier Medicine Lodge example, they often assume understanding of roles, structure, and meaning of the joint act they are engaging in. But they rarely realize that each participant possesses a separate cultural semantics for interpreting the activity. In my view of the entire situation, this is what happened: The Comanche interpreted the predicate of the Medicine Lodge event as immediately-in-effect, conditionless promises, considering all actors as equal plenipotentiaries. The American negotiators saw themselves as subordinates to Congress, the Indians as a group that should accede to a greater authority, and their 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.

  Pirahã society lacks sports teams, specialized professions, and so on. As an egalitarian, unspecialized (professionally), smaller society of intimates, it will be parsed into fewer constituents. Still, we can look into its constituents. Roughly (very much so), Pirahã can be described by the diagram in figure 2.5. Once again, the chart of Pirahã society is not intended to be complete. But it does cover a lot of what is important and, in my understanding, the principal constituents of Pirahã society as perceived by the Pirahãs. Their society incorporates setting, humans, humanoid creatures (kaoáíbógí), different groupings of flora and fauna, nuclear families, and the like. So the biosphere is the xoí. This word means “the environment in which we live, move, and have our being.” When one is going to the jungle, one says, “I am going to the xoí.” When a parent wants a child to sit still in the canoe, they will say, “Move not into the xoí.” When the Pirahãs talk about moving to another river or far downriver or upriver, or far to the interior, they describe all of these as “moving to a different xoí.”

  Figure 2.5

  Bigí refers to a natural barrier. The sky, in Pirahã, is bigí, as is the ground. This is a vital constituent of Pirahã social organization, with different types of entities defined by their position relative to the barriers.

  The next immediate constituent of Pirahã society are its villages. Every village is known to all Pirahãs at all times, even though they can be more than a hundred miles apart and even though their composition is constantly shifting. The river is the next immediate constituent of Pirahã society. More than half of the Pirahãs’ diet comes from the river. All Pirahãs always live at the river’s edge, wherever that is in the course of a rainy or dry season. River animals are crucially important to them in ways that jungle animals are not. But the river also organizes their village living, such that in the dry season they are on the beach and in the rainy season in the forest. However, at no time are they more than a hundred yards or so from the bank or edge of the river. In the river there are fish—of paramount importance to Pirahãs—and other animals (e.g., caymans, snakes, manatees, porpoises, stingrays) that they do not eat, or at least, very rarely eat. The fish will be divided into constituents corresponding to the Pirahãs’s idea of species (as will other animals). The plants around them will be either useless to them (a few kinds of bushes, ferns, etc.) or useful. Of the latter, some will be edible (e.g., Brazil nuts and fruits), while others will not be (e.g., vine for baskets, bark for bowstrings, wood for bows). The nuclear family will be manifested by parents, children, and anyone else occupying the same hut—grandparents on occasion, spouses of children, and so on. This is rather fluid. Some single people in the village live alone. There are a few single parents. This diagram, then, is just a way of illustrating how the Pi
rahãs break down the important components responsible for their values and day-to-day life as a society.7

  Cultural values, conventions, and so on, will serve as the interpretative “linking rules” (see Van Valin and LaPolla 1997 for a discussion of form:meaning linking rules in language) from the C-grammar to the C-semantics, linking rules (connecting meaning to form)—how people understand themselves and their social and physical worlds (and how those worlds are integrated into their culture; see, for example, Kohn 2013).

  Taking a field perspective of Pirahã C-grammar, the structure of a particular society comprises a set of relationships in a network (White and Johansen 2006). Individuals belong to a network of criss-crossing hierarchies and relationships. Each individual thus is located by coordinates in simultaneously co-existing matrices. Pike (1967, 644) says that “as language utterances in sequence form a hierarchy of parts, whereas the language units as an abstract system constitute a network of intersecting hierarchies, so society likewise has the activities of its individuals sequentially but hierarchically structures while the relationships between those individuals themselves are integrated in a total network.”

  Also important to understanding culture and society is the linguistic notion of “complementary distribution.” Individuals can have distinct identities or a single identity in multiple modes of manifestation (think Clark Kent vs. Superman). In a strictly distributionalist view of the individual, Siamese twins would represent what structuralists might refer to as a “portmanteau being,” where the unit boundary is less clear. A culture is an amorphous mass in some ways. It is like an enormous discourse. It isn’t likely useful to propose a single-tree diagram to map it out in any useful way. On the other hand, its constituent components, like the sentences of a story, may be individually diagrammed in order to represent their major organizational units and principles. Thus the construction-based language of thought is also the language of language and the language of society—a mode of human organization. Still, it is worth considering more deeply the linguistic model of cultural analysis (see also Searle 2010 and cf. Hacking 2000).

  For example, consider an analysis of leadership in a given society, along the lines of emic leadership vs. etic leadership—members of a society see a leader has having characteristics even when her or she does not, while ignoring other characteristics because of the “emic unit” of president, fireman, nurse, and so on. Changing the emics of roles—nurse = female to nurse = either male or female—results from changes in the nature and later the perception of the role.

  In the study of a cultural grammar, we need to know how our theory should help us understand the constituents of a culture. One example might be the study of the leadership role of president. We discover, let us say, that a president signs documents, makes speeches, talks to people, and gives orders. But so does just about every modern professional. So these are etic activities initially in our analysis. Yet if we watch many different individuals engage in etically similar (or even identical) activities, the question we need to answer is, what meaning underlies the actions that distinguish the role in question (e.g., the US Presidency) from other roles? Some questions that we might ask as we try to understand the insider, emic perspective are: When does the president do these things? What does the president sign? What are the contexts and contents of the president’s speeches? Who are the addressees of the president’s letters and speeches? What social authority underlies the president’s activities?

  The president signs laws passed by Congress. The president speaks on matters of local, state, federal, and global significance. His or her words influence others because of the office he or she holds. The president addresses—qua president—individuals, groups, and organizations. Holders of other roles have no societal sanction to do as the president does and the meanings of their actions, even when similar, are different. OK so far, but how does a specific role and set of behaviors arise in the ranked-value, grammatical view of culture? To see this, let’s consider a harder problem.

  This problem was suggested to me by Dr. Eugenie Stapert (pers. comm.) from her ongoing research. How do members of a speech community distinguish a native speaker from a nonnative speaker? Though there is no single sufficient condition, categories that could distinguish etic and emic perspectives could include the following: discourse and use of gestures; constructions and lexemes; conversation turn-taking conventions; semantic fields; prosodic and gestural guides to the pragmatic organization of speech; body orientation; pronunciation; use of jargon and slang; or clothes. (Stivers et al. 2009). Etically a speaker may manifest these features. But emically, one only counts as a native speaker if one manifests these features in meaningful ways—using the appropriate etics in native contexts with native intentions, to show emic grasp. This requires participant observation and distributional analysis, along the lines of linguistic fieldwork (Sakel and Everett 2012).

  The definition of culture offered earlier should help us understand the multitude of manifestations of communities living culturally: patterns of behavior, social roles, institutions, tools, museums, and so on. It follows from my definition, “culture-with-a-small-c” underlies “Culture-with-a-capital-C.” An example that stands out in this regard is my favorite museum, the majestic Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

  The Rijksmuseum was founded in 1800 in the capital of the Netherlands, the Hague. Eight years later it was moved to Holland’s most beautiful and important city, Amsterdam. The state museum, like many others around the world, was founded to reflect the values (shown in particular histories illustrated, artists selected, accomplishments highlighted, etc.) and the wealth (another value) of the nation.

  Cultural values ooze from its walls. Each of the one million or so objects owned by the museum reflects a choice motivated by a value of some subgroup of Dutch culture. And of that million, each of the eight thousand or so objects actually selected for display owes its place in the public space of the Rijksmuseum to a choice that at least in some cases reflects the value perceived by the selection subgroup as reflecting the values of the entire community of the Netherlands.

  The art library in the Rijksmuseum, the display of the country’s naval history, the Rembrandts and Vermeers and Van Goghs—all of these selections help create Culture-with-a-capital-C, (or what some might refer to as Kultur). The expression of the values of a people. The literature that becomes popular likewise. And music, and so forth.

  But in examining the components of culture or Culture, we must not forget that culture’s “bits” can be shared across a diversity of networks. The American rock ’n’ roll or rap played on a Chinese radio station may reflect a cultural network of teens around the world rather than merely a component of American culture. In fact, I remember hearing teens on the BBC years ago express the sentiment that they feel closer to people who like the music they like than to people who live in the same country, share a religion, or speak the same language.

  If we examine art within the Rijksmuseum, we see further examples of the enveloping cultural network. The most famous work of art in the Rijksmuseum is Rembrandt van Rijn’s imposing painting The Night Watch (or more accurately, The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch Preparing to March Out). This painting dates to the golden age of the Netherlands, and was completed in 1642. The painting is—like so many others—imbued with symbolism relevant to its home community’s values, knowledge, and roles. In the painting we see values of Dutch culture of that time, in the very idea of a “watch” (vigilance against invasion and crime); the ideas of virtue and noblesse oblige of the wealthy; and the larger need for vigilance in all areas of one’s life, the circumspection of the “good Christian.”

  Rembrandt’s work was enthusiastically received, but his reputation also declined precipitously in his lifetime. The rise in popularity of painters such as Anthony van Dyck, whose work contrasted so strongly in color and light with Rembrandt’s (his were much brighter, much more upbeat
than Rembrandt’s) adversely affected the reception of Rembrandt’s work, as the newer work reflected changing values and standards of beauty. Since Rembrandt’s death, of course, he has been recognized as one of (if not the) greatest of all Dutch masters, based on more recent changes values. And yet those who attend to the connection between culture and dark matter realize that change in any artist’s reception or reputation reflects the shifting values of those who behold the art rather than their art alone. In fact, the reader or looker or hearer’s culture is the most significant factor in success of the artist (or inventor, or CEO, etc.). The artist who can best read or predict those values and their shifting rankings among their audience—and adapt to them—will enjoy the lion’s share of success.

  THINKING IS CULTURE-BASED

  Neuroscientist Gary Marcus, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times (Marcus 2015), argues that everyone should “Face it, Your Brain Is a Computer.” He spends the first part of his brief piece exposing weaknesses in arguments that the brain is not a computer. He summarizes a few of the arguments against brains being computers in the following:

  1. Some people claim that “Brains are parallel, computers are serial,” therefore, brains are not computers. But Marcus correctly responds to the effect that “No, that’s wrong. Computers can be serial or parallel.”