When we look at individual businesses, the ethnography of commerce more generally, the anthropology of money, or any other area of business from a cultural perspective, there are various possible approaches we see, from diachronic to synchronic, from symbols to actions, patterns, practices, and so on. But the fundamental question in the study of business from my perspective is just the same as the fundamental cultural question for any domain: What are the emic units, the etic units, and process of emicization?
While people can be expected to share values regardless of where they are found, this should not be overstated. It is of course true that as biological entities, we paint our lives from a palette of overlapping “colors” (e.g., the similarity of the problems we face or our biological resources). Yet if I am correct, our differences are far more profound than our similarities. The dark matter that includes the ineffable, the unspoken, the not-often spoken, and the hard-to-say is a product of a specific place, time, individual psychology, apperceptions, memory, and culture. In this sense, my theory agrees with Edward T. Hall’s “silent language.” As he put it so perspicaciously: “What is most difficult to accept is the fact that our own cultural patterns are literally unique, and therefore they are not universal” (Hall [1959] 1973, viii; emphasis in the original).
Although there are most certainly general principles of human behavior and the formation of dark matter, the combinations 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.
Other examples of dark matter are useful and easy to find. So consider the important things we rarely say. How do you stop at an intersection? How do you aspirate a consonant? Why do we recreate the spatial configuration of events by their position relative to the anterior portion of our bodies rather than global directions such as north and south? When I went to the Amazon to begin field research, I wanted to work on texts that would simultaneously teach me about the Pirahãs’ language and culture. I did not realize at the time that there is in fact no other kind of text. All texts reveal culture and language. Still, some aspects of culture were more obvious to me as a beginner so I began with arrow making. It turns out that this is knowledge all male Pirahãs share; knowledge they rarely if ever talk about; but knowledge they obviously can talk about. In fact, the first text I ever collected (see below) was on arrow making. As my years among them went by, I became fascinated by this topic-knowledge transmission without language.
There are better examples of knowledge that is unspoken, though. Nonhuman animals present superior examples in some ways. These animals have beliefs, desires, and emotions, and learn complicated behaviors and ways of interacting with the world. Yet they lack language altogether and so, by definition, cannot talk about their knowledge. Almost all nonhuman 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 its environment, and so on. My 140-pound Fila Brasileiro, for example, 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 humans’ does.
Humans have non-informative labels for many of the things we know ineffably. Similarly to the way that we label some animal knowledge as “instinct,” we often refer to ineffability of human abilities as “talent.” For example, there are creative writing courses at many universities. But no one can teach you to write quality lyrics, novels, creative nonfiction, music, visual art, and so on. You can improve through instruction. But you cannot “arrive” solely by instruction. Someone might be able to teach you how to write in a style like Tom Wolfe or to compose like Bach, but you cannot be taught how to write as well as Wolfe, compose as well as Bach, paint as well as Van Gogh.
There are several reasons for the ineffability of talent. First, talent is to some degree a social ascription. When we say that “She has got it,” that it is a social appeal in a limited temporal context, along the lines of the formation of a band in the Springsteen epigram at the beginning of this book. Second, talent sits near the middle of the knowledge-that and knowledge-how continuum. We can talk about style and analyze art, but there is still what Dreyfus called “know-how.” Third, talent is not a cause but an effect. Writing a novel is an illocutionary act, but producing a novel that is considered brilliant requires a perlocutionary effect. The same goes for dancing well. Or any other ability. The society must sanction them and agree that you are good at them. Talent is often associated with seeing things differently than others of one’s culture, of being “on the cutting edge.” One way to conceive of this in my terms is that to have talent (or being a crackpot) or creativity is to think at the edge of the emic: being an outlier of—though still within—one’s own cultural system.
Another form of ineffable tacit knowledge is how we gesture to accompany spoken speech. We can describe (see chap. 7 for an in-depth discussion) gestures scientifically and study them. We can distinguish etic from emic gestures in particular cultures. But speakers themselves cannot tell us why they make certain gestures, when they make them relative to the speech stream, why some are used repeatedly throughout a story or conversation while others may emerge only once.
Exposure to overt knowledge in other contexts related to dark matter in our more familiar contexts becomes enormously informative if we can relate the two (which is nontrivial). For example, I really only began to understand my native English grammar when I first studied Spanish in sixth grade. When any person begins to probe for alternatives to their customary behavior, the diffuse light of their intellectual torch shines back on what they left behind, however momentarily—their path as they walked just before “here” and farther before the “there” ahead. Just as hablar taught me that “to speak” is a verb, so tortilla helped me to understand the function of “bread.” In the many years I lived among peoples of the Brazilian Amazon, especially among the Pirahãs, I saw the norms I had left behind in ever-brightening bas-relief. As my relationships changed to include a wife who loves animals, animals entered my beliefs, desires, values, and thoughts in the heretofore unexperienced role of friends and companions. This intrusion of animals has illuminated my relationships and thinking about humans. With each person I learn to like, love, or dislike, I learn more about those who already populate my past and present.
The desire to understand the various levels of human knowledge—from the explicit to the deeply embedded muscle memory of our flesh—is hardly new with me. This is the problem of human existences. One can talk about this knowledge as a psychologist, as a shaman, as a philosopher or a jurist, an anthropologist or a linguist, a minister, an imam, a chef, or a novelist. The crucial step is to recognize one’s vantage point, to the degree that this is possible in a rain forest carpeted with trees that block out one’s narrow horizons, or on a busy street valleyed between skyscrapers, or an open field from which no other reference point is available for miles.
On the other hand, we each begin from the same vantage point—our self. But what is this self I look out from upon the foreground and background of my visual field? How does this self come to be? In a delicious irony, determining the nature of our self-centered vantage point can answer the most profound questions of the “other,” as the other can answer the most profound questions about me. Anthropology begins simultaneously with me and them.
The knowledge tha
t makes us who we are is part body and part culture-mind, where “mind” is a way of talking about neurological development and “culture” is way of talking about the societal contribution to that neuromental development—procedures our brains go to first out of habit, in turn determined to large extent by the society in which the brain is found. For each member of a society, there will be a group with which he or she identifies. In fact, there will be several—some overlapping, some without any point of connection other than the societal member in question. Each human is a social nexus.
There is a Brazilian expression, Se der bolo eu tiro meu corpo daí! “If it gives cake, I take my body out!” I love this because literally interpreted, it is impossibly opaque in English. The first time I heard it, it was completely opaque to me. The meaning derives from the perceived complexity of cake baking, especially among those whose literacy skills make it difficult to follow recipes closely, rendering the final product lottery-like. But even for those who can follow recipes easily, a cake is a very complex item. The same flour that makes chapatis and gravy can make German chocolate cake. This humans-as-cakes metaphor, or humans-as-any-complex-mix concept, seems more useful to me than the “man in a can” view of the nativists.10 Sure, parts of us are innate. But the real action is in the variation of combinations and connections formed by our movements through the social world that make us each unique in nontrivial ways. This mixing, though, cannot be seen directly. The invisible matter of our brains is crucial in the composition of our selves and natures.
Human psychology and human culture construct one another, as Sapir argued more than eighty years ago. On the other hand, the work here differs significantly from Sapir’s in that it addresses not only the biological and cognitive “platforms” (see D. Everett 2012a) upon which language, culture, and interactions are built, but also the ways in which our selves and the very construct of human nature emerge from this interaction over the generations.
NORMS AND CONVENTIONS
By-products of culture that play out in texts and out of texts are norms and conventions (simplifying, norms are conventions with moral expectations). Considering norms, for example: What are these, and how are they enforced in any culture? Norms are not merely statistical regularities (Brennan et al. 2013), though even the statistical regularities of behavior need to be sorted out, because some of them will reflect the culture (such as Pirahã posture) but others will not (such as Pirahã canoe use vs. canoe building—they do not build the kinds of canoes that Brazilians make, even though these are the principal canoes that they use). Canoes reflect Pirahã economy and relations with the outside world. But limited (i.e., only a couple of hours per day) canoe accessibility for men is not a norm. It is a function of a shortage. On the other hand, there are canoe norms—who can use a canoe, which canoe, where, when and how, and so on.
The idea that our own values, knowledge structures, and social roles enable us to interpret the world has been around for a while. Davidson (2004) and Searle (1980a, 1980b) refer to this cultural knowledge as “the background” (though this term has a more technical definition in Searle’s work). Clifford Geertz, however, is the one whose work is most associated with the view of culture that I have in mind. For Geertz, culture is our way of imputing meanings to the world, our means to interpret our experiences.
We have been asking from various perspectives how the hermeneutic role of culture illumines the idea that there is a dark matter of the mind. To take yet another tack in answering this question, it is useful to address one more aspect of culture that has not been referred to yet in this exposition, namely, conventions. Conventions are signs, behaviors, reactions, and so on, that emerge from dark matter. They are identifiable behaviors of groups, not individuals alone, and are useful tools to extract meaning, predict behavior, reduce decisional complexity, and make us “feel at home.” They are the cues that give us comfort, the idea that we know what is being done and what we should do next. One example of a convention is phatic language.
We pass each other in the hall. I say, “Hi. How are you?” If you start to tell me about your hernia or that you had a bad night’s sleep, you do not understand the conventionality of phatic language. The purpose of conventional phatic statements like “Hi. How are you?” is not to elicit information. They take the syntactic forms of questions on occasion but are culturally the equivalent of “grooming.” Yes, they do take the form of questions and so some people will affect that they should answer them as such. But the form of phatic language as statements, questions, and so on, is an example of homopraxis—two acts that share a common form. In some cases, “How are you?” is intended to be an actual question. In others it is not. In those cases, the phatic cases, the point is to recognize you, similar in some ways to grooming in primate social groups. Some cultures, such as the Pirahãs’, lack phatic language. It is a matter of cultural convention. And in the case of American queuing, the queue is also a norm—it is considered immoral by some to fail to queue, and there are informal sanctions for failure to do so (e.g., “Get to the back of the line!” “Who do they think they are?” “I cannot serve you, sir, because you have cut in line.”)
Still other conventions include queueing. In an American store, for example, 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 waited on 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 in the other culture. The reason is that conventions make life easier by requiring fewer decisions, by bringing a sense of the familiar to the foreign.
Formulaic expressions—again, such as “Gezundheit” following another’s sneeze; using irony to defuse serious or sad situations; and expected responses to jokes (laughter), meals (“That was excellent”), and so on—are conventions. Though, due to dark matter, cultural members may see conventions as “natural,” they are in fact cultural.
Among the leaders in reflection on the nature of conventions are Lewis (2002) and Millikan (1998). According to Millikan, there are requirements for something to be a convention that are often overlooked or misunderstood in other work, even work as influential as Lewis (2002). (And, closely related is work on “norms,” which, like conventions, also follow from ranked values, knowledge structures, and roles. See Brennan et al. 2013.) Millikan’s list of the components of convention includes (1)–(8) below:
1. Reproduction. Structures of languages are reproduced, not by everyone, but recognizable by all. Language structures are thus one example of the conventional. The phatic language just mentioned is an example of this. But so is grammar. To say, for example, “the good ol’ red, white, and blue,” rather than “the good ol’ white, blue, and red,” or even “good the blue, red, white, ol’” is conventional.
2. Weight of precedent. Conventions have little tendency to appear in the absence of precedent. This is another manifestation of the actuation problem that we mentioned earlier. Saying “‘ta dum” after a joke, or rolling one’s eyes after an inane statement, are conventions. But they do not begin to be conventions until they have been so established by precedent, by a first exchange.
3. Coordination conventions. Some conventions help us coordinate activities, thoughts, interpretations, and so forth. Queuing is one such example. Others including raising one’s hand in a meeting to “have the floor,” and so on.
4. Conventions do not imply regular conformity. Sometimes in meetings people talk out of turn, even though everyone knows that it is expected to raise your hand and be recognized by the leader of the meeting first. Conventions are themselves violable constraints.
5. People want, expect, and seek conventions. In a waiting room, you place your hat on a chair to signal conventionally that you are reserving that chair for someone a
nd that no one else should sit in it. Since conventions are neither inviolable nor hold any special legal status, you would not be arrested if you picked up someone else’s hat, handed it to her, and sat in that chair. After all, who or what gives her the right to save a seat? Convention does. There are two conventions at play here. The first is “first come, first served.” If you see an empty seat and sit in it, someone is not “allowed” to come along later and try to move you out of it. But in the case of the seat-saving convention, you have in effect “first come, two served.” We allow this behavior and in effect depend on it, expect it, and look for it, because it brings order to circumstances that would otherwise be unorderly. Thus conventions can, in the right circumstances, develop into norms.
6. Conventions are not prescriptive rules. There is, of course, no rule written anywhere or memorized that says, “If you arrive first, you may save as many seats in a row of seats as you like.” And in fact, some people may sit in seats you are trying to reserve because there is no precise rule that tells you how many seats you can reserve at a time. However, in general, when we see someone behaving—even at the extremes—in accordance with recognized conventions, we avoid conflict and let them have their way via convention.
7. Conventions crisscross. I refer to conventions that crisscross as homopraxes (deriving from homo-; homonyms, homophones, etc.). Homopraxes can be teased apart only by emic analysis; two conventions that have the same etic form but different meanings—such as raising your hand in a classroom and offering a Nazi salute—can be distinguished only by emic understanding, dark matter.
8. Conventions produce perlocutionary effects. Imagine someone telling a story of a murdered loved one. In the US the expected perlocutionary effect is to express sadness and solidarity with the storyteller. But in other societies, such as among the Pirahãs, the expected response would be laughter, a convention that shows that one should not take things too seriously, that one has not lost face, and so on.
Dark Matter of the Mind Page 16