Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  One of the more interesting monograph-length studies of social and linguistic interactions to emerge in recent years is Enfield’s (2013b) Relationship Thinking. As he says:

  Social interaction, typically in its real-time, face-to-face format, is a privileged domain for studying social relations; it is our most experience-near locus of sociality, and is where we may directly observe processes of learning, production, comprehension, diffusion, change, convergence, and diversification in language and other aspects of culture. (xvi)

  Enfield refers to the creation of relations in real-time interactions as enchrony. His work reveals a great deal of significance for language and society—showing, for example, how meanings are created and negotiated and how their development is constrained by the cultures in which particular relationships take place. Part of attachment’s contribution to dark matter is the communication patterns the infant uses and acquires to establish its ever-widening circles of relationships. Thus the study of attachment and relationships is vital to understanding and perceiving the emergence of linguistic forms and meanings, apart from how cultural values and arrangements of knowledge and responsibilities might emerge from these interactions. Enfield’s work takes us closer to an understanding of Sapir’s (1934, 5) statement that “culture is then not something given but something to be gradually and gropingly discovered.”

  Summary

  This chapter offered a case study of the acquisition of dark matter, by means of a detailed description from my own field research on cultural learning among the Pirahãs. From this we learned that the entire individual—not merely a disembodied mind—learns and acquires dark matter, reinforcing the discussion of the previous chapter on the inability of computers are to ever be able to think or talk. The main reason is the conglomeration of factors that make human dark matter what it is: consciousness, emotions, apperceptions, cognitive plasticity, culture, society, and physiology. Without these, there is no thinking. The chapter also reviewed the necessary requirements to develop dark matter: a body, “culturing,” a flexible brain, an emotional brain, semantics, and human intelligence.

  4

  Dark Matter as Hermeneutics

  The perceiver (aisthêtikon) is potentially what the perceptible object (aisthêton) actually is already, as we have said. When it is being affected, then, it is unlike the object; but when it has been affected it has been made like the object and has acquired its quality.

  ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics

  To this point I have developed the idea of dark matter as a nuanced set of knowledges that are acquired via action and reflection, through lived experiences, attachment, personal apperceptional experiences (interpretation of memories), and by living culturally (participating in a community via social roles, shared and ranked values, conventions, symbols, beliefs, tools, etc.—the material, symbolic, and psychological integration of an individual into a community). Now we are prepared to apply the concept of dark matter to our perambulations through a given society in conjunction with the culture of that society.

  The case I make in the following discussion of dark matter is that this unspoken knowledge is our primary tool for interpreting all our experiences. In building my argument, much of what I have to say has been somewhat anticipated in classic works such as Hall ([1959] 1973, 1976, 1990), Bakhtin (1984), Vygotsky (1978), Geertz (1973), Ryle ([1949] 2002), Pelli (1999), and others. The discussion here is novel, however, in the way it attempts to unify mind and culture.

  Let’s begin with an example from American racial attitudes. In American society, as among most other industrial societies, our value judgments of subgroups of the society—as well as the society as a whole—are formed tacitly through media, myths, and the universal “talk like who you talk with” principle mentioned at several points, as well as the related idea that you “prefer people like yourself.” Human infants early on develop preferences for people who look like, talk like, eat like, smell like, and otherwise seem like the people they most often see and engage in these activities with.

  Along with sociocultural attachment, our perceptions of others is formed by educational institutions, movies (the portrayal of different members of distinct groups, e.g., women, African-Americans, gays), books (where we learn initially of heroes, villains, settings, supporting characters and value-laden plots, etc.), magazines (erotic, food, race, ethnicity, etc.), among many other sources of enculturation and socialization. These perceptions lead us to adopt and rank values relative to other people and to place them in perceived cultural roles and statuses (valuations of roles). In one study (Eberhardt et al. 2004), it was demonstrated that stereotypes of “Black Americans as violent and criminal” are implicated when subjects are presented with certain concepts such as “basketball” and “crime.” Gazing at black faces can decrease the perceptual threshold for recognizing crime-relevant objects. That is, there can exist bidirectional cognitive pathways between stereotyped groups and concepts such that either may trigger the other.

  Extending this, as we see directly in more detail, we interpret the world around us based on our unspoken knowns (Gregory 1970). For more than a century, for example, smoking tobacco was interpreted as a part of the trajé of the cosmopolitan intellectual, an expression of cool, of joie de vivre. A pipe and leather-patched tweed coat were part of the semeiotic of the “thinker,” from Sherlock Holmes to the professor of literature. Today, smoking is perceived differently in the Western world, largely as a filthy, self-destructive habit of nicotine addicts, with nothing cool about it at all. Showing the same images of beatniks or French philosophers from the 1950s and 1960s to people younger than thirty today would evoke quite different interpretations and value judgments for the simple reason that our values have changed dramatically—something about our culturing has led to different dark matters in younger members of the same societies that originally valued smoking.

  Thick Descriptions of Cultural Experience

  In fact, dark matter determines not only how we interpret images, but whether we can interpret them at all. The cross-cultural ability to interpret photographs is directly relevant to the idea that culture might provide a hermeneutics for interpreting the world. A bit of reflection suggests that differential perceptual ability in this regard might not be unexpected. After all, in the natural world, there are few if any two-dimensional visual experiences, aside perhaps from reflections in water. In cultures without two-dimensional visual arts—exposure to photography, or literacy, for example—the interpretation of photography could provide us with information on the sources of some visual representation, whether they are learned culturally (at least in part) or innate.

  I had noticed, after taking Polaroid photos of the Pirahãs or bringing in developed photos of them from town, that they would stare at the photos and then ask me what or who a given picture was about, even when the photo was a clear portrait of the beholder or a loved one. I commented on this later to a few colleagues, expressing my belief that this was “because they haven’t had much experience with pictures.” Some of my psychologist colleagues thought the observations were worth following up on. But before going into a discussion of the Pirahãs’ interpretation of two-dimensional objects, it is worth noting that their difficulty in this regard is no different than Westerners’ effort to understand art, from modern to impressionistic to realist, it all must find a place in the observer’s cultural matrix to be interpreted. Susan Sontag (2013, 1) insightfully observes that “in teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” And also: “Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.”

  Anthropologist Glifford Geertz (1973) borrowed a very important idea from philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1968) and used it to dramatically alter the notion of anthropology: the idea of “thick d
escription.” In a thick description, the scientist provides sufficient information for an outside observer to grasp the meaning of the events being described. Another way of putting this is that the description should provide an emic understanding of events, not merely contenting itself with the etics of what is being described.

  An example from linguistics can illustrate this. A “thin” description might say, for example, that English has aspirated occlusive consonants, going so far as to list the words in which these consonants occur, or at least a large sample. A thick description would include the fact that aspirated stops occur only in syllable-initial position and that native speakers hear the unaspirated and aspirated variants as the same sound whenever they adhere to the above-given expected distribution of syllable-initial and non-syllable-initial (that is, it would be at least a phonological analysis).

  For something like, say, a Pirahã dance, we can describe this etically simply as the Pirahãs walking in a circle singing. An etic description would note things like how many dance at once, who dances, when they dance, where they dance, how long they dance, under what circumstances, and so on—all those aspects of their dance that are physically measurable. The etic description would include the fact that some of the men dance naked or clothed in palm-leaf skirts with headbands woven from palm leaves or the bark of the buruti palm. A thick description would include all of this and more. For example, it would describe/explain the role of the naked or palm-attired men, the expressions on the faces of the dancers, the people’s explanation of why they walk in a circle, and so on. That is, the thick description of Pirahã dance enables us to understand the emics of the dance, the purpose and interpretation of the dance by its participants—what do the songs, circular walking, different dress or undress of some male participants mean to the dance and the dance’s role in the overall life of the Pirahãs?

  Pirahãs “dance” by walking in a tight circle. If there are a couple of villages dancing together, they may walk in concentric circles. This can last for a short while or as long as seventy-two hours (in my experience) without stopping (though individuals come and go, stop and eat, etc., the circle continues unbroken). Walking in a circle produces a slight dizziness, especially as dancers accelerate from time to time. The circle can be left or (re)joined during the duration of the event. The “songs” the people “sing” as they “dance” (i.e., walk in circles) are in fact prose retellings of remembered events, with the “melody” coming from the tones of the words themselves. The rhythm of normal speech is altered and the frequencies of tones are intensified (impressionistically high tones have higher frequencies than normal speech, and low tones have lower frequency).

  Again, the purpose of thick descriptions is to provide information sufficient to research the meaning—the emic analysis of the event. For Geertz, the purpose of anthropology is to interpret the meanings of cultures, not to offer up a “scientific theory” of them. But even if we (reasonably) were to hope for a bit more than Geertz’s anthropological hermeneutics as the output of anthropological studies, it is clear that in their individual development, members of a community will—through their practices, words, and individual experiences—come to acquire and imbue their bodies (including their brains) with dark matter.

  All around us, the absence of thick descriptions affects our understanding of others, even those central to our own culture. For example, the lack of a thick description or any inkling of an emic perspective of biblical culture by the average, contemporary US church member produces job security for ministers, preachers, and priests, since most of their public role is explaining what their sects’ scriptures mean.

  Consider, for instance, the Apostle Paul’s admonition that “women should keep silent in the churches.” This comes from the first letter of Paul to the church at Corinth, chapter 14, verse 34, and is often quoted in isolation as “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.” Taken thus out of textual, historical, and cultural context, these words seem to be a straightforward prohibition by the apostle against any leadership role for women in church life. But this would be mistaken. Consider, for example, the larger textual context:

  I Corinthians 14:33–35:

  For God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints. The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says. If they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.

  The passage talks about “confusion” and “learning at home.” The women are not to keep silent merely because they should “shut up in church” but for reasons having to do with less confusion and a more appropriate learning environment. What could this mean? Well, this textual context has raised the issue of the local cultural context at the time of Paul’s writing. Many commentaries observe that the woman’s place in first-century Greek and Hebrew societies was low, more like property than personhood.1 This treatment of women produced additional, compounded effects on the social inequality of women.

  The lingua franca of the first-century world in which the Apostle Paul was writing was Koiné (common) Greek. Itinerant Christian preachers were becoming more and more frequent. Koiné was favored in the churches because there were so many local languages and dialects throughout the Mediterranean, just as there are today; a traveling preacher couldn’t be expected to learn them all. However, women did not usually speak Koiné because their social roles kept them in the house and with very little opportunity to learn any language other than their local dialect. In addition, women and men often sat on separate sides of the meeting space. Thus as a trade-language sermon was being preached, some women would shout across the divide to ask their husbands for a translation. The husbands might answer or yell out the translation. The effect of this back-and-forth on church decorum and organization was not salutary, in Paul’s opinion. Hence he admonished the women to be silent—to wait until they returned home to ask for a translation if they needed one. Ecclesiastical roles for women were not in focus here per se. Without this knowledge of the culture, there is no proper interpretation of the verses. A thick description—or emic perspective, in my interpretation of this Ryleian phrase—of the culture of the source and the target cultures is essential for translation to take place accurately or effectively (see chap. 8).

  But culture in the popular sense, as we saw in chapter 2, is not really an entity in the real world. In this case, when we refer to culture, we are really generalizing over dark matters. Culture is an abstract network of ideas manifested through individual cultural members. It is not to be found outside those members. Thus what is usually referred to as “culture” is nothing more than individual dark matters (including roles, values, structures). So then, how does this dark matter come to function as a hermeneutic?

  As in the development of attachment to one’s caregivers and larger society (chap. 3), dark matter arises from the construction of concentric circles of relationships where the members of ever-widening groups are engaged in activities that the individual learns to interpret and to repeat, very much like they do in acquiring their first language. Culture is the dark matter that is acquired from these activities of culturing, social acting, languaging. Culturing, languaging—the various games, utterances, speech acts, discourses, symbols, icons, and so on—are of fundamental importance to the acquisition of dark matter, to interpret the world around us. They are our hermeneutics. To see this, let’s return to consider the interesting issue of perception among the Pirahãs.

  Culture and Perception

  The discussion that follows is drawn partially from my own field research. But the technical argumentation, much of the reasoning, and some of the wording are taken largely from Yoon, Whitthoft, et al. (2014). The question asked here, again, is “Does our dark matter—derived from culture and psychology—help or impede our ability to p
erceive the world around us?” The short answer is that it does both. But to see this more clearly, I will first examine my own difficulties in seeing what Amazonian peoples see. Next I will look at their difficulties in seeing what I see.

  In the rainy season, jungle paths flood. Snakes exit their holes. Caimans come further inland. Sting rays, electric eels, and all manner of creatures can then be found on what in the dry season are wide, dry paths. It is hard to walk down these paths in daylight during the rainy season, covered as they are by knee-deep, even chest-high water (though I have had to walk for hours in such conditions). At night, these paths become intimidating to some of us. As I walk with the Pirahãs, I am usually wearing shoes, whereas they go barefoot. Two memories stand out here. The first was me almost stepping on a small (three feet long) caiman. The second was me almost stepping on a bushmaster (there are many other memories as dangerous). In both cases, my life or at least a limb was saved by Pirahãs who, shocked that I did not or could not see these obvious dangers, pulled me back at the last moment, exhorting me to pay more attention to where I stepped. Such examples were frequent in my decades with Amazonian and Mesoamerican peoples. And each time, they were astonished at my apparent blindness.

  I discovered, however, that “blindness” affected the Pirahãs as well. There were things that, like me, they looked at but couldn’t “see.” These were objects from my culture, such as pictures. (Interestingly, the Pirahã expression for being good at some skill is to “see well.”)