Chapter One
1. Other treatments of culture as grammar failed because they lacked the notion of ranked, violable values and more articulated concept of culture that I attempt to develop here.
2. See the bicycle-riding robot on designboom: http://www.designboom.com/technology/bicycle-riding-robot/.
3. Searle’s (1980b) “Chinese room” analogy is famous in linguistics, artificial intelligence, and other scientific communities for underscoring the semantics problem for artificial intelligence, that is, that computers can produce forms but do not know what they mean. Some have claimed that this problem has been solved. I don’t agree in the slightest with this assertion. There can be no semantics without culture, and until the culture problem is solved, the semantics problem will be intractable.
4. Pike did not recognize distinctive features and worked with the notion of phonemes. What I say in what follows works as well for the latter as for the former, but is perhaps clearer with features.
5. A mora is a relative unit of length proposed by many phonologists and phoneticians. A vowel would be one mora, a consonant either zero moras or some fraction thereof, in the simpler cases.
6. Anticipating our discussion of Aristotle, it would be anachronistic and incorrect to attribute to him the view that there is in fact no mind at all, only a body with a thinking organ that carries out its tasks and takes its form as part of its body and history, though Aristotle is my own inspiration for this line of thought. Just as one’s heart may be damaged by diet or the liver by drink, so is the brain shaped, strengthened, or damaged by our diet, exercise, recreational activities, entertainments, etc. Our brain is just an organ of our body, merely a part of the whole.
7. Kant ([1903] 2001, 120) talks about “imagination” as “imagination has to bring the manifold of intuitions into the form of an image.” That is, in this sense, his notion of imagination is to create an image—an image based on experiences and apperceptions that have been internalized. This is in fact not far off from the notion of dark matter that emerges from the present discussion. However, this Kantian notion of imagination requires, or coexists with, the kind of innate conceptual knowledge that is incompatible with our view, so Kant still lies outside the tradition in which I believe I am constructing my own ideas. Nevertheless, Kant’s work on the imagination does show that it is nearly impossible to pigeonhole him in any way (thanks to Yaron Senderowicz for bringing my attention to Kant’s work on the imagination).
8. There are many reasons to entertain a robust skepticism of Chomsky’s nativist theory of tacit knowledge of language, however, as per D. Everett (2012a) and V. Evans (2014), among others.
9. There is no pure version of either rationalism or empiricism; such distinctions are rarely embraced as we come to see more and more of the complexity of the natural world. I refer to them here as a simplification of the debate that aids the exposition and does no harm to the overall argument.
10. By referring to specific names or samples of any individual’s work, I do not intend to create a false reification or synecdochical misrepresentation of an author that might diminish the subtlety of their thought in any way. Every author cited in this chapter held views that were wide ranging and impressively rich and nuanced, even to the degree of penning apparently self-contradictory passages. My appeal to their authorship and insights is intended neither to box them in nor to speak for them. It is clearly selective. Yet, I believe that my selections are consistent with a broader interpretation of their work.
11. All learners, of course, must have learning biases. But these biases need not take the form of innate knowledge, other than general perceptual constraints.
Chapter Two
1. Anthropology is a vast field, including social anthropology of the British variety, scientific anthropology, and various other approaches in a range of countries. Since my efforts here are directed toward developing my own theory, I have interacted primarily with anthropologists whose concerns with the intersection of language and culture have been a bigger influence on my development, namely, American linguistic anthropologists for the most part. This is not to slight other traditions intentionally, just to say that I made a decision to focus on a particular literature at the expense of others (and my own development, I am sure). Many will strongly disagree with my conception of culture. But disagreement is not new in anthropology.
2. A few definitions and descriptions of culture—in addition to those in the text—worth highlighting include the following (collected by Hervé Varenne, professor of education at Columbia University, all taken from http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/hv/clt/and/culture_def.html):
Franz Boas: “Culture may be defined as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of individuals composing a social group collectively and individually in relations to their natural environment, to other groups, to members of the group itself and of each individual to himself. It also includes the products of these activities and their role in the life of the groups. The mere enumerations of these various aspects of life, however, does not constitute culture. It is more, for its elements are not independent, they have a structure.”
Ruth Benedict: “What really binds men together is their culture,—the ideas and the standards they have in common.”
Margaret Mead: “Culture means the whole complex of traditional behavior which has been developed by the human race and is successively learned by each generation. A culture is less precise. It can mean the forms of traditional behavior which are characteristics of a given society, or of a group of societies, or of a certain race, or of a certain area, or of a certain period of time.”
James Baldwin: “Culture was not a community basket weaving project, nor yet an act of God; being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissutes with which they had been forced to deal.”
Antonio Gramsci: “One might say ‘ideology’ here, but on condition that the word is used in its highest sense of a conception of the world that is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in all manifestations of individual and collective life.”
Lionel Trilling: “When we look at a people in the degree of abstraction which the idea of culture implies, we cannot but be touched and impressed by what we see, we cannot help being awed by something mysterious at work, some creative power which seems to transcend any particular act or habit or quality that may be observed. To make a coherent life, to confront the terrors of the outer and the inner world, to establish the ritual and art, the pieties and duties which make possible the life of the group and the individual—these are culture, and to contemplate these various enterprises which constitute a culture is inevitably moving. [ . . . ][Freud] does indeed see the self as formed by its culture. But he also sees the self as set against the culture, struggling against it, having been from the first reluctant to enter it. Freud would have understood what Hegel meant by speaking of the ‘terrible principle of culture.’”
Ward Goodenough: “The term culture [refers to] what is learned, . . . the things one needs to know in order to meet the standards of others.” “[ . . . ] Therefore, if culture is learned, its ultimate locus must in individuals rather than in groups. If we accept this, then cultural theory must explain in what sense we can speak of culture as being shared or as the property of groups at all, and it must explain what the processes are by which ‘sharing’ arises.”
Clifford Geertz: “[the culture concept] denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life . . . The point is sometimes put in the form of an argument that cultural patterns are “models,” that they are sets of symbols whose relations to one another “model” relations among entities, processes . . . The term “model” has, however, two senses—and “of” sense and a “for�
�� sense . . . Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves.”
Richard Shweder: “Culture refers to the intentional world. Intentional persons and intentional worlds are interdependent things that get dialectically constituted and reconstituted through the intentional activities and practices that are their products, yet make them up . . . Culture is the constituted scheme of things for intending persons.”
Bruno Latour: “the set of elements that appear to be tied together when, and only when, we try to deny a claim or to shake an association.”
3. It is trivially true that if you can understand a movie, you must understand something of the culture that produced it, but this doesn’t mean that you are a member of that culture. Not even momentarily. And it is not obvious that a serious film can be understood well by those outside the culture.
4. Obviously DNA studies would be interesting and necessary scientifically before saying anything confident on this score, but it is difficult politically to carry out such studies because in Brazil, those delegated to protect indigenous peoples are wary of anything that could be perceived as racist studies, especially studies carried out by “gringo” scientists.
5. One of the most common objections critics raise against N. Evans and Levinson (2009)—and my own work—is that the superficial absence of a particular feature does not mean that the feature is not present in the language abstractly. This is correct. But the critics then make the mistake of moving from this banal observation to conclude that they/we are either deliberately or ignorantly failing to understand the difference between Greenbergian and Chomskyan universals. This is an old accusation—one that I, among many others, have rebutted in numerous publications, but apparently one that gives some critics comfort. However, it is worth considering in detail here to see how the debate has been manipulated/misunderstood.
6. An isogloss is a geographic boundary marked by a particular linguistic feature, such as pronunciation of specific segments, a different word form (e.g., gumband, which means “rubberband” in the Pittsburgh area and environs), or different constructions (e.g., the geographical distribution of “My car needs washed” vs. “My car needs washing”).
7. One of the more interesting immediate constituents of Pirahã society are kaoáíbógí, literally, “fast mouths,” which represent a largish group of human-like entities that the Pirahãs claim to interact with. At one time I confused these with the concept of “spirits” (see D. Everett 2008), but they are in fact seen as living creatures of a different order than animals or humans.
8. This is another reason why I do not believe that there was any “cognitive revolution” on September 11, 1956 (Gardner 1987), but—to put it humorously—simply a highly celebrated meeting of secular dualists.
9. For example, see DTN’s “Core Values”: http://www.custompage.reslisting.com/apartments/mi/lansing/dtn-corporate-site-0/ourvalues.aspx.
10. “Man in a can” was the way that my brother-in-law, Dr. Hugh Behling, described the cans of horse semen he used to artificially inseminate mares.
Chapter Three
1. A couple that stand out are Rogoff 2003, 2011; Keller 2007; Levine 2013; and Otto and Keller 2014. What follows borrows from Everett 2014a.
2. See Bruner 1979, 1987, 1993, and 1997, inter alia.
3. As exemplified in work by Ochs and Capps (2002), Silverstein and Urban (1996), Urban (2000), and Sherzer (1991), among others.
4. Such as in research at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig: http://www.eva.mpg.de/psycho/dog-cognition.php.
5. I use “attachment” here in a potentially nonstandard meaning that includes “identification with.”
6. A Pirahã garden will usually be located within a thirty-minute walk from the nearest village. This distance is partly to discourage casual theft from the garden.
7. Toddlers rarely come to me—they look at my beard and say I look like a dog. If I insist, they scream.
8. For example, children experience and see others experience toothaches on a regular basis. A toothache, where there is no dentist, is agonizing. One must simply tolerate the pain until the nerve dies and the tooth has rotted out.
9. I recall one night with a visiting American dentist when a child near where we were sleeping was screaming and crying all night. The dentist asked me, “Dan, what is wrong with that baby? It sounds horribly ill and in pain.” I replied, “If it were ill, the parents would have already come to us for help. It is just pissed off about something.” After about an hour, around 3 a.m., the dentist said “Dan, I have had medical training and I know a sick baby when I hear one. We have to go over there now.”
So I wearily grabbed at my flashlight, slipped on my flip-flops and said halfheartedly, “Let’s go.” We walked to the small hut near the path that was the source of the siren-like wailing. When we arrived, the parents were feigning sleep, with the toddler sitting up by his father, screaming at the top of its lungs. I asked the father, “What is wrong with the baby? Is he sick?” The father ignored me, pretending to sleep. I turned to the dentist, “They want us to leave and are pretending to be asleep to communicate this.” He said, “I am not leaving until the father tells us what is wrong.”
So I shook the father. He looked at me as though he wanted to tell me to go fug myself, but said, “What?”
“What is wrong with the baby?”
“Nothing. It wants tit.”
I communicated this to the dentist and said, “Satisfied? Let’s go back to bed.” The dentist said, “It is hard to believe. I would have sworn that this baby is very ill.”
As we started to leave, the mother pulled the toddler across the new infant at her side and began to nurse it—clearly to keep us from coming back and to communicate to me that the message had been received. Still, however ignorant of the Pirahãs, the dentist was well-meaning.
10. A favorite pastime of preadolescent boys is to sit and shoot small lizards running zigzags more than five meters away with arrows while holding the bows in their feet.
11. After completing this chapter, I sent a draft to Steve Sheldon, a missionary who lived with his family among the Pirahãs from 1967–1976 and learned to speak the language well. Sheldon’s comments are given below (e-mail from Sheldon, December 14, 2012):
We felt they preferred to give birth in the river if possible [not relevant to this paper]. When Linda was expecting Scott, they kept on us about her having the baby in the river like they did.
We saw some instances where a mother would help her daughter give birth.
One young girl was having a very hard time with a birth and Linda wanted to go “help.” The people did not want her to do so, nor would any of them go help. This young girl’s mother had died not long before. Normally they would let us do whatever strange things we wanted to do. Not in this case.
When our boys were young and nursing, the people did not like them to cry and would say things like: “We cannot dance if they are crying.” This in spite of some of their weaned children carrying on just as you described.
Our problem was we were following an American cultural norm of putting the boys to bed and “letting them cry” till they learned.
Once the boys were weaned, they could also scream and carry on with no frustration on anyone’s part—except ours.
Chapter Four
1. See William Barclay: http://www.dannychesnut.com/Bible/Barclay/First%20and%20Second%20Corinthians.htm.
2. Original caption for figure 4.1 (figure 1 in original volume): “All stimuli used in the experiment. Left column from top to bottom: houseboat, jaguar, alligator, woman in hut, sloths, older man. Right column from top to bottom: squirrel monkey ocelot, howler monkey, toucan, tapir, fisherman. Cue items are shown to the left of test items. Houseboat and jaguar are warm-up it
ems with simpler transformations. For full size stimuli, see online supplemental materials in order to recreate viewing conditions under which recognition is trivial for western adults.”
3. “Following the Gestalt school, we use the terms ‘perceptual organization’ and ‘perceptual reorganization’ to emphasize the process by which local image features are appropriately integrated (‘grouped’) or segregated in order to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of the image—a ‘gestalt’” (Kohler 1929).
4. “Participants included adult members of the Pirahã tribe (n = 9, mean estimated age = 30y) and as controls tested with the same stimuli, Stanford University students, faculty, and staff (n = 8, mean age = 26y). An additional control task with additional stimuli was tested on Stanford students (n = 10, mean age = 19y). The visual acuity of the Pirahã population was tested by DE and others some years earlier as part of a basic screen for medical services; the population was on the whole normal, with no cataracts and a small incidence of nearsightedness.”
5. “The amount of blur and the black/white threshold points were set independently for each photograph based on a repeated trial and error procedure until we were satisfied with the subjective impressions that the two-tone was (a) hard to recognize without first seeing the photograph from which it was derived (‘uncued’) and (b) easy to see after seeing the photograph (‘cued’). This stimulus creation and selection were guided by the perceptual judgment of the experimenters. Images were printed onto 12x12cm cards. These two-tones are similar in appearance, but different in method of stimulus creation (as well as experimental purpose) from the stimuli known as ‘Mooney faces.’ Mooney himself used the stimuli to study ‘closure’-based recognition of individual images, analogous to our ‘stage 1 uncued’ presentation. Mooney’s faces were hand-drawn artist’s renderings of human faces under extreme illumination conditions (Mooney, 1957), so there is no corresponding photo from which the images were derived.”
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