Treaties often break down over cultural misunderstandings. But there are plenty of everyday examples of culturally induced language breakdowns as well. If you tell someone, ‘We should do lunch sometime,’ what do you mean? In your community this might literally mean that we should now, the two of us, plan a meeting for lunch at a restaurant. Or it could mean instead, ‘I have to go now. I don’t have time for this conversation.’ The interpretations of the interlocutors will be based on their relationship, their knowledge of each other’s cultural and personal expectations and by monitoring of the looks of anyone else standing around, as well as each other’s expressions and gestures. The meaning of what is said is never based merely or even mainly on the words spoken in a conversation.
The point is that human language is not a computer code. Humans did not gain a grammar first and then figure out its meaning in a particular culture. Culture, grammar and meaning each imply the others in human language. Languages and psychology run their wells deep into cultures. No artefact in human languages or human societies can be understood except by means of the culture in which it is interpreted. Understanding the nature and role of culture in human behaviour, language and thinking is essential for comprehending the evolution of human language.
There are various arguments that modern researchers occasionally employ to deny the existence of culture and omit it from the construction of their theories of human thinking, behaviour and language. This may be because of their training or their adopting a poor definition of culture. Some theorists, both in linguistic theory and in language evolution, disregard more than a century of anthropological studies making a powerful case that culture is necessary to explain the human animal.
Each community of erectus, sapiens and neanderthalensis would have developed familiarity with one another, a sense of ‘togetherness’, leading to shared values, social roles and structured knowledge (‘structured knowledge’ means knowing not only lists, but also how things on the lists relate to one another). Sharing such things would have brought them to a degree of cultural homogeneity. Perhaps they had a common symbol that was used in times of difficulty, such as an emergency warning, either spoken or some sort of signal (smoke signals helped identify some Native American communities). Perhaps not. But each band of travellers necessarily shared a spirit and a culture that underwrote their communication.
Modern organisations work hard to develop slogans, chants (such as the 2016 Republican chant ‘Lock her up!’ directed against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton), anthems, phrases for the population as a whole. When the group proclamation becomes individuals’ value, the social and the individual become linked. This forms culture and alters language. Words take on new meanings or new words and new meanings are born. Culture changes bring language changes.
Culture, patterns of being – such as eating, sleeping, thinking and posture – have been cultivated. A Dutch individual will be unlike the Belgian, the British, the Japanese, or the Navajo, because of the way that their minds have been cultivated – because of the roles they play in a particular set of values and because of how they define, live out and prioritise these values, the roles of individuals in a society and the knowledge they have acquired.
It would be worth exploring further just how understanding language and culture together can enable us better to understand each. Such an understanding would also help to clarify how new languages or dialects or any other variants of speech come about. I think that this principle ‘you talk like who you talk with’ represents all human behaviour. We also eat like who we eat with, think like those we think with, etc. We take on a wide range of shared attributes – our associations shape how we live and behave and appear – our phenotype. Culture affects our gestures and our talk. It can even affect our bodies. Early American anthropologist Franz Boas studied in detail the relationship between environment, culture and bodily form. Boas made a solid case that human body types are highly plastic and change to adapt to local environmental forces, both ecological and cultural.
Less industrialised cultures show biology-culture connections. Among the Pirahã, facial features range impressionistically from slightly Negroid to East Asian, to Native American. Differences between villages or families may have a biological basis, originating in different tribes merging over the last 200 years. One sizeable group of Pirahãs (perhaps thirty to forty) – usually found occupying a single village – are descendants of the Torá, a Chapakuran-speaking group that emigrated to the Maici-Marmelos rivers as long as two centuries ago. Even today Brazilians refer to this group as Torá, though the Pirahãs refer to them as Pirahãs. They are culturally and linguistically fully integrated into the Pirahãs. Their facial features are somewhat different – broader noses, some with epicanthic folds, large foreheads – giving an overall impression of similarity to East Asian features.‡ Yet body dimensions across all Pirahãs are constant. Men’s waists are, or were when I worked with them, uniformly 27 inches (68 cm), their average height 5 feet 2 inches (157.5 cm) and their average weight 55 kilos (121 pounds). The Pirahã phenotypes are similar not because all Pirahãs necessarily share a single genotype, but because they share a culture, including values, knowledge of what to eat and values about how much to eat, when to eat and the like.
These examples show that even the body does not escape our earlier observation that studies of culture and human social behaviour can be summed up in the slogan that ‘you talk like who you talk with’ or ‘grow like who you grow with’. And the same would have held for all our ancestors, even erectus.
People unconsciously adopt the pronunciation, grammatical patterns, lexicon and conversational styles of those they talk with the most. If one lives in Southern California, they might say, ‘My car needs washing,’ or, ‘My car needs to be washed.’ But in Pittsburgh, they are more likely to say, ‘My car needs washed,’ or, ‘My car needs to be washed.’ There is a grammatical contrast between the two dialects. The Southern Californian dialect requires the present participle form of the verb, whereas the Pittsburghese dialect requires the past-tense form of the participle. Both cultures converge in the ‘to be’ construction. As another example, if you talk to people of my generation you are likely to say, ‘He bought it for you and me,’ whereas if you talked mainly with members of a more recent generation, you might say (ungrammatically), ‘He bought it for you and I.’
Although imitation is a major cultural force, always pressuring a society towards homogeneity, it is not the only force. There is also innovation, which pressures societies to change. Imitation, though, is the seed of culture. The structures and values constitutive of culture take time to evolve. These structures and values emerge partially through conversational interactions, which include not only the content of speech, but also perspectives on right and wrong actions or thoughts, acceptable levels of novelty of information or form of presentation and levels and markers of conformity. This happens as people talk like who they talk with.
In other words, people who interact become more alike. Raise two children together and they will be more alike than had they been raised apart. They will share values that children raised apart do not share and they will, at least early on, share knowledge structures that are more similar than had they been raised apart. The more people talk together, the more they talk alike. The more they eat together, the more they eat the same foods in the same way – the more they eat alike. The more they think together, the more they think alike.
The more people’s values, roles and knowledge structures overlap the more connections they share and, therefore, the stronger is their connection in a cultural network. Thus they can form a generational network, a CEO network, a rap-lovers network, a ‘Western culture’ network, a stone tool flakes network and an industrialised society network, or even a Homo sapiens network, so long as they share values, knowledge, or roles.
This is recognised by many people when they claim that ‘people are all alike’. This is a common truism. Culture is only superfici
al, it is thought. We do all share some values. Likewise the other extreme, represented by cultural relativists, is also right when it claims that no two cultures are alike. No two cultures or individuals share all the same values, all the same social roles, or all the same knowledge structures.
What were the components that were changing early Homo from bands of individuals into cohesive cultures? First, there were values. These are the assignment of adjectives of morality for the most part (more clarification of values will come directly) to specific actions, entities, thoughts, tools, people and so on. They are also statements about how things should or should not be. To say, ‘He is a good man,’ expresses a value. This can be broken down into finer-grained values such as, ‘He treats his children well,’ or, ‘He is kind to stray animals,’ or, ‘He gave me a ride home,’ or, ‘He is polite,’ etc. Values are also seen in the tools we choose – a bat instead of a gun for home defence or a machete instead of a hoe for digging vegetables in the garden. They are seen in the use of our time. Value sets are vast and varied.
My definition of culture also includes the phrase ‘hierarchical knowledge structures’, which refers to the idea that human knowledge, at least – perhaps this also applies to other animals – is not an unordered set of ideas or skills. What we know is broken down in various ways according to context. All is structured in relation to all. And this hierarchy inescapably produces a gestalt output, meaning that the sum of what we know forms a system that is greater than merely all the things we know put together. Just as a symphony is greater than a mere list of all of its notes.
In my understanding of culture the idea of ‘social roles’ is useful to describe actions as conforming to a particular position one occupies in a culture. Any grouping of people will be defined by its values, the knowledge structures it devolves from and develops and the expected duties of each of its members by virtue of their membership classification.
To take an example from business managers in North America, China, or the United Kingdom, these folks will differ in many of their values, administrative knowledge and more, but in their social roles (independent of what they are called), they will necessarily share some aspects of administrative knowledge and values. In a sense, then, there is an international management culture, broken down into national and company-specific, local subcultures. Likewise, in higher education there is careful watch over expected cultural values in the form of different accrediting bodies. Accreditors allow schools to operate insofar as the schools share and implement the agencies’ values.
As Homo species traversed the earth, they too shared values with all of those in their species. In fact, given the relative homogeneity in erectus lives – all were hunter-gatherers – the cultures of different erectus communities would have been, superficially at least, quite similar. Of course, there were also important differences. Some of these differences would have resulted from the different ecologies of separate Homo erectus bands. Some lived in cold climes, others in the tropics, while still others braved the sea to live on islands. These were the forces that led the original immigrants from Africa to the formation of distinct cultures.
Most studies of values fail to provide a theory of the relationships between values and because they do, they too often assume that all values are universal, though aside from biological values there is no evidence to support this.
The ranking or prioritisation of values is easy to illustrate. Suppose that we are comparing the values of the inhabitants of two cities, say Paris and Houston. Let us further assume that Parisians and Houstonians value ‘good food’, however they define ‘good’ and ‘food’ locally. And let us suppose that both of them value being in good shape. Now, for the sake of discussion let’s assume the following rankings (the symbol ‘>>’ means that the value on the left ‘outranks’ the value on the right):
Parisians: Good shape >> Good food
Houstonians: Good food >> Good shape
In this hypothetical scenario, it is more important to Parisians that they be in good shape than that they enjoy good food. Though they do enjoy good food, they will not overeat if that causes them to no longer be in good shape. Good food takes a back seat to health and the waistline. To the made-up Houstonians, however, being in shape is not as important as the enjoyment of good food. Abs and glutes are less important, say, than batter-fried okra and chicken. It seems fair to say that these value priorities would produce different body shapes, especially if we add to this ranking a finer analysis of what each group considers to be ‘good food’. Houstonians might prefer fried chicken and mashed potatoes. The French might like instead coq au vin, etc. But it would be correct to say that the two cities have the same values. In this case it is not the values but their relative ranking that makes the difference. So we need some idea not only of what a group’s values are, but also of the prioritisation of the values. One cannot say what a group’s values are, though, without studying them carefully. So we cannot infer much about the culture of Homo erectus communities. But they would have had values and their values would have shaped their daily lives, and some of these would have been more important than others.
In the 1950s Kenneth Pike began work on a ‘grammar of society’. He suggested that the principles of human grammars are the organising principles as well for ‘grammars of culture’. In this sense, a culture is partly grammar-like. Like any grammar, a culture-grammar can only be proposed based on solid methodology and rigorous testing of hypotheses.
Society and culture are, of course, more than merely grammars – but they are connected and constructed in grammar-like ways and especially in their local contexts, groupings and actions. A Bostonian investment banker and an Amazonian hunter or an erectus sailor find their place and the role they occupy in society. These roles are not usually invented by the individual. They emerge or are blocked from emerging by a particular culture. One knows that there were no full-time Homo erectus musicians because there can be no such roles without an entire technology, social role and payment structure produced by society over time. And the structures and roles of the cultural-grammatical system into which we are born themselves emerge from the values and beliefs of a culture. In this sense, if we take culture as beliefs, knowledge and values, and society as roles and structural relationships between them, with members of society filling particular slots created by the culture, then at times it becomes easier to understand or at least visualise what people do as members of their culture.
Therefore, one may conceive of all the individuals of a society as ‘fillers’ for slots in a culture-grammar. One example is the college classroom. The fillers of the different classroom slots are easy – these are the students and the professor.
What kinds of roles and structures would an erectus society have had? Or what kind of roles and structures would another kind of primate society have? If we take an ‘alpha-male’ society of, say, gorillas, the typical social structure would be a silver-backed male (the alpha-male), pre-adult males and females, and females of mating age or beyond. In more complex gorilla societies there can be more than one silverback, but the typical arrangement is one silverback and many females and children. The male has a variety of duties, including decision-making for the group, resolution of conflicts, mating for the reproductive survival of the group, deciding when the group should sleep and defending the group. Erectus societies would have had at least this level of organisation. In fact, as hunter-gatherers with Homo brains, they would have had a social structure simpler than, perhaps, but comparable to that of some modern hunter-gathers. Consider an Amazonian society such as the Pirahãs. That society will be manifested by its individuals and form larger subunits that will include families, men, children, adolescents, women and so forth. A different tribal society group might instead be broken down into more structured kinship hierarchies, including families, clans, lineages, or more professional specialisations.
To act together, a society must in some way share the intention that our indivi
dual actions produce a result of the group. Voting is arguably such an action. Participating in a classroom lecture is another. These are all actions in the grammar of culture in which each person occupies a role, alone or jointly. In the social organisation exemplified above, the students are the object, not the subject matter. We are describing their social roles in this moment in time relative to a particular teacher. Their roles may shift slightly with their next class. Certainly, students and teachers will change their roles at parties, at their homes and in their careers. Roles are like apparel, worn for specific situations.
When participants are from different cultures, as in the Treaty of Medicine Lodge example, they often assume that everyone shares a similar understanding of roles, structures and meanings of the joint act they are engaging in. But they rarely realise that each participant possesses a separate interpretation of their joint activity. In my view of the entire situation, this is what happened: the Comanches interpreted the promises made by the US government at the Medicine Lodge event as effective immediately and unconditionally. To them everyone speaking was a plenipotentiary representative of their people. The US negotiators, however, saw themselves as subordinates to Congress and perceived the Indians as a group that should accede to this greater authority. They understood the 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.)
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