by C R Hallpike
6 . Professor Colarusso has pointed out (personal communication) that languages with small phonological inventories, such as Polynesian, must have long words and so would find it difficult to utilize embeddings, whereas at the other extreme languages such as Ubykh, with 81 consonants, can pack more in and so put less strain on working memory and therefore open the door to embeddings. So it is possible that phonology can have developmental consequences, although these seem to arise only in extreme cases of simplicity or complexity.
Chapter VII: Some afterthoughts
Some of the theories we have been examining can fairly be described as the products of reckless ignorance—those of Harari, Girard, and Byrne, in particular, as well as some of the Just-So stories in Chapter 1 about prehistoric clothes and fist-fights. And evolutionary psychologists and their obsession with freeloaders, for example, do not think they need to give much attention to what anthropologists have written about primitive society because they think they already have all the answers they need in Darwinian theory. Arens, however, can hardly be placed in this category, since he is a professional social anthropologist who has also done fieldwork in Tanzania and the Sudan. As such, he knows perfectly well that ethnographers have to rely on native informants for much of their data, which for various reasons they may not be able to observe for themselves. So his denial of the reality of cannibalism cannot be ascribed to ignorance at all, but is the result of a political agenda which has been trying for some years to deny the existence of primitive society as a colonialist myth.
Professor Edmund Leach, for example wrote that:
In my view there is no significant discontinuity in terms either of structure or form between ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ societies. The social anthropologist can find what he is looking for in either.… [I]s it possible to formulate a useful stereotype of what this notional entity ‘a primitive society’ or ‘a savage (wild) society’ is like? The answer is: No! (Leach 1982: 14)
Professor Adam Kuper a little later compared the idea of primitive society to phlogiston or the aether, saying:
The idea of primitive society is about something which does not and never has existed. One of my reasons for writing this book is to remove the constitution of primitive society from the agenda of anthropology and political theory once and for all. (This is unashamedly a story with a moral.) (Kuper 1988: 8)
Their assertions that there is no such thing as primitive society actually rested on no evidence at all, as I have demonstrated with considerable detail in an earlier paper (Hallpike 1992), but Leach and Kuper were not really motivated by a scholarly concern with evidence but, as Kuper more or less admits, by moral indignation. Leach in particular practically foams at the mouth with indignation: for him the new science of anthropology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
…rested on the basic premise that all non-Europeans are stupid, childish, barbarous and servile by their very nature… The contemporary primitive peoples…were ‘living fossils’; their savage customs were horrid survivals from antiquity which served to illustrate both the stupidity and the depravity of the beast-like behaviour of our primeval ancestors. (Leach 1982: 16-17)
Obviously, if one claims that primitive societies are “Small-scale, face-to-face, without writing, money, or the state, organized on the basis of kinship, age, and gender, and with subsistence economies”, as I put it in the Preface, then modern industrial nation-states are the exact opposite, and we know that there has been an historical or evolutionary process by which societies of the first type have developed into those of the second. One of the major factors in this process has been conquest, and in recent centuries this has taken the form of colonialism. At the time this was generally seen as an extension of progressive government to under-developed peoples: Beatrice and Sidney Webb, for examples, pillars of the socialist Fabian Society, were keen imperialists for this reason. The colonial powers amalgamated large numbers of tribes into nation states with centralized governments, political and administrative systems and legal codes, literacy and education (especially in Africa, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere), monetary economies, hospitals, roads and railways and telecommunications, and access to the major world languages. These changes could only have been imposed by force, and while colonialism is now routinely denounced by liberals as racist, they choose to ignore the obvious-if-inconvenient fact that without a period of colonialism the newly independent nations would never have come into existence and their peoples would have no place at all in the modern world. But with the demise of the colonial empires, and aided by the new obsession with equality and human rights, and by the post-modern hostility to the idea of science, political attitudes and academic fashion have gone into reverse.
The anthropologist J.F. Hamill, in his Ethno-logic. The anthropology of human reasoning (1990) has provided us with an illuminating insight into how a moral and political commitment to equality can develop into a general anthropological theory. In explaining how he wanted “to build peace and avoid destruction” (no doubt very laudable aims) he says that “Among anthropologists I found a more compelling view [than Catholicism]: that different ways of life were equal; that no god had endowed anybody with any special standing. I saw how cultural relativism would weaken the excuses to justify racism, imperialism, and colonialism” (1990: 1). But he realised that cultural relativism could not explain some obvious universals in human society and culture, such as the human family whose patterns fall within a narrow range of variability. The solution to this dilemma was provided for him by Chomsky’s theory of grammar: “[T]he transformational-generative theory constrains variability while placing equal value on all observed variants: there are always some forms that language cannot take, but all languages are equally complex and equally good” (ibid., 1). Now, he continues, just as we all have an innate knowledge of language we must all have an innate knowledge of culture too; “People are equipped at birth, or before birth, with all the knowledge they need to acquire culture” (ibid., 11), and “the way cultures vary is similar to the way languages vary”. So now he can easily conclude that:
All people are essentially equal in their ability to become cultured, and all people encounter approximately the same amount of information in the process of enculturation. Thus it is untenable to maintain that one culture is ‘higher’ or more complex than another. In reality, there are no simple or primitive cultures; all cultures are equally complex and equally modern. (106)
Setting aside the factual absurdity of this claim, it should be obvious that, even if we did have an innate knowledge of language, it cannot follow automatically that we are also born “with all the knowledge we need to acquire culture”. That is a quite separate claim that has to be justified by at least the same amount of cross-cultural research into human culture as linguists have devoted to language. Actually, however, while all normal human beings have an equal ability to acquire culture, all the evidence from cross-cultural developmental psychology and anthropology in fact shows that all people do not encounter the same amount of information in the process of enculturation, and do not develop cognitively to the same extent, as I showed in The Foundations of Primitive Thought (1979).
But what is really fascinating here is the underlying but obvious assumption that a moral belief, in this case in equality, can become the basis for accepting the truth of cultural relativism, and then for accepting the further truth of Chomskian linguistics because this produces the desired conclusion that all cultures are, like all languages, essentially equal. The most effective way of protecting the sacred idol of equality, the Great Fetish, against the assault of facts is therefore to dispense with the idea of truth altogether and replace it by moral earnestness. So anyone who doubts that the syllogism is a universal mode of reasoning is a “colonialist”, anyone who claims that there is such a thing as primitive thought is a “racist”, and anyone who thinks that biology plays a significant part in human nature is a “fascist”. Not surprisingly, then, Leach could say that “S
ocial anthropologists should not see themselves as seekers after objective truth”, but more like novelists. Welcome on board the Ship of Fools.
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