Date:         Fri, 25 Feb 2000 06:01:02 -0600
From:         Mike Salovesh <t20mxs1@CORN.CSO.NIU.EDU>
Subject:      Cross-cultural and/or cross-professional misunderstandings

Paulo Oemig has done us all a favor by citing long parts of  Ullin T.
Place's article, "The Role of the Hand in the Evolution of Language",
published in Psycoloquy: 11(007) Language Gesture (1).  Unfortunately,
Place died before the article was published.  Oemig's citation of the
article as by "Place/Catania" recognizes that the article, as written by
Place, was reasonably complete when Place died, but not in conformity
with that journal's style sheet. PSYCOLOQUY Associate Editor A. Charles
Catania did some minor editing in the final publication process to bring
the manuscript into publication.

In saying that the long quotation does us a favor, I don't mean that
Place is either accurate or trustworthy or even enlightening from an
anthropological point of view.  (I don't think he is.) Of course,
there's no reason we should expect Place to satisfy the standards of
anthropology. PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological
Association (APA). It's not aimed at enlightening anthropological
theory.

The real favor we have received with these excerpts from Place lies in
the fact that Paulo Oemig has directed our attention to a concrete case
of exactly the kind of thing we have touched on in several current
threads.  (I'm happy to second Paulo Oemig's suggestion that we all read
the whole article, although my reason for doing so probably is
diametrically opposed to Paulo's reasons.)

Reminder:  The article in question is  available on-line at
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?11.007  The article is
also available via ftp; see
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/2000.volume.11/psyc.00.11.007.language-gesture.1.place

Place's article is reasonable, respectable, and acceptable in the world
of psychology.  It sounds pretty mainstream for one kind of approach to
evolutionary psychology.

Place's article is hare-brained, off-the-wall, dead wrong nonsense in
the world of anthropology.  Any mainstream anthropologist should be able
to demolish it from top to bottom without even breathing hard.

These wildly varying possible evaluations of a single piece of work are
gorgeous illustrations of how professional contexts vary in approaching
basic ways of evaluating theories.

I'll let Place do his own talking on a couple of central points in his
exposition, starting with this:

> III.v. REFERRING TO AN OBJECT BY POINTING AT IT
>
>40. The practice of pointing with the index finger as a way of
>establishing reference to objects in the common stimulus environment of
>speaker and listener is a linguistic universal which by common consent
>plays an essential role in the acquisition of word-meanings.

One sentence and he's lost me.  Here's one reason why:

An old caricature of anthropologists used to circulate among some Native
Americans.  It's encapsulated in the story of an anthropologist talking
with an informant in the informant's home.  The anthro points at a
chair, and asks "what do you call that?" Answer: "/ha?tok/"  The
anthropologist writes that down, then points at a saddle hanging on the
wall:  "What do you call that?"  "/ha?tok/"  The anthropologist then
points out the open door to a tree near the house.  "And that?"
"/ha?tok/"

"Now hang on, friend, maybe I didn't make myself clear.  You've got me
all confused.  Could you tell me how "/ha?tok/" can mean so many
different things in your language?"

"As far as I know, it only means one thing."

"Well, when I pointed at that chair and asked you what you call it, you
said "/ha?tok/", then you said the same thing when I pointed at a saddle
and again when I pointed to a tree.  So what does "/ha?tok/" mean?"

"Oh, is that what you thought you were asking?  All I saw was you kept
waving your finger and asking me what I called it.  "/ha?tok/" is our
word for "index finger"."

There are plenty of Native American groups who do not point with the
index finger to establish reference to objects -- or places! -- within
the common stimulus environment of speaker and listener.  Oh, they do
use body parts in  gestures indicating "I mean this one over here, not
that one over there".  They just don't do it with their index fingers.
Instead, it's customary in some groups to "point" with a jerk of the
chin.  Other groups get to the same general understanding by extending
the lower lip.

Index-finger pointing is no more a linguistic universal than the word
"horse".  Any language can come up with some way of indicating, with
words alone, "that big animal over there"; most languages I know about
have some word that can safely be translated by the English word
"horse".  But that word could be cheval, or Pferd, or caballo, instead.

I don't know whether every language community has its own grammaticality
of pointing; I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of languages/cultures
out there where nobody has made the relevant observations. I wouldn't be
shocked if someone were to prove that every language community has some
means of using body parts to indicate specific objects by their spatial
location.  All I'm saying is that I'm not aware that anybody has yet
taken the trouble to demonstrate the truth of the statement.

Anthropologists are, or at least should be, trained not to assume that
body gestures they regard as "natural" will be understood by people of
other cultures. Place builds a whole theory of language origins on his
allegation that pointing with the index finger is a language universal.
Then he plays a game of evolutionary guesswork, ending with the
allegation that language in Homo sapiens could not have developed until
after the evolutionary events that freed the hand from its previous use
in locomotion.

Well, Place does tell us enough to demonstrate that his ideas won't
stand up to anthropological assault.

Let me try another example of Place's lack of appreciation for the wide
range of variations that can be found by looking across cultral
boundaries.

> III.x. COUNTING AND THE COMMUNICATION OF NUMBER USING THE FINGERS OF
> TWO HANDS
>
> 45. No one would seriously dispute the claim that the earliest form of
> counting consisted in the practice which is found in every human
> culture of counting up to ten on the fingers of the two hands, and
> displaying the result to others by holding up the relevant number of
> fingers. This practice can, perhaps, be seen as an outgrowth of the
> ability to refer to objects by pointing at them.

Sorry, but I would seriously dispute that.  This time, we're biased in
favor of Place's allegations because Indo-European languages generally
accomodate pretty well to decimal counting and calculating systems.
What has disappeared from view?  Well, the Babylonian sexagesimal
system, for one.  That's the heritage from which we derived such
interesting divisions as the 60-minute hour and 60-second minute, not to
mention division of  circles into 360 degrees.  If you take Place
seriously, vigesimal systems (counting by twenties) wouldn't have come
into existence unless both the hands and the feet were freed from
locomotion. (I can almost conceive of the battle-cry of a new American
Revolution: No vigesimal calculation without teleportation!)

It's time to reveal, once more, that I count on my fingers using a
binary system.  In my system, each finger can take one of two positions:
up (standing away from the palm of my hand) or down (pressed against the
palm).  All ten fingers down (the equivalent of binary 0000000000) means
zero.  Left little finger up, all others down, means the same as decimal
1 (or binary 0000000001).  Left ring finger up, all others down, is the
same as decimal 2 (binary 0000000010).  Raising both the left little
finger and the left ring finger means decimal 3 (0000000011).  Raising
the left middle finger alone is not an obscene gesture; it's the
equivalent of decimal 4 (binary 0000000100).  Moving from little finger
to thumb on my left hand, the fingers indicate the binary equivalents of
decimal 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16, and I can use those five fingers to show any
number from 1 to 31.  With ten fingers, I can count up to 1023.

(It's not directly relevant to the present discussion, but if I've
understood a point Robbins Burling made to Place, then my way of conting
on my fingers surely is NOT iconic: it's symbolic in ways that ten-digit
counting on the fingers is not.)

What do I do with this system?  Well, for one thing, if I'm trying to
approximate a two minute interval, I count up to 120 in the (highly
anthropological!) sequence 1 chimpanzee, two chimpanzees, three
chimpanzees, four chimpanzees, etc. Once the rhythm and timing are set,
I simply raise or lower my fingers to keep the count.  When the thumbs
and index fingers of both hands are up, with all other fingers down
(that is, when the position of my fingers is equivalent to binary
0001111000) I know I've counted 120 beats that are fairly close to one
second each.  Voila!  My two-minute eggs are ready!

Place's attempt at developing a universal sequence for the development
of languaging based on (counting) gesture falls apart as soon as the
viability of a non-decimal system is demonstrated. The cross-cultural
reality is that other cultures follow multiple alternatives; not
everyone counts on fingers the same way.

There's a reason why I say "other cultures" when talking about the way I
count on my fingers. I didn't invent that system.  I read it in an
article in a magazine that was then called Astounding Science Fiction,
sometime around 1950 plus or minus five years.  Science fiction fandom
was at least a subculture separate from the (more sane) surrounding
larger society.  We fen (the fannish plural of "fan") were few in
number, but in  science fiction circles I saw a high proportion of
people counting on their fingers the same way I do.  Our finger-counting
in binary was a culturally shared trait. (It also gave us a head start
in understanding the binary logic of computers.)

Let me haul all the foregoing back to the discussion of what
"professional" means.  One of the things that characterizes standard
anthropological practice is that we sit around and wait for yet another
theorist given to equating specific local customs with human cultural
universals.  As soon as that theorist says something that amounts to
"all human beings know that the natural way to do X is to do it just
like my folks do", we pounce with anthropology's deadliest weapon.  We
say: "Nice try, but it won't work. The people of Ungo Bungo never do it
the way you say all humans do!  You don't have a handle on human nature
in your theory; you're just describing one limited possibility in a
universe of near-infinite possibility.  Don't you know you're being
ethnocentric in thinking that everybody has to do it your way?"

It shouldn't be too surprising to learn that a lot of people out there
find anthropologists terribly annoying.

Anthropology is the one profession that dedicates itself to looking
across cultural boundaries, and habitually faces the practical question
of how to understand people of other cultures on their own terms. I keep
asking why anthropologists are so seldom consulted by those who want to
communicate with, or work with, or just live in a world where others
have their own views of what is right, or natural, or desirable. I
deeply fear that a large part of the answer lies in the natural
resentment we've sown so often with our habit of puncturing other
people's balloons dealing with so-called human universals.  People with
visions of helping their neighbors to become just like themselves don't
appreciate being told that their insights are culture-bound,
ethnocentric, and contradicted by the facts of the real world.

--  mike salovesh       <salovesh@niu.edu>      PEACE !!!