From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology
Subject: non-linguistic structures... understanding and intuition
Distribution: world
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 92 04:03:25 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <1992Dec10.221930.21774@newshost.lanl.gov> steve@lanl.gov writes:

 > As a non-anthropologist, let me ask:  Is language anything more to
 > anthropologists than one (of many) projections of a culture?
 >  
 > Can one ever honestly "describe" a culture in any language other than
 > the native language and then only to someone raised in the culture?
 > And in the light of the subject of this conversation, is that even
 > adequate?  Mustn't one often take another person by the hand and
 > walk them down to the stream for example and teach them by example
 > how to skip rocks before they can "understand" that aspect of my
 > culture in particular?
 >  
 > I've wrestled with this in the context of language but not so much
 > in the context of anthropology?  Can you give me a professional
 > opinion?

Well I came into anthropology late, after having spent most of my life
in the Australian bush, only to find some of the other anthropologists
quite angrily insistent that such experience is not regarded as being
legitimate. But then I realised that those who so insisted had actually
spent *their* lives making their way up through the education tunnel by
reading books about the bush and the people living there, and in the end
I concluded that they simply spoke technocratic gobbledegook for want
of valid reference to the real world out there.

Even tiny infants explore objects by sight, smell and especially touch
long before they attempt to name and describe them with words. My two-
year-old has an excellent grasp of the world around him, but still cannot
talk very well at all much less argue so desperately the need to impose
certain strategic words and phrases on what has been supposed to be our
mutual reality.

He just says to me in the wonder and excitement of that magic moment,

           "'OOK! . .  big . 'ellow . 'ruck, . . . dad!"


So, my professional advice comes in the linguistic form, "Go and have
a look for yourself", from which point I would expect to shut up and
you to open your eyes (and other of your excellent sensory resources)
rather than your mouth to argue with me in reply. Then, when you return
from your field trip, we would both have something to share, something
we both know about to discuss.

 > Living in the era of "newspeak", if you will, I trust the language
 > of my own culture very little.  I value non-linguistic discourse
 > very much.  I value even more non-linguistic symbolism and knowledge
 > as it is much harder to corrupt.  The marketeers of our commercial
 > culture and the marketeers of our mass-market religious and political
 > culture already know this implicitely.  They may use words a lot
 > but they use much more subtle symbology and draw on much more primal
 > features of our human nature than our intellect.  Sex, food, fear,
 > greed all sell very well and for the most part are not "understood"
 > linguistically.

Yes, and to counter that type of control I think it is also important
to get around a bit outdoors among real people; being stuck in a nine-
to-five job in suburbia, as a couch potato glued to the idiot box, or
in your study with your nose in a book (as much as I *like* good books
and good quality TV, represented by the Millenium series ;-)) you get
whatever you deserve . . .

--
Gil Hardwick                          Internet:  gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au
Independent Consulting Ethnologist                  Fidonet:  3:690/660.6
PERTH, Western Australia                         Voice:  (+61 9) 399 2401
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