Lecture 7 - Anthropology 152 – October 5, 2022

Anthropology 152 – October 5, 2022 Lecture 7 Last class lecture, I wrote ; Essential characteristics of culture and language in the anthropological sense are: 1) CULTURE human _acts_ following rules and instructions ; acts pursuing symbolic purposes. Rules and purposes can be expressed IN WORDS, SENTENCES, PARAGRAPHS, etc. (symbolic signs). A specific Culture is learned; it is not genetic, not instinctive; it is learned from other people, especially previous generations (shared). (A specific culture or language is learned. The capacity of a brain to learn them _is_ genetically based and unique to human’s genes). 2) All culture can be represented in language. Language is critical in teaching culture. 3) All language is culture; _but_ not all culture is language; that is , language is a form of culture. 4) ACTS are _bodily_ action, activity, motion, behavior. _____ Today I add, culture and language are rules and guides on how to act; are rules and guides in the form of language, symbolic communications _from biologically dead generations, ancestors_; culture is custom, tradition, history – passed on from the past. This is an essential dimension and capacity of language and culture. It includes an accumulation of knowledge about nature, human society, objective reality. This dimension of language and culture raised human relative Darwinian fitness through human evolution and history. It became the main way that humans adapt. Symbolic communication Anthropology's special contribution to scientific understanding of humanity is the concept of _culture_, or the symbolic nature of human behavior, communication and social organization. Culture is behavior ruled by a mental system of shared customs, traditions, values, ideas and material products of a particular group of people. Culture and language , or symbolic communication , are unique and exclusive characteristics of human beings, the species Homo sapiens . No other animal species has them, despite the exaggerated claims of some primatologists for chimps and gorillas. What is symbolic communication ? What is a symbol or symbolic sign in the technical linguistic and anthropological sense ? It using something to represent something it is not. Almost all words are symbolic signs. Here is my name : CHARLES BROWN. Those marks on the paper are not me; But they are used to represent me. This is using something to represent something that it is not. The technical term is that there is an arbitrary relation between the sign and the thing signified. The opposite of a symbolic sign is an indexical sign . The relationship between an indexical sign and what it signifies is not arbitrary (conventional, traditional) but necessary. The classical example is smoke and fire. Smoke is an indexical sign of fire. The fact that a symbolic sign is not what it signifies , gives humans the power to talk , communicate with each other about things and the experiences of people that are not immediately present but DISPLACED IN TIME OR SPACE from them ! And cultural/linguistic learning is learning from the experience of other people, including learning from people who are now dead, learning about experiences that are not ours ; are _displaced_ from our immediate senses. So, signing or symboling , in the forms of both language and culture, is our species’ unique activity. And, importantly , also, most of human _learning_ is through symbols, culture, not so much by imitating, like other species. Not by "monkey-see, monkey do" imitation. Most of our learning ( as opposed to inborn or genetically based knowledge) is through culture, not from experience. . Just to further explain the concept of arbitrariness, it refers to the relationship between the signifier and the signified. So, if the sounds d-o-g are used to refer to things that are dogs, we see that those sounds do not "imitate" or are not naturally related to dogs. The arbitrariness of a sign refers to the fact that in a sign something is used to represent something that it is not. Two _different_ things are arbitrarily identified, treated as the _same_. I have theorized that the reason culture became our unique characteristic is that once some hominin discovered them way, way back when, they were highly adaptive because they allowed past generations to pass on their experience to future generations across the "death barrier" . Why ? Because a symbol represents something by something it is not ( the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified) so that living generation can learn from a symbol about the experience of dead generations, when it could not learn from directly observing and imitating the dead, since the dead aren't able to demonstrate things to be learned, obviously, because they are dead. But since a symbol uses something, a signifier, to represent something that it is not, the signified, because of this _arbitrary_ ( non-imitative) relation, the dead ancestor's "demonstration" can be learned by the living descendent through the signifier, through the thing (word or cultural object) that is _not_ the dead ancestor. Cultural learning allows us to learn from the experience of many, many...many of our ancestors. This was its main adaptive advantage when our species originated in founding culture. Culture also allowed learning more from other living members of the species. Human children could learn a lot more from their parents than other species, who were restricted to teaching their young by demonstration and imitation. Other species have to "give a picture" or demonstration of what they are teaching. They can show, but not tell. That a signifier is not what it signifies means it communicates by a non-picture or non-imitation of what it represents. Culturally inherited adaptations give human species high Darwinian fitness, because cultural adaptations are caused by the adaptive problem that they solve . 1) Symbolic thinking allows imagination and invention of tools and organized activities that adapt to survival problems. 2) Symbolic communication also allows inheritance of inventions. These 2 capacities of Culture and language, symbolic communication, provided the human species with an enormous adaptive and Darwinian selective advantage compared to other animal species in the hundreds of thousands of years that the human species came to be and inhabit the whole globe, again to a greater extent than other animal species. This is because it made humans extremely interconnected both with living other humans, so that human labor and methods of physical survival are very _social_, not individualistic; and perhaps more importantly, connected to dead generations of the species through , again, language and culture, as in ancestor veneration : myths, legends, stories, customs, historical accounts of past generations' experiences. Two (or a thousand ) heads are better than one in the struggles for survival and snuggles for reproduction . By sharing the experiences , discoveries, knowledge of many generations past and those of fellow living people, humans had and have a big Darwinian or natural selective advantage especially in the stone age in prehistoric times over the course of 100's of thousands of years and, starting going back about 2.5 million of years with the species Homo habilis . Again , this enormous social networking within living generations and between living and dead generations is encapsulated in the concepts of culture and language and symbolic communication , the _differentia specifica_ of the human species.