[Xmca-l] Re: Cultural historical

[David Kellogg]

Andy has a knack for winkling brilliant insights out of early Vygotsky: he
remarks somewhere that "Ape, Primitive, Child: Studies in the History of
Behavior," a book which I really didn't care much for, taught him that
whenever we decide on some essential distinction between human and
non-human behavior, we necessarily find rudiments of it in non-human
behavior. To which I would only add that the circumstance that the
rudiments of human behavior are linked  to non-human behavior doesn't make
them indistinguishable. On the contrary, it is really only because human
behaviors are distinct that we can speak of them being linked (we don't
talk of air-breathing in humans as being linked to air-breathing in apes,
because the process is really one and the same; we do speak of language in
humans as being linked to ape vocalizations precisely because they are
distinct processes). If this is true of anthropogenetic phenomena like free
will, language and literacy, it's also true of their  symptomatic
epiphenomena, such as migration, culture, and literature. I don't agree
with Andy that the lowering of the vocal tract was phenomenal to language;
it was only an epiphenomenal circumstance which made the majority of humans
choose the vocal channel for language while an important minority choose
the visual channel, to which the majority again reverted once alphabets and
literacy were invented (again, an exercise of some rudimentary form of free
will).

Compare migration along a seacoast with migration into a mountainous
region. One requires no major change in productive relations, while the
other probably does. Similar with migration along an East-West axis. This
requires relatively little free will, as the climate does not change and
many of the plants and animals which provide food are probably the same. In
contrast, migration along a North-South axis, which involves climate change
and corresponding adaptations, would require relatively more communal
discussion, the process Andy calls collaborative decision making. I think
that wandering out of Africa involved, on the one hand, migration along the
Nile and coastlines and, on the other, migration out of a mountainous
region (the Rift Valley is pretty mountainous). But it also involved
migration along a North-South axis and not an East-West one. Of course,
staying put in Africa probably also involved collaborative decision making
over millenia, but we don't have any record of the decision as we do with
leaving the home continent

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Recent Article in *Early Years*

The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
child’s first interrogatives
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>

Free e-print available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full


On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 9:07 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:

> David, they wouldn't have known they were leaving their home continent,
> would they? Some of them were just lucky enough to wander in the direction
> of a land bridge, instead of into the ocean. Like any species that spreads
> into a new geographical location, no conscious decision required.
>
> Martin, who wandered into South America
>
>
>
>
> > On Mar 19, 2018, at 7:50 AM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Somewhere in the discussion of Monica and Fernando's article, Fernando
> made
> > the remark that history does not know "ifs". Similarly, Monica implied at
> > one point that large technological changes must be taken as given; they
> are
> > not something over which humans have control. But even if we accept
> > the "Out of Africa" story which this article undermines, we are left with
> > the apparently conscious decision of early hominids to leave the home
> > continent, something none of the other great apes ever determined upon.
> > Vygotsky remarked that rudiments of all four forms of higher
> > behavior--instinct, enculturation, creativity, and free will that is none
> > of these--appear even in infancy. So it appears that free will was always
> > part of anthropogenesis, and consequently that history--including present
> > history--knows nothing but ifs. We just don't see the others because we
> are
> > sitting in one of them.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Sangmyung University
> >
> > Recent Article in *Early Years*
> >
> > The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
> > child’s first interrogatives
> > <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>
> >
> > Free e-print available at:
> > https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 7:33 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> >
> >> This synoptic story of the current state of research on human origins
> seems
> >> relevant to the cultural-historical folks around.
> >> mike
> >>
> >> https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/human-evolution-
> >> australia-asia/?utm_source=SAPIENS.org+Subscribers&utm_
> >> campaign=1b31c25316-Email+Blast+12.22.2017&utm_medium=
> >> email&utm_term=0_18b7e41cd8-1b31c25316-199570669
> >>
>
>