[Xmca-l] Re: Cultural historical

[Helena Worthen]

David, what is the important minority that you’re referring to:

"... 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” — ?

And how can we see what can be seen in the visual channel?

Helena Worthen
helenaworthen@gmail.com
Berkeley, CA 94707 510-828-2745
Blog US/ Viet Nam: 
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skype: helena.worthen1







> On Mar 21, 2018, at 8:37 AM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
>>>> 
>> 
>>