[Xmca-l] Re: Cultural historical

Andy Blunden andyb@marxists.org
Wed Mar 21 01:35:06 PDT 2018 

Sorry David. You directed us to the home page of a journal.
I am chuffed that you have actually read some of my work,
but I think in general people on xmca don't usually go
further than reading an article of a few thousand words if
it is relevant to a discussion. A whole journal archive?

But if you can direct me to the article which correlates
palaeontological evidence and speech  and tool origins (not
philosophical speculation) I will be all over it. (I love
philosophical speculation, but not on this question just now).

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
ttp://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
On 21/03/2018 7:10 PM, WEBSTER, DAVID S. wrote:
> Please forgive my impatience but I have already directed you all to a  site where all the points you (collectively) have so far made,  and all the one that you are ever likely to make on this subject, have been raised and comprehensively worked over by Gans and those many scholars who have engaged with him. The nub is the progressive transformation from analogue to digital required for information transfer between different systems operating at differing time scales. What Gans described in his 'originary hypothesis' is the same transformational operation that was used to  teach deaf and alingual children at Zagorsk that involves taking the actions of appropriation (actions for life skills) and paring them down to a digital code - dactylic signing. For Andy: the Urpraxis, solidarity in your telling, arises at the originary scene of language (in Gans's telling) through the formation of a in-group out-group relation.
>
> Rant Over
>
> Ps its not that I agree with all Gans argues, But he does attempt to cover all bases where origin of language /human culture is concerned and in a non-sectarian/non-egotistical fashion and I therefor worth engaging with. No need to reinvent the wheel here.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
> Sent: 21 March 2018 05:39
> To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Cultural historical
>
> I think that the thesis that *mime* (to generalise beyond
> signing) is a plausible precursor to spoken language, and there is are substantial anthropological arguments to support that thesis. It seems to me that stone tools are precursors of tools more generally, and mime may be a precursor to spoken language, while the anatomical prerequisites to speech are evolving. How did speech become such a necessity that it drove anatomical change, and when/why did tool=making "take off" after stagnating for millennia?
>
> But I'm only guessing, as are you David!
>
> This is not a palaeontologists' list, so I guess I was over-optimistic to think I'd get a decisive answer to this.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> ttp://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 21/03/2018 4:24 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
>> I meant deaf people. There's a strong argument being made by deaf 
>> linguists--which I agree with--that holds that spoken languages are an 
>> offshoot of sign rather than the other way around. This sheds some 
>> light on Andy's problem: people developed spoken languages when they 
>> found they had other things to do with their hands, like hold tools. 
>> But I also think that pre-linguistic children are an important 
>> minority that prefers the visual channel, at least for taking in 
>> information, just as we adults who get most of our information through reading do.
>>
>> There are some scripts that are more visual and others that are more 
>> auditory--and within the same script we find elements that are more 
>> visual (Chinese radicals) and others that are more auditory (the 
>> phonetic components of Chinese characters). Even in English there are 
>> some elements that are visually salient but not auditorily salient 
>> (e.g. punctuation, variations in handwriting styles, fonts, etc.) and 
>> other elements that are more auditory (the International Phonetic 
>> Alphabet which is really English based and which has sought, for over 
>> a century, a perfect match between phonemes and graphemes). Phonics is 
>> based on the idea that English has evolved towards a one phoneme-one 
>> grapheme match; in fact, it has evolved away from it.
>>
>> 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 1:11 PM, Helena Worthen 
>> <helenaworthen@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> 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:
>>> helenaworthen.wordpress.com
>>> 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/10.1080/09575146.2018.143187
>>>>>> 4>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 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
>>>>>>>
>>>
>

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