[Xmca-l] Re: Cultural historical
WEBSTER, DAVID S.
d.s.webster@durham.ac.uk
Fri Mar 23 00:59:16 PDT 2018
Bound to agree with you re Gans and anti-Zionism/ antisemitism. Whatever the strengths of his anthropology, firstness and resentment cannot cope alone (if at all) with explaining contemporary socio-political situations least of all those in the Old Testament lands. His dogmatism here has pushed him to the right and that is to be regretted. Not sure I understand your musical example...
David
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: 21 March 2018 21:27
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Cultural historical
One reason for Jews like me to be sceptical of Gans is his apparent Zionism (i.e. his insistence that there is a Jewish archaeological claim to the land of Israel, and is conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-semitism in the "Love and Resentment" blog).
I am teaching phonetics and phonology this term, and one of the first things we learn is the difference between the highly musical instrument that we share with all of our conspecifics and the peculiar way in which we compose music for it (including the chords of notes, the intonational melodies, and the stress rhythms) which we share only with our speech community. The late, great Dmitri Hvorostovsky was charged with hubris for referring to his own mellow baritone as "the perfect instrument", but what he really meant was that we humans have evolved our music tastes around a universal, ideal, non-existent human voice (like Daniel Jones' cardinal vowels, which are not the vowels of any known language).
But I am also sceptical of Andy's desire for archaeological evidence of language development--I agree with Gans that the question of the origins of language is solveable by other, more indirect means (e.g. studying child language and looking at how mitochondrial DNA changes correlate with language dispersion). But for that very reason I think the "Jewish" claim to Palestine is about as strong as the European claim to the Rift Valley in Kenya.
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 11:35 PM, WEBSTER, DAVID S. < d.s.webster@durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> Andy, dear heart; busy will be tomorrow, hand excavating a Neolithic
> ditch with mattock and trowel - there might even be some flints to find!
> Academic writing is pure relaxation..
>
> Regards
>
> David
>
> -----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 13:26
> To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Cultural historical
>
> In short David, because I am writing. If something caught my
> imagination I would make time for it. At the moment, like everyone
> else I suspect, I am busy. But I am still up for hard news of a palaeontological kind.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> ttp://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 22/03/2018 12:15 AM, WEBSTER, DAVID S. wrote:
> > Why read Wikipedia when you can just as easily read Gans? Sceptical,
> fine, why?
> >
> > -----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 12:49
> > To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Cultural historical
> >
> > Wikpedia gives a fair picture of Gans's ideas, David. I'm sceptical.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > Andy Blunden
> > ttp://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> > On 21/03/2018 8:24 PM, WEBSTER, DAVID S. wrote:
> >> As it happens there Gans offers a blog associated with the
> >> journal 'Chronicles of Love & Resentment' but his story start with
> >> his first book 'The origins of language'. Unfortunately,
> >> palaeontological evidence philosophical speculation and semiotics
> >> are blended throughout if with shifting focus. Not much directly on
> >> tool use if memory serves but that tends to follow on in one way or
> >> another from the rest. There was no expectation that anyone would
> >> need to digest the whole of the archive but it takes little effort
> >> to dip in and see what may catch your interest or ire and start
> >> from there. You might start your Gansian journey with 'The little
> >> big bang' (i.e. event of
> >> language) http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0501/gans-2/
> >>
> >> -----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 08:35
> >> To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> >> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Cultural historical
> >>
> >> 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/10.1080/09575146.2018.14318
> >>>> 74
> >>>> >
> >>>>
> >>>> 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/10.1080/09575146.2018.143
> >>>>>> 18
> >>>>>> 7
> >>>>>> 4
> >>>>>> 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/10.1080/09575146.2018.1
> >>>>>>>> 43
> >>>>>>>> 1
> >>>>>>>> 8
> >>>>>>>> 7
> >>>>>>>> 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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