Reading :: Becoming Human

Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny
By Michael Tomasello

Recently I reviewed Tomasello's earlier book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. This present book comes a couple of decades later (2019) and is a capstone on Tomasello's work as Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (1998-2018) as well as his previous work. In this research, he compared how humans develop during the first seven years of life, comparing them with other primates (chimpanzees and bonobos). Rather than focusing on evolution, he focused on development, and the results suggest eight developmental pathways that differentiate us from other primates: "social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity" (from the blurb on the back of the book). In all of these, other primates have rudimentary abilities, but our capacity for shared intentionality transforms these abilities into our uniquely human characteristics of cognition and sociality.

In Chapter 1, Tomasello says he is working within a neo-Vygotskian framework: "uniquely human forms of cognition and sociality emerge in human ontogeny through, and only through, species-unique forms of sociocultural activity." It is neo-Vygotskian because it places "human sociocultural activity within the framework of modern evolutionary theory," thus "seeking to identify the ways in which humans are biologically prepared for engaging in their unique forms of sociocultural activity" (pp.6-7). In doing so, he develops an ontogenetic account that "invokes three sets of processes that together construct particular developmental pathways": 

1. "the ontogeny of human cognitive and social uniqueness is structured by the maturation of children's capacities for shared intentionality," starting with "joint intentionality at around nine months of age" and leading to "the emergence of collective intentionality at around three years of age" (p.8)
2. "children's unique experiences, especially their sociocultural experiences," including two crucial ones: "interactions with knowledgeable and authoritative adults, who provide key experiences relevant to the transmitive dimension of culture" and "interactions with coequal peers, who constitute especially challenging partners for social and mental coordination in collaboration and communication, thus providing key experiences relevant to the coordinative dimension of culture" (p.8)
3. "humans' various forms of self-regulation" (p.8): following Vygotsky's Mind in Society, Tomasello claims that "many aspects of human cognitive and social uniqueness result from the special ways in which children attempt to executively self-regulate their thoughts and actions not just individually, as do many primates, but also socially through thir constant monitoring of the perspectives and evaluations of social partners on the self" (pp.8-9). He notes that "Again age three is key" because "before age three, children's executive regulation is individual, as other primates'," but "after age three, children begin to socially self-monitor their communicative attempts to see if they are comprehensible and rational to others, and they begin to socially self-monitor the impression they are making on others so as to maintain their cooperative identity in the group"  and they "also *collaboratively* self-regulate their cooperative interactions with others" (p.9). Thus they can make both joint commitments with others and implicit collective commitments to group norms (p.9). 

In Chapter 2, "Evolutionary Foundations," Tomasello reviews some of the things we know about human evolution. Based on his comparison of humans and other primates, he postulates what we know about the last common ancestor (LCA):

Cognition: He discusses the fact that great apes possess "an understanding of others as intentional agents," probably "developed in the context of [competitive] foraging" (p.12), but they do not possess "humanlike skills of shared intentionality, such as the ability to participate in the thinking of others through joint attention, conventional communication, and pedagogy" (p.13). 

Sociality: "cooperation was grounded in competition," such as when hunting, in which each primate must "take account of the actions and intentions of others" in order to compete to capture the game (p.13). 

Executive regulation: Although the LCA "likely had the ability to self-monitor their own actions and thinking," like other primates, they likely did not "monitor their actions and thinking based on the perspectives and evaluations of others in their social group" (p.14)

Collaboration and joint intentionality: Tomasello gives an evolutionary history here, the upshot of which is that around 400,000 years ago, early humans, probably *Homo heidelbergensis*, "began obtaining the majority of their food through more active collaboration; indeed, the collaboration became obligate" and thus humans were more urgently interdependent (p.15). That meant "strong and active social selection (West-Eberhard 1979) for cooperatively competent and motivated individuals" (p.15). That yielded a "radically new psychological process," which was "joint intentionality based on joint agency .... The creation of a joint agent - while each partner maintains her own individual role and perspective at the same time -- created a completely new human psychology, spawning new forms of both cognition and sociality" (p.15). 

Cognition: These new skills "created a new kind of agent, one in which two distinct individuals, in a sense, perceived and understood the world together while still not losing their own individual perspectives" (p.16). This "created a shared conceptual world" and thus "the pragmatic infrastructure upon which early humans' new skills of cooperative communication could be built" (p.16). These included "socially recursive inferences -- in which the individual conceptually embeds one intentional or mental state within another," yielding "joint intentionality" in which partners could form "a joint goal with joint attention" and thus "perspectival cognitive representations and socially recursive inferences" (pp.16-17).  

Sociality: These humans "were socially selected for collaborative foraging" and thus "had strong cooperative motives" including cooperative goals, sympathy, cooperative rationality leading to a sense of fairness, and "role-specific ideals (for example, in hunting antelopes the chaser must do *x*, and the spearer must do *y*)" (p.17; cf. Leontiev). 

Modern human culture and collective intentionality: Small-scale collaborative foraging was destabilized by "competition with other human groups," leading to a "more tightly knit social group," and increasing population size," leading to "so-called tribal organization" in which smaller social groups split off from larger ones but still shared a "culture," thus necessitating ways to recognize others from one's cultural group (pp.18-19). These led to marking group identity through conforming to social structure, meaning that conventions became critical to survival (p.19). 

Cognition: "The cognitive skills needed for functioning in a cultural group were not just skills of joint intentionality but skills of collective intentionality" (p.19), meaning that individuals could share "common cultural ground" with others they had not met as well as the collective perspective ("a kind of 'objective' perspective, independent of any individual" -- fortified by institutions such as marriages; p.19). Combine those cognitive skills with language and you get arguing cooperatively (i.e., deliberation, although Tomasello doesn't use that term). Individuals assumed an objective view and argued about beliefs and actions, and "by engaging in this process individuals' thinking became organized in a much wider and more reason-based 'web of beliefs,' structured by the group's normative standards of rationality" (p.20). 

Skipping forward to modern humans: "humans' specialized social-cognitive skills are not things added onto the end of ontogeny in adulthood, but rather they emerge relatively early -- sometime before two-and-a-half years of age," and "all other aspects of human cognitive and social development are built on this unique foundation, leading to unique outcomes" (p.28). 

To understand how this ability interacts with skills that vary across human societies (such as riding a bicycle or reading a book), Tomasello draws on Vygotsky's basic distinction between natural skills (developing "through maturationally structured individual learning") and cultural skills ("via imitative learning from others in the culture via adult instruction") (p.34). Thus he presents a typology of learning:

1. individual learning
2. observational learning
3. pedagogical or instructed learning
4. social co-construction (pp.34-35)

Importantly, in addition to interacting with culturally more advanced individuals such as adults -- Vygotsky's emphasis -- children also learn from interacting with peers. This interaction "who are no more knowledgeable or powerful than they are ... engenders perspective-taking, dialogic thinking, and reciprocity" (p.35). 

In terms of executive self-regulation, children learn normative self-government, which entails self-regulation on the basis of cultural structures or norms (p.38). 

In Chapter 3, "Social Cognition," one insight we learn is that "of all 200+ species of nonhuman primates only humans have highly visible sclera that basically advertise the direction of their eye gaze to others" (p.51)! These sclera thus facilitate joint attention. 

In Chapter 4, "Communication," Tomasello asserts that in ontogeny, children acquire cultural heritage by conforming to expectations around them. One avenue is through grammar: grammar constraints symbolize events from a particular perspective (p.92; cf. Bakhtin). Tomasello also notes that executive self-regulation of discourse yields discursive negotiation (e.g., repairs), and after some experience, children "begin to self-monitor and anticipate when their listener may have difficulties," meaning that "they have internalized the dialogic process and used it to executively self-regulate" (p.122). 

This question of internalization is taken up in Chapter 5, "Cultural Learning." Tomasello argues that "internalization is nothing other than role-reversal imitation used in a flexible way: the child imitates others directing her behavior or, alternatively, imitates herself teaching others, with herself substituted as learner" (p.153). 

In Chapter 6, "Cooperative Thinking," Tomasello notes that "reasons and justifications serve to connect beliefs causally and logically and, in the end, to ground them in the culture's rational norms" (p.161). And as mentioned earlier, "when the more coordinative dimension of cognition is the issue, of special importance are interactions with peers of equal status, to whom the child does not defer," because "the equal status enables them to engage in a true dialogue in which either individual's point of view may potentially prevail, based not on power but on reason" (p.166). 

There's more, much more to this fascinating book, but I'll stop there. If you are at all interested in the questions of social cognition, cooperation, and what makes us human, I highly recommend this book.

Reading :: The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition

The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition
By Michael Tomasello

This is a really fantastic, dense book and I'm sorry it took me so long to get to it. Tomasello is a cognitive psychologist who has spent a lot of time investigating differences in the developmental cognition of humans vs. other primates. He is neo-Vygotskian in outlook, but draws more broadly on cognitive and anthropological literature to better understand a basic puzzle: human evolution in itself has not given us the time to evolve cognitive tools, complex symbolic systems, and complex social organizations or institutions (p.2). 

So how did we? The only answer, he says, is social or cultural transmission (p.4), which produces the so-called "ratchet effect" in which people learn, adopt, and adapt modifications from each other (p.5). For other species, the problem isn't invention but stabilization, i.e., learning others' innovations and applying them oneself (p.5). Only humans, he says, understand conspecifics as intentional agents like themselves, thus engaging in cultural learning (p.6). Because they do, they can apply existing cognitive skills (ex: for dealing with space, time, and quantities) to develop "culturally-based skills with a social-collective dimension" (p.7—readers of this blog will recognize Vygotsky's basic distinction between lower and higher mental functions, a distinction that Tomaselli references later). Human children, enmeshed in a cultural world, learn linguistic and other communicative symbols (p.8), something that allows them to adopt multiple perspectives and free themselves from immediate perception (p.9). 

In this book, then, Tomasello presupposes basic cognitive skills, then (like Vygotsky) focuses on how they were transformed evolutionarily, historically, and ontogenetically (p.11). 

To do this, he first discusses biological and cultural inheritance in Chapter 2. Interestingly, only primates understand external social relations (p.17), but nonhuman primates do not understand the world in intentional and causal terms (p.19). To understand how humans inherit culturally, he rejects the innate-vs.-learned dichotomy in favor of Vygotsky's dichotomy of individual (or "natural") and cultural lines of development, with the latter concerning "those things the organism knows and learns that are derived from acts in which it attempts to see the world through the perspective of other persons (including perspectives embodied in artifacts)" (p.51). Here, cultural inheritance involves "intentional phenomena in which one organism adopts another's behavior or perspective on some third entity" (p.52). But the individual and cultural lines of development "become inextricably intertwined early in human development, and virtually every cognitive act of children after a certain age incorporates elements of both" (p.52). 

Part of what makes the cultural line of development work is that we have a biologically inherited ability to understand others as agents, leading to uniquely human forms of cultural inheritance (p.78). We can learn the intentional affordances of artifacts, i.e., what X is supposed to be used for (p.84)—and we can decouple intentional affordances, leading to play and creativity (p.85). Tomasello notes that infants are cultural beings—but at 9 months, they begin understanding others as "intentional agents like themselves," opening up "a whole new world of intersubjectively shared reality" (p.91). 

Moving on to language. Tomasello says that sounds become language when the child understands that there's an intention (p.101). And children who receive heavy scaffolding and joint focus with adults tend to develop a large vocabulary earlier (p.117). What distinguishes linguistic symbols from other forms of communication used by other animal species, in fact, is their perspectival nature (p.123). In discussing how external representations become "internal, individual representations," Tomasello name-checks Vygotsky's notion of internalization, but concedes differences based on our greater understanding now (p.125). 

Later, Tomasello emphasizes again that "social and cultural processes during ontogeny do not create basic cognitive skills. What they do is turn basic cognitive skills into extremely complex and sophisticated cognitive skills" — leading children to reorganize their information about the world, "construe the world in terms of the categories and perspectives and relational analogies embodied in [their] language," and "perhaps" apply these cognitive skills to "other domains such as mathematics" (p.189). 

There's more to this book, much more. I highly recommend it and I know I'll be returning to it.

Reading :: Case Study Research Methods

Case Study Research Methods
By Bill Gillham

I picked up this slim book at the used bookstore a month or two ago. Published in 2000, this book sells for $95 new, but you can pick a used copy up right now for a low $12. If you're interested in case study methodology, maybe you should do that—this 106-page book is a really excellent overview.

The book covers the basics of case study research, the relationship between evidence and theory, the literature review and its relationship to the case, the major data collection techniques (observations, interviews, artifacts), and even writing the research report. Each chapter is well structured, clearly written, and highly organized. We get examples, but we are not inundated with them. 

In fact, the book is really lucid in a way that methodology texts often aren't. Gillham covers everything from what qualitative research is good for, to what makes a case, to why "objective" (i.e., quantitative) research isn't enough to answer some questions, to the recursive relationship among research concerns, questions, and cases, to guidance for avoiding the trap of seeing what you expect in the data. And he does all of this with plain language and examples that (I think) a first-year college student could easily follow. That prose contrasts starkly with much of the guidance we get on qualitative research and theory-building, which tends to be abstract, abtruse, or heavily based on advanced theoretical literature. To be honest, I am not sure I realized how difficult some of these texts were until I read this one.

Not to gush, but I really like this book. If you are interested in getting into case study methodology—and certainly if you can pick this book up for $12!—take a look.

Reading :: Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana

Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana: The Encounter Between the Lodagaa and the 'World on Paper'
By Sean Hawkins

I picked up this book after seeing it being cited in the dissertation of one of our recently graduated PhD students, Stephen Dadugblor. (Stephen's dissertation is great, by the way.) To develop his argument, Stephen drew on this history of how the "world of experience" (here, the Lodagaa of Northern Ghana) encountered "the world on paper" (the writing regimes of colonialism) between 1890 and 1990. 

Hawkins draws on a diverse array of literature to understand writing and especially colonial writing. This literature includes names familiar to writing studies, such as Olson and Goody. Hawkins notes that, like Christianity and Islam, colonialism is a religion of the book (p.14), and to deal with the court systems, the LoDagaa (who did not possess laws) had to adopt foreign concepts from literate categories of social representation (p.31). 

For instance, the late 19th century colonialist regime had certain assumptions about people, including that they formed distinct tribes with powerful chiefs, and thus the regime attempted to install and maintain friendly chieftainships. These late 19th-early 20th century chiefs had a "near-monopoly of knowledge of writing" (p.122) that "allowed them to solidify their positions as intermediaries between the world on paper and those of farmers and migrant laborers" (p.123). Only in 1917 was a school established, and it was only for developing a governing class of chiefs (p.123). The role of chiefs was solidified by the postcolonial period (p.129). 

This latter point is an important theme running through the book. Later, the author discusses the concept of the family and notes the confusion that bishops, missionaries, and colonialist courts had in understanding family arrangements. Westerners assumed that marriage was a universal institution, yet the LoDagaa had a more fluid family arrangement that did match these expectations. Courts thus ruled on family disputes using a baseline set of expectations that the LoDagaa initially did not share, but had to adapt to. In one example, a bishop characterized "traditional Dagaare society," but Hawkins notes that "It was not the society of the past, but contemporary LoDagaa culture, that the bishop was describing," specifically a colonized version that was enforced by the courts (p.285).

In his conclusion, Hawkins references the example that I have been thinking about: Luria's expeditions to Uzbekistan. Here, he notes that unschooled Uzbeks interpreted shapes as real objects (ex: a circle would be called a plate or the Moon), while schooled ones described them as "geometric symbols, as things abstracted from the world of experience" (p.323). Similarly, "Because the words (conceptual language) used to represent the LoDagaa on paper were not generative of their practices or experiences, the use of writing as a medium of representation has resulted in a series of misrepresentations" (p.323).

And that's where I'll end this review. Like many histories, this book is long, dense, and detailed—but it's also intriguing and full of lessons for those of us who want to understand writing as a cultural practice. I recommend it!

Readings :: The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination
By C. Wright Mills

The link goes to a later version; my version of this 1959 classic is dated 1967. It's part of a used book haul I collected during the pandemic. 

To be honest, I get nervous when reading these classics. They are usually outside my field (I'm not a sociologist) and although I sometimes see them cited, they were not covered in my undergraduate or graduate classes and are not a big part of the conversation in my discipline. So please regard these notes as an outsider trying to figure out how this classic relates to writing studies in 2021.

How does it relate? The book actually reminds me of the framework essays and books that were trendy in the 1980s and 1990s in writing studies as we tried to figure out our field. In these essays, the author usually sets up three or four camps in which they* can divide the field, then compares, contrasts, and critiques each camp. In many cases, the author implies allegiance with the last camp discussed.

* NOTE: I'm trying to use they for indeterminate pronouns since this practice has been recently sanctioned. In previous book reviews, I have typically alternated singular pronouns (she/he) or pluralized the noun.

Here, Mills notes the issue that people are facing "nowadays" (i.e., 1959) in which the more aware we are of other locales, ambitions, and threats, the more trapped we feel. The individual and social must be understood together, he says, but we usually don't understand them that way (p.3). People need to be able to use information to sum up what is happening in the world and in themselves, and this is what he terms the "sociological imagination" (p.5). But to do this, we need sociological theory, and those who use it have been asked three kinds of questions:

• What is the structure of the society as a whole?
• Where does it stand in human history?
• Who prevails in this society? (pp.6-7)

To address these questions, he attempts to define the meaning of social sciences for the "cultural tasks of our time" (p.18). He detects three tendencies in classical sociology:

• theory of history
• systematic theory of the nature of man [sic] and society
• empirical studies of social facts and problems (p.23)

He addressed the first under "Grand Theory" (Ch.2). Among other things, he addresses the basic question of power: who decides the social arrangements under which we live (p.40)? He specifically looks at three dominant orders:

• economic 
• political
• military

which are coordinated in totalitarian countries (p.46). 

In Chapter 3, he discusses "abstracted empiricism," in which (he complains) investigators collect a sample of people, interview them, reduce the interviews to statistics based on scales, and yield public opinion (p.50). One problem with this approach is that the methodology determines a narrow range of questions to investigate (p.55). Abstract empiricism is not the same as the concrete behavior of people, and it favors problems of milieux rather than structure (p.61) as well as reducing social realities to psychological variables (p.63). That is, it assumes that the fundamental source of information is individuals, and thus understands the institutional structure of the society through individuals (p.67). In contrast, he argues for a sociological method that has general relevance and is logically connected (p.73). 

In Chapter 4, he discusses types of practicality. Here, he mentions that "classical economics has been the major ideology of capitalism as a system of power," but is "fruitfully misunderstood," just as "the work of Marx is used by Soviet publicists today" (p.82). In Chapter 5, "The Bureaucratic Ethos," he adds that "work in modern industry is work within a hierarchy: there is a line of authority and hence, from the under-side, a line of obedience," and "a great deal of work is semi-routine," meaning stereotyped work. Put these two together and "it becomes evident that work in a modern factory involves discipline" and thus "the factor of power, so coyly handled by human relations experts, is thus central to an adequate understanding of problems of morale" (p.93). 

In Chapter 7, he concludes that "what social science is properly about is the human variety, which consists of all the social worlds in which men [sic] have lived, are living, and might live" (p.132). 

In Chapter 9, he argues that freedom is "the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them—and then, the opportunity to choose" and thus freedom requires a broad role for human reason (p.174). 

Okay, I think that's enough Mills. Not being enmeshed in mid-20th century sociology, I am sure I have not caught everything Mills threw at me. But I did find this broad, discipline-wide discussion of different lines of thought to be interesting and useful. If you're interested in these sorts of discussions, pick this book up.

Readings :: Eating in Theory

Eating in Theory
By Annemarie Mol

I loved Annemarie Mol's first book, The Body Multiple, in which she asked the question "what is atherosclerosis" and concluded that it was not just found or discovered but enacted, and necessarily enacted differently by different actors in different specialties. That book was transformative for me, and I still refer to it a lot. Her second book, The Logic of Care, was not as transformative, but still solid. So I had high hopes when picking up this book.

How is it? Honestly, just okay for me. 

Whereas Mol's other two books focused on fairly bounded questions and settings, this one is more generally about eating (and metabolic engagement more generally) as a different way to think about agency. She notes and agrees with the posthumanist critique of human agency as exceptional, but she notes that "agency" and "subjectivity" are both grounded in humanism and then applied to nonhumans. But "robbing 'the human' of his [sic] exceptionalism by spreading out his [sic] particular traits over the rest of the world is not enough" (p.3). Her solution is:

What if we were to stop celebrating 'the human's' cognitive reflections about the world, and take our cues instead from human metabolic engagements with the world? Or, to put it differently: What if our theoretical repertoires were to take inspiration not from thinking but from eating? (p.3)

(The word "inspiration" is based on breathing in, so we have a bit of a mixed metaphor here, but let's go with it.)

Her approach is to tell stories about eating (and excreting) that do not lead to theoretical conclusions about eating, but rather about "being, doing, knowing, and relating" (p.5). In practice, she conducts fieldwork—well, really, it sounds like she visits different places and tells stories about them. These stories include visits to dietician-led groups to address kidney disease; a sewage plant; and a dinner with asparagus. The latter has a punch line that I am sure has already occurred to you.

One discussion, in which she attends a workshop for cooking with "old grains," yields the insight that eating is not bounded by the body. Eating also involves selecting and modifying grains over centuries to yield variations that are digestible, nutritious, and productive, as well as using cooking methods (she cites Wrangham here). She concludes: "Here is the lesson for theory. Doing is not necessarily centered in an embodied individual. It may well be distributed over a stretched-out, historically dispersed, socio-material collective" (p.93). This insight is not particularly new, but it is well put here.

The phrase "Here is the lesson for theory" occurs near the end of each chapter, and if you're reading it on a Kindle (I'm not), I imagine you could search for it to get the basic insights of the book. If not, you'll need to read through the illustrative anecdotes.

So what did I think? I think this book was less interesting to me than the first two, partially because it was not as well bounded, partially because the metabolic metaphor really does most of its work in the first chapter. The illustrations seemed a little drawn out for me and the insights seemed less unique and fresh than in The Body Multiple. Still, if you are interested in posthumanist critiques of agency and cognition, this book may give you what you're looking for. 

Readings :: Ethnographic Decision Tree Modeling

Ethnographic Decision Tree Modeling
By Christina H. Gladwin

I picked up this slim monograph the other week (93pp.) and read it in maybe one sitting. Part of the Qualitative Research Methods series, this 1989 book proposes a modeling strategy for interpreting ethnographic data on how people make decisions:

This method is called ethnographic decision tree modeling because it uses ethnographic fieldwork techniques to elicit from the decision makers themselves their decision criteria, which are then combined in the form of a decision tree, table, flowchart, or set of "if-then rules" or "expert systems" which can be programmed on the computer. (p.8)

The author emphasizes that decision criteria should be emic, but made explicit (p.9). She notes that "people do not rank order alternatives wholistically when they make a decision. They just choose one of several alternatives without ranking them" (p.10, citing Kahnemann & Tversky, Shoemaker, Quinn, and Arrow). Thus her approach is not linear, but rather context-sensitive, testing the interpretation of an observed behavior (p.11). Thus the ethnographic data collection can take from a few weeks up to two years, and model testing can take up to 6 months (p.13). These models, like model trains, are simplified (p.13).

When we get into the models, however, we find that there's a lot of craftwork and tacit knowledge involved. In an extended case study — how students decide whether to buy a meal plan at their dorm — she models the results of each interview, then combines them, telling us to "combine them in a logical fashion while preserving the ethnographic validity of each individual decision model" (p.39, her emphasis). Okay. The models also assume a lot about both decisions and justification, primarily by portraying branching pathways with yes/no decisions.

I like modeling qualitative data, so I can see value in this modeling process. It's a good way to aggregate messy data and see patterns that may not be visible in raw interviews. However, I do worry that these "model trains" may not take us very far: they attempt to rationalize decisions that are potentially much more complicated, and they appear to rely on untriangulated interviews, meaning that they represent what people say or recall or reconstruct about their decision making. 

Nevertheless, used judiciously, this modeling technique could be really helpful. I'll keep this book in mind in case I need to model decisions in the future. If you're interested in modeling qualitative data in this way, please do pick up this book.

Reading :: Culture, Language and Personality

Culture, Language and Personality
By Edward Sapir

I picked up this paperback some years ago in a used bookstore, and finally got around to reading it during the pandemic. The original text is copyrighted 1949; this paperback was printed in 1964 and has one of those amazing abstract 1960s covers. It's just a pleasure to look at. 

When I picked it up this year, I noticed the previous owner's name written on the fly page along with "1980 (used)." As it happens, the name was very distinct and matched someone I knew at UT. I reached out to him and he confirmed that he had owned the book during his undergraduate days (!!). 

So what is the book about? These are selected essays Sapir produced on, well, culture, language and personality. More specifically, Sapir examines the function of language, the status of linguistics, the nature of culture and religion, the question of how cultural anthropology and psychiatry related, and the concept of personality. Rather than thoroughly review these essays, I'll just pick out a few specifics.

In the essay "Language" (written in 1933), he notes that every known group of human beings has a language, and he rejects the idea that language emerged because gestures were not enough to communicate (p.1). All language, he says, consists of "phonetic symbols for the expression of communicable thought or feeling" (p.1; I think he means phonemes rather than written phonetic symbols, and notice the same bias toward spoken language that Vygotsky had). "Language is heuristic" in the sense that "its forms predetermine for us certain modes of observation and interpretation," and thus "as our scientific experience grows we must learn to fight the implications of language" (p.7). Race, culture, and language do not often coincide, he says. But with increased emphasis on nationalism (recall that he wrote this in 1933), these are collapsed (p.39). He suggests the logical necessity of an international language (p.42). (Readers may recall that Esperanto had a lot of enthusiasts in the early 20th century, and I wonder if he had something like that in mind.)

He does discuss writing as well. Writing, he adds, "proved that language as a purely instrumental and logical device is not dependent on the use of articulate sound" (p.2). He also claims that effective writing systems are "more or less exact transfers of speech" (p.12), a claim that is understandable given the time but, I think, incorrect.

In "International Auxiliary Language," Sapir continues the idea of an international language, this time recognizing that "English, or some simplified version of it, may spread for certain immediate and practical needs, yet the deeper needs of the modern world may not be satisfied by it" (p.51). He argues that we need a simpler, more logical language. Although I am monolingual, I also recognize that English is wildly inconsistent. 

In "Linguistics as a Science," I pulled just one quote: he states that "linguistics is destined to have a very special value for configurative psychology ('Gestalt psychology'), for, of all forms of culture, it seems that language is that one which develops its fundamental patterns with relatively the most complete detachment from other types of cultural patterning. Linguistics may thus hope to become something of a guide to the understanding of the 'psychological geography' of culture in the large" (p.73). Although not directly connected, this line of thought of course reminds me of Vygotsky and Luria in the very early 1930s, about the time of the Uzbek expeditions.

Okay, that's it for this collection of essays. Sapir is a little far afield for me. But if you are interested in early-to-mid 20th century thoughts on culture, language, and personality, this time capsule should be of help to you.