'Machiavellian Intelligence II': Language is a tool for making tools for thinking and acting with, therefore Roles and Rules appeared with early proto-language: by Esther N. Goody
Spoken language, classification and the labelling of roles
… The fascinating discussion of the nature of the role of 'father' in human societies provides a particularly vivid instance of how labels for kin roles may influence social forms. This turns on the fact that, in the absence of any manifest physiological continuity between a man and his offspring, for people outside the influence of western scientific discourse there is no evident physiological basis for the role of 'father'. Nevertheless there is always some term for this role (variously defined depending on other aspects of the social structure).
Fortes (1983) holds that the emergence of the role of father marked the beginning of human society since it is necessarily socially defined; further, he points out that the role of father is linked to the internalisation of rules without which people cannot live together in society. Although Fortes does not mention it, the social creation of a role must have depended on spoken language to separate particular individual fathers from the generic 'father role' (as with other kin terms).
[Fortes, M. (1983). Rules and the Emergence of Society. Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Papers, No. 39. London: Royal Anthropological Institute.]
Wilson (1980), taking a very different view of the origin of human society, also sees the emergence of the role of 'father' as pivotal, and for him it is linked to the human capacity for making promises, i.e. commitments for the future. Again the vehicle for role emergence must have been a spoken language.
[Wilson, P. J. (1980). Man, the Promising Primate: The Conditions of Human Evolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press]
While it is likely that kin roles were the earliest social roles, there is probably no society in which additional social roles have not emerged. Even in very simple societies there are usually political roles (warrior-warrior, elder—subordinate), economic roles (hunter—hunter, weapon/tool maker—warrior/farmer) and ritual roles (diviner—supplicant, ritual expert- congregation). One index of increasing social complexity is the number of roles and the networks of links between them.
Spoken language, roles and the emergence of 'rules'
The naming of regularities of behaviour associated with positions in a social structure as roles linked to recognised rights and obligations is a feature of all human societies. Such roles are 'cultural things' in that they exist as part of the socio-cultural world independently of particular individuals who may 'be' fathers or warriors at any given time. Social roles make the cognitive modelling of social contingency significantly more efficient in several ways related to increasing the predictability of the responses of others. Most obvious is the making explicit of what a role occupant — say a father — is in this society. Anthropologists recognise that Trobriand fathers are very different from Nuer fathers; but how do the members of a particular society know 'how to be a father'? Once a role is labelled comments and criticism of the behaviour of individual holders make explicit the expectations on which it is based, and comments and criticisms can only be made explicit through language.
There is another characteristic feature of social roles that has great power in making social interactions more predictable. This is their dyadic nature. Fatherhood implies sonhood and daughterhood; to be a wife you must have a husband, an older sibling requires a younger sibling, and so on. With family roles we have a labelling of key reciprocal interdependencies arising from kinship. Given the human capacity for the cooperative construction of meaning in interaction, what is actually expected of occupants of family roles emerges in the first instance in the kinship practice of a given society. Fathers make claims on their sons, and sons in turn make claims on their fathers. But in a world of spoken language such reciprocal expectations become explicit. It is in this way that explicit role expectations become models for individuals for their own behaviour. It is clear what is involved in being a 'good English/middle class/Nuer father', and boys and men internalise this model as a standard relevant to their own behaviour.
The second new dynamic, based on the dyadic nature of social roles, is the reciprocal sanctioning of deviations from expected behaviour. Experiments have revealed the universal character of the discomfort that we feel when expectations based on customary, routinised interaction are not met. When social roles come to be labelled these expectations become explicit, and widely shared.
Now deviations are matters of public comment and may be sanctioned, perhaps by a delegation of elders, or by legal means depending on the social system.
Levi-Strauss (1963) has suggested that it was the invention of the incest taboo that marked the beginning of human society. It has become clear that humans are not the only species that avoids mating between close kin.
[Levi-Strauss, C. (1963). Totemism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press]
But as the only species with spoken language we have indeed invented rules — about incest among other things. Both early roles and early rules appear to have centred around the dynamics of close kinship. The dyadic nature of social roles and the accountability of role occupants for their behaviour are socio-cultural procedures for the replication of structural couplings of individuals in the same roles within a society.
Like roles, rules are also 'cultural things' that exist in the socio-cultural world apart from individual actors (Bourdieu, 1977). Both roles and rules have a dual existence — they shape the cognitive modelling of contingent action, they are tools for thinking with; and they frame and shape interaction, they are tools for acting with.
[Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press.]
If we return to the question of how language would have altered the challenges of early hominid existence one answer is that language creates two new sorts of socio-cultural tool — new socio-cultural tools for thinking with, and new socio-cultural tools for acting with.
Language-in-use generates cultural tools for managing social interaction on many levels.
In fact language is a tool for making tools for thinking and acting with. Roles and rules could well have appeared with early proto-language since they are based on the labelling of classification that simple reference makes possible. As language becomes more complex it is also a more powerful tool-making tool. This is best seen in studies that reveal the power of conversational genres such as politeness forms, questions, and irony to shape both form and meaning [multiple references].
Such conversational genres are tools for doing particular important tasks with spoken language (being polite while pursuing a goal; getting information in ways appropriate to status difference; making comments by using language in a non-literal, safe, way). They work because as socio-culturally defined genres they are also 'cultural things', to which individuals have shared access. Since they are learned, they form a quasi-standardized mode of interacting for unacquainted individuals in similar settings.
Indeed Luckmann (1995) has argued that conversational genres also perform a critical task in the articulation of individuals by managing the key problem in communication of reciprocal adjustment of perspectives. Where a conversational genre is shared by members of a community, ethnic group or social class, it acts as a mode of synchronising the joint construction of meaning within this group. In fact it seems likely that this is one of the main ways in which group identities are both expressed and created.
[Luckmann, T. (1995). Interaction planning and intersubjective adjustment of perspectives by communicative genres. In Social Intelligence and Interaction, ed. E. N. Goody, Cambridge University Press.]
Cooperation and the dialogue template
From the replicated exchange of verbal input and output necessary for establishing lexical meanings, to the close synchrony of gesture and utter- ance between people in making conversational meanings, to the conversion of recurrent modes of solving conversational problems into culturally shaped genres, language-in-use creates and facilitates collaboration between speakers. Dialogue, literally 'speaking alternately', is our specially human mode of structural coupling, perhaps the fundamental form of human social- ity. It is as though humans were designed for dialogue; we seem to think with a dialogue template.
One expression of this is the internal dialogue we hold with ourselves. Indeed Vygotsky (1986) argues on the basis of experimental studies that conscious thought is internalised speech. Our dialogue bias appears when we try to hold conversations with new-born infants, and with pets. Dialogue can be seen as the basis for such socio- cultural practices as divination and prayer. [multiple references inc. Goody]
[Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.]
Social intelligence and language: Another Rubicon?
The social intelligence of apes models the contingent responses of other apes. Ethological evidence suggests that whether it is used for deception or co-operation this modelling relies on inference about the responses of others based on knowledge of past interactions. With the gradual emergence of spoken language hominid modelling of the responses of others is augmented by shared cognitive artefacts. Cognitive models in individual heads now use the same representations—words, phrases, hierarchically ordered phrases. The establishing of shared meanings for words must have required cognitive procedures for exchanging mappings of form on meaning between speakers and hearers. These procedures would have been used, or extended, to manage the collaborative construction of meaning in conversation. For it is recognised that for language-in-use, meaning is an emergent property of collaboration between speakers.
Conversational meaning requires both the grand artefact of language, and the cooperative use of this tool. The tool/artefact is shared by members of the community — both in individual heads and 'in the world'. Spoken language is realized only in use between them.
Such close reciprocal monitoring of each others' speech would be predicted by the model [reference] for the initial establishing of a lexicon through repeated exchanges of sign/form mappings as spoken/heard utterances. Early spoken language may have resulted from, and progressively refined, new patterns of joint attention to and cognitive processing of utterances.
The fact that once a lexicon has been established a speaker hears the same 'word' as does his listener may have been the crucial factor in escaping from the private worlds of thought into the shared social world of spoken language. Lexicons and spoken languages exist 'in the world', apart from the minds of individual speakers. As proto-languages became more complex, elements of structure — negation, question forms, tense, embedding of clauses, etc — presumably came, like vocabulary, to be part of the learned language. Today fluent speakers are not aware of using grammatical structures, and indeed are often unable to describe them. What must have begun as shared conventional usage have become routinised cognitive strategies, and on some level, genetically expressed. Yet even with these refined tools for language use, evidence from recent research [references] shows that the construction of shared meanings in conversation continues to require the sort of close reciprocal monitoring through which proto-languages presumably emerged. …
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MULTIPLE REFERENCES TO GOODY’S OWN WRITING
Goody, E. N. (1972). 'Greeting', 'begging' and the presentation of respect. In The Interpretation of Ritual, ed. J. S. LaFontaine, pp. 39—71. London: Tavistock Press.
Goody, E. N. (1978a). Introduction. In Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, ed. E. N. Goody, pp. 1—16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, E. N. (1978b). Towards a theory of questions. In Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, ed. E. N. Goody, pp. 17—43, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, E. N. (1984). The persistence of core roles across space and time. In Female Migrants and the Work Force: Domestic Repercussions. Special Issue. Anthropologica NS, 26, 123-34.
Goody, E. N. (1993). Informal learning of adult roles in Baale. In Images d'Afrique et Sciences Sociales: Les pays lobi, birifor et dagara, ed. M. Fieloux & J. Lombard, with J.-M. Kambou-Ferrand, pp. 483-91. Paris: Karthala-Orstom
Goody, E. N. (1995a) Introduction: Some implications of a social origin of intelligence. In Social Intelligence and Interaction, ed. E. N. Goody, pp. 1—33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, E. N. (1995b). Social intelligence and prayer as dialogue. In Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction ed. E. N. Goody, pp. 206—20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, E. N. (ed.) (1995c). Social Intelligence and Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Source:
Esther N. Goody, Social intelligence and language: Another Rubicon’, in Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations, edited by A. Whiten and R. W. Byrne, Cambridge University Press 1997
Esther N. Goody died in 2018. Here is an obituary.
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