Discourse and gibbons

[Ronald Kephart]

A couple of comments on a rainy Florida afternoon, and collapsing several
responses into one...

Timothy Mason wrote:

> One thing I think I know about discourse is that terms can slip from one
> discursive domain to another, changing meaning and role, and occasioning
> clarity/perplexity or whatever. [...] Boundary managers may well feel moved to
> condemn, but the best they can hope to do is to wag a stern finger at any
> illicit border-crossing.
>
This is pretty much my feeling; the alternative would be to invent a new
term for everything. And I reserve the right to wag my own stern finger when
someone says, for example, that Koko or Washoe "learned American Sign
Language," which is not what I think they did although you hear this all too
often.

I also agree with Kerim Friedman:

> Maybe I watch too many nature documentaries, but I just think humans are a
> little too cocky sometimes, and we over-value those things which make us
> unique...
>

Even as scientists, we are inheritors of a dualistic tradition that has
attempted to place humans, and their properties and products, outside of
nature, and this tradition has by no means disappeared. In my opinion, if
it's true that overly sentimental anthropomorphizing can lead us to falsely
attribute human properties to, say, cats and snakes, it's equally true that
the opposite can lead us into missing important similarities between us and,
especially, our closest relatives, and in doing so cause us to mistakenly
take as "human" some trait that is, in fact, "hominoid" or "primate." In the
process, we risk losing an important component of our own
self-understanding. At least, that's how I see it; it's partly my
personality, I guess, and partly the result of having been nurtured in a
four-field anthropology department which, at the time, stressed integration
of the subdisciplines.

Celso Alvarez Cáccamo writes:

> What I'm objecting to in this whole discussion, I believe, is that by
> humanizing other species [...] some people may be in fact de-socializing
> humanity, which offers us a strong temptation to cease searching for the
> social and economic sources of misery and violence.
>
I don't understand why this should be so... I can think of one prominent
linguist who has spent much of his career seeking to reduce methodological
dualism and who has had what amounts to a parallel second career exposing,
in print and public lecture, the sources of misery and violence that we
inflict upon ourselves.

> As far as I know, non-human primate social organization is determined by the
> access to and distribution of resources and goods (mainly food, sex and
> territory).  Human social organization is not *determined* by those resources,
> as many past and present political experiences and experiments show...
>
But, non-human primates are not all the same: just sticking to the
hominoids, you have a range from the rather anarchic bonobo groups, among
whom females can be dominant; to somewhat more structured chimp groups where
males are usually on top (tho females have a parallel ranking system of
their own); to gorillas with their single dominant male and his ladies and
their kids. Then too, you have gibbons which iirc maintain mated pairs; and
orangs, which are solitary except for moms and dependent kids. All these
animals live in broadly similar tropical forest regions, and all are mainly
vegetarian, tho the chimps hunt and eat small antelopes and monkeys. All
have some kind of social ranking (which in my view needs to be a part of any
understanding of human ranking and social stratification). In each case, it
seems to me from what I've learned of these matters that it's the social
organization that determines access to resources as much as the other way
around.

Of course, all these animals are foragers; so, while they exhibit social
ranking of various sorts they don't have the social stratification that
humans exhibit. And, interestingly, neither do human foragers for the most
part, although even human foragers have social ranking (by age, gender,
etc.). As we move into more complex human societies, we get stratification,
always. So when you say that...

> ...human discourse has produced the utopia of planetary social equality...

... I have to wonder whether this ideal is achievable given the primate
roots of inequality. The human societies that come closest are always pretty
small-scale, and seem to have to build strong mechanisms into their culture
(like the !Kung "insulting the meat") to reinforce an ideology that may be
in some sense "anti-primate."

Oh well... enough is enough. I apologize in advance, but it was fun writing
this. Thanks for "listening.."

--
Ronald Kephart
English & Foreign Languages
University of North Florida
http://www.unf.edu~rkephart/