Discourse and equality

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Just one last comment to Ron's:

At 15:37 16/11/02 -0500, Ronald Kephart wrote:

> > 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. . . .

Ron, thanks for all that information. But you're not being fair ;-): I
wasn't grouping all hominoids or non-human primates together. Sure, each
species has its own form of social organization, but, are there substantial
*intra-species*, cultural differences among groups in terms of basic types
of social organization? (I don't believe there are).  That is (excuse my
plainness), are there "anarchist" bonobo groups versus clearly hierarchical
ones?  Even more clearly, can a specific bonobo group modify the basic
principles of its organization over time -- from "anarchist" to
"tyrannical" or viceversa?

So, my (obvious) point is again that the human mind can produce social
imaginaries, design social systems, implement them with relative failure or
success, etc. etc. And that these projects can be and often are reflexively
stated in discourses, so that -- except for classic dialectic materialists
-- the material does not *determine* ideologies (and even for materialists
of this type social emancipation is possible). This is just an example of
the interactions between cognition, discourse and, well, matter. So, I just
say that cross-species comparison of communication should take account of
the performative and inherently reflexive nature of human discourse. If
this is left out of the cross-species comparison picture, in my opinion the
picture is flawed. Or, in our non-reflexive primateness, we're left only
with a certain failurism ;-) about the possibility of emancipatory,
equalitarian social change, which is born as a product of the mind.

Best,
-celso


Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
lxalvarz at udc.es
http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/
Assembleia da Língua:
http://br.groups.yahoo.com/group/assembleia-da-lingua