Roots of Human Sociality

Culture, Cognition and Interaction

Stephen C. Levinson, Nicholas J. Enfield, Stephen C. Levinson, Nicholas J. Enfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Evolution
• Index: Biological Sciences

This book marks an exciting convergence towards the idea that human culture and cognition are rooted in the character of human social interaction, which is unique in the animal kingdom. Roots of Human Sociality attempts for the first time to explore the underlying properties of social interaction viewed from across many disciplines, and examines their origins in infant development and in human evolution. Are interaction patterns in adulthood affected by cultural differences in childhood upbringing? Apes, unlike human infants of only 12 months, fail to understand pointing and the intention behind it. Nevertheless apes can imitate and analyze complex behavior - how do they do it? Deaf children brought up by speaking parents invent their own languages. How might adults deprived of a fully organized language communicate?This book makes the case that the study of these sorts of phenomenon holds the key to understanding the foundations of human social life. The conclusion: our unique brand of social interaction is at the root of what makes us human.

Part 1
Properties of Human Interaction

one
On the Human "Interaction Engine"

Stephen C. Levinson

My goal in this chapter is to make the case that the roots of human sociality lie in a special capacity for social interaction,¹ which itself holds the key to human evolution, the evolution of language, the nature of much of our daily concerns, the building blocks of social systems, and even the limitations of our political systems.

Much of the speculation about the origins and success of our species centers on the source of our big brains, the structure of our cognition, on the origins of language, the innate structures that support it, and on the striking cooperative potential in the species. These are genuine and important puzzles, but in the rush to understand them, we seem to have overlooked a core human ability and propensity, the study of which would throw a great deal of light on these other issues. It is right under our noses, much more accessible than the recesses of our brains or the fossils that track our evolutionary origins, and quite understudied. It is the structure of everyday human interaction.

Despite the fact that it is over fifty years since human interaction was first treated as a scientific object of inquiry deserving of a natural history (Bateson 1955; Chapple and Arensberg 1940; see also Kendon 1990), progress has been quite limited. One problem has simply been that human interaction lies in an interdisciplinary no-man’s land: it belongs equally to anthropology, sociology, biology, psychology, and ethology but is owned by none of them. Observations, generalizations and theory have therefore been pulled in different directions, and nothing close to a synthesis has emerged. In this chapter, I therefore try to stand back and extract some generalizations about the special human abilities that seem to lie behind the structure of social interaction.

Are there Special Principles of Human Interaction?

Human interaction, by comparison with what goes on in even our nearest relatives, looks very distinctive, suggesting that there may be specific principles or abstract properties that underlie it. One starting point would be to ask whether there is a core universal set of proclivities and abilities that humans bring, by virtue of human nature, to the business of interaction—properties of interaction that are at source independent of variations in language and culture. Although much might be attributable to language, there are quite good prima facie grounds for thinking that human interactional abilities are at least partially independent of both language and culture:

•  Travelers to foreign lands report successful transactions conducted without language. Captain Cook’s unintended sojourn in Cape York is a case in point, or Thomas Henry Huxley’s journeys on HMS Rattlesnake. The best documentary evidence is probably the film First Contact (Connolly and Anderson 1987), incorporating footage made by the gold prospecting Leahy brothers contacting tribes in Highland New Guinea for the first time in the 1930s: it is as if the basis for transactional interactions exist independently of culture and language, and the slots can in necessity be filled by mime and iconic gesture (see Goodwin this volume).² Quine’s (1960) demonstration of the impediments to “radical translation” notwithstanding, something like it seems anyway to occur.
•  Infants show an early appreciation of the give and take of interaction (Bruner 1976) long before they speak, indeed arguably at four months (Rochat et al. 1999), only two months old (Trevarthen 1979), or even 48 hours (Melzoff and Moore 1977), depending on the measure. By nine months old, infants are embarked on complex triadic interactions between ego, alter, and an object in attention (Striano and Tomasello 2001). We know that different cultures have different infant-caretaker patterns (see Gaskins this volume), so it is hard to rule out early cultural influence, but the infant evidence is highly suggestive of an ethological basis on which cultures may or may not choose to build in early infancy.
•  When language is lost, interaction doesn’t disappear—restricted channels of communication, as in aphasia, can nevertheless support rich interaction (Goodwin 2003).
•  There is some evidence for a distinct “social intelligence” (Gardner 1985; Goody 1995) from inherited deficits and neurological case studies. The study of autism and Asperger’s syndrome, in comparison with, say, Down’s syndrome kids, suggest a double dissociation: highreasoning abilities, low social skills (Asperger’s), low-reasoning skills, high social skills (high-functioning Down’s)—see Baron-Cohen 2000 and Baron-Cohen et al. 1985. Similarly, different kinds of frontal lobe lesions induce different kinds of interactional incompetence, for example right temporal lesions correlate with flat affect and the loss of nonsuperficial understandings as required for jokes (Kolb and Whishaw 1990:607ff.; see Baron-Cohen 2000:1252 for brainimaging evidence).
•  Languages can switch midstream in interaction (“code-switching”), leaving the interactional framework undisturbed, evidence that interaction structure is independent of the “coded” signal systems of language (Muysken 2000).
•  Ethnographic reports on interaction style rarely question the applicability of the fundamentals. Where they do, as in Basso’s (1970) account of massively delayed greetings in Apache, or Albert (1972) on turn taking according to rank in Burundi, or Reisman (1974) on “contrapuntal conversation” in the West Indies, there is reason to believe they are describing something other than the unmarked conversational norm (Sidnell 2001). What the ethnographic reports nevertheless do make a good case for is cultural shaping of all the modalities of interaction, from spacing, posture, and gesture to linguistic form.
•  The small amount of work that has been done on the structure of conversation cross-linguistically and cross-culturally (on Thai, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, etc.) shows remarkable convergence in many details, supporting the idea of a shared universal framework for verbal interaction (see, e.g., Clancy et al. 1996; Hayashi 2003; Moerman 1989).
•  Humans look different from other primates in the amount of time and effort invested in interaction—it would be interesting to see them in a zoo. We don’t actually have good measures of this. Dunbar (1997:116) reports a study of a New Guinea tribe (the Kapanora) whose males spend 30 percent (the women slightly less) of daylight time socializing (or gossiping),³ compared with 20 percent for gelada baboons (doing grooming), but my suspicion is that such figures hugely underestimate the amount of human social interaction during the business of the day, not to mention the entertainments of the night. Allowing for differences caused by population density, age and gender, and subsistence mode (fishermen may spend the day alone), and Hymes’s (1972) notes about cultural differences in volubility,⁴ my guess is that humans on average spend somewhere between 30 percent and 70 percent of waking hours in social interaction, whether at work or play.⁵

I hope this sort of rough and ready list is enough to give the proposal prima facie plausibility—the proposal that, from an ethological point of view, humans have a distinctive, pan-specific pattern of interaction with conspecifics, marked by (1) intensity and duration, (2) specific structural properties, and (3) those properties separable from the language with which it is normally conducted.

Scholars from some disciplines may be puzzled by the absence of language from this catalogue of evidence for a human interactional specialization. We are (along with the song birds) a distinctively chattering species. The reason for the demotion of language is that so much attention has been given to it that we have been damagingly distracted from the interactional underpinnings that make it possible. Students of language usage have tried to remedy this, from Grice 1975 to Sperber and Wilson 1995 to my own earlier self—it is quite clear to us that “Language didn’t make interactional intelligence possible, it is interactional intelligence that made language possible as a means of communication” (Levinson 1995:232). So language is the explicandum, not the explicans—humans did not evolve language, then get involved in a special kind of social life, it was just the reverse. For language must have evolved for something for which there was already a need—that is, for communication in interaction.

Finally, there is another striking kind of evidence for the independence of interaction principles from the specifics of language and culture. Around the world, children are born deaf to hearing parents, who sometimes raise their children without access to a conventional sign language. What emerges is called “home sign,” an expressive signing system invented by the child to make himself or herself understood, and that is reciprocated by other means (see Goldin-Meadow this volume). In societies without institutional education of the deaf or a sizeable deaf community, such “home-sign” systems can remain the only communication system for deaf adults. I have investigated a couple of such cases on Rossel Island, a remote island community in Papua New Guinea. Take the case of Kpémuwó, about twenty-eight years old, born in a village where he is the only deaf person, which is three hours walk away from any other deaf people. One day he came to me when I was alone and proceeded to sign. To my intense surprise, I thought I could understand quite a bit of what he was “saying” although we shared no language, little culture and just a bit of background knowledge. He seemed to be communicating, by means of pointings and iconic gestures, about a woman who was dying of cancer in the neighborhood: There was a lot of detail about the course of her disease, her futile trip to the mainland for treatment, the visits of her daughters, and so forth. Then, when my hosts returned, I got them to “translate” as best they could Kpémuwó’s message—according to them, much of what I had inferred was correct. They obtained much further detailed explication, for example about the cause of the impeding death, caused by the antisorcery god Nkaa, depicted by mime as his eagle avatar (see Fig. 1.1), and hence Kpémuwó’s reluctance to help the family of the convicted sorcerer.⁶

Figure 1.1. Kpémuwó, deaf home signer on Rossel Island, inventing a way to communicate about abstract ideas concerning sorcery.

A moment’s reflection will reveal the depth of the mystery here. How is it possible for two people who share no language and little cultural background (myself and Kpémuwó) to communicate at all? For Quine’s “radical translation” to be possible after all, despite his scruples, there has to be some powerful meaning-making machinery that we all share. This depends, I claim, on a peculiar ability to match communicative intentions within an interactional framework. Kpémuwó and I got as far as we did because first he signed in such a way as to make his intentions maximally clear to me, and then I gestured my understanding of what he signed, and then he in response attempted to correct or narrow my interpretation, until step by step we converged on an understanding. Intention recognition and the mechanics of turn taking are deeply interlocked. The focus of this chapter is on what exactly Kpémuwó and I share that makes it possible for us to communicate, when we share so little other background in conventions of culture and communication.

The Idea of a Core "Interaction Engine". What the Output Shows

The idea in a nutshell is that humans are natively endowed with a set of cognitive abilities and behavioral dispositions that synergistically work together to endow human face-to-face interaction with certain special qualities. I call these elements collectively the human interaction engine (which is meant to suggest both dedicated mental machinery and motive power, i.e., both “savvy” and “oomph”). Right away, I should underline this is not a proposal for a “social cognition ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Human Sociality as a New Interdisciplinary Field
• Part 1: Properties of Human Interaction
• Part 2: Psychological Foundations
• Part 3: Culture and Sociality
• Part 4: Cognition in Interaction
• Part 5: Evolutionary Perspectives
• Index