For our collective enlightenment I have saved two pieces by Rita Astuti to the Dropbox. I have only read the first (chronologically - it's also shorter), the 2001 memorial Malinowski lecture entitled "Are we all dualists?" This must be from before the scales fell from her eyes, since as far as I can tell she's using the sorts of cognitive psychology experiments Tevans-Britchard described to prove something a little more conventional, viz. that the Vezo are dualists in the conventional Cartesian sense, but (crucially) that they are not born that way. She seems to implicitly endorse a linguistic model of culture and to think that her results demonstrate the pluripotency if not totipotency of the human infant psyche, rather than its limits. The main point appears to be that you can't take what people say about, in this instance, their ontology at face value, but rather have to apply tests which will allow you to observe the "inferential reasoning" which they are actually using to discriminate between various categories of being. This subterranean ontology still appears, in this lecture, to be very much like a language.
I am expecting something wildly different from the second piece, which I assume TTTB has either read or heard a version of in person, and which is called "Constraints on conceptual development: a case study of the acquisition of folkbiological and folksociological knkowledge in Madagascar (2004, co-authored with Gregg Solomon and Susan Carey). It's a little long but is double-spaced, and I am guessing will provide some fertile points for further discussion of the limits of human cognition and the potential contributions of cognitive psychology and neuroscience (as opposed to their symbological counterparts.
Needless to say, I am a babe in the woods with this material and if Sir Tevans-Britchard has alternative recommendations I defer entirely to his hard-won expertise.
CORRECTION:
I can't save the Malinowski lecture, but it's freely available at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/471/
3 comments:
I need to think more carefully about the difference between being a duelist and acting, speaking or thinking like a dualist. There are actually three interesting positions here.
1. You are either a dualist or a monist. If you believe this then it makes no sense to say that some people are dualists and some not, or that people are "naturally" dualists or that we become dualists or monists because this is about the fundamental substratum of reality, not basic psychological or social categories. Much philosophy has been written from this perspective, including philosophy that has influenced people who are of the following perspective:
2. Dualism and monism characterize basic categories of thought. Thus it is possible for someone to think like a dualist or think like a monist. Generally I take it the conclusion is that people think like dualists, particularly neurologists (despite their claims), René Decartes, anyone who claims to bridge the gap or collapse the distinction between mind and body and various primitives who don't know any better. Often the epistemology of these anthropological ontologists allows them to seamlessly fold more traditional ontology into their system, much one would guess, to the protest of Spinoza et al.
3. There is no categorical distinction between philosophical speculation, the fundamental logic of a culture (including its basic psychological categories), and. This functions much in the way that the previous position does, but understands the basic categories of existence not merely to be about the way people think but about the way everything is. It thus entails dealing with much more than "cognition." A lot of people occupying the second position want to be in this third position, but don't realize that they're secretly crypto-dualists or crypto-monists.
Unsurprisingly these three possibilities map onto Absolutism, Relativism and something we could call Radical Relativism, Relationism or Perspectivism. The problem with category three is that it makes everyone's life harder and more confusing rather than tidying up all of our differences and identities.
I myself occupy the elusive fourth position, called variously Substance Polybrachialism or Eliminative Cephalopousianism, where both Mind and Matter are reducible to a more "fundamental" state(?) of dusky, besuckered, writhing, tentacular madness.
Also I blame my apparent inability to find a stable spelling of "dualist" (or "duelist") on the powerful distillate of squid ink and pure grain alcohol that is customarily consumed in my culture prior to any philosophical endeavor.
I personally think we are all natural mustelidae. I seem to have caused some confusion with my use of Astuti's paper as an example before - it was the first overtly 'cognitive' paper I could think of off the top of my head that demonstrated that the learning approach could provide descriptive richness. I did not mean to hold Astuti up as a supporter of thought not being language-like. I still think the work she does is interesting and worth paying attention to.
But what I would be most interested to learn is the panel's views on the relationship between 'duellism' and 'purification', since I am finding the distinction to be fluid and elusive at pres.
But it seems the point of the 'are we natural duellists' question is, or should be, whether we can produce an archaelogy of this way of thinking that appears to be 'modern' (cartesian, christian, whatever) which involves dividing the world up all over the place and separating your brain from your body from the kingdom of heaven.
And that is worthwhile because a) it really would go some way to helping to clarify the millions of occasions where we ask people in other places questions and then totally misunderstand their answers, and b) because it would of course prove the symbological thesis that we were all natural monists until the catholic church suppressed the free love teachings of sir Jesus Christ. Oh wait or were we duellists who just appreciated the balance between the masculine and feminine. Either way an archaeology of duellism/purification is of urgent necessity, I think.
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