Ship of Fools

Please give my review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RCWNOGLOPZSN6?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

Modern Scholarship is all about knowing what camels to swallow and what gnats to strain at.

This book goes on the shelf next to “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage” by Lawrence H. Keeley and “Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony” by Robert B. Edgerton. All three books turn tropes that the modern readers are fed on a daily basis, and don't even get enough of a warning to challenge, on their heads by pointing out hard, irreducible empirical data that cuts against the received image of what most of us falsely think is received anthropological truth.

The author, C.R. Hallpike is a British anthropologist with extensive fieldwork among the Konso people of Ethiopia and the Tauade of New Guinea. Hallpike uses his empirical experience as a testing ground for criticizing several overarching tropes, theories or buried premises that are popular among anthropologists and the modern world.

The structure of the book appears to be a collection of prior essays. Each chapter basically addresses some theory postulated by some anthropologist. The essays are lucid and coherent and readable. The style of addressing particular theories sharpens up the discussion for those of us who are not anthropologists. Along the way, a lot of fool's gold is pointed out.

For example, I had incorporated into my mental software the notion that language developed in large part to spot and guard against “freeloaders.” I've read this repeatedly stated by experts in the field....and who am I to argue?

Hallpike efficiently decapitates this nostrum by pointing out that for most of human history, humans have lived in bands of 20 or so people who knew each other intimately. How, he asks, in that setting was a freeloader or cheater supposed to have escaped detection? Hallpike offers examples of such societies from his experience with the Tauade and Konso.

Mind-blown...good point. We have to worry about freeloaders in our culture because we have the ability to have “one-off” transactions. But I have noticed that even in our culture, freeloading and cheating inevitably have diminishing returns as more and more people refuse to deal with the cheat.

Another example that left me embarrassed involved my reading and immediately incorporating into my storehouse of received wisdom the recently discovered “factoid” that the human face developed to protect against punches. Hallpike points out that, in fact, primitive people are more inclined to kill using spears and clubs, which makes you wonder why evolution hasn't fitted us out with a hide?

Theories litter the ground as Hallpike passes.

In one chapter, Hallpike takes on the myth that cannibalism is a myth. Hallpike marshalls the historical evidence of explorers - historical and more modern - who observed cannibalism. His own experience among the Tauade involved admissions of a recent history of cannibalism (and we are, apparently, talking about, in some cases, as recent as the 1950s.) Along the way, we get some interesting and disturbing insights into the practice of cannibalism, e.g., did you know that human flesh cooks up “white,” like pork and chicken?

In the final chapter on the reality of “primitive” language, Hallpike takes on Chomsky's “Universal Grammar (“UG”).” I am educated just enough to be dangerous and I had no idea that Chomsky was actually proposing that UG was a quasi-biological organ, like a heart, that was wired into people. Calling on his actual experience, and the linguistic research of others, Hallpike explains that mental structures are innate, not a language as such. Humans have the mental ability to make tools; the particular tools are not innately wired.

Hallpike cites Daniel Everett against Chomsky. I recently read and reviewed Everett's “How Language Began.” I was surprised to see this:

“Daniel Everett, in an interview with Geoffrey Sampson (2009b: 215) is obviously deeply committed to cultural relativism: “The Piraha's culturally constrained epistemology can only be evaluated in terms of the results that it gives the Pirahas relative to their own values. Since it serves them very well, there is no sense in the idea that it is inferior.” We might choose to avoid terms like “inferior” as vague and tendentious, but it is entirely valid to compare Piraha culture with that of other societies, and in this more general scheme of things it appears to be unusually primitive, and the fact that the Piraha themselves appear quite happy has nothing to do with the matter. (Remarkably, in his book (2008: 272) Everett also says that he no longer believes in truth, a strange position for one who has spent a great deal of time and effort trying to prove that Universal Grammar is false, or who wishes his work to be taken seriously at all.)”

I didn't pick up that Everett was a complete relativist.

I also didn't realize this:

“Indeed, the unfortunate Professor Everett, celebrated for claiming that the Piraha have no grammatical recursion, has been denounced as a racist for implying that they are therefore subhuman, and denied permission to return to them (Bartlett 2012: 5).”

But this all goes to show the truth of my maxim: “Never read a book; read multiple books on the subject.”

Hallpike's theory on the complexity of language is that literacy matters. Humans get complex features like the embedding of phrases and ideas into a sentence, using comparators, and the like, from reading and writing, which is a line that separates the primitive from the complex. It also separates readers in our culture from non-readers. As an attorney, I've noticed how difficult it is for most people to follow questions that are more recursive than a single iteration, and never mind about comparators. Simple declarative factual questions are best.

Hallpike offers the example of innumeracy. Some cultures simply do not have numbers. They have one, i.e., “this thing”, and they have words for a pair of grouping, “these things,” but the idea of adding together things that are similar in some way is not necessary because everything is unique. Thus, Hallpike gives the example of the Cree hunter who could not say the number of rivers in his territory but who could describe each and every one.

An interesting feature of this book is Hallpike's explanation for why so much misinformation is spread concerning anthropology. As in so many areas, the answer is political ideology, namely a kind of leftist egalitarianism. In his conclusion, Hallpike lays it on the table, which is worth quoting in full:

“But what is really fascinating here is the underlying but obvious assumption that a moral belief, in this case in equality, can become the basis for accepting the truth of cultural relativism, and then for accepting the further truth of Chomskian linguistics because this produces the desired conclusion that all cultures are, like all languages, essentially equal. The most effective way of protecting the sacred idol of equality, the Great Fetish, against the assault of facts is therefore to dispense with the idea of truth altogether and replace it by moral earnestness. So anyone who doubts that the syllogism is a universal mode of reasoning is a “colonialist”, anyone who claims that there is such a thing as primitive thought is a “racist”, and anyone who thinks that biology plays a significant part in human nature is a “fascist”. Not surprisingly, then, Leach could say that “Social anthropologists should not see themselves as seekers after objective truth”, but more like novelists. Welcome on board the Ship of Fools.”

This ideology has done great damage to science. Hallpike should be commended for doing what he can to oppose it.