Chris Knight

University College London | UCL · Department of Anthropology

This is an early and incomplete version of what eventually became my Ph.D. thesis. It is a collection of notes toward an in-depth library study of the Myth of the Two Wawilak Sisters, as told by the Yolngu people of North-East Arnhem Land, Australia.

A new perspective on Noam Chomsky's linguistics and its relationship to his politics

Taboo

David Graeber was that rare thing—a popular anthropologist. His best-known book, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, was a publishing sensation. Graeber had a highly original anarchist take on his discipline, much influenced by his fieldwork experience in Madagascar. He wrote prolifically in a variety of fields while teaching in the United States and subs...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Noam Chomsky’s early linguistic research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was funded by the Pentagon. While acknowledging this funding, Chomsky has always denied that it had any effect on either his linguistics or his political activism. Here, I provide evidence that Chomsky’s linguistic theories were initially developed in a context of...

Noam Chomsky’s early linguistic research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was funded by the Pentagon. While acknowledging this funding, Chomsky has always denied that it had any effect on either his linguistics or his political activism. Here, I provide evidence that Chomsky’s linguistic theories were initially developed in a context of...

Language is utterly different from any known system of animal communication. Whether it evolved gradually or in a sudden leap remains a matter of debate. While the capacity for language is biological, its communicative use is social and its elaboration and historical diversification essentially cultural. The evolutionary origins of language are cur...

Friedrich Engels was a German political theorist, philosopher, activist, journalist, and cofounder with Karl Marx of dialectical materialism or “scientific socialism.” In many ways, he was an anthropologist before the discipline was established. His most widely read publication was The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which arg...

Modern kinship theory dates from the middle of the nineteenth century, when figures such as Sir Henry Sumner Maine, John F. McLennan, and Lewis H. Morgan debated whether the principles of early kinship and marriage were individual or collective, endogamous or exogamous, patriarchal or matriarchal. A related topic was whether early humans restricted...

Many animals have culture, but only humans have symbolic culture. This special kind of culture, which is unique to our species, poses a theoretical challenge to evolutionary theory. Each human community has its own set of symbolic cultural entities, a realm of objective facts whose existence depends, paradoxically, on collective faith. Currency val...

Sir Henry Sumner Maine was a British comparative jurist and historian whose most influential work, Ancient Law, pioneered the field of comparative jurisprudence and effectively founded the anthropology of law. Holding conservative views that would now be considered racist, he identified progress and civilization with people of Aryan descent and saw...

Why is it that, out of 220 primate species, we are the only one that talks? The relative inflexibility of primate vocal signaling reflects audience pressure for reliability. Where interests conflict, listeners’ resistance to being deceived drives signalers to limit their vocal repertoire to signals that cannot be faked. This constraint was lifted i...

Language evolved in no species other than humans, suggesting a deep-going obstacle to its evolution. Could it be that language simply cannot evolve in a Darwinian world? Reviewing the insights of Noam Chomsky, Amotz Zahavi and Dan Sperber, this article shows how and why each apparently depicts language's emergence as theoretically impossible. Choms...

Offering an exciting new perspective on the origins of language, this book places social life centre-stage. Challenging assumptions about the causal role of mutations and gene sequences, the authors picture the biological faculty evolving incrementally on the basis of capacities already in existence, genetic change occurring as previous adaptations...

Presents a new theoretical framework for the origins of human language Adopts an interdisciplinary approach with contributors from diverse fields of research Sets key issues in language evolution in their wider context within biological and cultural evolution This book offers an exciting new perspective on the origins of language. Language is con...

For grammar to evolve, it was not enough for social relations to become more cooperative. Before grammaticalization processes could get under way, primate-style dominance/submission dynamics had to be decisively countered by coalitionary resistance culminating in an egalitarian social order based on “reverse dominance”. Only once unprecedentedly tr...

On the eve of the royal wedding, two anthropologists and an actor – members of a street theatre troupe known as ‘The Government of the Dead’– were arrested for conspiracy to stage a performance. We adopt a Bakhtinian perspective of carnival laughter as essential to the scientific investigation of officialdom and ceremonial power.

Common to language and kinship is digital format. This is a discovery, not an innate feature of human cognition. But to produce a testable model, we need Darwinian behavioural ecology.

Ovulation in humans is well concealed, leaving menstruation salient as an external sign of fertility. Extant hunter-gatherers package this information in ways designed to prevent philanderer males from exploiting it to their advantage. This culminates in human symbolic culture - a digital world of institutional facts designed to conceal and reconst...

Symbolic culture is a realm of patently false signals. From a Darwinian standpoint, it is not easy to explain how strategies of reliance on such signals could have become evolutionarily stable. The archaeological record shows evolving modern humans investing heavily in cosmetics, with a particular emphasis on ochre pigments matching the color of bl...

This book is the first to focus on the African origins of human language. It explores the origins of language and culture 250,000-150,000 years ago when modern humans evolved in Africa. Scholars from around the world address the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence and critically examine the ways it has been interpreted. The book also consi...

This book is the first to focus on the African origins of human language. It explores the origins of language and culture 250,000-150,000 years ago when modern humans evolved in Africa. Scholars from around the world address the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence and critically examine the ways it has been interpreted. The book also consi...

The Equivalence of SiblingsThe Matrilineal ClanEngels and ‘the Origin of the Family’The ReactionGroup Motherhood Versus the Ideology of the FamilyThe Case of the Kwakiutl IndiansThe Case of the Mother's BrotherThe Effect on PalaeoanthropologyMorgan RevisitedPartible PaternityEngels Revisited?Kinship Theory in CrisisSome Concluding Notes

Animals think. Only humans play around with their thoughts.

The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only hi...

Language has sometimes been described as a ‘mirror of mind’. Chomsky attributes this idea to ‘the first cognitive revolution’ inspired by Descartes among others in the seventeenth century. ‘The second cognitive revolution’ – triggered in large measure by Chomsky’s own work – is taken to have been a twentieth century rediscovery of these earlier ins...

Many scholars assume a connection between the evolution of language and that of distinctively human group-level morality. Unfortunately, such thinkers frequently downplay a central implication of modern Darwinian theory, which precludes the possibility of innate psychological mechanisms evolving to benefit the group at the expense of the individual...

Only by misconstruing the term performative are the authors able to argue that males surpass females in “performative applications” of language. Linguistic performatives are not costly displays of quality, and syntax cannot be explained as an outcome of behavioural competition between pubertal males. However, there is room for a model in which lang...

Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) rightly criticize cognitive theories for failure to explain sacrifice and commitment. But their attempt to reconcile cognitivism with commitment theory is unconvincing. Why should imaginary entities be effective in punishing moral defectors? Heavy costs are entailed in enforcing community-wide social contracts, and behaviou...

Noam Chomsky is an enigma. To many, he is and has been for 50 years the most prominent and courageous academic opponent of his country s militarist ambitions around the globe. Yet among those who admire him on that score, few find it easy to relate to his seemingly obscure theories about language. The academic community acclaims Chomsky as the prin...

Human right-handedness does not originate in vocalisation as such but in selection pressures for structuring complex sequences of digital signals internally, as if in a vacuum. Cautious receivers cannot automatically accept signals in this way. Biological displays are subjected to contextual scrutiny on a signal-by-signal basis – a task requiring c...

The paper reports on experiments in which robotic agents and software agents are set up to originate language and meaning. The experiments test the hypothesis that mechanisms for generating complexity commonly found in biosystems, in particular self-organisation, co-evolution, and level formation, also may explain the spontaneous formation, adaptat...

Linguists, biological anthropologists, and cognitive scientists come together in this book to explore the origins and early evolution of phonology, syntax, and semantics. They consider the nature of pre- and proto-linguistic communication, the internal and external triggers that led to its transformation into language, and whether and how language...

Introduction : relevance as a basic property of language In his 430 page book `The language instinct', S. Pinker (1994) devotes only five pages to issues related to pragmatics and relevance. The minor role played by pragmatics in this natural history of language is quite surprising. Perhaps we are so accustomed to relevance that, like fish unaware...

Introduction: the language gap Language is the main distinctive feature of our species. Why do we feel the urge to communicate with our fellows, and why is this form of communication, characterised by relevance, unique in animal kingdom ? In this chapter, we will first stress this specificity of human communication. In a second part, using computer...

Cetacean cultural transmission is associated with lengthened postmenopausal life histories and relatively stable matrilineal social structures. Although Homo erectus was not marine adapted, broadly comparable selection pressures, life history profiles, and social structures can be inferred.

Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences....

Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences....

Language has no counterpart in the animal world. Unique to Homo sapiens, it appears inseparable from human nature. But how, when and why did it emerge? The contributors to this volume - linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others - adopt a modern Darwinian perspective which offers a bold synthesis of the human and natural sciences....

Darwinism is setting a new research agenda across the related fields of palaeoanthropology, evolutionary psychology and theoretical linguistics (Dunbar 1993; Hurford 1989, 1992; Pinker & Bloom 1990; Steele & Shennan 1996). It is now widely accepted that no other theoretical framework has equivalent potential to solve the major outstanding problems...

this paper will be on the evolution of the human language faculty, and not on the evolution of particular languages. 2 Explaining a unique phenomenon

In much Native American mythology, marriage is conceptualized as a monthly honeymoon interrupted at each dark moon by menstruation. Woman's monthly alternation between marital sex and menstrual seclusion is coded as an alternation between her rival partners, Sun and Moon. Against this background, a Plains Indian myth attempts to come to terms with...

By 50,000 years ago, the effects of a ‘symbolic explosion’ — an efflorescence of human art, song, dance and ritual — were rippling across the globe. Applied to archaeological evidence, standard neo-Darwinian theory offers new understandings of this improbable event. The present article defines ‘symbolism’, models quasi-ritual behaviour in late arch...

Traditional healing rituals in many parts of the world seem to derive from a model of cyclical renewal provided in the first instance by menstruation. Health is seen as dependent upon a correct balance between polar opposite states such as 'heat' and 'cold','dryness' and 'wetness' etc. Nature seems to achieve such balance by alternating regularly b...

Recent findings concerning the synchronisation of human female menstrual cycles under conditions of proximity inform a re-analysis of the myth of the Wawilak Sisters from north-east Arnhem Land. It is suggested that the logic generating the Rainbow Serpent myth-universal in one form or another throughout Australia-is the cultural logic of menstrual...

'I believe', writes Sir Edmund Leach (1961: 26), 'that we social anthropologists are like the mediaeval Ptolemaic astronomers; we spend our time trying to fit the facts of the objective world into the framework of a set of concepts which have been developed a priori instead of from observation.' First among these arbitrarily-imposed premises, accor...

'Selfish gene' Darwinism differs from earlier versions of evolutionary theory in its focus on one key question: Why cooperate? The faculty of speech which distinguishes Homo sapiens from other species is an aspect of human social competence. By inference, it evolved in the context of uniquely human strategies of social cooperation. In these chapter...