From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sat Nov 25 2006 - 20:14:57 EST
Jerry, I trust that you are right and that I am wrong on this. For an interesting but introductory discussion to questions of human diversity/unity, animal/human distinction and sociobiology, see Edmund Leach's very elementary Social Anthropology. The book was generally considered a failure, but there is a tantalizing argument from p. 106 ff. "Human language is not just a tool by which we control other people and control the material world out there; it is also a device which allows us to formulate metaphysical concepts, and to recognize, at a conscious level, the binary oppositions which are basic to the structure of ordered thought...I am saying that men are men and not non men because they have created artistic imagination which is bound up with the use of language and other forms of patterned but arbitrary expression, e.g dancing and music....in using the Comtean notion of progress from superstition to science...no one suggested that apes have imagination to be superstitious! A fundamental discontinuity between human thinking and non human thinking is already presupposed in the very arguments which were used to describe the imagined evolution from the one to the other...I am saying that the recognition of a distinction Natural/Supernatural (Real/Imaginary) is a basic marker of humanity." At any rate, a very different emphasis than found in our discussion. RB
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