104 Before Agriculture
14 The process by which human beings acquired language is bound to involve speculations about the
nature of evolution, the structure of the human brain and the functional advantages of language
itself. The science that pertains to these things is constantly evolving. An account of the evidence,
and the state of the relevant scientific art, is to be found in Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct.
Pinker reviews the results obtained by experts who have attempted to teach apes to use language
(see pp335–349), revealing how unsuccessful these attempts ultimately are as language learning,
then considers evolution and the probably development of a hard-wired faculty for language in
human brains (p349ff ). On the question of how long it took for humans to evolve language, he
notes: ‘We expect a fade-in, but we see a big bang’ (p343).
15 Anthony Traill made the observation that San speakers are ‘the acrobats of the mouth’. His essay
‘!Khwa-Ka Hhouiten, The Rush of the Storm’ offers many insights into both the nature of San
Language and the causes of language loss. I am grateful to the ethnolinguist Nigel Crawhall for
details about the sound elements in different languages (personal communication, 1999).
16 Noam Chomsky’s work on language began in the 1950s and continued into the 1970s. The
quotes here come from Reflections on Language. These passages are quoted at greater length in
Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct, pp22–23.
17 This issue is discussed in Steven Pinker’s Words and Rules (p198), where he cites the work of Arnold
Zwicky, James Morgan, Lisa Travis, J. Tooby and Irven DeVore. For Pinker’s comments on grammar
learning and identical twins, see Words and Rules, p203. For Pinker’s concluding remarks, see p210.
18 Lévi-Strauss first wrote about the Nambikwara in the 1940s. He contributed an essay to volume
3 of the 1948 Handbook of South American Indians. The first edition of Tristes Tropiques was pub-
lished in 1955; it was translated into English as A World on the Wane, first published in 1961. The
Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage), published in French in 1962 and in English in 1966, is the book
of his that had the most widespread impact on European intellectuals. Lévi-Strauss’s work on kin-
ship and totemism, especially Les Structures elémentaires de la parentée and Totemism, published in
1962 and 1963, respectively, examined core questions of anthropology.
19 The Lévi-Strauss version of the myth, which takes place in the Nass Valley in Nisga’a territory
(though Lévi-Strauss identified it by the broader term Tsimshian, now used to refer to the lan-
guage family of the region), was drawn from written accounts. His analysis of the myth, ‘The
Story of Asdiwal’, was published with an accompanying essay by Edmund Leach, in which Leach
gave himself the task of explaining and celebrating structuralism to English anthropologists. Nei-
ther Lévi-Strauss nor Leach ever did fieldwork in the region.
20 In his paper ‘On the origins of hunter-gatherers in seventeenth century Europe’, Mark Pluciennik
of the University of Wales suggests that the new science of political economy divided human
society into hunters, herders and farmers as part of a need to rationalize and justify individualism,
inequality and the unquestionable obligation of labour. Natural laws were sought that would
show that certain kinds of individual owed service to society but could not expect to be an equal
member of it. Pluciennik suggests that the purported ‘laziness’, ‘ignorance’ and ‘inferiority’ of
‘savages’ was useful to this project because it laid a ‘natural’ foundation for hierarchy and the pos-
sibility of fundamental differences among people.
He also suggested that these categories – hunter, herder and farmer – are contingent and heuristic:
they were invented to meet a particular intellectual and political need, and are not grounded in
sociological or anthropological reality. A difficulty with this reductionist account of the categories
lies in the extent to which they are to be found in other languages and times. At the Cambridge
conference where Pluciennik put forward his view that the categories belonged to 17th- and 18th-
century social theory, not to reality, James Woodburn pointed out that the same categories are to
be found in the Bantu languages of southern Africa, with a provenance far from the political
economists of 17th-century Europe. Woodburn also observed that these categories correspond to
what people can most readily observe. Hence it is not surprising to find that a distinction between
hunter-gatherers and the herders or farmers who are their neighbours is of great importance to
both the hunter-gatherers and the agropasturalists themselves.