around a circle,vocalizing back and forth in an overlapping,collabora-
tive way.Not only was such overlapping,collaborative vocalizing crucial
to fixing formulas,it also had an important social function in itself.Why
do people stay with each other? What keeps them involved in relation-
ships with each other? In a certain sense,one of the main ties that bind
people to each other is just talking,just the talking and dialogue and
vocalizing by itself.Samuel Beckett (1958) illustrated this mutual vocal
dependence that we are all condemned to in his play Endgame,where
the two main characters say this:Clov: I’m leaving.
Hamm: No!
Clov: What is there to keep me here?
Hamm: The dialogue.The cross-rhythms,dissonances of melody and rhythm,cross-purposes
of power over others,and solidarity with them that are expressed in
every dialogue and performance,the need to join in and exaggerate the
differences while at the same time trying to resolve them,are among the
“participatory discrepancies”(Keil 1994) that motivate people to keep
on talking and keep on making music with each other no matter what.
In egalitarian-cooperative societies,where most of human history was
lived,to talk and make music with others in a high-involvement,over-
lapping,repeating style is precisely to be a full-fledged member of
society.This style of relating is still quite important in our own more
complex societies.The high-involvement style of vocalizing is not just
a drag on freedom:it is also a sign of one’s full citizenship and right of
participation in society.“Talking”
I am trying to recover what I call “talking”^1 as the biologically based
form of human spoken vocalizing that drives people to engage in and
participate in socially constructed language,but is separate from it and
precedes it historically and logically.(In effect,talking is the foundation
that makes socially constructed language possible.Notice that I say that
language is a vast,socially constructed artifact,produced by discourse
processes by thousands of people over many years.The biological part
of human language that I call talking is what pushes people to engage in
socially constructing language;it is not language itself.See Andrew
Lock’s work [1996,1997] on how social discourse constructed human
symbolic evolution.)307 On Rhythm,Repetition,and Meaning