Tag Archives: Language

Upstairs Downstairs in Academy

Lately I seem to keep bumping into anthropologists studying gossip. Even the San Francisco Chronicle is writing about the trend. But while the Chronicle article emphasizes the role gossip can play in policing community behavior, the gossip I’ve personally encountered in academia seems to often serve a different function. Namely, gossip is what allows the very different worlds of professors and graduate students to interact.

Not unlike the upstairs/downstairs world of British aristocrats and their servants, so well depicted in the movie Gosford Park, professors and graduate students inhabit the same space in very different ways. It is, for instance, quite difficult to put together a good thesis committee if you don’t know the intricate history of departmental politics from before you arrived in a program. It might be very relevant, for instance, that one faculty member crossed a picket line fifteen years back, while another was leading organizer of the faculty union. Similarly, the faculty are curious about the lives and interests of the students they will be working with. Classroom performance alone is not necessarily a good indicator of which students are ambitious enough to succeed in a competitive marketplace. Graduate students can also become important allies in departmental battles.

As a result, a knowledge economy develops in which professors and graduate students trade gossip. It also serves as a way to bridge the gap created by unequal power relations. Giving graduate students the inside scoop on other professors at least creates the illusion of treating them as equals. I was either not very good at such gossip, or I worked with professors who were more reticent, so I ended up depending on fellow graduate students who were better able to trade in gossip with their advisors. Or maybe I just say that because the gossip I didn’t know always sounded much more interesting than the gossip I did know?

Hip Hop Fact Checking

The University of Calgary issued a press release about a linguistics researcher, Dr. Darin Howe, who is using hip hop to study African American vernacular English [AAVE]. The press release states, in part:

It’s rare to use the words ‘hip hop’ and ‘serious academic research’ in the same sentence…

Howe is believed to be the only academic in Canada and one of the few in the world to take a scholarly look at the language of hip hop.

A simple Google search for “hip hop” on academic web sites produces over a million hits. Right at the top is this bibliography. And a Google search for linguistics and hip hop produces 27,500 hits. Of those, 725 hits are from Canada! (Linguists seem to be doing more hip hop research than anthropologists. AnthroSource has only 101 hits.)

But what really bothers me about this press release isn’t so much the wildly inaccurate nature of its claims, but the notion that there is something intellectually daring about doing research on popular culture in this day and age. I mean, we are talking about a 1.5 billion dollar industry!

(via Nomadic Thoughts)

UPDATE: For some serious hip hop linguistics fact checking, see Benjamin Zimmer’s post over at Language Log.

Aleph Bet

I recently wrote a post on my other blog pondering how the Devanagari alphabet came to be ordered in such a rational way. So I was excited to read about this exciting archaeological find, described in the New York Times as “the oldest reliably dated example of an abecedary – the letters of the alphabet written out in their traditional sequence.”

Just what language these letters represent is a matter of some debate, as is archaeologist Ron E. Tappy’s literal use of the Bible, but it seems like a spectacularly important discovery nonetheless.

More links over at Language Log where you can also see a picture.

Communication Technologies Old and New

Tony Salvador and John Sherry, ethnographers for Intel Corporation’s People and Practices Group, spent four years traveling the world to see how computers are used. In a recent article the document some of their findings:

In fact, only about 10 percent of the people on the planet are familiar with the Internet and what it can do. Most of them live in industrialized countries, or if they live in developing countries, they are part of the well-off, well-educated, and often English-speaking minority that resides in urban areas. Few come from the poor and sometimes illiterate masses.

The split between those with and those without access to digital technologies is referred to as the digital divide. But that phrase hides the complexity of the problem, because it focuses on the “having” and the “not having” of technology. Instead, what really matters is the ability to benefit from technology, whether or not that technology is personally owned.

Continue reading →

Translation Economy

Via Lorenz, I see that the latest Anthropology News article by Brazilian anthropologist Gustavo Lins Ribeiro is freely available online. In it he seeks to offer an alternative vision of the knowledge economy which breaks down barriers between the various national anthropologies which have emerged over the past century. Although there is some flow from these various national anthropologies to the English speaking world, he would like to see more horizontal flows of knowledge:

We need to foster the visibility of non-metropolitan works of quality and enhance our modes of exchanging information. Translation of different anthropological materials into English is important to help diversify knowledge of the international production of anthropology. But unidirectional translation is not enough. If we want to avoid linguistic monotony, we also need to increase the quantity of heterodox exchanges and translations. German anthropologists should be translated into Japanese, Mexicans into German, Australians into Portuguese, Brazilians into Russian, and so on.

A noble goal, which I wholeheartedly endorse, but it is also necessary to consider just what a tall order this is. It costs the EU a billion dollars a year to translate all official documents into the various member languages. The entire US publishing industry only manages to translate about 330 books a year into English. Volunteer translations on the web can help, but I have yet to see any such site that produces a significant volume of output. For instance, there is a huge gulf between the various language versions of Wikipedia – the one place where we would expect the web to work best in this regard. And we all know just how far machine translation still has to go …

Which isn’t to say that it can’t be done. Government subsidies, better machine translation, and collaborative online software can all help. But for the time being I think we will still depend on individual scholars who have the skills to serve as a bridge across the linguistic divide. We should remind people just how valuable those skills are, and why it is worth the significant time and costs to train scholars in those skills. And not just scholars, but diplomats and our defense forces as well.

Wars and Words

A little horn tooting:

My Language in Society book review on both At war with words and War of words: Language, politics and 9/11 has finally been published!

Here’s the abstract:

Daniel Nelson writes that “we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it” (Dedaic & Nelson [henceforth DN], p. 449). Drawing on a diverse array of methodological and theoretical perspectives and an equally wide range of subject matters, Mirjana Dedaic and Daniel Nelson’s edited volume on the role of language in war, and the effects of war on language, is a sprawling, perhaps unwieldy collection that opens up a number of important avenues of investigation in this gravely important but as yet undefined field of study. Sandra Silberstein focuses her book much more narrowly on the language of politics and news media in the wake of the September 11 tragedy. Despite their differences, both books address similar themes: (i) declaring war, or the language used by political leaders to justify military action; (ii) propaganda, or the construction of a war narrative by the media, and the use of political discourse to divide populations; (iii) language politics, or how wars shape language policy; and (iv) controlling speech, or the language used to grant or deny legitimacy in political debates. With the exception of language politics, not touched on by Silberstein, these themes are addressed equally by both books.

OK, it isn’t an article, but I’m put a lot of work into it! It was hard to adequately discuss so many different essays in such a short space (one of my criticism of At War With Words is that the material doesn’t all gel together into a coherent volume), and I think I did a good job of it.

Two-Spirit vs. Berdache : acknowledging self-identity

This is my second, and possibly last for now, post on queer issues resulting from post-Montreal Pride reflections. The first one was “here”:/2005/08/04/redefining-marriage-queering-up-anthro-textbooks/.

One thing that struck me at this year’s Pride was the increasing presence of the Two-Spirit community at queer events. A corollary thought that occurred to me is the apparent disparity between how anthropologists define the Two-Spirit identity and how Two-Spirited people themselves define it.

First of all, Two-Spirit is increasingly being used as a replacement for the misleading and inappropriate berdache, which has negative connotations due to its linguistic roots. In fact, searching for berdache on “Wikipedia”:http://www.wikipedia.org automatically takes one to a page on “Two-Spirit”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berdache. However, many anthropology texts still refer to berdache. I guess old habits die hard.

Now, when anthropologists talk about berdache, they are often referring to male gender variants (please note that I have adopted Serena Nanda’s usage of this term from her book “Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/1577660749/qid=1125195598/sr=1-5/ref=sr_1_0_5/702-5693806-0815232 – an excellent book) in Aboriginal North America. One frequently finds the disclaimer that the berdache does not necessarily marry or have sexual intercourse with other male-bodied persons and that the gender crossing is mainly at the occupational or vestimentary level. Ironically (I think it’s ironic because of the mainstream Western fascination with female-on-female sexuality) this disclaimer appears to be even more ardent when discussing the “occasional” female gender variants.

So from this older anthropological stance, which still permeates much current anthropological discussion on gender variance, gender identity is not so completely intertwined with sexual orientation (in the strict sense of who one has sex with) that one will adopt the prescribed orientation of the gender to which one adheres. In other words, a male bodied person who adopts a female gender will not necessarily adopt the “sleeping with men” that is supposedly included in this gender role.

What is contradictory, however, is that the standard rubric of homosexuality in many texts incorporates a discussion of the berdache and often fails to make the very distinction between sexuality and gender. The berdache is then used as an example of (usually) male homosexuality with the implication that it’s probably more about the gender role than an actual sexual preference. What remains unclear in these discussions is whether there ever existed men who slept with men or women who slept with women without changing gender roles.

What I love about Nanda’s book is that she shows the complexity of gender variance in North America. There is no one single way of being a gender variant and, yes, there are more female gender variants than some would let on, although perhaps not as many as male gender variants for reasons that Nanda briefly discusses. But I digress . . . according to Nanda, some gender variants engage in heterosexual relations, some engage in homosexual relations and some engage in (gasp!) both. Heck, some don’t even engage in sexual relations at all.

Now, with regards to the replacement of berdache by the term Two-Spirit there might still be problems. In light of the diversity that is characteristic of North American gender variance, can we assume that all gender variants are blessed with two spirits? From an anthropological standpoint does the term Two-Spirit reflect the many variations on the theme any more accurately than berdache? I’m not sure. However, one thing I am sure of after reading texts written by Two-Spirited folk and listening to them is that the term is held in higher regard by Aboriginals and that is enough for me to adopt its usage.

What is interesting about the Aboriginal usage of the term is that it includes pretty much all the varieties of queer that are summarised by the mainstream queer community by one of the brands of alphabet soup (LGBT, LGBTT2I and so forth). All lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, transsexual, intersexed Aboriginal males and females may self-identify as Two-Spirit.* This is a far cry from the very specific denotation of berdache yet at the same time, it acknowledges the diversity that is a part of this identity.

What is also interesting is that Two-Spirit maintains the spiritual component of this identity unlike its predecessor which reduced the identity to one relating purely to sexuality. Coupled with the European tendency at the time of contact to associate all things sexual with icky, sinful things, the use of the term berdache imposed and propagated an ethnocentric view of gender variants and people who had sex with members of the same sex (MOSS). Two-Spirit, however, reminds us that Aboriginal conceptions of sexuality before the influence of Christianity were far different than those of Europeans.

Now, is Two-Spirit a term that could readily correspond to the local terms in all the linguistic groups across the continent? Probably not. Are the realities of present-day Aboriginals who have sex with MOSS or who adopt gender roles that differ from those usually assigned to their physical sex the same as those of pre-Euro North America? Probably not. Do all Aboriginal people who have sex with MOSS experience what psychologists would call gender dysphoria? Probably not.

Does the term Two-Spirit enable queer Aboriginals to feel solidarity in a society where they risk being ostracised by the dominant cultural groups, by their respective home communities and even by the rest of the queer community? Certainly. And it does this without denying the enormous range of diversity within the Two-Spirit community itself or the presence of some shared elements with non-Aboriginal queers. I’m all for it.

My suggestion for anthropologists, then, is not necessarily to refer to what used to be called berdache in the literature as Two-Spirit. I think that the term gender variant is quite adequate for that in a cross-cultural context and that local terms such as nadleeh, alyha or hwame are most appropriate when discussing specific case studies. However, I think it’s important that anthropologists recognise the self-identification of Two-Spirit individuals and to remember that they exist right here, right now and that they are dealing with realities that are much different than those that existed at the time Europeans encountered Aboriginals.

*As with the increasing use of the term “queer” rather than the terms for specific identities, this is what I would call extreme lumping in the taxonomy of alternate sexual orientations and gender/sexual identities. Our extreme splitters would be the ones who resort to the alphabet soup and keep adding on letters. Me? I’m a lumper. But I recognise the good intentions of both camps.

When you say “I do” how can I know you mean it?

Harpers reproduces the transcript of a 2002 wedding between a professor of critical theory and an artist:

ALLISON: “I do.”

JUDGE SILVERMAN: “And do you, Cary, take Allison to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

CARY: “I do.”

JUDGE SILVERMAN: As it turns out, it is enough, and the words just uttered by both Allison and Cary are sufficient—but not because of the words themselves.

First of all—according to Austin and according to the law—the words must be meant “seriously” and not self-referentially.

The problem with that, though, as Jonathan Culler has pointed out in his discussion of Jacques Derrida’s critique of Austin, is that the distinction between serious and nonserious is always uncertain, always subject to deconstruction, and any attempt to solve that problem by insisting on the “proper” context for a statement is bound to fail.

(via Ishbaddidle)

Addendum: I recently came to the conclusion that Harpers is one of the best journals for reading in the “euphemism.”

Perceptions of Asian Perception

A recent AP news story (discovered thanks to Photoethnography.com) claims that “Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time science has attempted to prove the uniqueness of the Asian mind. There was Swarthmore President Alfred Bloom’s 1981 book, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought which claimed:

that the lack of a subjunctive tense in Chinese made it extremely difficult for native speakers to explore “counterfactual” conceits (for example: if Gisele were fat, she wouldn’t be a supermodel).

When Mr. Bloom tested Chinese and American students on a series of counterfactuals, he found that the Chinese students were typically unable to distinguish between events that really happened and false hypotheticals. The implication, Mr. Bloom argued, is that Chinese is more concrete than English, and, as a consequence, Chinese speakers have more trouble with abstract thought than Americans.

However, his research methodology was seriously flawed. In fact, poor translation may have been the problem:

Terry Kit-Fong Au, a native Chinese speaker and psychologist at Harvard, did not take kindly to this linguistic slight of his presumed powers of reasoning. He repeated Bloom’s experiment with one crucial change: he asked Chinese bilinguals to translate an idiomatic Chinese version of the story into English. With this translation his results were in the reverse direction from Bloom’s. Only 60% of American high school students who read the nonidiomatic versions understood the counterfactual, whereas 97% of Au’s monolingual Chinese subjects who were given an idiomatic Chinese version grasped the significance of the counterfactual.

More recently, there have been claims that Japanese have unique brains as a result of their language.

A lot of these discussions invoke the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Unfortunately, they rarely have anything to do with what Sapir or Whorf actually said.

I can’t get online access to the original scientific article cited by the Associated Press story for another six months, so I can’t tell if what we have here is poor science or (more likely) simply poor reporting. But I have a big problem with the conceptual leap taken between the following two statements:

The researchers, led by Hannah-Faye Chua and Richard Nisbett, tracked the eye movements of the students — 25 European Americans and 27 native Chinese — to determine where they were looking in a picture and how long they focused on a particular area.

“They literally are seeing the world differently,” said Nisbett, who believes the differences are cultural.

There is a big difference between how we see pictures and how we see the world. I am ready to accept that there are cultural differences (perhaps dependent upon our various traditions of visual representation) that affect how we “read” a picture, but I’m not sure that these translate into differences in how we see the world – or even what that might mean.

Paul Messaris’ 1994 book, Visual “Literacy”: Image, Mind, and Reality has a fairly good discussion of the state of scientific research on reading images at that time. He is primarily concerned with debunking the myth that people who have never seen a picture need to be taught how to understand visual representations. Accordingly, he recounts several studies which suggest that understanding two dimensional, black-and-white representations of the world, even abstract ones, is fairly intuitive. He highlights how such issues as the materials used and the nature of the images being portrayed can have a huge impact on reader’s ability to interpret an image.

A 1960 by William Hudson study found South African miners having difficulty interpreting smaller animals in the background as being further away; however, his study turned out to suffer from many of the same problems as Bloom’s study of Chinese counterfactuals:

The Africa depicted in these pictures — a loincloth-wearing, spear-carrying hunter in a landscape populated by big game — might still have been a reality in some parts of the continent when the research of Hudson and his successors was taking place, but it seems doubtful that the kinds of people who were actually studied in this research — South African mine laborers, Ugandan farmers — would have much direct contact at all with such situations. On the contrary, it is possible that, for many Africans, familiarity with that particular version of Africa may actually be more likely to occur secondhand – for example, through pictorial media.

Consequently, those subjects who were more experienced with pictures might also have had greater previous experience with the kind of hunting scene depicted in Hudson’s pictures, and this familiarity, rather than knowledge of pictorial codes, might account for their superior ability to form an integrated, three-dimensional percept. Data supportive of this possibility occurred in the Kilbride and Robbins study (1969), in which 10 percent of the rural residents accurately identified the picture of the elephant as that of a large animal but were apparently uncertain as to the exact nature of the animal, calling it a hippopotamus, a rhinoceros, and so on. This uncertainty is consistent with the fact that the only large animal likely to be found in their own immediate environment would be a cow.

So, when Japanese and American’s are asked to look at underwater scenes and Japanese spend more time describing the background, it may not be because of “differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years,” it may just be something simple – like the fact that Americans eat a lot less seafood and aren’t used to seeing pictures of fish. It may also be that differences which have been observed in eye movement when reading Chinese and English may account for different habits of visually scanning a printed page – whether text or image; but these differences might not necessarily reflect how we visually scan the real world around us.

National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives

The National Anthropological Archives and Human Studies Film Archives collect and preserve historical and contemporary anthropological materials that document the world’s cultures and the history of the discipline. Their collections represent the four fields of anthropology – ethnology, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology – and include manuscripts, fieldnotes, correspondence, photographs, maps, sound recordings, film and video created by Smithsonian anthropologists and other preeminent scholars.

They also have a blog (well, it has an RSS feed – but no permalinks…) telling you what’s new in the collection. Recently announced is an effort to “digitize 8,000 pages of Cherokee language manuscripts.” The site also has a few online exhibits, including this one of Lakota Winter Counts.

Bourdieu in Bollywood

No, not a post about French academics dancing in wet saris … In a post over at Sepia Mutiny, Amardeep Singh asks an interesting question about Bollywood* cinema:

Why is physical difference from Indian norms acceptable (or even desirable), while significant linguistic difference is an impossibility?

He is talking about Hindi film actress Katrina Kaif, whose voice has to be overdubbed to hide her English accent when speaking Hindi. This, in itself, is nothing new. In fact, Bollywood has long employed actors from various regions of India, using overdubbing to hide their regional accents. But Amardeep feels that this is different:

But why is Katrina Kaif in Bollywood to begin with? Why is she getting parts? It’s not for her acting ability, which seems pretty minor, at least in Sarkar. I believe she and others are being brought in because they look white.

I don’t hold that against them, but I do question why it’s such a commodity in Bollywood. … Indian actors have always tended to be much lighter-skinned than ordinary Indians, and the projection of ‘western lifestyle’ has been a part of Indian movie mythology for at least 40 years. And it’s always been somewhat troubling to me — a sign of a lingering colonial mentality.

The difference now, in this era of hybridity-globalization, is that the simulacrum of whiteness is approaching perfection.

The oddity is that what is wanted is the physical appearance of whiteness mixed with a classy, sometimes English-inflected, but still authentic Hindi-speaking capability. I find that to be an interesting paradox. The need for good Hindi can be explained as an issue of effective communication with mass audiences, but it doesn’t make the paradox any less real.

Vikrum Sequeira has more on the concept of fair skin in India, but I’d like to get back to Amardeep’s original question. What is the difference between looks and language?

I believe that the answer has to do with the way in which alternative symbolic markets are constructed. In her famous critique of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital, linguistic anthropologist Katherine Woolard pointed out that the official language of the state is not always the dominant language – that alternative linguistic markets can be created which oppose the state sanctioned hierarchy. She uses the example of Catalonia, Spain, where Catalan came to be valued over the dominant Castilian. As Wooldard points out, this is true even of the Castilian speaking workforce. For Woolard, the historical reasons for this lie in “the regional economic dominance of the Catalan bourgeoisie” which survived attempts by the Francoist government to impose “centralized (and increasingly multinational) finance capitalism over the Spanish economy.”

In Bollywood, the truly rich and powerful characters in most films have always spoken English. However, these characters have often been portrayed as untrustworthy. In the 70s they were villains who sold out the interests of their people to big business. Today they are often young people who have lost touch with their values. What we have is the classic case of an alternative linguistic market. While the dominance of English is recognized, a space has been created in which preferring English over Hindi is negatively sanctioned.

Interestingly, the Bollywood elites who make these films are largely cosmopolitan and English speaking. This is not an unusual phenomenon in postcolonial nations. In Taiwan I also found that many advocates for local language rights were similarly cosmopolitan and multilingual. Looking at race can help us better understand this phenomenon.

Amardeep’s question can be rephrased: Why has an alternative market developed in the linguistic sphere, but not in the sphere of personal beauty? I would argue that it is precisely because race is not something that one can so easily change. Sure, there are all kinds of beauty products one can buy to lighten one’s skin. (In Taiwan I have to go out of my way to avoid buying moisturizing cream with bleach in it.) But without Michael Jackson’s wealth, most people cannot change the color of their skin. Now, there have been attempts to create alternative markets in skin color. The whole “Black is Beautiful” movement sought to do just that. The problem such movements often face is that they tend to exclude the elite. India’s English speaking cosmopolitan elite can, if they want, have their children learn enough Hindi to maintain their power in such a marketplace. However, they cannot easily change the color of their skin – and India’s ruling class is still largely “wheatish” in complexion.

*See here for a post on the origin of the word “Bollywood.”

Interviews

In one of my first posts on Savage Minds I discussed the convention of using a “man in the street” interview in journalism. Two recent Mark Liberman posts on Language Log raise more general questions about the use of interviews as data. In “Ritual questions, ritual answers,” he argues that

The journalists already know what the stories are. Their questions are not designed to discover any new facts or ideas, but rather to get quotes that will fit in to designated places in the frameworks of logic and rhetoric that they have already erected.

And in “Down with journalists!” he reinforces this argument with a funny example in which a French journalist finds himself the victim of this very practice.

We all know that this happens, just as we know that these quotes often server little more than a ritual function, but what can we do about it?

One option is to make the source data – the interviews themselves – available to download. In fact, such “grey literature” may eventually become available as part of AnthroSource, but it will not be easy. For one thing, there are confidentiality concerns. How do we make our data publicly available while still protecting our sources? It is possible to do – but it would create a huge burden on researchers. In essence, one might be punished for being a good researcher and collecting large amounts of data, because then you would have to carefully censure much more data to make sure it is safe for public consumption.

Making such data available online is not something that is without precedent in the field. Johannes Fabian’s book Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire is very much a collaboration with his informant, the artist Tshibumba Kanda Matulu. The full interviews are available online, as part of the Archives of Popular Swahili website (which, in turn, is part of the Language and Popular Culture in Africa website). Now, this is somewhat different in that Tshibumba Kanda Matulu is an internationally famous artist, who is anything but an anonymous informant, and the book is constructed in such a way that his discourse is allowed to challenge Fabian’s authorial authority.

Such a model may not work for all ethnographies and all situations, but it will be interesting to see what happens as more and more primary anthropological data becomes available online. Will anthropologists creatively re-mix each other’s data? Will informants salvage their message from the grand narratives of the anthropologists? Will computational methodologies and google allow for the work to be analyzed in new ways? Or will anthropologists resist to the bitter end in the name of protecting their informants … even when they might just be protecting their own reputations? Which isn’t to say that confidentiality isn’t a real concern – just that we should think twice before ducking for cover.

NOTE: My thinking on this topic dates back to an e-mail exchange I had with Mark Liberman last year about the topic of posting primary data online.

Yale’s Monkey Brothel

Keith Chen, an economist at Yale who is researching whether monkeys can be trained to understand monetary transactions, never suspected that it would come to this:

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys’ true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

This is a sensitive subject. The capuchin lab at Yale has been built and maintained to make the monkeys as comfortable as possible, and especially to allow them to carry on in a natural state. The introduction of money was tricky enough; it wouldn’t reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel. To this end, Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.

But these facts remain: When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food and, on occasion, sex. In other words, they behaved a good bit like the creature that most of Chen’s more traditional colleagues study: Homo sapiens.

monkey

Now that I’ve gotten your attention, I do want to comment seriously on one aspect of this research, which is that money is a form of symbolic communication. As such, it meets several of Charles Hockett’s design features for comparing animal and human communication: interchangeability, arbitrariness, discreteness, displacement, and learnability. If, indeed, the monkeys do understand money (and I’m inclined to believe that they do), then they are displaying remarkable cognitive abilities. I have long believed that humans place too much stake on language in evaluating the cognitive abilities of our fellow creatures, and I hope that experiments like these serve to broaden our understanding of the multiple intelligences required for linguistic communication.

Here are some video clips of the monkeys. And here is a story about monkeys praying at a Hindu temple in Orissa.

UPDATE: Mark Liberman thinks that “the silver disks” aren’t really relevant, and that its simply “a bit of a presentational trick.” Nonetheless, he concludes:

In my view, this is yet another interesting demonstration that non-human mammals have more of the basic abilities required for speech and language than one might have thought.

I thought that this is what I said. Maybe I’m lacking some of those basic abilities we supposedly share with non-human mammals.