Notes on Some Anthropological Aspects of Communication

Abstract

This paper by Clyde Kluckhohn and the comments by A. L. Kroeber were prepared for the Wenner-Gren Foundation's Burg Wartenstein Symposium (no. 13), "Compara-tive Aspects of Human Communication," held in Austria from September 4 to 10, 1960. On July 28 Clyde Kluckhohn died in New Mexico and Kroeber presented both papers to the Symposium. Kroeber's comments were the last thing written by him before his death in Paris on October 5, 1960. The papers were made available to the AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST through the good offices of Paul Fejos of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. TAKE as my general definition of communication Hockett's (1958:573): I "communication is those acts by which one organism triggers another." But I shall deal only with that kind of communication called language. Language differs from other communication systems in that there is a nonlinear feedback. Language is physics, biology, and culture. I shall deal only with the cultural aspect of language, though I recognize that some of the universal features of human languages which are built into all cultures rest upon certain limiting conditions and forwardings provided by the constancies of physics and biology. There are many possibilities for review and discussion. By way of example, I shall mention three which are, in a sense, relatively miniscule but which have great theoretical interest. There is the question as to whether stuttering is determined by biological inheritance, or by the combination of constitutional predisposition and the individual's unique life history, or whether a particular language and a particular culture-in general make for the appearance and persistence of stuttering. The most recent monograph (Stewart 1960) presents evidence for certain American Indian tribes that language-as-culture does indeed influence the incidence and type of stuttering. A second sort of problem centers upon the following related enquiries: To what extent do words for the same persons, objects, or events tend to be acquired first or very early in the child's vocabulary? Is approximately the same vocabulary level, mastery of syntax, and phonological control characteristic of, say, the three-year old child across cultures? Is the growth rate in vocabulary from infancy to adulthood (proportional to total vocabulary of the language) comparable in different languages and cultures? Roman Jakobson and a few others have pioneered such investigations, but most field workers in linguistics and anthropology have neglected to provide sufficiently comprehensive and detailed data. A third interesting development is the experimental creation of linguistic micro-cultures and the tracing of their evolution by Bavelas (see Gerard, Kluckhohn, and Rapoport, 1956: 25ff.), Lenneberg (1957), and others. 895