British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Social Brain, Distributed Mind
Abstract
When individuals do not stop at the skin
Alan Barnard (Edinburgh)
This paper examines contemporary hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and elsewhere in light of the social brain and the distributed mind hypotheses. One question to be asked is whether African hunter-gatherers offer the best model for societies at the dawn of symbolic culture, or whether societies elsewhere on globe offer better models. I argue for the former through an examination of common features of African hunter-gatherer society and the global distribution of specific kin structures and forms of reciprocity. Issues touched on include food-sharing, gift-giving, and spouse exchange in various ethnographic contexts. Theoretical ideas include universal kin classification, the giving environment, concepts of the person, the relation between group size and social networks. I offer reinterpretations of classic anthropological notions such as Wissler’s age-area hypothesis, Durkheim’s collective consciousness and Lévi-Strauss’s elementary structures of kinship. I also touch upon my theory of the co-evolution of language and kinship through three phases (signifying, syntactic and symbolic) and the subsequent breakdown of the principles of the symbolic phase across much of the globe in Neolithic times.