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Abstract This article deﬁnes the present moment in the anthropology of embodied human communication as a moment of possible fusion between (a) the new conception of the living human body emerging in biology, cognitive science and neuroscience, and sociology and anthropology and (b) the advanced methodology and research on social interaction in the “interactionist” tradition, which is reinterpreted here as a study of socialized practices for interacting in, and inhabiting, the world with others. A growing number of studies of interaction are now focused on “multimodal” communication in complex material settings. The convergence of research programs is illustrated here by sociological research on dance and sports, by a practice-based approach to gesture, and by a selective overview of recent studies of multimodality. Particular attention is given to two inﬂuential theoretical programs, one by E. Hutchins and the other by C. Goodwin. 419 INTRODUCTION In the past few decades, the conventional conception of nonverbal communication has become unmoored and is rapidly losing its grip on research and theory, increasingly so as more scholars across disciplines take a serious and sustained interest in the living human body and its being in the world. The old model had conceived of human senses and body parts (voice, eyes, hands, etc.) as “channels” through which “messages” travel. Sender and receiver are construed as mind or brains, as central processing units which encode and decode immaterial meanings conveyed by material signs. The body in this model was but an instrument at the service of some central, meaninggenerating internal “system,” recruited solely for the production of forms and separated from its other skilled and meaningful doings in the everyday world. Although the sender-receiver model has never gained much overt traction in anthropology (which has tended to ﬁnd communicative forms within rich ﬁelds of material culture and activity), a notion of the body as passive bearer of coded cultural messages has nevertheless been a tacit foundation of much work (e.g., Douglas 1970). Against the sender-receiver paradigm, beginning in the 1950s, but gaining momentum in the 1970s, an increasing number of researchers across disciplines, working from ﬁlm and video recordings of everyday interactions, have shown that communicative actions accrue meaning as they emerge in the moment-by-moment interaction of copresent parties. Thus, rather than the encoded content of an individual mind, meaning is a relationship between form and context, with context as an ongoing product of sequential and complementary action. Research in the interactionist tradition of Mead (1934), Bateson (1971), and Goffman (1963, 1971), notably context analysis (Kendon 1990, Scheﬂen 1973) and conversation analysis (Sacks et al. 1974), has been gaining increasing inﬂuence and is now, in many ﬁelds, the prevailing methodology offering the largest body of empirical ﬁndings. But new impulses for reframing embodied communication also come from a variety of other sources, few of which have so far been taken up, let alone absorbed, in interaction research. These sources are found in the wake of the so-called body and practice turns in sociology, anthropology, and linguistics (Schatzki et al. 2001); in the revival of phenomenology, including the “anthropology of experience” (Csordas 1990, Jackson 1989); in the happy marriage of biology, neuroscience, and phenomenology formed in various “neurophenomenological” programs (Fuchs & de Jaeger 2009, Stewart et al. 2010, Ziemke et al. 2007); and in the fusing of ecology and phenomenology in an anthropology grounded in human “dwelling” (Ingold 2000, 2011). This article deﬁnes the present moment in the anthropology of embodied communication as a moment of possible fusion between the new conception of the living human body emerging in biology, cognitive and neuroscience, and sociology and anthropology, on the one hand, and the advanced methodology and research on social interaction in the “interactionist” tradition, on the other, which is understood here as a study of socialized practices for interacting, understanding, and inhabiting the world with others. Although interaction research began with a focus on a single modality, or a small set thereof (speech, gaze, gesture, etc.), over the past several years, “multimodal interaction” has become a programmatic term, and a growing number of studies are now devoted to the analysis of communication that is embedded in, and incorporates, material settings rich in artifacts, technologies, and external representations (Streeck et al. 2011). This research program is illustrated by sociological research on dance and sports; a practicebased approach to gesture; an overview of the development of the ﬁeld; and an appreciation of two inﬂuential theoretical programs, one by E
. Hutchins and the other by C. Goodwin. Both Hutchins and Goodwin emphasize that semantic and pragmatic meanings of communicative acts are coconstructed in the interaction of the parties involved. As conversation analysts have argued (Sacks et al. 1974), the recipient’s responsive act ultimately determines the signiﬁcance of the turn 420 Streeck at talk. This feature is given only scant attention in this review, which focuses on the role of the living body in the production of communicative acts. COGNITIVE BIOLOGY OF BODY MOTION Central to the new, antidualist conception of embodiment is recognition of the fact that every living movement has a cognitive component (Sheets-Johnstone 2012), a perspective emerging from the conception of life and cognition by Maturana & Varela (1980) as “autopoiesis” or self-organization (see also Varela et al. 1991). “There is a basic formal organization of life, and its paradigm and minimal case is... the single cell. A single-cell organism is a self-making... being... In self-production, a cell continuously produces itself as a spatially bounded system, distinct from its medium or milieu” (Thompson 2007, p. 92). Motion is a fundamental mechanism of an organism’s self-making within a milieu. By moving its body or a body part, it responds to an environmental cue and picks out its signiﬁcance or “value” within the environment (Ziemke et al. 2007). By habitualizing couplings between cues and motions, organisms create an Umwelt (von Uexk¨ull 1957). This process has been called “sensemaking”: “An autopoietic system always has to make sense of the world so as to remain viable. Sense-making changes the physicochemical world into an environment of signiﬁcance and valence, creating an Umwelt for the system” (Thompson 2007, pp. 146–47). Cognition is not a separate process “in the mind” or the brain; “cognition is embodied action” (De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007, p. 486). From these actions, other organisms build their Umwelt, all becoming implicated in the emergence of communicative webs and social organization. The organic identity of cognition and motion is illustrated by the brain. Only organisms that possess motricity have brains. The sea anemone, whose life cycle comprises a sedentary (plant-like) and mobile (animal-like) stage, grows a brain during the latter and reabsorbs it in the former. The original function of the brain, then, is to allow mobile organisms to anticipate the consequences of their movements in a medium or Umwelt. Cognitive scientists since William James have therefore suggested that thinking and other “high-level” activities in the human brain have ultimately evolved from motor control and that thinking is “internalized motion” (Llinas 2002). Research has shown that humans perceive all self-propelling movements by living organisms as intentional (Brentano 1995), that is, as being oriented to an object and toward a goal. In other words, identifying living motion with cognition is also our “natural attitude” (Schutz 1967). However, kinesis is impossible without kinesthesia (Sheets-Johnstone 2010). Animals sense their motions through internal receptors (“muscle sense”). In his study of the “haptic system,” the perceptual system through which grasping hands experience the world, Gibson (1966) laid out that our tacit bodily knowledge of the world around us consists of proprioceptive—“felt”— patterns of actions such as grasping. That kinesthesia is an indispensable component of intelligent motion poses a conundrum for theory and research on intercorporeal communication, given that our kinesthetic experiences do not appear to be accessible to others. The requirement, so emphatically and convincingly stated especially by conversation analysts (Sacks et al. 1974), that only those dimensions of action that are publicly available can ﬁgure in the interactants’ mutual sensemaking, thus, excludes kinesthetic phenomena. However, the fact that the body motions of others are usually only visually available to us (disregarding moments of touch) does not mean that we perceive them with only our eyes. One of the breakthroughs in recent neuroscience has been the discovery that our own motor-control system is activated whenever we see others move in familiar ways ( Jeannerod 2006). Our motor system (i.e., the neural networks operations of the motor and premotor cortex and their operations) and our perceptual systems overlap; consequently, we recognize and understand the actions that www.annualreviews.org • Embodiment in Human Communication 421 we know how to perform. We “emulate” them covertly as we are seeing them (W
olpert & Miall 1996) and thus are able to anticipate their trajectories before they have taken their full course. A popular ﬁnding related to this research has been the discovery of mirror neurons in rhesus monkeys, which ﬁre not only when the animal executes a grasping motion, but also when it observes one. Mirror neurons have become an icon for the hope to ﬁnd a “brain organ” that produces intersubjectivity, i.e., the ability to understand other minds. But, as Jeannerod (2006) has pointed out, mirror neurons are not perceptual neurons at all, and they do not produce imitation (as the term “mirror” suggests). Rather, they constitute a “vocabulary” of actions that an individual knows how to perform and has practiced; they ﬁre whenever an instance of such an action is being observed. Their operation depends, as it were, on participation in a shared culture. In addition, the body motions that we are most likely to recognize among random visual noise are our own, the only ones that we cannot possibly see as we perform them (Loula et al. 2005). What our bodies know how to do is also what they are able to see. All these cognitive-communicative processes are “autonomic”; they occur outside our realm of attention, and focusing our consciousness on them usually disrupts them. Neuroscience thus has given us a view of the body in which autonomic “body-to-body” understanding is possible to the extent to which our bodies share sufﬁciently familiar patterns of action. It has thereby opened up the body to other bodies, to the world, and to culture. In doing so, it has transformed the body from an anatomical structure and instrument of the mind into a living body, the “Leib” of phenomenology (Husserl 2012), a dweller and comaker of life-worlds. THE LIVING BODY OF PHENOMENOLOGY The congruence of “embodied” neuroscience with phenomenologists’ view of the human body’s being in the world is most evident in the work of Merleau-Ponty, who wrote that “the body is our vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be involved in a deﬁnite environment” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 82). The living body is constituted in part by its relation to things. “To move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call” (p. 138), and actions that we routinely perform (habits) “incorporate their instruments into themselves and make them play a part in the original structure of my own body” (p. 91). But action also always includes a measure of “groping” (tˆatonnage) (Leroi-Gourhan 1993), a reaching for “maximal grip,” an articulation of the sedimented habit with the contingencies of the situation, a tendency on the part of the body “to reﬁne its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt” (Dreyfus 2002, p. 367). As the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in the mind, but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of the situation. The living body is constituted not only by its incorporation of things, but also by its incorporation of other bodies. Merleau-Ponty called this relation “carnal intersubjectivity” and “intercorporeality” (intercorpor´eit´e) (MerleauPonty 1962) and illustrated it by the handshake: [W]hen I shake his hand... [the other man’s] hand is substituted for my left hand, and my body annexes the body of another person... My two hands “coexist” or are “compresent” because they are one single body’s hands. The other person appears through an extension of that compresence; he and I are like organs of one single intercorporeality. (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 168) This compresence constitutes one foundation of our bodies’ ability to understand each other, “the reason the compresence of my ‘consciousness’ and my ‘body’ is prolonged into the compresence of my self and the other person” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 175). 422 Streeck The handshake is an example of a “face-engagement” (Goffman 1971), constituted by mutual attention. Although this is the mode of social engagement in which human life, sociality, and intersubjectivity begin, it is only one primordial form of social engagement; the other is
constituted by joint attention to and engagement with the world of things and begins around the fourth month of life (Trevarthen 1998). Intercorporeality in this sense is a relationship among “incarnate minds which through their bodies belong to the same world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 172; also see Meyer et al. 2015). This dimension of our being is central to Heidegger’s phenomenology (Heidegger 1926; also see Dreyfus 1991). According to Gordon (2014, p. 34), Heidegger proposed that philosophy should take as its cue our everyday commerce with worldly things. When I wield a hammer, my knowledge of that hammer is not primarily a matter of how it is represented or conceived; it is an implicit know-how that animates my action and embraces its elements all at once: the weight of the tool, the heft of the wood, my care in the work, and so forth. This everyday kind of purposeful involvement motivates a general picture of the human being as already immersed in its world. Heidegger took the term Dasein, “being there” or “being-in-the-world” (Dreyfus 1991), to refer to the human being who is “always already” immersed in the world of things through “mindless” (representation-less) absorbed coping or “dwelling.” We “dwell in” or “inhabit” the places where we, the tools that we use, and the speaking routines that we perform all are. When we inhabit something it is no longer an object for us but becomes part of us and pervades our relation to other objects in the world... Dwelling is Dasein’s basic way of being-in-the-world. The relation between me and what I inhabit cannot be understood on the model of the relation between subject and object. (Dreyfus 1991, p. 45) Our basic mode of being-in-the-world is not constituted by the unoccupied face-to-face relation but by “Mitsein” (being-with) or “Miteinander” (with), which is “equal behavior towards things” (Heidegger 1928/1929). Being-with is not constituted by mutual understanding (“erfassen,” grasping). Mutual understanding is founded in being with one another. Dasein must already be transparent (“offenbar,” disclosed) for Dasein for mutual understanding to be possible. Being transparent for one another appears in such circumstances as two wanderers being caught by the view. (Heidegger 1928/1929, pp. 87–88; translation by J. Streeck) THE “DWELLING PERSPECTIVE” Ingold has grounded a far-ranging anthropological research agenda in the phenomenology of being-in-the-world, integrating it with Gibson’s (1986) ecological psychology and Marx’s (1973) early historical materialism with its focus on the subjective side of praxis. Ingold (2011, p. 11) is concerned to “unite the approaches of phenomenology and ecology within a single paradigm.” From his “dwelling perspective,” Ingold (2011, p. 10) notes, “the forms humans build, whether in the imagination or on the ground [or in gesture and speech] arise within the currents of their involved activity, in the speciﬁc relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings.” Situating the human body, the subject of perception and action, within its “involvement whole” and “on the ground,” Ingold (2004) analyzes culture members’ perceptions and cognition in a “horizontal” perspective along their “paths of observation” as a “gathering” and “lateral integration” www.annualreviews.org • Embodiment in Human Communication 423 of meanings, thereby countering the traditional account of culture as an imposition of meaning and form onto inherently meaningless media and substrates. Ingold’s decisive move has been to recognize the continuity of world-making (niche-building) and meaning-making across all forms of organic life, notwithstanding the distinct human ability to “rachet up,” reﬁne, and reanalyze shared skills, forms, stories, and practices—culture—from generation to generation. Ingold does not study videotapes of human communication, but he gives researchers in that ﬁeld a rich and coherent heuristic for coming to terms with the moment-to-moment activities—the dwelling—in which all embodied communication takes place and from which it takes its material. THE BODY’S HABITUS AND PRACTICES An anthropological text that has been reanimated in the discourse about the body is Techniques du corps. In this text, Mauss (1973, p. 70) describes “the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies.” For example, “the positions of the arms and hands while walking form
a social idiosyncrasy, they are not simply a product of some purely individual, almost completely psychical arrangements and mechanisms” (p. 72). Mauss introduced the term “habitus” to refer to these social idiosyncrasies of the moving body, translating the Aristotelian notion of hexis, “acquired ability” and “faculty.” In bodily habits, Mauss (1973, p. 73) saw “the techniques and work of collective and individual reason” (emphasis added). Bourdieu (1977, 1990), with whom the term is usually associated and who much inspired the “practice turn,” deﬁned habitus as “a system of durable, transposable dispositions”: To understand habitus one has to situate oneself within “real activity as such,” that is, in the practical relation to the world, the preoccupied, active presence in the world through which the world imposes its presence, with its urgencies, its things to be done and said, things made to be said, which directly govern words and deeds without ever unfolding as a spectacle. (Bourdieu 1990, p. 52) The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices—more history—in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the “correctness” of practices and their constancy over time. (p. 54) Habitus constructs the world by a certain way of orienting itself towards it, of bringing to bear on it an attention which, like that of a jumper preparing to jump, is an active, constructive bodily tension towards the imminent forthcoming. (p. 144) As these quotes demonstrate, Bourdieu’s concern was to discern sedimented history in the habitus of individuals, most clearly felt in the forward-looking tensions of the body toward its projects in the world. However, Bourdieu gave little attention to the spontaneity and creativity of action ( Joas 1996), to its potential to transcend and remake sedimented practices (Noland 2009), or to the ways in which individuals acquire the speciﬁc subjectivity—the embodied self—that is associated with a habitus (but see Wacquant 2004). INTERCORPOREALITY IN DANCE AND SPORTS Of particular interest in the present context is sociological and linguistic research on the selfmaking of bodies in the practice ﬁelds of dance and sports (Alkemeyer et al. 2009, Haller 2009, 424 Streeck Markula 2006) as well as the temporalities of language and body motion in instructional practice and their integration (Keevalik 2015). Dancing and sporting bodies are constituted by their heightened and practiced abilities for tacit intercorporeal coordination and action. Dance allows sociologists to investigate how dynamic, yet recurrent and intelligible, behavioral orders are established, known, and sustained under contingent conditions. Argentine tango dancers, for example, seek to reach, through sequences of steps that are both routine and improvised, the exalted moment when two bodies move as one “four-legged animal” (Elsner 2000). The order of steps in a basic sequence is not ﬁxed; each member of the dancing couple must at every step anticipate what the other will do next, which is made possible through haptic communication via their torsos, arms, and hands. Movement practices such as classical ballet and taiji also bring to the fore cultural values and conceptions of the body. The classical corps de ballet is an anatomical body, trained to maximize degrees of freedom and produce movements that create “the illusion... of the dancer being light as a feather in movement” (Mitchell 2013, p. 4). The body of taiji, in contrast, is moved by the ﬂow of chi, life energy, and the goal of practice is to move so that energy from the body’s center can ﬂow into these motions, and to ease one’s thoughts and feelings into them so that the mindful body will be enabled to spontaneously and prudently respond to the intercorporeal contingencies of any situation. (Mitchell 2013, pp. 4, 6) Presently, millions of people in the industrialized world are attempting to transform their bodily identity by acquiring the movement idiom, habitus, and “carnal intersubjectivity” of Latin salsa, merengue, and tango. Key experiences in the acquisition of movement genres such as dance (particularly ballet) and sports are the incessant confrontations with the obstinacy or recalcitrance of the body, the experience that movement possibilities are constrained by incorporated normative culture. Sedimentation enables, but also limits, spontaneity. Yet it is also a common experience in this context that
the body is capable of performing autonomic and adaptive motions that transcend and innovate habitualized patterns. The very enactment of a practice by an obstinate body entails the possibility of resistance, criticism, and cultural change (Alkemeyer 2004, Noland 2009). Team sports such as volleyball are activities that require “hypercooperativity” (Meyer & von Wedelstaedt 2015), for example, when volleyball players take ﬂight in unison to block a ball, anticipating its trajectory from the preparatory moves of the opponent. In such moments a “wesubject” is brought into being (Schutz 1982). Sports therefore presents... a litmus test for existing theoretical models of communication, sociality and interaction, since it reveals features of social life that are foundational even though they have been systematically neglected by all social theories that took social spaces that... are relieved of practical constraints... as their starting point. Many aspects that are present in sports, however, equally apply to other activities that occur under time pressure and at great social speed, through the coordination of bodies and things. (Meyer & von Wedelstaedt 2015, p. 11) Elias (2009, p. 124) has noted that the social sciences traditionally have considered the state of being at rest the “normal state of affairs [and]... movement a deviation”; he recommended against abstracting away from the in-motion nature of social phenomena. Indeed, “the sporting environment—both physical and social—is in the main perceived by the participants, not from a static position, but rather from a moving vantage point” (Hockey & Collinson 2007). During dance instruction, the different temporalities of speech and moving bodies must be aligned (Keevalik 2015). Another advantage many researchers of dance and sports have is that they are also www.annualreviews.org • Embodiment in Human Communication 425 professional practitioners of these ﬁelds, and close conscious attention to kinesthetic experience is part of their habitus; the viability of a discourse of kinesthesia is familiar to them from training and practice. This is a vantage point that interaction researchers often lack: Although we are also practitioners of the phenomena that we study, we inevitably produce and experience these in the “natural attitude” (Schutz 1932): We have not been trained to interact, and our only conscious access to the phenomena in question is through videotapes, which ﬂatten out interpersonal perception and reduce it to its audible and visible dimensions. GESTURE PRACTICES In the new ﬁeld of gesture studies that emerged in the 1990s, inspired especially by the observational, “naturalistic” work of Kendon (2004) and the experimental psycholinguistic research of McNeill (1992, 2005), it was common to regard gestures either as utterance components (Kendon) or as external representations of “thinking-for-speaking” (Slobin et al. 1987), of the “holistic-synthetic” dimension of thought that is articulated with the “analytic” mode during speech (McNeill). Streeck (2009b) breaks with these intertwined traditions and approaches gestures of the hand as they emerge from, and mediate, collaborative physical action. Building on work by Kendon (2004) and Goodwin (2000), Streeck (2009b) proposes a view of gesture as craft, a distinct yet heterogeneous family of manual sensemaking practices that abstract communicative forms from everyday actions and construe experience in terms of actions of the hands. To understand how hand gestures work, we must begin with an appreciation of the kinds of organs that human hands are. Originating as organs of locomotion, as ﬁns that became feet, hands eventually acquired unique sensory abilities and precision grip and became organs for toolmaking or productive labor (Streeck 2009b, ch. 3). The most characteristic movement of the human life-form is the “gesture of making” (Flusser 2014), in which the two hands come together in complementary cooperation, making something out of something, attended by the eyes. Through the same processes, human hands have evolved into our most sophisticated organ for environmental cognition, i.e., for feeling, assessing, and comparing textures, consistencies, shapes, and the affordances of things. Gesture is a symbolic practice that draws upon this tacit knowledge: It makes distinctly manual patterns of experience, habits, and skills—schemata—available to the sensemaking person. It is possible to discern different ecologies in which gesture practices partake, i.e., how they differentially contribute to the communicative situation. This is, at one level, an issue of perception: Are gestures perceived as “free-standing” ﬁgures, or in relation to an environmental feature or ground? Does a gesture depict a distant object that is being discussed, or, instead
, does it display the “illocutionary act” (Austin 1962) that the speaker is performing? The “intentional arcs” of gestures point in different directions, each arc implying a different role for the gesture within the moment of sensemaking. Streeck (2009b) distinguishes six “ecologies of gesture”: 1. Hand gestures can investigate the world within reach and disclose and elaborate its features and signiﬁcances by active exploration and visible manipulation (“environmentally coupled gestures”) (Goodwin 2007a). 2. Gestures can select and elaborate features and signiﬁcances of the “world in sight” and orient the interactants in relation to them (pointing toward and tracing visual phenomena in the distance). 3. Gestures can evoke phenomena that are not present or model imaginary and abstract worlds (depictive gestures). 4. Gestures can conceive thematic content by casting it in terms of postures and actions of the hands (conceptual gestures). 426 Streeck 5. Gestures can embody and display aspects of a communicative act, for example, a speech act that is concurrently performed (pleading, praying, etc.). 6. Gestures can regulate the actions of others. These categories, which may not accommodate ritual gestures that solicit or manifest deities or spirit forces or pay tribute to them, are not disjunct; a pointing gesture by deﬁnition regulates the action of another by suggesting a shift or focus of gaze. A single gesture can also do different things at the same time or condense multiple signiﬁcances into a single form. Importantly, different modes of gesticulation involve different degrees of attentiveness and awareness. Pointing gestures and depictions are deliberately made and given their maker’s and addressee’s visual attention (Streeck 1993). By contrast, conceptual and “pragmatic” gestures are commonly not oriented to by the participants, remaining at the periphery of the attentional ﬁeld, where they spectacularly display the human body’s autonomic sensemaking abilities. In this mode of gesturing, hands spontaneously give form, say, to abstract notions of community, to the feeling of comfort, or to the imminent beginning of storytelling (Streeck 2009b, ch. 8), unpredictably shifting their “intentional arc” from one phrase to the next. As such, this mode is full of both conventional forms and personal idiosyncrasies, forever demonstrating that the “energeia” (Humboldt 1988) of language-making, or communicative action, can never be fully subsumed under the “grammar” of the forms that it secretes. For each of the orientations to the situation, distinct gesture practices have evolved. The methods people use to depict or refer to objects include drawing using an index ﬁnger, molding, and “modeling” (Kendon 2004, M¨uller 1998; see also Enﬁeld 2003, 2005), but the preference seems to be for gestural “handlings,” schematic versions of movements by which we handle these objects in everyday life. Thus, in the depiction of objects via gesture, we rely on a common ground of familiar “couplings” between motor actions and the kinds of things being depicted. Streeck noted that several of the basic methods for depiction correspond to a fundamental mode of being of the human hand, some general capacity in which the hands engage with the world: in the service of transportation, for example, moving things from one place to another... As users of things, hands know each thing by its affordance. Hands also act in the capacities of explorer and disassembler and, supremely, as maker and molder of things. These capacities are engaged in abstracted form in... gestural depiction... Gestural depiction is grounded, then, not in visual resemblance, but in the everyday interpenetrations of actions and things. (Streeck 2008, p. 298) Investigating the emerging gestures of very young children, Andr´en (2010) has shown how distinctly communicative gestures are separate from “instrumental” physical acts such as reaching, taking, and giving. The “action gestalt” of early communicative gestures emerges through the “freezing” and separation of some stage in the excursion and behavior of the hand during a manipulatory act such as taking hold of an object within reach. The action unfolds as the hand moves away from the body toward the object, forming a prehensile posture in the process, grasping and lifting the object, holding and perhaps manipulating it, setting it down, and retracting the hand. Each of these phases can give rise to a gesture, which is “immediately” transparent in the context because it is perceived as an inherently meaningful phase of an inherently meaningful act. Andr´en offers
a ﬁne-grained set of distinctions to show how gestures emerge from object-related and interpersonal actions, becoming visual rather than haptic acts, separated from the model by degrees of communicative explicitness and semiotic complexity. Similar methods for abstracting meaningful enactive schemata from everyday actions with things appear to pervade developing “home sign” systems (Haviland 2013) and sign languages (Kendon 2009). Whenever hands make www.annualreviews.org • Embodiment in Human Communication 427 meaning through gesture, some reconﬁguration of sensations seems to be involved. Although all hand gestures are visible actions, the sensory experiences that they otherwise involve and draw upon are diverse: tactile, haptic, digital (i.e., using an index ﬁnger as “antenna”) (Napier 1980; cf. Deleuze 2003). STUDIES OF EMBODIED AND MULTIMODAL INTERACTION Beginning in the 1950s and gaining momentum in the 1970s with the advent of video technology, a large ﬁeld of study of the moment-by-moment production and organization of social interaction has grown, the seed of which was The Natural History of an Interview project in Palo Alto, California (Leeds-Hurwitz 1987, Lipset 1980). Using ﬁlmed records, researchers, including Gregory Bateson and Ray Birdwhistell, set out to study for the ﬁrst time how interacting dyads or groups sustain themselves as self-regulating systems, by which bodily behaviors interaction participants “frame” the “working consensus” (Goffman 1963) of their encounter, and how behavioral forms become intelligible within behavioral contexts and sequences of symmetrical and complementary action (Bateson 1958, 1971, 1972). An equally important, yet often unacknowledged, inspiration for this research is Mead’s (1934) work, especially his scenario of a “conversation of gestures,” of sequential, complementary interactions in which signiﬁcant gestures and symbols emerge. The “interactionist tradition” comprises both context analysis (Kendon 1990, Scheﬂen 1973) and conversation analysis (Sacks et al. 1974; Streeck 2009b, ch. 2; Streeck et al. 2011; for an account of the development of the ﬁeld and its methodology, see Kendon 1990; for a comprehensive overview of conversation analytic research on bodily action, see Heath & Luff 2012; for a review of Kendon’s work, see Streeck 2007; for a broad range of approaches and themes, see M¨uller et al. 2013). Bateson (1956) conceived of context as “framing,” a logical typing of communication, signaled and sustained by metacommunication: During animal interactions, through signals such as “play faces,” otherwise antagonistic acts, e.g., bites, are recontextualized as play. Bateson’s conception informed Scheﬂen’s (1964) groundbreaking studies of posture and posture conﬁgurations as embodied contexts in therapeutic interaction as well as the methodology for context analysis that he developed (Scheﬂen 1973). Bateson’s work also inﬂuenced Kendon’s (1990) “dynamic” account of the moment-by-moment interaction in which interactional formations are assembled, sustained, tuned, and dismantled. Numerous studies have since investigated the spatial organization of social encounters (Hausendorf et al. 2013, Mondada 2009), including the coordinations required, both within each party and between them, of body orientation, gaze, and speech in both stationary and mobile ensembles (Haddington et al. 2013, Mondada 2012). Further research has explored how these participation frameworks are being reconﬁgured by new communication technologies (Button 1993, Heath & Luff 1993) and how the physical arrangement of the setting mediates and constrains talk and interaction (Lebaron & Streeck 1997). Other research has investigated how spatial posture, positioning, and orientation embody affect and stances taken toward the other’s act (Goodwin 2007b, Goodwin et al. 2012) and how postures operate within the moment-by-moment organization of the participation framework (Goodwin & Goodwin 1992), including the distribution of participation roles and rights. Recently, research has begun to investigate the zone of immediate or “haptic sociality” to consider the ways in which families touch and hug and parental arms and hands scaffold and constrain the body motions of their children (Goodwin 2015, Tulbert & Goodwin 2011). Working with the deaf-blind community in Seattle, Washington, Edwards (2012) has studied how speakers of deaf sign language who are losing their
eyesight are developing modes of tactile and haptic sociality and communication. Research on bodily components of the organization of talk in interaction initially focused (a) on gaze (Kendon 1967), i.e., how the sequencing of mutual gaze operates in the turn-by-turn 428 Streeck organization of talk (Goodwin 1979, 1981; Heath 1982); (b) on the temporal and semantic coordination of gestures and speech (Kendon 1972, 1983); and (c) on the role of gaze and speech in directing attention to gestures (Goodwin 1986, Streeck 1993) and the role of gestures in directing gaze (Heath 1986). Through gaze and facial actions, speakers and listeners can negotiate the dynamic development of a turn at talk (Goodwin 1979, Iwasaki 2011). Rossano (2012) showed that the requirements for mutual gaze are contingent on the course of action or sequence type under way. Only recently have interactionist researchers begun to investigate the display and management of affect in conversational interaction (Per¨akyl¨a & Sorjonen 2012). A signiﬁcant ﬁnding from all this research is that gestures, similar to other communicative motions of body parts, very often “project ahead”: They foreshadow what is about to be said or done (Schegloff 1984; Streeck 1995, 2009a), and their signiﬁcance lies in preparing the next moment (McDermott et al. 1978). These studies concern interaction in the face-to-face mode. Mitsein, shared engagement with the world at hand, ﬁrst came into view in studies of deixis and pointing (Kita 2003), of the ways in which the “deictic system” of a language cooperates with the deictic system (or set of deictic practices) of gesture in structuring a situated deictic ﬁeld (Hanks 2005). Studies include research on the signiﬁcance of choices among body parts (Enﬁeld 2001, Wilkins 2003) and hand shape (Kendon & Versante 2003) in pointing and of the impact of the conceptualization of space in a language community (absolute or relative) on the practices of pointing (Haviland 1993, 2003; Levinson & Wilkins 2006). In a similar vein, Cooperrider & Nu˜nez (2009) and Nu˜nez & Sweetser (2006) have investigated how spatial “conceptual metaphors” of time reverberate in gestures referring to time. Reaching out into the “manipulatory zone” (Mead 1932), i.e., the world at hand, interactants in work settings may ﬁnd inscriptions and the means to make them. Although these inscriptions afford the recording of meaning for the longer term, they often require annotation and interpretation by embodied (gestural) acts (Streeck & Kallmeyer 2001): Two-dimensional diagrams and blueprints often become imbued with a third and fourth dimension (volume and time). Gestures are also integral to the collaborative production of imagination, for example, in the work of designers and architects (Murphy 2005, 2011). Things at hand are recruited—exhapted—for purposes beyond their indigenous affordances; they are subsequently arranged and manipulated in ways that give form to social meanings (Streeck 1996). Increasingly, then, interaction researchers are coming to terms with the whole complexity of interaction, cooperation, and sensemaking in the human-made world that we inhabit and of the divergent temporalities of the systems involved (Deppermann & G¨unthner 2015). Much of the research on “multimodal interaction” in recent years has been conducted in technology-rich workplaces, including subway and airport control rooms (Goodwin & Goodwin 1996, Heath & Luff 1996), cars and cockpits (Mondada 2012, Nevile 2004), car-repair shops (Streeck 2002), and surgerytheaters(Mondada2011).Inthesesettings,bodilyactsofcommunicationoftenincorporate tools and electronic media, for example, when physicians during laparoscopic surgery perform communicative gestures with their instruments while observing each other’s actions on a monitor (Koschmann et al. 2007, Zemel et al. 2001). Such settings reconﬁgure the perceptual and enactive conditions for interaction and sensemaking, requiring new adaptations and spurring the rapid evolution of new practices (Keating & Sunakawa 2011). EMERGING THEORIES Hutchins (1995, 2006) approaches interaction from a “distributed cognition perspective,” according
to which the socially organized cognitive system, not the individual, is the unit of analysis for the study of cognitive activity. This system includes not only a network of actors and the media of communication available to them, but also tools and the historically constituted skills coupled www.annualreviews.org • Embodiment in Human Communication 429 with them, the spatial arrangements that they inhabit, media that can store information, and so on, which together form a “cognitive ecology.” Hutchins is particularly interested in the affordances of cognitive tools involved, and of the embodied human agent, for holding, propelling, and computing information and in the interfaces among them. Analyzing the collaborative construction of multimodal utterances in an explanation given by an airline pilot in a moment of crisis, Hutchins & Palen (1997) observe that “the meaning of the explanation is carried in the coordination among the spatial organization of specialized artifacts, the positioning of gestures with respect to those artifacts, and the words that are spoken” (Hutchins & Palen 1997, p. 23; see also Hutchins & Nomura 2011). Hand gestures are especially ﬂexible cognitive artifacts. For example, the gestures superimposed on the space of the [fuel] panel can be read as meaningful actions and courses of action on the fuel panel itself, or they can be seen as events in the fuel system. To see the gestures as actions on the panel, one must see the panel as a panel. To see the gestures as representations of events in the fuel system, the panel must be seen as the system that it represents. (Hutchins & Palen 1997, p. 37) In another context, where scientists attempt to formulate theory, “representational gestures serve to reference and animate portions of existing material structure such as models, diagrams, and graphs” (Becvar et al. 2005, p. 89) and instantiate “essential spatiodynamic features [e.g., of molecules]... not effectively conveyed in other modalities” (p. 89). Hand gestures can also serve as “material anchors” (Hutchins 2005), giving stable sensate forms to emergent conceptualizations (cf. Freedman 1977). In much of his work, Hutchins has assumed “the separation of dedicated modalities for experiencing [and acting in] the world and for communicating about it” (Hutchins & Johnson 2009, p. 527) and the existence of a “dedicated communication channel that is separated from the other sensorimotor channels” (p. 530). But Hutchins & Johnson (2009) realized that, to explain how “the capacity for representation” (p. 523) emerges, what is needed is a scenario “in which signals [inhabit] the same domain of sensorimotor experience as other events and objects in the world” (p. 532), because “iconic signs” develop through the abstraction of sensorimotor patterns from sensorimotor action. Hutchins & Johnson (2009) found such a scenario in the interactions of bonobos, which “spontaneously produce embodied forms that have some, but not all, of the features of language” (p. 534). Gestures emerge when infants abstract stages of participation in familiar interaction patterns—for example, being picked up to be carried—and present them to their mothers visually. Mothers and experienced infants come together for the carry activity in a very ﬂuid way... Mothers often sweep up infants and move off while looking at their destination... The infant simultaneously moves its body and hands in ways that ﬁt and take advantage of the mother’s motions. Mother and infant just come at one another, interdigitating (grab, climb on, lift, etc.) mainly by feel. Bonobo mothers experience most carries as tactile and proprioceptive events rather than as visual events... The infant’s gesture is made available to the mother as a visual experience, yet it seems to refer to an activity that consists primarily of tactile, motor, and proprioceptive experience. (Hutchins & Johnson 2009, pp. 535–36) This ﬁnding parallels Streeck’s (2009b, 2013) suggestion that the capacity for manual gesture in humans is abstracted from sensorimotor (haptic) experience and action. Instrumental and communicative action overlap and do not constitute separate “modules.” The bodily actions of others can be transparently meaningful for us without thereby becoming signs; signs originate when actions are performed speciﬁcally for communicative purposes. 430 Streeck Hutchins & Johnson (2009, p. 536) further observe that “the primary form of coordination in this activity is the production of complementary rather than matching (imitation) behavior... Actions that ‘ﬁt’ the actions of the other are favored. Actions that do not ﬁt the actions of the
other are dissipated.” These abstracted gestures can become common currency in a group. “Putting signals into the world of action... creates opportunities for the reuse of emergent structures as communicative forms” (p. 543). The scenario bears a striking resemblance to Mead’s (1909) “conversation of gestures,” both in its speciﬁcation of gestures as “frozen” parts of an action and in the emphasis placed on complementary interaction as the context in which symbolic meanings and forms intelligibly originate. Mead had noted that imitation is of little importance in social interaction. Goodwin & Goodwin (1996; also see Goodwin 1994) were among the ﬁrst conversation analysts to study talk in technology-rich settings and speciﬁc communities of practice. C. Goodwin (2003) showed how seemingly trivial acts such as pointing to a speck of color on the ground may work only because of the parties’ negotiated reliance on meanings embodied in diverse “semiotic resources.” Goodwin (1994) also showed how acts of professional vision such as noticing a discoloration of soil or seeing violent resistance in Rodney King’s beaten-down body are made possible by the coordinated deployment of linguistic categories and indexical gestures. Goodwin (1995, 2004) examined in detail the artful multimodal practices that enable the family of a man stricken by aphasia to continue to be a fully competent speaker despite having his speakable vocabulary reduced to three words. Since 2000, Goodwin has integrated his research into an increasingly comprehensive theory of action. Crucially, rather than taking the face-to-face situation with its mutual focus as his starting point, he deﬁnes collaborative activity as the primordial site of sociality, that is, a situation in which multiple participants are attempting to carry out courses of action in concert with each other through talk while attending to both the larger activities that their current actions are embedded within, and relevant phenomena in their surround... Human action is built through the simultaneous deployment of a range of quite different kinds of semiotic resources... Strips of talk gain their power as social action via their placement within larger sequential structures, encompassing activities, and participation frameworks constituted through displays of mutual orientation made by the actors’ bodies. The body is used in a quite different way to perform gesture... Both talk and gesture can index, construe or treat as irrelevant, entities in the participants’ surround... [and] material structure in the surround... can provide semiotic structure. (Goodwin 2000, p. 1,489) Goodwin focuses on how the “contextual conﬁguration” (Goodwin 2000) or “contexture of action” (Goodwin 2011) is altered with every action. In the “cooperative transformation zone” (Goodwin 2012) of human activity, each action builds upon and reuses resources provided by prior action: Individual actions emerge from, and use, a consequential past shaped through chains of prior action, providing current participants with a dense, present environment, a rich now, containing many different kinds of resources that can be selectively decomposed, reused and transformed to build a next action, a proposal for how the future will be organized... In so far as such processes preserve with modiﬁcation structures provided by the environments that constitute the point of departure for new action, this process is accumulative, something that is central to the distinctive organization of human culture and society. (Goodwin 2012, pp. 1–2) In the work of both Hutchins and Goodwin, multimodal interaction has been put in historical perspective for the ﬁrst time: In the artifacts from which we build action, including language, www.annualreviews.org • Embodiment in Human Communication 431 histories of action, experiment, and knowledge are sedimented. By enacting them, “preserving structure,” we secure that they remain available for future occasions and thus contribute to the “ratcheting up” of our community’s culture. In Goodwin’s work in particular, the creativity of action ( Joas 1996) also comes into view, the spontaneous ingenuity with which humans “make world” out of the serendipitous constellation of resources that the present moment offers. Although roughly covering the same ground, Hutchins and Goodwin avoid the ﬂattening out of ontology that is characteristic, for example, of actor-network theory (Latour 2005), which indiscriminately distributes agency to people, inanimate objects, and networks. In this respect, actor-network theory runs counter to natural languages, which distinguish between inanimate and sentient beings and whose grammars imply “animacy hierarchies” (Keenan & Comrie 1977). Actor–network theory and other “posthumanist” frameworks have been received with interest by many researchers of multimodal interaction. However, most of those theories and frameworks are committed to
the ethnomethodological maxim that the analytic task is to explicate, not compete with, common-sense reasoning. As a result, they maintain a “humanist” conception of agency, in line with ordinary languages and the “practical sociological reasoning” (Garﬁnkel & Sacks 1970) that is sedimented in them. SEMIOTICS OR ECOLOGY? An open question is whether the ﬁeld will grow along semiotic or ecological paths of inquiry, or how these paths will intersect. Representing linguistic anthropology in the mode of Peircian semiotics, Kockelman (2006) has shown that it is possible to cast the relations of dwelling (“residence”) as sign relations: An affordance can be conceived as a sign, and the action that makes use of it as its interpretation. Kohn (2013) has cast forests as thinking entities, but in Descola’s words, the whole notion of cosmic semiosis may become superﬂuous because what is at stake... is how living and nonliving beings relate to each other according to the types of connection that their physical assets allow. Some of these connections may fall under the rubric “interpretation” or “representation,” if they involve iconic and indexical signs in the widest sense, but most of them will probably be the outcome of nonrepresentational physical and chemical processes. (Descola 2014, p. 271) At stake in human interaction are the concrete enactive couplings between enculturated living bodies and their human and nonhuman environments, not all of which involve or produce signs. To explain the capacity for representation, we must understand how signs evolve from physical action that is “always already” meaningful. Signs are sediments of human action; intelligible, embodied social action does not require that its signiﬁcance be expressed—or expressible—in signs. Signs, according to Heidegger (1926), form a special kind of “equipment,” and the function of a sign is to indicate, or refer to, something, minimally to the action from which it is abstracted (as illustrated by the gestures of infant bonobos). However, bodily actions become intelligible and socially signiﬁcant through the ways in which they couple with the context at hand, and not in the ﬁrst place because they may also refer to this (or some other) context. In other words, semiotic phenomena constitute only parts of processes of embodied communication, and semiotic accounts of embodied communication must be embedded within ecological understandings of bodily being in, and making of, the world (Ingold 2011). The turn to the living body as an agent of embodied communication that this article has described is far from complete. Rather, this turn has the form of an ongoing, often unsuccessful effort. Many submissions to journals betray the immense difﬁculty of understanding and writing about embodied action as inherently cognitive and communicative and about the human self as 432 Streeck “always already” embodied. Such difﬁculty is revealed in the way they continue to refer to interaction participants as using their bodies (or body parts) to communicate meanings, as if the body were an instrument controlled by some “homunculus” residing within it and meaning were some disembodied substance that is translated into material form during the process of communication. Although there is wide consensus about the empirical research agenda and neuroscience provides increasingly more insights into the materiality of the communicating body, the real difﬁculty at present appears to be ﬁnding a postdualist language to formulate our understanding of the communicating human body and of the ways in which human bodies understand one another in social interaction. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT The author is not aware of any afﬁliations, memberships, funding, or ﬁnancial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review. LITERATURE CITED Alkemeyer T. 2004. Bewegung und Gesellschaft. Zur “Verk¨orperung” des Sozialen und zur Formung des Selbst in Sport und popul¨arer Kultur. In Bewegung: Sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Konzepte, ed. G Klein, pp. 43–78. Bielefeld, Ger.: Transcript Alkemeyer T, Br¨ummer K, Kodalle R, Pille T, eds. 2009. Ordnung in Bewegung: Choreographien des Sozialen. K¨orper in Sport, Tanz, Arbeit und Bildung. Bielefeld, Ger.: Transcript Andr´en M. 2010. Children’s Gestures from 18 to 30 Months. Trav. Inst. Linguist. Lund Ser., Vol. 50. Lund, Swed.: Lund Univ. Press Austin J. 1962. How To Do Things with Words. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press Bateson G. 1956
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1964; Lee & Devore 1968; Cartmill 1974; Lovejoy 1981; Carrier 1984; Shipman & Walker 1989; Sussman 1991; Aiello & Wheeler 1995; Leonard & Robertson 1997; Key & Ross 1999; Aiello & Key 2002; Aiello & Wells 2002; Ant´on et al. 2002; Leonard & Ulijaszek 2002; Pontzer & Wrangham 2004; SteudelNumbers 2006; Snodgrass et al. 2007; Snodgrass & Leonard 2009; Pontzer et al. 2010, 2012, 2014; Orkin & Pontzer 2011; Pontzer 2012). Much of the early technology used to measure energy expenditure required captive subjects, conﬁned to a laboratory. These efforts led to many seminal insights that remain salient today despite the artiﬁcial nature of the laboratory setting (e.g., Kleiber 1947). The development of accurate, noninvasive methods for measuring or estimating energy expenditure in free-living subjects has greatly improved our understanding of activity and energy expenditure in humans and other primates. Although much of this work was motivated by and directed toward estimating nutritional requirements and energy stress among living human populations (e.g., Panter-Brick 1992, 1993; FAO et al. 2001; Dufour & Piperata 2008), anthropologists have applied these methods to reconstructions of energy budgets in nonhuman primates and fossil hominins (e.g., Coelho et al. 1977, Leonard & Robertson 1997, Knott 1998, Key & Ross 1999, Aiello & Key 2002, SteudelNumbers 2006, Froehle & Churchill 2009, Snodgrass & Leonard 2009). This work highlighted the importance of local ecology and activity levels on daily energy requirements and, in turn, on reproductive and somatic investment. More recently, anthropologists and those in public health have been employing the doubly labeled water (DLW) method (Speakman 1997, Int. At. Energy Agency 2009, Westerterp 2010) in measurements of energy expenditure in human and primate populations (e.g., Nagy & Milton 1979; Stein et al. 1988; Singh et al. 1989; Heini et al. 1991, 1996; Kashiwazaki et al. 1995, 2009; Drack et al. 1999; Esparza et al. 2000; Schmid & Speakman 2000; Snodgrass et al. 2006; Pontzer et al. 2010, 2012, 2014; Simmen et al. 2010, 2015; Rosetta et al. 2011). DLW is considered the gold standard for measuring daily energy expenditure in free-living populations because it tracks the body’s rate of carbon dioxide production (and hence caloric expenditure) without encumbering the subject with equipment, conﬁning them to a calorimetry chamber, or extrapolating from activity budgets (Int. At. Energy Agency 2009) (see sidebar Methods for Determining Total Energy Expenditure). Results from DLW studies have often complemented and conﬁrmed results from other approaches, but they have also challenged long-held ideas about the ﬂexibility and plasticity of daily energy expenditure (Westerterp & Speakman 2008, Dugas et al. 2011, Pontzer et al. 2012), suggesting that energy budgets may be more constrained and less responsive to variation in activity levels than is generally thought. These results hold implications for models of energy stress and metabolic syndrome in humans and for variation in metabolic ecology and life history across primates more broadly. In this article I review studies of total energy expenditure (TEE) (kcal/day) in humans and other primates. After brieﬂy discussing the classic laboratory work on metabolic energy expenditure, 170 Pontzer METHODS FOR DETERMINING TOTAL ENERGY EXPENDITURE Doubly labeled water method: Considered the gold standard for measurements of TEE in free-living subjects, the DLW method calculates TEE by measuring the body’s rate of carbon dioxide production (Speakman 1997, Int. At. Energy Agency 2009). Subjects drink a dose of water enriched with 2H and 18O, and the concentrations of these stable isotopes are tracked over time (usually 10–14 days) through a series of urine samples. Both isotopes are lost through water: urine, sweat, and expired water vapor. 18O is also lost via carbon dioxide; thus, the rate of
carbon dioxide production can be calculated by subtracting the rate of 2H depletion from the rate of 18O depletion. The rate of carbon dioxide production (moles/day) is converted to TEE (kcal/day) using the food quotient or respiratory quotient, which can be estimated from dietary information or measured via a respirometry trial. Flex-heart rate method: Recorded using a heart rate monitor and data logger, calibrated heart rate data are used to estimate TEE (Leonard 2003). Prior to the measurement period, a calibration trial in which heart rate and energy expenditure are measured simultaneously, over a range of exercise intensities, is performed for each subject. Energy expenditure is typically measured via mask-based respirometry in these trials. DLW validation studies have shown that ﬂex-heart rate measurements are generally reliable and accurate (e.g., Heini et al. 1991, 1996; Leonard 2003). Respirometry: The body’s consumption of oxygen and production of carbon dioxide are measured by monitoring expired air. Mask-based systems are commonly used to measure the cost of speciﬁc activities (e.g., walking or running). For TEE measurements using respirometry, subjects are conﬁned to a calorimetry chamber, a small, sealed room equipped to monitor the movement and concentration of room air (Ravussin et al. 1982). Respirometry studies provide highly accurate measures of energy expenditure, minute by minute, throughout the study period, but they require subjects to be conﬁned to a calorimetry chamber. Factorial method: TEE estimates are based on an individual’s height, weight, age, and activity budget (FAO et al. 2001). BMR is estimated using available anthropometric data. Time-allocation studies are then used to estimate the mean time per day in various activities (e.g., light work, sleep, walking). Activity data are then converted to energy expenditures using an individual’s estimated BMR and established PAL values for each activity. Factorial estimates of TEE are relatively easy and inexpensive to conduct but have relatively low accuracy; thus, they should be treated as estimates, not measurements, of energy expenditure. I focus on more recent studies of energy expenditure in free-living populations. This review is organized around four broad questions, beginning with proximate determinants of energy expenditure in humans and working toward an integrated ecological and evolutionary perspective on human and primate energy expenditure: 1. Anthropometry of TEE: How much energy do humans and other primates expend each day, and how does this vary with body size, age, and sex? 2. Components of TEE: How do basal metabolic rate (BMR), physical activity, reproduction, maintenance, thermoregulation, and other functions contribute to TEE? 3. Ecological determinants of TEE: How does variation in activity budgets or lifestyle affect TEE, and to what extent is TEE a constrained physiological trait shaped by evolution? 4. TEE and metabolic ecology in humans and other primates: How does TEE shape the life-history strategies and foraging ecology of humans and other primates? ANTHROPOMETRY OF TOTAL ENERGY EXPENDITURE It seems obvious from our daily experience that larger individuals require more energy each day than do smaller individuals, other factors being equal. A positive relationship between energy www.annualreviews.org • Human Energetics 171 expenditure and body size follows intuitively from ﬁrst principles: Larger organisms have more cells, each involved in myriad homeostatic processes, and they also carry more weight and thus must perform more physical work as they move. The question, then, is not whether larger size will tend to increase TEE, but to what extent. Kleiber (1947), in his seminal work on energy expenditure across a range of animals, showed that the relationship between size and energy expenditure was nonlinear. Kleiber focused on measurements of BMR, the rate of energy expended when the organism is at rest. Although BMR is only one component of TEE (often accounting for less than half of daily expenditure among mammals) (see Westerterp & Speakman 2008), it is relatively easy to measure in laboratory settings (usually via respirometry) (see sidebar, Methods for Determining Total Energy Expenditure) and is repeatable and reliable. Kleiber found that BMR increased allometrically, with Mass0.75, a relationship now commonly referred to as Kleiber’s Law. The physiological mechanism underlying the scaling exponent of 0.75 has been debated by comparative biologists ever since. One hypothesis, by West and colleagues (West et al. 1997, Gillooly et al. 2001), proposes that the 0.75 exponent stems from the fractal branching patterns of the energy supply systems (blood vessels) common among animals. More recently, White and colleagues (2009), using phylogenetically informed analyses of
a large, quality-controlled data set of mammalian BMR, reported considerable variation in the scaling exponent among clades, with exponents for the majority of orders falling between 0.67 and 0.75. For the purposes of this review, it is sufﬁcient to note that BMR does not increase linearly with mass and that larger animals use less energy per gram of body mass than do smaller animals. Measurements of TEE using the DLW method (see sidebar, Methods for Determining Total Energy Expenditure), in both wild and captive populations, indicate a similar scaling exponent for mammals. Nagy and colleagues (1999) reported a scaling exponent of 0.77 for eutherian (placental) mammals, with some variation among taxonomic groups. Primate TEE scales with a similar exponent of 0.73 ± 0.03, but the intercept is signiﬁcantly lower, such that TEE for primates (including humans) is 50% lower than expected for a eutherian mammal of the same body mass (Pontzer et al. 2014). As discussed below, this substantial reduction in TEE appears to be related to the remarkably slow life histories evident in humans and other primates. This grade shift in TEE notwithstanding, the scaling exponent (i.e., the allometric slope) does not differ between primates and other eutherian mammals (Pontzer et al. 2014). A similar allometry of energy expenditure is evident within human populations, both in BMR and in TEE. Predictive equations for BMR (Henry 2005, FAO et al. 2001), developed from large diverse human samples, indicate that smaller individuals have, on average, higher massspeciﬁc BMR. Black and colleagues (1996) analyzed DLW measurements from 564 adults living in developed countries (mostly Western Europe and the United States) and developed predictive equations for TEE. The exponent for mass is substantially lower than 1.0, indicating that larger individuals generally expend less energy per gram of body mass than do smaller individuals. For this reason, correcting for body size in analyses of TEE and BMR should be done via multiple regression or ANCOVA, with log-transformed data, rather than simply dividing by mass or fat-free mass (Tsch¨op et al. 2011). The effects of height and sex likely reﬂect effects of body composition on metabolic rate. Adipose tissue is much less active metabolically than other tissues, and both calorimetry chamber studies and DLW studies have shown that the strongest size-related predictor of TEE is lean mass, also called fat-free mass, which often accounts for 65–75% of the variation in TEE between subjects (e.g., Ravussin et al. 1982, Pontzer et al. 2012). Subjects who are taller for a given mass are generally leaner, and men tend to carry less body fat for a given mass than do women. Thus height is positively correlated with TEE, and women tend to have lower TEE for a given body mass. 172 Pontzer Large studies of TEE across a broad age range have noted a small but detectable decline with age, on the order of ∼15 kcal/year for adults older than ∼30 years (Black et al. 1996, Vinken et al. 1999, Elia et al. 2000). Speakman & Westerterp (2010), in the largest analysis of age and TEE to date, argue that this decline does not begin until ∼50 years of age. At least half of the age-related decline in TEE can be ascribed to age-related decline in BMR, suggesting that the decline in TEE is due to age-related changes in body composition (i.e., less lean mass) as well as senescence in cellular activity (Elia et al. 2000, Speakman & Westerterp 2010). Indeed, predictive equations for BMR (e.g., Henry 2005) developed in large, diverse samples indicate similar effects of age, sex, and height as reported for TEE. Reduced physical activity with age, particularly among elderly subjects, appears to contribute to the decline in TEE as well (Elia et al. 2000, Speakman & Westerterp 2010). Variation In and Limits to Total Energy Expenditure Representative TEE values for human populations, measured using the DLW method, are shown in Table 1. Repeated measures of TEE using DLW indicate that average TEE (i.e., mean TEE averaged over a two-week period) (see sidebar, Methods for Determining Total Energy Expenditure) is a relatively stable trait, with a coefﬁcient of variation within subjects of ∼6% (Schoeller & Hnilicka 1996).
The coefﬁcient of variation between subjects is considerably greater, approximately 15% (see Table 1) (Pontzer et al. 2012). In fact, variation in TEE between subjects within a population is considerably greater than the variation between populations, as evident in Table 1. Only 50–75% of the variation in TEE between subjects is explained by anthropometric variables, particularly fat-free mass (Black et al. 1996, Dugas et al. 2011, Pontzer et al. 2012). Measurements of physical activity can explain some of the remaining variation in TEE, but this is dependent on the methods used to measure activity and the population being examined. For example, GPS-based measurements of daily walking distance were not correlated with TEE in an adult sample (n = 30) of Hadza hunter-gatherers, after accounting for fat-free mass (Pontzer et al. 2012, 2015). Accelerometer measurements of activity account for some of the variation in TEE (Butte et al. 2012, Plasqui et al. 2013), but the amount of variation explained is generally modest, ranging from 4% to 23% (Plasqui et al. 2013). Indeed, accelerometry-based estimates often deviate substantially from measured TEE (Leenders et al. 2006). Genetic variation likely accounts for some of the variation in TEE as well. In a study of 294 elderly subjects, Tranah and colleagues (2011) found that subjects with mitochondrial DNA haplotypes of African origin had ∼10% lower TEE than those with mitochondrial DNA haplotypes of European origin, after correcting for body size and activity. Variation in hormone proﬁles undoubtedly affects energy expenditure, but endocrine regulation of BMR and TEE is complex and understudied. Several hormones, including thyroid hormones (thyroxine and triiodothyronine), estrogen, testosterone, and growth hormone, promote metabolism and tissue growth (Widmaier et al. 2004) and can be expected to increase energy expenditure. In particular, thyroid hormone is a primary regulator of metabolic rate and of heat production in response to cold exposure. However, although extreme levels of thyroid hormone affect BMR and TEE, normal variation in thyroid hormone levels in healthy adults is not necessarily correlated with variation in BMR or TEE (Tagliaferri et al. 2001, Klieverik et al. 2009, Leonard et al. 2014, Spadafranca et al. 2015). Similarly, growth hormone has positive effects on BMR and TEE (Gregory et al. 1991, 1993; Chong et al. 1994), but variation in growth hormone levels among adults, even those with clinically low levels, does not necessarily predict variation in TEE (Chong et al. 1994). Santosa and colleagues (2010) manipulated testosterone and estrogen levels in older men and found no difference in BMR when these hormones were completely www.annualreviews.org • Human Energetics 173 Table 1 Mean TEE (measured using the doubly labeled water method) and PAL ( ± standard deviation) in human populations Population N Sex Mass (kg) BMI Age (years) TEE (kcal/day) PAL Reference(s) Combined populationsa Developing countries 10 M 66.1 ± 2.7 22.7 ± 1.0 32.0 ± 3.3 2,940 ± 96 1.88 ± 0.06 Dugas et al. 2011 Developed countriesb 42 M 81.3 ± 2.0 26.0 ± 0.6 34.5 ± 1.7 3,226 ± 72 1.81 ± 0.03 Dugas et al. 2011 Developing countries 13 F 59.1 ± 2.0 24.3 ± 0.7 33.2 ± 2.7 2,223 ± 48 1.70 ± 0.03 Dugas et al. 2011 Developed countriesb 102 F 72.6 ± 3.2 26.6 ± 0.4 35.1 ± 1.3 2,462 ± 24 1.72 ± 0.02 Dugas et al. 2011 Extremely low physical activityc Enforced bed-rest, healthy subjects 8 F 52.6 ± 1.4 19.8 ± 0.4 33.9 ± 0.8 1,702 ± 186 1.37 ± 0.06 Bergouignan et al. 2010, 2013 Demented elderly 7 F – – – 1,242 ± 167 1.27 ± 0
.14 Black et al. 1996 Nonambulatory adolescents 11 M, F – – – 1,458 ± 239 1.22 ± 0.18 Black et al. 1996 Extremely high physical activityc,d Tour de France cyclists 4 M 67.8 – – 8,054 ± 143 4.69 ± 0.20 Black et al. 1996, Cooper et al. 2011 Arctic explorers 2 M 62 – 42.5 7,910 ± 358 4.47 ± 0.06 Black et al. 1996, Cooper et al. 2011 Swedish national nordic skiers 4 F 54.2 ± 5.4 – 25 ± 2 4,374 ± 550 2.81 ± 0.09 Black et al. 1996, Cooper et al. 2011 Runners in training 9 F 51.9 ± 3.7 – 26 ± 3 2,820 ± 311 2.03 ± 0.16 Black et al. 1996, Cooper et al. 2011 Foragers and farmersc Hadza hunter-gatherers 13 M 50.9 ± 5.4 20.2 ± 1.3 33.1 ± 14.4 2,649 ± 395 2.04 ± 0.28e Pontzer et al. 2015 Hadza hunter-gatherers 17 F 43.4 ± 6.4 20.1 ± 1.7 40.0 ± 19.4 1,877 ± 364 1.76 ± 0.28e Pontzer et al. 2015 Bolivian farmersf 11 M 54.7 ± 2.9 21.2 ± 1.6 49.1 ± 20.9 2,866 ± 435 2.08 ± 0.26 Pontzer et al. 2012 Bolivian farmersf 14 F 48.1 ± 6.9 20.7 ± 3.2 43.9 ± 21.8 2,469 ± 315 2.11 ± 0.30 Pontzer et al. 2012 Gambian farmersg 8 M 61.2 ± 3.6 21.2 ± 0.9 25.0 ± 1.4 3,879 ± 351 2.40 ± 0.14 Heini et al. 1996 Gambian farmersg 10 F 49.4 ± 1.7 – 30.0 ± 2.2 2,407 ± 196 1.98 ± 0.13 Singh et al. 1989 Abbreviations: BMI, basal metabolic index; PAL, physical activity level; TEE, total energy expenditure. aN represents the number of populations included. bRestricted to cohorts with a mean age <65 years (see Dugas et al. 2011). cN represents the number of individuals measured. dSubjects lost weight during these periods (0.2–1.3 kg/week) (see Cooper et al. 2011). ePAL is calculated using estimated basal metabolic rate. fCombines periods of high and low farming activity. PAL was 11% greater during high versus low activity (Kashiwazaki et al. 2009). gMeasured during periods of high farming activity. 174 Pontzer suppressed versus maintained at normal levels. More work is needed to disentangle the actions and interactions of individual hormones in the regulation of BMR and TEE in free-living, healthy humans. Several studies have examined subjects at the extremes of physical activity to investigate the limits to sustained TEE in humans. To compare across subjects and populations of different body mass and age, daily energy expenditure in these studies is often expressed as physical activity level (PAL), calculated as the ratio of TEE/BMR. At the low end of the range, patients who are conﬁned to bed rest have a PAL of 1.2–1.3, whereas athletes and military personnel achieve a maximum PAL of ∼5 during competition (Black et al. 1996, Hammond & Diamond 1997, Cooper et al. 2011). In addition to documenting the limits of human physiology, these studies point to two important aspects of our metabolism. First, even inactive subjects exhibit a PAL of 1.2–1.3, rather than the theoretically lowest value of 1.0. Second, even in well-provisioned athletes with unlimited food supply, there is a limit to the rate at which the body can take in and expend energy. COMPONENTS OF TOTAL ENERGY EXPENDITURE Basal Metabolic Rate BMR is the body’s lowest rate of
energy expenditure, reﬂecting summed energy requirements of the body’s organ systems at rest. Organs and tissues differ in their resting energy requirements, and expensive tissues such as the brain, gut, kidneys, heart, and liver account for a correspondingly large portion (Elia 1992, Aiello & Wheeler 1995, Wang et al. 2011). Accordingly, fat-free mass is a strong predictor of BMR (e.g., Ravussin et al. 1982). By deﬁnition, BMR is measured after a period of rest (usually after a full night’s sleep) and 10–12 h of fasting, with the subject awake, lying down, and at rest in a thermoneutral (22–26◦C) room; the subject must also be free from psychological or other stress and accustomed to the apparatus (Henry 2005). Measurements taken outside of these conditions (e.g., at midday or while standing or seated) are sometimes called resting metabolic rate (RMR) and will be elevated relative to BMR. Mean PAL for healthy adult populations in developed countries generally ranges from 1.6 to 1.9 for men and from 1.6 to 1.7 for women (Black et al. 1996, Dugas et al. 2011) (Table 1), meaning that BMR accounts for more than half of TEE for most subjects. Moreover, as noted above, subjects restricted to bed rest generally exhibit PAL values of 1.2–1.4 owing to the marked diurnal increase in RMR (Table 1). As a result, PAL is somewhat of a misnomer, because a substantial portion derives not from physical activity but from other generally unseen physiological processes. Similarly, activity energy expenditure (AEE), calculated as the difference between TEE and BMR (Black et al. 1996), includes energy expenditure on physiological activity other than movement and muscle activity. Physical Activity Muscles at rest use relatively little energy (Elia 1992, Wang et al. 2011), but during physical activity they can raise the body’s rate of energy expenditure by more than an order of magnitude above BMR. A compendium of energy costs for a broad range of activities is regularly updated by Ainsworth et al. (2000). Still, calculating the proportion of TEE expended in physical activity is difﬁcult, because recording all muscle activity is challenging and estimating its cost introduces error. Further, as noted above, common measures of physical activity, such as PAL and AEE, overestimate the true contribution of physical activity to TEE by ignoring diurnal ﬂuctuation in RMR. www.annualreviews.org • Human Energetics 175 One approach to estimating the contribution of physical activity to TEE is to subtract the PAL of subjects restricted to bed rest from the PAL of healthy, active adults. Given that a completely inactive adult has a PAL of ∼1.3 (Black et al. 1996) (Table 1), physical activity in healthy adults (PAL = 1.6–1.9) must contribute an additional 0.3–0.6 PAL, equivalent to 19–32% of TEE. Note that this ﬁgure includes the cost of walking, climbing stairs, and other gross motor activities as well as that of less-noticeable activities (e.g., sitting, typing, ﬁdgeting). Levine (2004) has argued that the daily energetic cost of these minor activities constitutes an important component of TEE, which he terms nonexercise activity thermogenesis. Growth Butte (2000) provides a thorough overview of the energy costs of growth for humans, synthesizing a large body of DLW measurements. Growth costs are generally estimated at 20 kJ/g of new tissue deposited (Butte 2000). By combining TEE measured via DLW (which does not capture the energy invested in new tissue) with weight velocities for growing children from Tanner and colleagues (1996), Butte calculated the proportion of daily energy requirements allocated to growth in healthy human children. For both boys and girls, growth accounted for 28–39% of daily energy requirements during the ﬁrst 3 months of infancy, falling to 4–5% of daily energy throughput at 1 year and then to ∼2% or less by age 2. These estimates are for well-nourished children in developed countries and may be somewhat lower for children with slower growth rates. These rough estimates of growth cost are useful but may obscure many important costs of development. For example, Kuzawa and colleagues (2014), using data from positron emission tomography studies of brain glucose uptake, found that the energy requirements of the developing human brain peak in early childhood, around age 5, accounting for more than 40% of TEE. This peak in brain energy use is associated with synapse development
and learning, rather than with the deposition of new brain tissue (brain growth is nearly complete by age 5). Notably, this period of high metabolic activity in the brain corresponds to a period of slow growth in the body overall, strongly suggesting that the high metabolic demands of the developing human brain lead to a slowing of growth and an extension childhood (Kuzawa et al. 2014). Similar studies of developmental cost in other organ systems are needed to provide an integrated perspective of growth and metabolism in humans and other primates. Reproduction The energetic costs and consequences of pregnancy and reproduction in both humans and nonhuman primates have received a great deal of attention (see Ellison 2001, 2003; Dufour & Sauther 2002; Butte & King 2005; Martin 2007; Dunsworth et al. 2012; Emery Thompson 2013). Reproduction is incredibly expensive for humans, with an estimated total metabolic cost of pregnancy of ∼78,000 kcal, and peak lactation costs of ∼630 kcal/day (Butte & King 2005). The cost of lactation is offset by the mobilization of fat reserves, such that daily energy requirements during lactation peak at ∼450 kcal/day, similar to the daily energy cost of pregnancy during the third trimester (Butte & King 2005). These costs bring human mothers to the brink of unsustainable TEE, with a PAL of ∼2.1 (Hammond & Diamond 1997). Dunsworth and colleagues (2012) have argued that gestation length in humans is limited by the mother’s capacity for energy throughput, with birth occurring just as the fetus threatens the mother’s metabolic ceiling (and see Ellison 2001). Under this scenario, the relatively underdeveloped, altricial nature of human newborns is a consequence of the mother’s metabolic limits; longer gestations and greater development in utero simply cannot be sustained. 176 Pontzer With reproduction so energetically expensive, humans and other primates have evolved a suite of physiological strategies for limiting its costs and reducing the likelihood of failure. Ellison (1990, 2001, 2003) and others have shown that human ovarian function is remarkably sensitive to energy availability and stress, reducing the likelihood of conception during unfavorable conditions. Energy investment during gestation and lactation is relatively buffered against maternal energetic stress, but gestation length, birth weight, and the duration of lactational amenorrhea all respond to some degree to energy availability (Ellison 2003). Milk content and volume also appear to be relatively buffered, but more studies of milk composition across the lactation period are needed (Hinde & Milligan 2011). This buffering requires decreased metabolic throughput in other organ systems. Mothers in traditional farming populations, with physically demanding lifestyles, may reduce BMR during pregnancy and lactation to keep total daily energy requirements in check (Heini et al. 1991, Dufour & Sauther 2002). Immune Function Mounting an immune response to infection requires energy, but although the physiological responses to disease have been intensively studied, their energy costs are not well characterized (Muehlenbein 2010, Muehlenbein et al. 2010). Work in nonhuman mammals suggests metabolic rate increases of 10–50% are common in response to infection (see Muehlenbein et al. 2010). Muehlenbein and colleagues (2010), in one of the few human studies of immune function energetics, report an 8% increase in RMR among nonfebrile men with relatively minor respiratory tract infections. Torine and colleagues (2007) compared premature infants with sepsis to age-matched healthy controls and found 43% greater TEE among those ﬁghting infection. Digestion The energy costs of digestion, termed the thermic effect of food (TEF) (Kinabo & Durnin 1990), are typically estimated at 10% of the caloric value of the meal consumed (Black et al. 1996). Kinabo & Durnin (1990) reported TEF values ranging from 7% to 9% of the energy consumed for a range of diets, with no effect of nutrient composition on TEF. The majority of TEF reﬂects the work done in digestion and transport of nutrients, but approximately 20% of TEF derives from the activation of the sympathetic nervous system (Welle 1995). Calculations of AEE sometimes account for TEF by reducing TEE by 10% prior to subtracting BMR, such that AEE = 0.9 TEE −BMR. Thermoregulation In conditions outside of the thermoneutral zone (22–26◦C for lightly clothed human subjects) metabolic rate increases to either heat or cool the body and defend a core temperature of 37◦C. The metabolic
responses to acute cold and heat exposure have been relatively well studied in laboratory settings, but in normal daily life, clothing, housing, and other cultural innovations greatly reduce thermoregulatory demands. Nonetheless, Leonard and colleagues (2002) showed that circumpolar populations, living in exceptionally cold environments, exhibit elevated BMR. Indigenous subjects showed a greater elevation in BMR (women: 17%, men: 19%) than nonindigenous subjects (women: 5%, men: 14%) after controlling for fat-free mass, suggesting a genetic component to cold adaptation in native populations. More recently, in a study of the Yakut population in Siberia, Leonard and colleagues (2014) reported a 6% increase in BMR during winter months among adults 19–49 years, but no difference in older adults. The elevation in BMR in response to cold is likely due in part to the activity of brown adipose tissue (Saito 2013, Muzik www.annualreviews.org • Human Energetics 177 et al. 2013). It remains unclear whether these increases in BMR result in corresponding increases in TEE. In a study of Dutch adults, Plasqui & Westerterp (2004) found similar TEE in summer and winter despite increased winter BMR. ECOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF TOTAL ENERGY EXPENDITURE It is often assumed that TEE reﬂects variation in ecology, particularly the level of physical activity, among individuals and populations. Indeed, this is the foundational assumption underlying factorial models of TEE (FAO et al. 2001) (see sidebar, Methods for Determining Total Energy Expenditure), which have been widely adopted in human and nonhuman primate ecology and paleoanthropology. However, factorial estimates are generally no more reliable for predicting TEE among individuals than are estimates from body mass (r2 values of 0.2–0.3 within populations) (see Leonard et al. 1997, Walsh et al. 2004) and tend to underestimate mean TEE, particularly in physically active populations (Leonard et al. 1997, Kashiwazaki et al. 2009). Similarly, as noted above, accelerometry-based measures of physical activity add little to TEE estimates based on fat-free mass (Plasqui et al. 2013), and accelerometry-based estimates of TEE often deviate substantially from observed values (Leenders et al. 2006). Empirical measurements of TEE in a broad range of populations and species indicate that the relationship between ecology and TEE is much more complex than factorial models and accelerometry-based estimates of TEE allow. Intervention studies regularly show a short-term increase in TEE among sedentary individuals enrolled into exercise programs (Ross & Janssen 2001). But over the long term, this effect is diminished as the body adapts to the increased workload. For example, Westerterp and colleagues (1992) measured TEE and BMR in sedentary men and women enrolled in a 40-week training program. Subjects ran three times per week, and the duration of these running bouts increased over the course of the study, preparing the subjects to run a half-marathon. TEE increased over the ﬁrst 8 weeks of training but then plateaued for the duration of the study even as the exercise workload increased. Instead, BMR (measured during sleep) decreased to accommodate the increased exercise (Westerterp et al. 1992); such metabolic adaptation to increased activity is thought to be a major reason that exercise-based weight loss programs fail to produce expected weight reduction over the long-term (Ross & Janssen 2001). Similar metabolic responses to increased activity have been reported in laboratory studies for a range of birds and mammals (Pontzer 2015). This dynamic, adaptive view of metabolic physiology is supported by comparative studies of TEE across populations that differ in habitual activity level. Dugas et al. (2011) found no effect of socioeconomic development (a proxy of physical activity) on TEE in a global sample of 183 same-sex cohorts. My colleagues and I (Pontzer et al. 2012) found no difference in TEE between traditional Hadza hunter-gatherers and Westerners, after accounting for effects of lean mass, age, and sex. That same analysis (Pontzer et al. 2012) found that subsistence farmers had somewhat higher TEE, but the effect was variable; for example, among Bolivian farmers, men did not exhibit elevated TEE, but women did. This similarity in TEE among populations with different levels of physical activity is not restricted to humans. In a recent analysis of 19 populations representing 17 species of primate, controlling for body mass, my colleagues and I (Pontzer et al. 2014) found no difference in TEE between captive and wild primate populations
. These results indicate that the effects of habitual physical activity are muted by dynamic physiological responses that work to maintain TEE within a narrow range. This constrained TEE model, in turn, suggests that energy allocation among physiological activities is responsive over the long-term to changes in physical activity (Pontzer 2015). Indeed, physiological adaptation to increased workload is well documented. As noted above, Ellison and colleagues (Ellison & Lager 178 Pontzer Methods for Determining Total Energy Expenditure); it assumes that all costs are additive and cannot account for adaptive and dynamic changes in allocation. Factorial estimates of TEE should be used cautiously for living populations and, ideally, validated against DLW measurements within the study population. Using the factorial method to estimate TEE for nonhuman primates or fossil hominins (e.g., Leonard & Robertson 1997, Key & Ross 1999, Aiello & Key 2002, SteudelNumbers 2006, Snodgrass et al. 2007, Froehle & Churchill 2009) raises particular challenges, as validation against empirical measurements of TEE is often difﬁcult or (for extinct populations) impossible. Second, public health policy, particularly as it pertains to obesity and metabolic syndrome, may be improved by adopting an adaptive, dynamic view of metabolic physiology. The importance of regular exercise in promoting and maintaining good health is well established, but the mechanisms involved remain an area of active research. If TEE is constrained, increasing exercise energy expenditure would have a muted effect on TEE but would reduce energy expenditure in other, potentially harmful, physiological activities. Consistent with this hypothesis, exercise is associated with a reduction in inﬂammation response and other metabolic activity that is implicated in the development of chronic disease (Michigan et al. 2011, Roemmich et al. 2014, Silverman & Deuster 2014). Population differences in energy allocation, rather than in TEE, could underlie low rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other chronic illness and age-related decline in traditional populations (e.g., O’Dea 1991, Vasunilashorn et al. 2010, Pontzer et al. 2012, Pisor et al. 2013). Conversely, if physical activity has a limited effect on TEE, strategies for weight loss and healthy weight maintenance should focus on diet and food energy intake (Luke & Cooper 2013). Third, insofar as TEE reﬂects physiological constraints, the physiological limits of TEE may be shaped in large part by genetics and may therefore be subject to evolution through natural selection (Sibly & Brown 2007, Pontzer & Kamilar 2009). Consequently, variation in TEE among species may reﬂect evolved, systemic changes in metabolic physiology rather than differences in physical activity. These evolved metabolic strategies are central to the ecology and physiology of a species. www.annualreviews.org • Human Energetics 179 103 105 104 103 102 101 100 102 101 100 10–1 10–2 10–3 Body mass (kg) Total energy expenditure (kcal/day) Terrestrial carnivores Nonprimates y = 209x 0.77; R2 = 0.96 Aquatic carnivores NONPRIMATES PRIMATES Wild Primates y = 107x 0.73; R2 = 0.97 Captive Artiodactyls Rodents Bats Other Sloths Aardwolves Orangutans Figure 1 Total energy expenditure (TEE) versus body mass for primates (n = 19 populations, 17 species) and nonprimate eutherian mammals (n = 86 species). Data from Pontzer et al. (2014) and Simmen et al. (2015). Separate trend lines for primates (red ) and nonprimates ( gray) are shown. Trend line for primates excludes mouse lemurs (Microcebus murinus). See Pontzer et al. (2014) for an in-depth comparison of primate and nonprimate regressions. Among primates, orangutans are notable for having low TEE, which may reﬂect a metabolic strategy to reduce the risk of starvation during periods of low food availability (Pontzer et al. 2010). Two eutherian mammals >1 kg fall below the primate trendline: aardwolves (Proteles cristaus) and sloths (Bradypus variegatus). Sloths and aardwolves, and perhaps orangutans, also exhibit low basal metabolic rate (BMR) (Nagy & Montgomery 1980, Williams et al. 1997, Pontzer et al. 2010). EVOLUTION OF TOTAL ENERGY EXPENDITURE IN HUMANS AND OTHER PRIMATES Considerable variation in TEE has been documented among species and
clades, even when controlling for body size (Nagy et al. 1999, Pontzer et al. 2014). As discussed above, my collaborators and I have recently shown that primates, including humans, expend only half of the energy expected for a placental mammal of similar body mass (Pontzer et al. 2014) (Figure 1). The magnitude of difference is too large to be a result of differences in physical activity. To put human TEE in context, predicted TEE for a 65-kg eutherian mammal is 5,550 kcal/day (Pontzer et al. 2014), which exceeds all but the most extreme feats of human endurance and is clearly not sustainable over the long-term (Black et al. 1996, Cooper et al. 2011). As with human populations, lifestyle differences appear to have little effect on TEE in nonhuman primates. Captive (zoo and sanctuary) 180 Pontzer and wild populations have similar TEE, and daily energy intake among wild populations closely matches TEE measured in captivity (Pontzer et al. 2014). The reduction in TEE is found across the primate order, indicating that it evolved very early in the primate radiation. BMR does not show the same reduction across primates; monkeys and apes have BMR similar to other placental mammals, whereas BMR among lemurs and lorises is marginally lower (Snodgrass et al. 2007, Pontzer et al. 2014). My colleagues and I (Pontzer et al. 2014) have hypothesized that this divergence in BMR and TEE reﬂects the evolutionary increase in brain size among anthropoid primates. Initially, early primates, which were small bodied and had unremarkable brain sizes, evolved a reduced metabolic rate that would have decreased both BMR and TEE. As brain size later increased in primates, particularly in anthropoids, BMR also increased, reﬂecting the high metabolic cost of brain tissue (Elia 1992, Wang et al. 2011). Today, the highly encephalized anthropoid primates evince BMR similar to that of other placental mammals, whereas the less-encephalized strepsirhine primates retain somewhat lower BMR. The grade shift in TEE accounts for the slow rates of growth, reproduction, and aging evident among primates. Primates have the slowest life histories of any eutherian order (Charnov 1993, Charnov & Berrigan 1993). However, when rates of growth, reproduction, and senescence are plotted against metabolic rate rather than body mass, this difference in life history falls away (Pontzer et al. 2014). The ultimate evolutionary reasons for changes in TEE remain largely unresolved and may well vary among different lineages (Brown et al. 2004, Sibly & Brown 2007, Pontzer & Kamilar 2009). Increased TEE may support greater reproductive output and thus be favored when food availability is high (Mueller & Diamond 2001), whereas lowering TEE may reduce the risk of starvation during food shortages as well as the risks, including predation, associated with foraging (Sibly & Brown 2007, Pontzer & Kamilar 2009). Species with particularly low TEE may be informative here. Two nonprimate eutherian mammals fall below the primate TEE/body mass trend line: three-toed sloths (Bradypus variegatus) and aardwolves (Proteles cristatus) (Figure 1). Sloths are notoriously sedentary, and their extremely slow metabolism may be part of a slow, cryptic lifestyle that reduces the risk of predation (Nagy & Montgomery 1980). Aardwolves have a highly derived diet, feeding almost exclusively on termites; their low TEE is thought to be an adaptation for reducing energy requirements and the risk of starvation (Williams et al. 1997). Similarly, orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) exhibit very low TEE, even for a primate (Figure 1), and my colleagues and I (Pontzer et al. 2010) have proposed that their low metabolic throughput is an adaptation to reduce the risk of starvation during the severe but unpredictable periods of food shortage in their native habitats. These extreme cases suggest TEE may be a target of selection in the context of foraging ecology and predation, but the evolutionary relationships linking foraging ecology, TEE, and life-history strategies are not well understood and remain an important focus for future research. Larger samples are needed to examine evolutionary changes in TEE within the hominoid clade, but the available evidence suggests that TEE has decreased substantially in orangutans and may have increased in our own lineage, independent of changes in mass and activity (
Pontzer et al. 2010, 2014). Changes in TEE—the size of the daily “energy budget”—would hold important implications for reconstructing hominin evolutionary history (Pontzer 2012). Ecophysiological models for increased brain size and reproductive output in hominins have emphasized energetic trade-offs between brain and gut size (e.g., Aiello & Wheeler 1995, Isler & van Schaik 2009) or locomotor cost (Navarrete et al. 2011), an approach that assumes the daily energy budget, TEE, is ﬁxed. However, if the energy budget can expand and contract over evolutionary time, these models need to account for potential changes in TEE as well as trade-offs in energy investment and allocation. www.annualreviews.org • Human Energetics 181 SUMMARY TEE in humans and other primates has traditionally been viewed as a simple product of body size and activity level (FAO et al. 2001). Although this perspective persists in some areas of ecology and public health, a large and increasing set of studies from free-living populations across a broad range of populations and species provides a much more dynamic and complex view of our metabolic physiology. TEE in humans and other primates is remarkably low compared with that of other placental mammals, a previously unappreciated aspect of the primate phenotype that appears to correspond with primates’ distinctively slow life histories. Physical activity is an important component of TEE, but variation in physical activity among individuals or populations has less effect on TEE than is often assumed. Instead, in humans and other species TEE appears to be maintained within a relatively narrow, evolved, and species-speciﬁc physiological range. The ecological and evolutionary pressures shaping TEE and BMR in humans and other primates are important areas for future research and discovery. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT The author is not aware of any afﬁliations, memberships, funding, or ﬁnancial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank David Raichlen, Dale Schoeller, William Wong, Peter Ellison, and Amy Luke for insightful conversations that have helped shape my thinking on human and primate energetics. LITERATURE CITED Aiello LC, Key C. 2002. Energetic consequences of being a Homo erectus female. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 14:551– 65 Aiello LC, Wells JCK. 2002. Energetics and the evolution of the genus Homo. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 31:323– 38 Aiello LC, Wheeler P. 1995. The expensive-tissue hypothesis: the brain and the digestive system in human and primate evolution. Curr. Anthropol. 36:199–221 Ainsworth BE, Haskell WL, Whitt MC, Irwin ML, Swartz AM, et al. 2000. Compendium of physical activities: an update of activity codes and MET intensities. Med. Sci. Sports Exerc. 32:S498–504 Ant´on SC, William RL, Marcia LR. 2002. An ecomorphological model of the initial hominid dispersal from Africa. J. Hum. Evol. 43:773–85 Bergouignan A, Antoun E, Momken I, Schoeller DA, Gauquelin-Koch G, et al. 2013. Effect of contrasted levels of habitual physical activity on metabolic ﬂexibility. J. Appl. Physiol. 114:371–79 Bergouignan A, Momken I, Schoeller DA, Normand S, Zahariev A, et al. 2010. Regulation of energy balance during long-term physical inactivity induced by bed rest with and without exercise training. J. Clin. Endocrinol. Metab. 95:1045–53 Black AE, Coward WA, Cole TJ, Prentice AM. 1996. Human energy expenditure in afﬂuent societies: an analysis of 574 doubly-labelled water measurements. Eur. J. Clin. Nutr. 50:72–92 Bribiescas RG. 2001. Serum leptin levels and anthropometric correlates in Ache Amerindians of eastern Paraguay. Am. J. Phys. Anthropol. 115:297–303 Brown JH, Gillooly JF, Allen AP, Savage VM, West BG. 2004. Toward a metabolic theory of ecology. Ecology 85:1771–89 Butte NF. 2000. Fat intake of children in relation to energy requirements. Am. J. Clin. Nutr. 72:1246S–52S Butte NF, Ekelund U, Westerterp KR. 2012. Assessing physical activity using wearable monitors
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of these technologies on contemporary archaeological practice. This article reﬂects on how the democratization and proliferation of HDSM opens various applications and greatly broadens the set of problems being addressed explicitly and directly through shape and place. 347 INTRODUCTION Shape, Space, and Place in Archaeology What is so revolutionary and wonderful about recording the shapes of things and their places? The ability to record these fundamental archaeological data has been around since the beginning of the discipline. More than two generations ago, Gordon Willey stated that the objectives of archaeology are “approached by the study and manipulation of three basic factors: form, space and time” (Willey 1953, p. 361). In 1960, Albert Spaulding identiﬁed what he termed the “dimensions” of archaeology. He deﬁned dimension as “an aspect or property of the subject matter which requires its own special measuring device” (Spaulding 1960, p. 438). In the same way that radiocarbon and related dating techniques profoundly changed the structure of archaeology by providing the ability to precisely and accurately measure the dimension of time, we argue that high-density survey and measurement (HDSM) will impact the other two dimensions: space and form. Furthermore, the rapidity and ease with which the technologies needed to measure these dimensions can now be deployed move spatial and morphological data from specialist or exceptional recording to the norm. This democratization and proliferation are fundamentally important because they open up various applications and greatly broaden the set of problems being addressed. What Is HDSM? HDSM incorporates a growing suite of technologies that facilitate the measurement, recordation, and analysis of the spatial, locational, and morphological properties of objects, sites, structures, and landscapes with unprecedented spatial resolution and precision. Key technologies today include airborne lidar, real-time kinematic global navigation satellite system and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and global positioning system (GPS) survey for projects working at the landscape scale, robotic total stations, terrestrial “laser” scanning, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based SfM/CRP or scanning for projects at the medium (site) scale, and structured light scanning and close range photogrammetry [CRP, also known as structure from motion (SfM)] for work at the intra-site to object scale (Figure 1). In short, collectively these technologies are supporting data acquisition for recording the form, location, and orientation of archaeologically relevant remains (mobile objects, landforms, architecture) across a number of scales. The enterprise of capturing rich data on form and place has thus moved from the resource-expensive/difﬁcult/time-intensive quadrant toward the low-resource/straightforward/low-time-investment quadrant. These changes are not mere improvements in our former methods but represent a fundamental shift in how we create and engage with the archaeological record. Rather than provide quickly dated detail on the individual technologies, we include current references, summarized by technology in Table 1, and move directly to the essentials of HDSM data. At the most basic level, all the technologies record relative x,y,z positions on the surfaces of an entity or entities. The returns, summarized or digitally represented as points or pixels or voxels, are spaced closely enough to readily suggest the form and morphology of the entity, and the returns may be geolocated through the inclusion of control points or by spatial tagging at a more generalized scale. In some cases, spectral properties or other physical properties of the elements are recorded by the same signal that is providing the spatial information; however, for the purposes of this article, we exclusively consider the x,y,z data and their derivatives. History of HDSM Technology in Archaeology The history of recording shape and place in archaeology is also a history of archaeological survey and illustration. In this light, HDSM’s precursors include architectural and plane table survey, 348 Opitz· Limp a b c d Figure 1 Examples of high-density survey and measurement (HDSM) data. (a) Terrestrial laser-scanning data at Chaco Canyon, United States. (b) Airborne laser-scanning data from Gozo. (c) Structure from motion data from Gabii, Italy. (d ) Head pot from the Hampson Museum Collection. drawings and line drawings of artifacts (see Adkins & Adkins 1989 and Dobie & Evans 2010). Within this long history, the crucial transition from traditional survey and measurement (SM) to HDSM is marked by a series of technological watersheds (see Table 2). The impact of these technological developments on disciplines for which ﬁeldwork, often in remote locales, is central cannot be overstated. Vitek (2013), commenting on developments in geomorphology, highlights that “[t]he ability to know exactly where you are in the ﬁeld is now taken for granted,” a far cry from “the beginning of the twentieth century
, [when] the amount and quality of maps available was minimal” (p. 24). The ﬁeld reached this state over a series of technological leaps. To focus on the more recent developments in HDSM speciﬁc to archaeology, we turn to the literature. There are three striking patterns in the growth of the literature on HDSM in archaeology: Conference proceedings rather than traditional journals dominate, the center of gravity in research, development, and applications was and is in Europe, and the literature involving HDSM in North America is just now beginning to explode. There are numerous examples of early www.annualreviews.org • Implications for Practice and Theory 349 References Real-time kinematic GNSS General introductions: Henning 2011, Donahue et al. 2013, TSA 2012 Archaeological applications: Barratt et al. 2000, Leckebusch 2005, Yun-sheng & Chang-qing 2008, Roosevelt 2014 Robotic total stations Archaeological applications: Kvamme et al. 2006 Airborne laser-scanning lidar General introduction: Vosselman & Maas 2010 Archaeological applications: Opitz & Cowley 2013 Sources in United States: USGS et al. 2011, Snyder 2012 Terrestrial laser-scanning General introduction: Barber & Mills 2007, Engl. Herit. 2011, Buckley et al. 2008, Van Genechten 2008 Archaeological applications: Limp et al. 2011, Remondino & Campana 2014; see also International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (http://www.cage.curtin.edu.au/∼gordonsj/isprs_wgv3/) Close-range photogrammetry/SfM General introduction: Hanke & Grussenmeyer 2002 Archaeological applications: Ioannides et al. 2014, Remondino & Campana 2014 Abbreviations: GNSS, global navigation satellite system; SfM, structure from motion. investigations in the technologies that compose HDSM (examples include Anderson 1982, Barber & Mills 2001, Doneus & Neubauer 1998, Ebert 1984, Gisiger et al. 1997, Lagerqvist 1999), but for all practical purposes, they did not have a signiﬁcant footprint in archaeology until the early 2000s and in North America until the second decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century. North America has lagged behind Europe and the rest of the world for several potential reasons. Perhaps one of the most signiﬁcant was the early realization in Europe that HDSM was a key method in heritage management and interpretation, especially where there was a preponderance of architectural remains. Over the past decades, the European Union has funded many multi-institutional research programs focused on the development and application of HDSM, investing many tens of millions of euros to do so. Institutional linkages between archaeologists and HDSM practitioners are also often strong in Europe, where heritage case studies often serve as vehicles for research problems in computer vision and other computational research efforts (cf. http://www.cd-coform.eu). Table 2 Introduction and peak use of main technologies and corresponding key references Introduction and/or peak of technology Key publications Aerial photography circa 1910s Crawford 1928; Poidebard 1929; Agache & Br´eart 1983; Brophy & Cowley 2005, Opitz & Cowley 2013, chapter 2 GIS systems circa 1980s Kvamme 1989, Allen et al. 1990, Lock 2000, Mehrer & Wescott 2005, Conolly & Lake 2006, McCoy & Ladefoged 2009, Llobera 2012 (Robotic) total station survey circa 2000s Kvamme et al. 2006 Real-time kinematic GNSS/GPS circa 2000s Barratt et al. 2000, Leckebusch 2005, Henning 2011, Limp & Barnes 2014 Object, terrestrial, and airborne laser-scanning circa 2000s Barber et al. 2001, Barber & Mills 2007, Van Genechten 2008, Vosselman & Maas 2010, Limp et al. 2011, Opitz & Cowley 2013, Remondino & Campana 2014 Photogrammetry/SfM circa 1990s and 2000s Clouten 1974, Dennett & Muessig 1980, Anderson 1982, Debevec et al. 1996, Gisiger et al. 1997, Hanke & Grussenmeyer
2002, Ioannides et al. 2014, Remondino & Campana 2014 Abbreviations: GIS, geographic information systems; GNSS, global navigation satellite system; SfM, structure from motion. 350 Opitz· Limp Much of the early and current literature relevant to archaeology can be found in conference proceedings from organizations such as CIPA (The International Committee for Documentation of Cultural Heritage) and a number of working groups from the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Of particular signiﬁcance are those in Commission V: WG/2 on “Cultural Heritage Data Acquisition and Processing,” WG/3 on “Terrestrial 3D Imaging and Sensors,” and WG/5 on “Close Range Measurements for Biomedical Sciences.” (Conference proceedings are available at http://www.isprs.org/publications/default.aspx and http://cipa.icomos.org/index.php?id=28.) More recent signiﬁcant sources are the conferences and the proceedings produced by Computers and Mathematics in Archaeology (CAA; proceedings are available at http://caaconference.org/proceedings/) and the European Association for Computer Graphics’ VAST conferences (proceedings at https://diglib.eg.org/EG/DL/WS/VAST). The recent products of the EU Project 3D-COFORM (available at http://www.3d-coform.eu) and the proceedings of the recently established Digital Heritage Conferences (Addison et al. 2013) are required reading for those interested in HDSM. There are numerous recent surveys and compendia covering many of the topics discussed in this review. In particular, the reader should consider some volumes that provide excellent access points to the more widely distributed proceedings and journal articles (Ioannides et al. 2014, Opitz & Cowley 2013, Remondino & Campana 2014, Vosselman & Maas 2010). For a somewhat dated but solid review with a similar focus, see McCoy & Ladefoged (2009). As a whole, the literature on HDSM, regardless of the technology or technologies at hand, focuses on the mechanics of data capture, assessments of data quality, comparisons between data capture techniques, and case studies illustrating the successful aggregation of large quantities of data. HDSM, to date, has been primarily about data capture, with aspirations toward analysis and interpretation. However, publications that are oriented substantively toward analysis and that make the intellectual leap to archaeological interpretation and the production of new archaeological information and arguments remain rather thin. ACTIVE AREAS IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL HDSM We identify six areas of archaeological activity that explicitly or implicitly take advantage of the development of HDSM. Each of these areas, perhaps not coincidentally, is a part of the discipline where core archaeology intersects with the strong inﬂuence of an allied ﬁeld. In presenting current work and suggesting future potential in each of these areas, we intend to paint an optimistic picture of the state of HDSM in archaeology and point to a way out of the trap of data capture centrism and technology comparisons that have dominated the HDSM literature to date. We suggest that the interesting work is scattered throughout archaeology and that archaeologists using HDSM in important analytical and interpretive ways are not talking about HDSM explicitly. They are simply engaging with data on space and form and place, as archaeologists do. HDSM is most successful when it is pervasive and implicit, a state it is nearing in the work emerging in several of the key active domains identiﬁed here. Zooarchaeology and Bioarchaeology The impact of humans and their activities on animal communities, both domestic and wild, is of long-standing interest to zooarchaeologists, and the potential value of this research for studies of the evolution of phenotypes, trait selection (intentional or not), and environmental impacts viewed through animal populations has more recently been recognized by researchers interested in sustainability and ecodynamics. Well-provenanced archaeological skeletal collections are emerging www.annualreviews.org • Implications for Practice and Theory 351 (for domains outside archaeology) as key repositories for the study of medium-term evolution, leveraging time depth and spatial distribution and close ties with speciﬁc cultural behaviors, i.e., human-impacted contexts available through the archaeological record. Morphological analyses in zooarchaeology have traditionally depended on manual measurement of a few skeletal dimensions. As such, the process has been labor intensive and the suite of available metrics have been limited. Substantial advances in studies dependent on detailed morphological analysis (such as those dealing with the changes in skeletal structures relating to domestication) may be achieved through scanning and analyzing large collections of skeletons. In parallel, bioarchaeologists are taking advantage of the detailed morphological analyses supported by HDSM to pursue questions of changing skeletal morphology and biomechanics in human populations in relation to changes in
activity patterns and the environment. HDSM studies have been useful in assessing changes in skeletal structures related to the evolution of bipedalism, for example. This approach supports research on important events, including the development of bipedalism, the divergence between population groups, the emergence of agriculture, and the transition from nomadism. As with animal populations, statistical robustness in the pool of available measurements, the size of the population that may be readily addressed, and the development of new measurements relevant to biomechanical and morphological traits are facilitated through HDSM (Benazzi et al. 2014, Davies et al. 2012, Garvin & Ruff 2012, Hammond et al. 2013, Niven et al. 2009, Macintosh et al. 2014, Tocheri et al. 2005, von Cramon-Taubadel et al. 2013). The digitization of large collections by the Idaho Virtualization Laboratory (http://ivl.imnh. isu.edu/Library/VMZI/VMZI.htm), the EVAN-SOCIETY (European Virtual Anthropology Network–Society), and the Virtebra Lab at the University of West Florida (http://virtebra. wordpress.com/) are examples of key early efforts in these domains. Smaller projects handling collections for individual research or teaching are proliferating [e.g., the Museum of London Archaeology Digitized Diseases; the Paciﬁc Slope Archaeological Lab (http://oregonstate.edu/psal/); the Ikaahuk Archaeology Project; Bernard Means’s work at Virginia Commonwealth University; Appalachian State University’s teaching collection (https://osteoteaching.wordpress.com)], as digital capture of skeletal morphology moves toward the pervasive. This work is developing in parallel with efforts in paleoanthropology, e.g., the work of Ungar on dental microwear and micromorphology (Scott et al. 2006, Ungar et al. 2012). (Anthropo)geomorphology, Geoarchaeology, and Archaeological Stratigraphy The documentation of macrostratigraphy and microtopography in detail using HDSM is beginning to drive innovative work on formation and taphonomic processes, drawing on geomorphology, geoarchaeology, and stratigraphic analysis. Work in this realm is being undertaken both by geoarchaeological specialists and more broadly by excavating archaeologists documenting soil deposits in unprecedented detail. This development in documentation method is an expansion of geoarchaeology in that in the excavation context “geoarchaeology focuses on sediments and sedimentation, microstratigraphy and soil horizons, as well as evidence for alternating stability and change” (Butzer 2008, p. 404); however, most excavations are traditionally conﬁned to microstratigraphic study. Fruitful new areas identiﬁed by Butzer (2008) include the assessment of site or deposit integrity, combined human and geological processes in urban site formation, and processual links between a site and its wider environment. HDSM has a clear role to play in pursuing each of these. The question of site or deposit integrity (stratigraphic reliability) and the association of mobile ﬁnds, that is portable artifacts, with their sedimentary contexts is of fundamental importance. Detailed documentation using HDSM of the deposits’ surfaces with artifacts and inclusions 352 Opitz· Limp embedded may provide new insights to respond to this question. To date, urban excavation analyses have been dominated (in most cases) by the study of architectural remains and mobile ﬁnds. The intricate sedimentary architecture of urban sites, resulting from complex depositional histories, both during their active anthropogenic formation and use and during their afterlife, is an area with great potential. We may see substantial beneﬁts from more detailed studies of soil slumping, compaction, downslope movement, and collapse through HDSM data on surfaces and volumes. We may equally view work such as that of Lenoble & Bertran (2004) or Powlesland and the team at West Heslerton (1998, Powlesland et al. 1998, Powlesland & May 2010, Conolly & Lake 2007) as dependent on HDSM and working at the intersection of geoarchaeology and excavation because the interrelationship between site formation and taphonomic processes and artifact distributions representative of combined human and environmental impacts are studied on the basis of detailed digital mapping exercises. Indeed, the long-term research at West Heslerton led by Powlesland represents one of the key sustained investigations into plough zone stratigraphic formation processes. The detailed spatial recording of dense artifact distributions and orientations within an excavation context (general notes in Roskam 2001, pp. 150–52) is central to the study of many early human occupation sites: for example
, Haua Fteah in Libya (Douka et al. 2014); lithic scatters such as in Gault, Texas (Waters et al. 2011); and metal production sites such as in Tell Tayinat (Roames 2011). Although it is often done with total station or robotic station mapping, and less frequently with laser-scanning, this work represents an HDSM approach (Ricks 1976, McPherron 2005). These detailed object provenance studies and the study of the interﬁngering of deposits created through “natural” processes as compared with those created through more direct human intervention may allow the reﬁnement of the chain of events resulting from interactions between a site and its wider environment (Beach & Luzzadder-Beach 2008). At the same time, HDSM is acting as a driver for a fundamental change in general excavation practices. Total stations and GPS/GNSS instruments are widely used for topographic mapping on sites and have been for well over a decade, although the precision of the measurements from the commonly used differentially processed GPS/GNSS (decimeter levels at best) is modest. The increasing affordability of higher-precision (e.g., centimeter and subcentimeter level) real-time kinematic GPS/GNSS systems (cf. Limp & Barnes 2014) will undoubtedly lead to their adoption and improvement in measurements. The use of HDSM for stratigraphic recording, through either laser-scanning or SfM, is increasingly common, with leading efforts by the University of Vienna and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection (LBI) (M. Doneus and W. Neubauer), Lund University and Duke University (N. Dell’Unto and M. Forte), the University of Cologne (D. Hoffmeister), the University of Michigan and the University of Arkansas (N. Terrenato and R.S. Opitz), and the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) at the University of California San Diego (T.E. Levy and N. Smith) with roots in the early 2000s (Doneus & Neubauer 2005, Doneus et al. 2011, Dell’Unto et al. 2015, Forte et al. 2012, Opitz & Nowlin 2012, Smith & Levy 2014). The effect of these maturing efforts is a renewed interest in the morphology of soil deposits and the physical structure of stratigraphic sequences (e.g., Frankl et al. 2015, Kaiser et al. 2014, McCoy et al. 2010, Penasa et al. 2014, Ravanel et al. 2014); speciﬁc research questions remain to be deﬁned. The convergence of the research agendas in these linked domains should be an active area in years to come. Contextual Topography At the landscape scale, topography is being revived as a key data source in the form of contextual topography, combining microrelief representing diffuse archaeological features embedded www.annualreviews.org • Implications for Practice and Theory 353 in landforms with proxies for recent land use that provide insight into preservation and visibility (Opitz & Cowley 2013, chapter 1). Topographic data have a long history in some regions, e.g., the United Kingdom and France, where earthworks constitute an important part of the record, but this form of survey historically was and remains less well integrated into rural and regional studies in Meso-America or inland Australia, for example. This differential uptake, with the adoption of airborne lidar [also known as airborne laser-scanning (ALS)] in Europe ahead by nearly a decade compared with other regions, is tied to, among other drivers, the spread of landscape archaeology, the popularization of historic landscape characterization approaches (e.g., Dobson & Selman 2012, Rippon 2012, Turner 2006, Warnock & Grifﬁths 2014), and the ongoing (if glacially slow) implementation of the European Landscape Convention (Counc. Eur. 2000). To oversimplify, large area and holistic studies of archaeological landscapes experienced a moment of popularity in research and academic circles in concert with a growing policy interest in landscape as a unit of management at both national and European Union levels and were tied up with issues of sustainability. Thus there was impetus both from the archaeological community and from public policy institutions to investigate new methods for large-scale documentation and study, and airborne lidar/ALS was seen as a key tool for new studies and management initiatives. Well-developed and institutionally supported traditions of aerial survey were equally essential in preparing the ground for the rapid adoption of ALS into archaeological practice in the United Kingdom. A fortunate historical coincidence in the development of the European Union and its associated program of research exchange and networking programs
(e.g., Culture 2000, Archaeolandscapes) helped proliferate this approach in Europe. Further institutional drivers, including the Malta Convention (Counc. Eur. 1992), are playing a crucial role in bringing ALS into European archaeology in a heritage-management context. In the Meso-American and Southeast Asian contexts, the same ALS data affecting our understanding of rural archaeology in Europe are altering and promoting research on diffuse urbanism, with dramatic effect (see Chase et al. 2012 for a general discussion on MesoAmerica). Landmark studies including those at Ankor Wat (Evans et al. 2013) and Caracol (Chase et al. 2011) are illuminating a form of urbanism that is a far cry from the compact form often imagined when we think “city.” HDSM’s greatest successes are perhaps at this landscape scale because airborne lidar is used, if for nothing else, as a background terrain model wherever it is available. Basic assessment of lidar, wherever available, has become a standard part of desktop assessment in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and a growing cohort of European regions and nations in cultural and heritagemanagement contexts (Crutchley & Crow 2010 for the English Heritage perspective; GeorgesLeroy 2011 for a French Direction R´egionale des Affaires Culturelles (DRAC) perspective). For both rural and urban studies, airborne lidar has made its greatest impact in forested or otherwise heavily vegetated areas, where other forms of archaeological prospection are generally not successful [see studies in, for example, Southwest Germany (Hesse 2013); Eastern France (Fruchart 2014); Lorraine (Georges-Leroy et al. 2012); northwest Spain (Fern´andez-Lozano et al. 2014); and Italy (Coluzzi et al. 2010)]. The opening of these wooded and scrub landscapes to archaeological study provides important research opportunities, both exposing a set of activities previously not readily or thoroughly studied (archaeology of the woodlands) and generating opportunities for ﬁne-grained studies of the medium-term impacts of past anthropogenic activities on woodland vegetation communities. Persistent effects of human alterations of soils and terrain morphology are emerging from HDSM-driven studies, with implications for contemporary landscape and soils management. In both rural and dispersed or low-density urbanism contexts, the challenge now lies in going beyond the identiﬁcation of features. Airborne lidar has been used almost exclusively as a site and feature prospection tool. Creative analyses and applications for these data beyond identifying 354 Opitz· Limp Approaches HDSM materially alters the way we approach the past because it allows us to measure phenomena in what might be called the lived scale, that is a scale that has direct and immediate relevance to human behavior and experience. Archaeologists interested in how the built environment and landscapes shape social interactions and reﬂect social structures have pursued modeling, notably of lines of sight and movement, using a variety of digital tools such as GIS analyses, J-graphs, network analyses, and serious games or virtual worlds built around reconstructions (e.g., Paliou et al. 2014). Archaeologists using HDSM data are increasingly creating virtual places (e.g., Eve 2012) to stage embodied or experiential experiments. By focusing on people’s reactions to space and form, these approaches turn on themes such as movement through an environment, responses to visual cues in architecture, control of visual or physical access, or social positioning through art and monuments. The gist of the critique of these efforts, coming from the phenomenological school [e.g., McEwan & Millican 2012 and other papers in volume 19, number 4 (2012) of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory], is that it is impossible to reconcile a purely spatial and visual experience, or indeed any experience in a virtual setting, with the embodiment experienced in an actual landscape. Chrysanthi et al. (2012) note that computational and virtual works in archaeology “have been long haunted by ﬁerce ocularcentrism” (p. 10). This tension between the virtual experience and embodiment holds, for them, even in the case of more immersive visual and multisensory (in a limited way) virtual environments. The counterargument is that the purely visual, spatial, and metric experiences provided by HDSM in a virtual setting are a valuable complement to the full-sensory experience of being in a place. The virtual experience allows the decomposition of the visual experience as a complex phenomenon that needs to be unpacked. Moreover, the ability to quantify the visual experience, for example by measurements of eye movement or by scales of inherent visual attractiveness based on local color contrast or global rarity, being one of a kind in a set, allows for nonexperiential and nonvocabulary constrained expressions of spatial properties.
We recognize the validity of the critique but suggest that the controlled virtual environment provided by HDSM models provides an excellent medium to force ourselves to think spatially and visually through a controlled, singlesensory experience, which while highly artiﬁcial provides a useful complement to the full-blown real-world experience by pushing us into a “regime of attentiveness” (Wickstead & Barber 2012, p. 84) in which we explicitly focus our attention on a particular aspect of experience and by making us more careful observers. In studies of urban or domestic architecture, the potential for these HDSM-enabled experiential analyses, coupled with architectural analyses, is particularly important. HDSM allows the built environment to be approached both from the detailed study of the structures/plan and from the lived space using a uniﬁed platform, eliding two basic approaches to urban and domestic built environments. Thus HDSM data can afford us the ability to tack rapidly back and forth between an approach rooted in the systematic study of architecture and urban plans as the results of social processes and collective acts and the individual acting within and being guided by their built environment. Data now available for key urban sites and monumental structures should be fruitful ground www.annualreviews.org • Implications for Practice and Theory 355 for pursuing this approach: for example, Pompeii (e.g., http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ record/2048702/ISTI_CNR_HA_POMPEI_INSULA_CORNER.html and http://www. pompejiprojektet.se/insula.php),MachuPicchu(e.g.,http://cast.uark.edu/projects/internetvirtual-metrology-lab-invirmet/invirmet-data-repository/machu-picchu-3d-data.html), Scara Brae (e.g., http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/2048712/object_HA_937.html and http://3dicons-project.eu/index.php/eng/Guidelines-Case-Studies/Case-Studies/SkaraBrae-UK),AnkorWat(e.g.,http://archive.cyark.org/3d-point-cloud-of-a-gopura-tower-inbanteay-kdei-created-from-photo-textured-laser-scan-data-media), and Skellig Michael (e.g., http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record/2048705/object_HA_839.html and http:// www.3dicons.ie/3d-content/sites/246-skelligmichaelisland#3d-model), to name just a few. Research in visual perception indicates that three-dimensional (3D) shape alone is normally enough for recognition and identiﬁcation of an object (cf. Pizlo 2010), although there are a few well-deﬁned exceptions. This potential opens an avenue for research using HDSM models and metrics that describe the spatial characteristics of something, rather than attempting to describe the total visual experience, to get at the suite of visual (and, from that, perceptual and interpretive) possibilities arising from a place. A metrics-driven approach to questions of visual and spatial experience that leverages HDSM data has the potential to bring something substantially new to this domain. The metrics used here would be separate from those geared primarily for the detailed point-to-point or curve-to-curve comparisons of two models—e.g., variants on the Hausdorff distance, which measures the distance between corresponding vertices and edges of two meshes— but rather would rely on the perceptual metrics coming out of computer vision, e.g., measures of shape complexity, curvature concentration, or global rarity (cf. Borji & Itti 2013, Wu et al. 2013). The implications of HDSM for archaeological classiﬁcation, especially at the object level, are enormous (cf. Cardillo 2010, Gilboa et al. 2013, Koutsoudis et al. 2010, Koutsoudis & Chamzas 2011, Selden et al. 2014, Sﬁkas et al. 2013). A Return to Materialism At the object scale, and at that of the built environment, HDSM is entangled with the resurgence of materialism and things as the primary means through which archaeologists engage with the world (cf. Olsen et al. 2012). In a section titled “Second Trend: A Turn to Things Themselves,” Olsen et al. (2012) notes that [r]ecently things—and thing theory—have become a fashionable subject in the cultural and social sciences. Thus, after a century of oblivion in most social and cultural research, and after decades of linguistic and textual turns, there is now much talk about a material twist: a (re)turn to things (e.g., Preda 1999; Brown 2001; Olsen 2003; Domanska 2006; Trent
mann 2009), and that, unlike previous attempts at change, the current one can count among its strengths that it is not about sacriﬁcing archaeology for something else (anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism, hard sciences, etc.)[... ]. Rather it is about having trust in our own project and in what archaeologists hold dearest: Things. It should also provide further reassurance to a few that this is not about making archaeology more theoretical, abstract, and elitist but rather an acknowledgment that knowledge and understanding also emerge from practice and mindful engagements with ditches, layers, relic walls, hearths, slab-lined pits, abandoned mining towns or last week’s rubbish. (p. 28) As the above discussion demonstrates, there is an active conversation in archaeology about things and being thing centric and what this means for us as practitioners, linking through to 356 Opitz· Limp broader discussions of things as active agents (cf. Hodder 2012). HDSM has obvious potential for foregrounding thingness, the physicality and materiality of the soils, structures, surfaces, and mobile objects. We suggest that HDSM models as direct tools for analysis (see above) and communication (see below) are a quite literal and explicit means of being more object centric and being led explicitly by material culture, an opportunity to take thingness and human-thing entanglement seriously, as archaeology’s primary means of engagement with the world. We further suggest that HDSM models are better suited to conveying thingness than are photos, charts, drawings, or other visual means of communication because models promote interactivity and engagement through an interface. Simply put, the HDSM digital model, presented in its native form through an interface that supports interaction, assumes active participatory engagement. The default mode of interaction is not static (the gaze) as with an image, but rather one in which you rotate the model, you move closer to it, you toggle its visibility, you push or pull it, you move around it. These are all descriptions of movement, of physical interaction: They are tactile, which is what makes the digital HDSM model that much closer to thingness than the image. The default mode of interaction, although seeming to be visual (we look at the models), is in fact substantially tactile and physical because, as we view, we touch and move and move through. This added level of engagement is how we interact with objects and constructions. We get to escape the gaze as the default mode of engagement, and the distancing and static nature of the gaze, which is what makes images and drawings less than ideal for communicating things as things. In this context, HDSM affords the possibility of creative means of communication and engagement with the material remains of the past. An HDSM-based model of things, mediated through an interface, provides a proxy that gives to a broad group the possibility to engage with the thing itself rather than providing a description or depiction of that thing. For archaeology, the discipline of things, the ability to communicate more directly through things as things, is the opening of an exciting and unpredictable area of study (for example, see Olson et al. 2014, Reilly & Beale 2014). Data as Publication Data publication, and the widespread use of published raw data, has languished as an ideal rarely put into practice. We most often reference the report, and even the raw data that are published are rarely reused when the report is available, the main exception to this common practice being doctoral dissertations and formal restudy projects such as the Tiber Valley Project (Patterson et al. 2000). Why are researchers reluctant to restudy or recycle other people’s data? Simply put, it is difﬁcult to understand the organization and potential pitfalls of somebody else’s data. Much of the effort surrounding metadata and ontologies and proper archiving boils down to an attempt to provide semantics and structure for disorganized and incomplete and, most importantly, uninterpreted (or in want of reinterpretation) data in an effort to ameliorate the problem stated above. HDSM products seem to be fundamentally different here because they have readily evident pseudosemantic and informational value in a raw preinterpreted state. These data are simultaneously data and representation and are readily reusable precisely because of their low semantics but legible state. It follows that HDSM may be an area for innovation in the digital reuse of data and the repeatability of analyses. With HDSM, when the digital data are curated and made available, later investigators can interrogate the data themselves, validating the initial results or, perhaps, altering them, without encountering signiﬁcant semantic or data structure barriers. With HDSM, the data recorded are more cleanly separated from the information abstracted than are data in most other research situations. Kansa (2005) has made this point clearly and emphasizes that “[s]cholarship www.annualreviews.org •
Implications for Practice and Theory 357 is better served if claims about the past can be evaluated in terms of appropriate use of evidence to support arguments and interpretations” (p. 100). This potential for reuse is being realized. A particular interesting suite of examples of digital reuse are those that utilize the Virtual Hampson Museum collection of some 400 digital objects from the pre-Columbian US mid-south (see Limp et al. 2011). The data have been accessible on the Web since 2008 under a CC 3.0 license. The materials have already been reused in numerous scholarly efforts, including those by Gilboa et al. (2013), Koutsoudis & Chamzas (2011), Koutsoudis et al. (2010), and Sﬁkas et al. (2013). In an unexpected reuse, the digital objects were used as the basis for a 2013 art installation in Toronto (Hanes 2013). The surge in publication in 3D—as evidenced by the inclusion of 3D models in traditional journal publications and in new journals that are explicitly friendly to 3D interactive content (e.g., Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage), as well as by the prominence of 3D in digital social media [e.g., a series of posts on the Electric Archaeology website (http://electricarchaeology.ca/); the 3D Thursday series on The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World website (https://mediterraneanworld.wordpress.com/)], by the proliferation of museum sites such as the 3D Petrie Museum (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/3dpetriemuseum), and by inclusion in major collections such as Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/)—is motivated, on the one hand, by the foregrounding of things through the resurgence of materiality, discussed above, and, on the other hand, by the recyclability and legibility of HDSM data without intensive semantic gymnastics. Although a mix of modeled reconstructions and HDSM-derived models continues to drive publication in 3D, the HDSM models are the main force behind bringing 3D publication into the academic literature. This adaptation of publication media to accommodate HDSM 3D models, such as the move to digital publication and hyperlinked text, should be a moment for creativity and experimentation in how we communicate archaeological information and ideas. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS The domain of archaeological HDSM described here sits at the intersection of multiple disciplines. It technically draws on ﬁelds that include metrology, geomatics, surveying, computer vision, and photogrammetry, and there continues to be ongoing, relevant, signiﬁcant research in these ﬁelds. Archaeologists are rightly concerned about how these approaches will advance their study of the past, and so they are consumers of the research in these other ﬁelds. HDSM applications, then, continue the interdisciplinary trend of contemporary archaeology. Work in this domain also engages with the wider theoretical discourse, particularly with ongoing thinking regarding experiential approaches and materialism. No doubt the development of these discourses will continue to inﬂuence and, we hope, be engaged by HDSM as practiced in archaeology. The impacts of HDSM are broad, cutting across subdisciplinary divides, as the properties being measured are everywhere in archaeology, and so domain-speciﬁc impacts are many and diverse. One particularly signiﬁcant cross-cutting impact is that these methods provide multiple bridges between scientiﬁc and humanistic ways of understanding the past. Emerging approaches that combine metric analysis and experiential perspectives serve as one such bridge, and we see these as a core contribution of HDSM to new directions being forged in archaeology. Another bridge comes in the processes of analysis, interpretation, and communication of HDSM through software and hardware. HDSM data as experienced through these technologies act simultaneously as data and as illustration/visualization/virtual object. The increasing granularity of our data means that 358 Opitz· Limp the technology and user interface through which we view it becomes integral to the data itself and to how we explore and interpret it. The technology is effectively becoming a co-creator of archaeological knowledge together with the human interpreter. The second cross-cutting impact comes as HDSM allows us to decouple measurement from interpretation, data from information, leading to a fundamental alteration of the abstractive process in archaeology. Consider the common task of proﬁling a wall or mapping a ﬂoor in an excavation. The ﬁrst step is to visually process the data and abstract from it relevant objects of interest to be recorded (a pit, post mold, layer or sediment change, etc.). These abstracted elements are then recorded, usually by selecting relevant two-dimensional points and recording them on graph paper. The traditional process can be intentionally (over)simpliﬁed
to a sequence of observe, interpret/abstract, measure, record, analyze. HDSM breaks us out of this process in two ways. First, it pushes us toward a recursive and reﬂexive engagement with the data, in which we observe, record, measure, analyze, and abstract/interpret repeatedly and in varying order. Second, anyone who has followed the groundbreaking work of Simons & Chabris (1999) on “inattentional blindness” is well aware that we see only what we are prepared to see, a point discussed in an archaeological context by Barcel´o (2010, p. 93). Semiautomatic and metrics-driven analyses, promoted by HDSM simply by dint of the scale of the data, provide a parallel abstractive process, and the results of these analyses may point us to aspects of the data or information sitting in our attentional blind spots. In parallel, recent research in neurobiology, computational biology, and behavioral economics is now providing new ways of understanding how humans interact with their surroundings at a fundamental, precognitive level, opening another set of alternative analyses and offering yet another route through the abstractive process as we attempt to escape from the subconscious assumptions that we impose on the archaeological record. The third signiﬁcant cross-cutting impact is in drawing attention to space and form and careful observation and consideration of these basic archaeological dimensions. There is a gap between the ready availability of HDSM data and archaeologists with the training, abilities, and philosophical disposition to engage with the potential of the data and models derived from them, which underlies the relative lack of interpretative engagement with HDSM data sets. Similar thinking by the aerial archaeology community and the military on the need for trained observers is relevant here. From theaerialsurveyperspective,Wickstead&Barber(2012)note,“Theunique,deﬁningcharacteristic of aerial survey was not aerial photography, but the construction of a new regime of attentiveness” (pp. 84–85). It is not about the speciﬁcs of the technologies, but about an observational, analytical, and interpretive stance. Just so, the deﬁning characteristic of HDSM is not terrestrial laserscanning, SfM, or GPS/GNSS survey, but the deﬁnition of a detailed, metric approach to shape space and place. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT Within the past three years, Dr. Limp has been the recipient of NSF awards focused on advancing the utilization of spatial archaeometry methods in the international archaeological community (SBE 1321443) and 3D data acquisition and computational processing (EPS 0918970) and NEH grant funding research into 3D model publication strategies (HD-51753), and he has served as a Board Member of the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT). Dr. Opitz serves as the Executive Director of an NSF-funded program advancing the utilization of spatial archaeometry methods in the international archaeological community (SBE 1321443) and as a director of NEH grant funding research into 3D model publication strategies (HD-51753). www.annualreviews.org • Implications for Practice and Theory 359 LITERATURE CITED Addison AC, De Luca L, Guidi G, Pescarin S, eds. 2013. Proc. 2013 Digit. Herit. Int. Congr., Oct. 28—Nov. 1, Marseille, Fr., IEEE, Vols. I, II Adkins L, Adkins RA. 1989. Archaeological Illustration. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press Agache R, Br´eart B. 1983. De merveilleux jouets au service de l’arch´eologie: les ULM. Arch´eology 175:28–31 Allen KM, Green SW, Zubrow EB. 1990. Interpreting Space: GIS and Archaeology. London: Taylor & Francis Anderson RC. 1982. Photogrammetry: the pros and cons for archaeology. World Archaeol. 14(2):200–5 Barber D, Mills J. 2007. 3D Laser Scanning for Heritage: Advice and Guidance to Users on Laser Scanning in Archaeology and Architecture. London: Engl. Herit. http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/ 3d-laser-scanning-for-heritage/ Barber D, Mills J, Bryan P. 2001. Laser scanning and photogrammetry: 21st century metrology. Presented at Int. Symp. CIPA, 18th, Potsdam, Ger., Herit. Doc., Proc. XVIII CIPA Symp. http://cipa.icomos.org/ index.php?id=60 Barcel´o JA. 2010. Visual analysis in archaeology. An arti�
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cult, and painful and is burdened by a notable risk of trauma and mortality to mother and infant (Dolea & AbouZahr 2003, WHO 2005). It is an extraordinary event among sexually reproducing organisms. To determine when childbirth became difﬁcult, we should ﬁrst consider the causes. These include a number of factors; however, the causes related to bony pelvic anatomy and other skeletal traits have received much attention from anthropologists because they are applicable to fossil analysis. In association with and, perhaps, in adaptive response to selection for bipedal posture and gait, the hominin pelvis metamorphosed in ways that included changes to the bony birth canal (Lovejoy 2005). The overall shape of the hominin pelvis became more basin-like—moving the action of the minor gluteals from the back to the sides, changing their role to support the trunk and body during the single-leg-support phase of walking and running. In concert with these changes, the overall shape of the birth canal transformed from an anteroposteriorly elongated opening to an anteroposteriorly short and mediolaterally oblong one (Schultz 1949, Rosenberg & Trevathan 1995). The pelvic passage, as it exists now, is deﬁned by three planes that differ in shape and orientation. That is, the ﬁrst aspect that the fetus encounters, the pelvic inlet, is widest in the mediolateral dimension. Next, the midplane is often the narrowest of the three planes. And ﬁnally, the outlet is widest in the anteroposterior dimension, perpendicular to the shape of the inlet. Thus, for a large portion, perhaps the majority, of human births, the fetus twists while passing through the birth canal during the ﬁnal stages of labor as its head and its shoulders navigate these dimensions of varying size and shape to exit the mother’s body (Abitol 1993, Rosenberg & Trevathan 2002, Trevathan 2015). Humans and extinct hominins, with the pelvic indicators of this fetal rotation (or this “birth mechanism” as it is often called; Rosenberg & Trevathan 2014), appear to require assistance during childbirth (Rosenberg & Trevathan 2002). Because the baby emerges facing away from the mother, with its occiput anterior, it is purported to be difﬁcult to pull safely out and up to the breast. And, in this orientation, it is difﬁcult for the mother to reach down to clear the mucous away from the baby’s airway so that it can safely endure the entire labor. This fetal rotation caused by the human pelvic morphology is considered to be a major contributor to childbirth difﬁculty. So the reconstruction of the evolution of the hominin birth canal has been an exercise in tracing childbirth difﬁculty. 56 Dunsworth· Eccleston Unfortunately, the fossil record for hominin pelves is smaller than we would prefer. There are few fossil pelvic remains of hominin species that precede those of human-like Neanderthals and anatomically modern Homo sapiens (Trinkaus 1984, Arsuaga et al. 1999). There are ∼20 total pelvic specimens for Homo erectus and earlier hominins, most of which are fragments that have not been useful for answering questions of childbirth evolution. The few pelves that are relatively well-preserved are incomplete and require reconstruction, which is not performed in exactly the same way by all researchers. Some pelves have disputed sex and/or taxonomic identities (e.g., BSN49/P27, a possible H. erectus from Gona, Ethiopia; Simpson et al. 2008, Ruff 2010). The individuals are also separated by thousands of miles and millions of years, and a key H. erectus specimen is an immature male (the “Nariokotome boy” KNM-WT 15000). It is not surprising that analyses of these few fossil hominin pelves have not converged on a consensus about the origin or evolution of fetal rotation throughout the hominin clade (Weaver & Hublin 2009, Chene et al. 2014, and others). Fetal rotation in australopiths is disputed. Reconstructions and analyses of the pelves of AL 288-1 (“Lucy” from Hadar, Ethiopia) and STS 14 (from Sterkfontein, South Africa) indicate to some that the inlet and outlet are both widest in the mediolateral dimension; therefore, fetal rotation did not occur in australopiths (Tague & Lovejoy 1986). Others, however, infer more humanlike rotational mechanics (Berge et al. 1984, Berge & Goularas 2010). Whether such a phenomenon occurred in earlier hominins such as Ardipithecus (Love
joy et al. 2009) remains unknown. It is possible that a humanlike pattern of fetal rotation began in H. erectus (Chene et al. 2014), but the trait was not necessarily retained in some Neanderthals (Weaver & Hublin 2009). Owing to the incomplete fossil record, the evolution of fetal rotation continues to elude paleoanthropologists. However, as increasing instances of nonhuman primate births are observed, the rotational birth process loses signiﬁcance. That is, nonhuman primates are now known to be born oriented with the offspring’s head facing occiput anterior as in human births (Hirata et al. 2011, Trevathan 2015). Regardless, fetal rotation contributes to prolonged and painful labor in humans, especially when combined with the tight ﬁt between the fetus and the birth canal. So if the hominin pelvis causes present fetal rotation, does it also cause the present tight ﬁt? And if so, could we trace the tight ﬁt through the hominin fossil record? That human pelves are sexually dimorphic in the dimensions that comprise the birth canal is evidence that selection has favored adequate capacity for reproduction (LaVelle 1995, Simpson et al. 2008, Kurki 2013). But the well-known obstetric dilemma (OD) hypothesis posits that selection for bipedalism has imposed a limit on the dimensions of the birth canal and that extant hominins have reached it. That is, selection ramped up hominin neonatal brain size but was simultaneously prohibited from easing childbirth and lowering trauma and mortality risks because increasing the size of the birth canal would negatively impact bipedalism (see Schultz 1949, Krogman 1951, Washburn 1960, Leutenegger 1982, Trinkaus 1984, Rosenberg 1992, Rosenberg & Trevathan 1995, Dunsworth et al. 2012, Wells et al. 2012, Roberts & Thorpe 2014). In this article and elsewhere the OD refers to a human evolutionary hypothesis. However, “obstetric dilemma” is also used by anthropologists as shorthand for the tight ﬁt between pelvis and neonate at birth in extinct and extant humans and in other primates, regardless of the evolutionary explanation (e.g., Wells et al. 2012). From the OD hypothesis perspective, researchers assume that the greater the biacetabular distance (between the hip joints), the more work that is required of the hip abductors during bipedalism, and therefore the higher the cost and/or the lower the efﬁciency. A notable drawback to the OD is that although the biomechanical theory is sound, it has not been borne out by studies of human performance. Neither wide hips nor female hips have consistently predicted locomotor www.annualreviews.org • Difﬁcult Childbirth and Helpless Infants 57 Macaca Hylobates Pan Homo sapiens AL 288 -1 (Lucy) STS 14 MH 2 Early Homo (Gona) EXTANT Anteriorposterior entry Transverse entry Anteriorposterior entry Transverse entry FOSSIL Figure 1 Tightness of ﬁt at birth is not unique in humans and may precede the modern human postcranium. Filled ovals represent infant crania; outer ovals are maternal pelvic inlet dimensions, which are scaled so that mediolateral dimensions are equal. Representations on top show variation in the tightness of ﬁt in a monkey (Macaca), a gibbon (Hylobates), a chimpanzee (Pan), and humans. The four hominin fossils on the bottom illustrate estimations of the tight ﬁt in Australopithecus (AL 288-1, STS 14, MH 2) and early Homo (Gona). Adapted with permission from Wells et al. (2012). economy or efﬁciency (demonstrated and reviewed in Warrener et al. 2015; see also Dunsworth et al. 2012). Regardless of whether selection for bipedalism (or some other unidentiﬁed reason) is limiting the expansion of the birth canal, other nonpelvic traits are contributing to the tight ﬁt: Humans have relatively large and fat babies with large heads and broad shoulders that approach the capacity of the bony birth canal (Schultz 1949, Rosenberg & Trevathan 2002, Wells et al. 2012; Figure 1). The human condition at birth starkly contrasts that of the other hominoids. When the mother’s body size is taken into account, humans have relatively large neonates with relatively large heads compared with other apes and other primates (Dunsworth et al. 2012). Surely the high percentage of fetal body fat accumulated
in the latter stages of gestation contributes to neonatal size (Kuzawa 1998, Aiello & Wells 2002, Cunnane & Crawford 2003). And although hominin adiposity likely increased with encephalization, beginning most notably with H. erectus, it is possible that large neonatal size began even earlier in hominin history than the genus Homo. DeSilva (2011) recently made a rigorous attempt to estimate neonatal size across hominin evolutionary history (Figure 1). By this estimation, it looks like australopiths, with their very small increase in relative brain size, would have had slightly larger neonates for their body sizes. Unfortunately, without fossilized mother–infant dyads, comparing unrelated fossil hominin 58 Dunsworth· Eccleston individuals with related pairs of living humans will remain a challenge for constructing models such as DeSilva’s. In addition, the contribution of large neonatal size to childbirth difﬁculty still depends on pelvic dimensions, which for australopiths (listed above) are known only for two incomplete specimens. However, it does raise the possibility that the tight ﬁt and, hence, difﬁcult childbirth arose prior to the modern bipedal skeleton and marked encephalization. Encephalization likely increased the selection pressure on the size of the hominin birth canal (Abitol 1987), but whether the small brains of australopiths drove this pressure is unclear. Further complicating matters, the partial pelvis of the relatively new species Australopithecus sediba has been described as having morphological traits like those suggested to be adapted in Homo for birthing encephalized infants (Kibii et al. 2011). So it is possible that the capacity to birth large or large-brained infants arose before the large or large-brained infants did—a scenario that sounds unremarkable given it is what chimpanzees would experience if they were to become more encephalized or larger, overall, at birth. Only more fossils will speak to this potential plot twist in the evolutionary history of childbirth. In addition to large overall size and brain size, the shoulders also contribute to the tight ﬁt in humans (Trevathan & Rosenberg 2000, Rosenberg & Trevathan 2002) and possibly affect the birthing process in apes (Hirata et al. 2011). However, it is possible that human shoulders contribute uniquely to the tight ﬁt, and if so, then fetal australopith shoulders may not have caused a problem. The well-preserved scapulae of the Dikika infant show a cranial orientation of the glenoid fossa (shoulder joint) as opposed to a human-like lateral one, indicating that the shoulders of australopiths were more ape-like (Green & Alemseged 2012) and may have passed more easily during parturition than do human shoulders. The delay in infant cranial sutures may have evolved to deliver large-brained babies. Soft neonatal heads are suggested to have increased in prevalence as early as Australopithecus africanus (Falk et al. 2012). However, separate interpretations contest this analysis of the fossil evidence (Holloway et al. 2014), so this issue, like all the rest discussed so far, remains to be resolved. Humans are not the only primates to have large neonates relative to pelvic dimensions (Figure 1). This understanding, partnered with the increasing awareness of social behavior during nonhuman primate parturition, poses quite a challenge to human uniqueness. The ﬁrst scientiﬁc observation of wild bonobo birth was recently published, and not only was it attended by interested group mates, but it added one more data point to the long list of similar observations published by primatologists since the 1960s (Douglas 2014). Primate birth is a social event, regardless of fetal rotation or tightness of ﬁt, which suggests that identifying the origins of these pelvic-based phenomena in hominin history is not a strong basis for reconstructing a shift in hominin social behavior. That is, we can assume that if ancient hominins were social primates, then they were true to form during parturition as well. A more active midwife-like assistance in childbirth performed uniquely by humans might require language to share and preserve that knowledge or a heightened cognitive capacity to create that knowledge in the ﬁrst place. Such culture is not usually hypothesized to extend any further back than the past two million years with the origin of the genus Homo (to be generous). Thus, it may or may not be a coincidence that at least one of the contributors to difﬁcult childbirth, marked encephalization, arose during the evolution of the genus Homo, but it will be difﬁcult to demonstrate the point at which a midwife’s knowledge
and/or assistance would have become necessary (Rosenberg & Trevathan 1995). Even with a more complete fossil record, it is not easy to imagine how to reconstruct whether and how extinct hominins assisted one another in childbirth beyond the social support that might be universal among anthropoid primates. Although we do not have direct evidence for the origins or evolution of birthing relatively large babies, it is easy to argue that this phenomenon contributed to the tight ﬁt. However, www.annualreviews.org • Difﬁcult Childbirth and Helpless Infants 59 it is not as easy to argue why the human pelvis contributes, and it is even less easy to argue that it must. Taphonomy, combined with the unique anatomies displayed by extinct fossil taxa, and the increasing variation in the hominin pelvis displayed by each new addition to the record (e.g., Kibii et al. 2011) complicate matters. Looking to the fossil record to determine which evolving aspects of the pelvis are due to selection for bipedalism is not an easy task, nor is identifying when the tight ﬁt at childbirth arose or when the corkscrew pattern of exit originated. The hominin pelvis evolved for numerous reasons over the past several million years, which makes it unlikely that present human anatomy is what is required for bipedalism, as it is so often phrased. Pelvic evolution and present variation are explained by a combination of the following: adaptations to locomotion and to childbirth in an evolving body and evolving environment, sexual selection on an evolving body in an evolving environment, loss of tail, morphological integration, canalization, phylogenetic constraints, genetic drift, diet, behavior, climate, and other environmental inﬂuences during development or life (e.g., Abitol 1996, Lovejoy 2005, Dixson 2009, Ruff 2010, Grabowski et al. 2011, Lewton 2011, Tague 2011, Betti et al. 2013, Kurki 2013). But during hominin evolution, selection consistently favored adequately sized birth canals; that much is absolutely clear. Likewise, selection consistently favored neonates capable of ﬁtting through those birth canals. So the few pelvic specimens in the hominin fossil record are testament to the variable morphology that has worked both for bipedalism as well as for childbirth over the past several million years. Of course, that is true only as long as each hominin pelvis on record did not end up there because of selection against its bipedal or birthing morphology. Fossils may be best for preserving hominin paleobiology, but they may be blinding us to other signiﬁcant contributors to childbirth difﬁculty, including, but not limited to, position of the laboring woman; position of the fetus and the umbilical cord; function of the placenta, uterus, and cervix; muscular and bodily weakness; slow labor progression; multiple fetuses; preeclampsia; gestational diabetes; and young or old age at ﬁrst birth. The most recent and most thorough exploration of causes of childbirth difﬁculty through hominin evolutionary history was performed by Wells et al. (2012), and followed up by Wells 2015. They noted that although the tight ﬁt between the fetus and the mother’s pelvis may have occurred millions of years prior, agriculture has had a remarkable, and perhaps the most dramatic, effect. Agriculture has created opportunities for both malnourishment and over-nourishment, affecting both the growth of a mother’s pelvis and the growth of her fetus during gestation. Undernourished mothers can birth relatively large babies owing to adaptive responses to protect fetal growth during pregnancy (Konje & Ladipo 2000, Prentice & Goldberg 2000), and regardless of maternal condition, larger babies are associated with longer labors and higher incidences of medical interventions (Turner et al. 1990). It is highly likely that there was never more childbirth difﬁculty than there is now and in recent history. In sum, based on the limited pelvic remains in the fossil record at present, childbirth difﬁculty may have occurred as early as four million years ago in Australopithecus. But childbirth is a much more dynamic process than can be reconstructed from bones alone, so the hominin fossil record provides limited and tenuous information. Thus, it is difﬁcult to explain childbirth difﬁculty with only the increase in body and brain size and the metamorphosis of the pelvis during hominin evolution. For now, the answer to the question of when childbirth became difﬁcult is still soundly answered: when body and brain sizes approximated modern ones <500,000 years ago, or even more recently when agriculture and its consequences began to signi�
��cantly impact human growth. Finally, documented social behavior associated with nonhuman primate births weakens our ability to infer uniquely human social behavior at birth based on hominin pelvic morphology. 60 Dunsworth· Eccleston DOES DIFFICULT CHILDBIRTH HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH INFANT HELPLESSNESS? The OD hypothesis also explains infant helplessness: Seemingly premature human neonates that require highly invested parenting are consequences of, or solutions to, the tight ﬁt or the dilemma caused by competing selection for encephalized neonates and bipedal pelves. However, the accumulation of relevant evidence over the years has weakened the OD as an explanation for helpless human offspring. That is, intense childbirth difﬁculty and intensive parenting are not so easily explained by bipedal pelvic anatomy. Gestation length, fetal growth, childbirth processes, and neonatal helplessness are all connected to the bipedal hominin pelvis, but whether they are fundamentally inﬂuenced by it is not an easy argument to make. A core issue here is whether humans are born early or receive less investment in utero (Dunsworth et al. 2012). However, human gestation is not short and seems to be even longer than expected for a primate of its body size. Furthermore, a human mother does not invest less in pregnancy than expected; she bears a large infant with a large infant brain for a primate of her body size. It is only when neonatal brain size is compared with adult brain size that human infants appear to be born early for primates. Humans grow relatively less of their total brain size in utero, being born with only about 30% of their adult brain size and having to achieve more postnatal brain growth than any other primate (DeSilva & Lesnik 2006). Chimpanzees grow relatively more of their full brain size than humans do by the time they are born, but they still get only 40% of the way there. If humans are removed from the comparison, chimpanzees appear to be born early compared with other primates such as capuchins, which are born with 50% of their adult brain size (Fragaszy et al. 2004). So what has driven the tendency to label humans as altricial for so long is, from the infant’s perspective, the fact that they are born with relatively small brains. That is, humans would need to gestate about seven more months to be born with the same proportion of brain growth accomplished that a chimpanzee has at birth (Portmann 1969, Gould 1977, Leutenegger 1982, DeSilva & Lesnik 2006). This perspective assumes that brain size relative to adulthood is important for the timing of birth. Thus it appears that brain growth in utero is truncated, and this is due either to the OD or to Portmann’s “extrauterine spring” hypothesis (1969); the latter proposes that infants are born early to experience enriching stimulation outside the womb while their brains develop. These are the two different perspectives on human gestation length: from the infant brain’s (OD) and from the mother’s. The former suggests a unique end to gestation in humans, timing parturition to occur prior to the brain’s lethal enlargement relative to the birth canal. However, the latter, from the mother’s perspective, suggests a metabolic and energetic end to gestation because human neonates and their brains are as large or larger than expected for maternal body size and gestation is as long or longer than expected. From this maternal perspective, the birth canal coevolved with maternal metabolism to adequately accommodate the upper limit on fetal size that the mother’s physiology can tolerate during pregnancy, which in humans is relatively large. We call this hypothesis the energetics of gestation and fetal growth (EGG; Dunsworth et al. 2012) (Figure 2). Although the data are far better for humans, the hypothesis may also apply to other species because, among placental mammals, maternal body size (a proxy for metabolic parameters) is a good predictor of gestation length, fetal mass, and fetal brain mass (e.g., Sacher & Staffeldt 1974; Martin 1983, 1996, 1998). From the EGG perspective, gestation ends and the birth process is initiated when pregnancy reaches a critical point at which the mother can no longer support her growing fetus. The hormonal cascade that is involved in triggering birth has been described by Ellison’s metabolic crossover hypothesis (2001; see also Dunsworth et al. 2012). From this metabolic and energetic perspective, www.annualreviews.org • Difﬁcult Childbirth and Helpless Infants 61 Maximum sustainable metabolic rate Total maternal energy requirement (BMR) Offspring energy requirement or additional maternal energy requirement (kcal/day) 1.6 1.7 1.8
1.9 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1,000 0 5 10 15 20 25 Months postconception BIRTH Figure 2 Metabolic constraint on gestation length and fetal size. Fetal energy demands (blue circles) increase exponentially during gestation. Maternal energy expenditure (red squares) rises during the ﬁrst two trimesters but reaches a metabolic ceiling in the third, as total energy requirements approach 2.0 × basal metabolic rate (BMR). Projected fetal energy requirements for growth beyond nine months (blue dashed line) quickly exceed the maximum sustainable metabolic rates for human mothers (horizontal, dotted line). After parturition (arrow), infant energy demands increase more slowly, and maternal energy requirements do not exceed 2.1 × BMR. Required maternal energy expenditure for a fetus developmentally similar to a chimpanzee newborn (7-month-old infant; blue circle with white asterisk) would entail maternal energy requirements greater than 2.1 × BMR. In humans, maximum sustained metabolic rate is thought to be 2.0–2.5 × BMR (Peterson et al. 1990, Hammond & Diamond 1997). Adapted with permission from Dunsworth et al. (2012), which includes supporting references for the metabolic theory as well as for the data plotted in the ﬁgure. difﬁcult childbirth has not caused a speciﬁc end to human gestation or required that humans are born underdeveloped relative to other primates. Hypotheses that humans are born too soon derive from classic comparisons of newborn humans to other species. Mammals fall along a spectrum from precocial (relatively more developed) to altricial (relatively less developed) in their anatomy and behavior at birth and through infancy. Primates as an order align with the precocial mammals, but humans have been singled out as “secondarily altricial” (Portmann 1969, Gould 1977), despite being unlike altricial animals in many ways (Robson et al. 2006, Trevathan & Rosenberg in press). As knowledge has increased over the past several decades, it has become increasingly difﬁcult to single humans out as altricial mammals or altricial primates. As mentioned above, the human brain at birth is absolutely larger than any other primate’s at birth. But unlike altricial mammals, human eyes and ears are open at birth and relative human furlessness is permanent. Like altricial mammals, humans can hardly move about independently, but neither do newborn apes (Douglas 2014). Human locomotion appears to be delayed but objectively might not be: When body size 62 Dunsworth· Eccleston and foot position are taken into account, humans begin walking just when expected for a mammal (Garwicz et al. 2009). Perhaps the most relevant difference between newborn humans and apes is that infant apes are eventually able to cling to their mothers and infant humans are not, at least not as early in development. Many factors contribute to human infants’ clinging deﬁcits. Perhaps skeletal immaturity plays a role (Watts 1990), as might the fact that humans produce large heavy babies that have relatively weak muscles. A relatively large head probably slows a human infant’s motor behavior as well. Prioritization of brain development over muscle development could help explain human infant behavioral immaturity, as could heterochrony of the development of regional musculature (Grand 1992, Walker 2009). Certainly the loss of grasping feet and toes during the early hominin evolution—by the time australopiths made footprints at Laetoli at 3.6 million years ago—contributes to human infants’ inability to cling as well. Other contributors to so-called helplessness can be blamed on adults rather than on infants. Perhaps, for primates of their body size and strength, human infants are a signiﬁcant burden for human caregivers to carry (WallSchefﬂer et al. 2007). Variation in parental behavior also contributes to the timing of infant motor skill development; humans living in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) populations have been associated with delayed onset of infant sitting and walking (Kasarik et al. 2010). Surely observations restricted to WEIRD populations are biasing how we perceive infant human development in an evolutionary framework. In sum, little about human pregnancy, gestation, and fetal growth suggests that infants are born early or too soon, which suggests that difﬁcult childbirth due to locomotor constraint on the bony birth canal is not a strong explanation for the timing of birth or infant helplessness. Humans appear to reach a metabolic capacity around nine months of gestation, and combined fetal–
maternal metabolic stress is a solid hypothesis for what initiates the birth process. It is not clear whether it will be possible to demonstrate that the bipedal pelvis has truncated gestation or fetal growth, resulting in the birth of underdeveloped neonates. Factors that contribute to childbirth difﬁculty—such as overall size and adiposity of the infant, and muscular weakness and bipedalism of the infant and the mother—may also contribute to infant helplessness. Their inability to cling combined with their large size and the species’ deﬁcit in muscular strength, in both infants and caregivers, help to make human offspring a burden that is mitigated with cooperative breeding and culture. Whether helpless infants selected for cooperative breeding and culture, or whether the latter allowed for the former, is likely to remain a puzzle for those attempting to untangle these phenomena. EXPLORING FURTHER Not only is the human birthing process long and painful, but it is burdened with an injury and mortality risk to the fetus and the mother that is exceptional among primates. Moreover, few women bear offspring unattended or unassisted. What the mother and fetus experience and the cultural nature of it are both deﬁning traits of the human species. With enough evidence, we should be able to determine whether the differences we observe in humans can be attributed to their unique adaptation and whether the species’ brand of reproduction can be evolutionarily linked to other traits that arose in the lineage such as bipedal locomotion, encephalization, intense prosociality, heightened cognition, and culture. Reconstructing the evolution of childbirth, both for the sake of knowledge but also for the potentially positive impacts on present childbirth practices and outcomes, makes it an important enterprise despite the numerous questions that remain and the impressive workload that still needs to be accomplished. www.annualreviews.org • Difﬁcult Childbirth and Helpless Infants 63 With the discovery of each new fossil hominin pelvis, or with each new, alternative pelvic reconstruction, there will be new light shed on the evolution of childbirth. With greater understanding of the link between anatomical variation and function, paleoanthropologists will better be able to tease apart pelvic adaptations for childbirth that might be compromised by those for bipedalism and vice versa, in both living and extinct hominins. This work will be easier as sexual dimorphism, particularly in the pelvis, is better understood through hominin history (Plavcan 2000). Functional interpretations of the hominin pelvis will also be easier as the model for the last common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees is better understood. Perhaps we have been downplaying any monkeylike hominin ancestral anatomy. Studies of both living and fossil apes and monkeys will continue to improve the human anatomical and behavioral models for the earliest hominins. Furthermore, with an increased realization among paleoanthropologists that females are the gateway to continued evolution (Wall-Schefﬂer 2012), it is possible that the pregnant and lactating hominin female will garner more intense and creative scientiﬁc study by paleoanthropologists and other scientists. Human skeletal (and other) traits in females, and even in males, are likely the product of natural selection on the childbearing and -rearing female. Although it is exaggerated in women, the lumbar lordosis may be one such trait (Whitcome et al. 2007). Perhaps the pelvis is limited or altered in certain dimensions not for bipedal walking and running for all hominins, but because of selection for the locomotion of pregnant females or females carrying infants (WallSchefﬂer et al. 2007). Perhaps sexual dimorphism is diminished in humans not because males have decreased in size but because females have increased. Bearing and rearing large infants might not have evolved if hominin females were appreciably smaller than males. There is clearly still much to be gained from studying and augmenting the hominin fossil record; however, other types of research potentially hold greater promise for answering interesting questions about the evolution of childbirth. There is still much to learn about pregnancy, parturition, infancy, and infant-rearing in nonhuman primates. Nonhuman primates hold many, if not most, of the answers to our questions about what makes human childbirth comparatively difﬁcult and what makes human infants (and parents) comparatively helpless. Data from behavioral observations will be crucial, including data on pregnant female primate locomotion, sociality, diet, caloric intake, fat deposition, weight gain, oxygen consumption, and sleep behavior, as well the equivalent data on infants and lactating females and alloparents. Metabolic, endocrinological, and other physiological evidence for all these phases and events in life will be increasingly important, as will intensive anatomical study of fetal and infant ontogeny, especially when linked to the behavioral and physiological data. Increased understanding of behavior, especially positional and social behavior, during
labor and parturition will be insightful. Pregnancy and lactation energetics will be keys to understanding whether a species is gestating and nursing to a metabolic and/or energetic maximum or whether it is altering gestation and fetal growth and lactation compared with predictions. Without increasing our ability to make primate comparisons, there is little hope for knowing how bipedalism, adiposity, taillessness, encephalization, culture, etc. contribute to the evolution of pregnancy, childbirth, infancy, and how we parent and alloparent. The primate studies (and those of all placental mammals relevant for answering these questions), especially those focused on metabolism and behavior (Pontzer et al. 2010, Thompson 2013, Pontzer et al. 2014), are crucial if we are to explain how humans have such costly infants yet have much shorter interbirth intervals than do the rest of the hominoids. Without more comparison we cannot know how costly human pregnancies and the resulting infants truly are, and for example, we cannot understand the role of the placenta and how it varies in relation to other traits among species. Primates that regularly birth 64 Dunsworth· Eccleston twins and practice cooperative breeding, such as marmosets, hold great potential for answering many questions about reproductive physiology, metabolic limits, and behavioral correlates (e.g., Rutherford & Tardiff 2008). Published data such as gestation length may appear to be straightforward but, in fact, are not (Borries et al. 2013). And as more and better gestation data accumulate, especially for apes (e.g., Wildman et al. 2011), it may be possible to reconsider whether human gestation is comparatively short, or for example, if species that lack restrictive bony birth canals [cetaceans and sirenians (manatees and dugongs)] have comparatively long gestations. If they do, then humans would not be unique in having a life history altered by the pelvis, and therefore the OD might not seem so unlikely despite the metabolic hypothesis. The trigger or, perhaps, multiple triggers that initiate human parturition remain unknown (e.g., Newman et al. 2014). This seems like an important area for intense research focus both on humans and on their closest primate relatives. The clinical implications are, of course, signiﬁcant, but such knowledge would also shed light on why chimpanzees and many other primates and mammals give birth so far in advance of reaching a pelvic limit. How do we use any of this evolutionary perspective to inform current childbirth practices? Attempting to answer this question will breach the bounds of this article (see Liston 2003, Roy 2003, Pike 2005, Rosenberg & Trevathan 2007, Wittman & Wall 2007, Davis-Floyd & Cheyney 2009, Brown et al. 2013, Basso 2014, Newman et al. 2014). However, the OD is very much a part of the present zeitgeist; it factors into how parents are advised to parent their seemingly altricial infants and how women elect to schedule cesarean sections out of fear of childbirth. The typological thinking applied to fossil hominin pelvic analyses and favored in an OD framework may be limiting present appreciation for the normal variation in pelvic anatomy and the birthing process that has been tolerated by natural selection (Walrath 2003). Furthermore, medical professionals might believe that cesarean sections are an evolutionary imperative (Weiner et al. 2008) rather than a cultural one, which may lead some practitioners to perform interventions when they are unnecessary. Judging whether interventions are necessary, however, is far from easy, especially while armed with the culture and resources to reduce mortality risks to mothers and infants. In addition, larger babies seem to exhibit better postnatal cognitive outcomes (Figlio et al. 2014), so pregnancies that test the limits of the pelvis, and births that occur in operating rooms, may exemplify a different kind of reproductive success than hominins knew for most of evolutionary history. Childbirth in this present chapter of hominin evolutionary history should prove to be a wonderland for anthropologists. Answering questions directly and indirectly related to the evolution of childbirth may never satiate our quest for speciﬁc details about hominin prehistory. But the answers will shed light on how humans have come to dominate the planet in spite of the difﬁculty we face in bearing infants. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT The authors are not aware of any afﬁliations, memberships, funding, or ﬁnancial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Samantha Tickey, Sharon DeWitte, Pat Shipman, Jeremy DeSilva, Karen Rosenberg, and Wenda Trevathan provided helpful discussion and insight while we were writing this article. For that, and for the researchers who
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Leah EcclestonAbstract The turn to ontology, often associated with the recent works of Philippe Descola, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Bruno Latour, but evident in many other places as well, is, in Elizabeth Povinelli’s formulation, “symptomatic” and “diagnostic” of something. It is, I here argue, a response to the sense that sociocultural anthropology, founded in the footsteps of a broad humanist “linguistic” turn, a ﬁeld that takes social construction as the special kind of human reality that frames its inquiries, is not fully capable of grappling with the kinds of problems that are confronting us in the so-called Anthropocene—an epoch in which human and nonhuman kinds and futures have become so increasingly entangled that ethical and political problems can no longer be treated as exclusively human problems. Attending to these issues requires new conceptual tools, something that a nonreductionistic, ethnographically inspired, ontological anthropology may be in a privileged position to provide. 311 INTRODUCTION I here discuss the turn to ontology in sociocultural anthropology. This turn, narrowly deﬁned, is closely tied to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “multinaturalism” and a series of conversations around his work. In the context of North American anthropology, this turn is sometimes thought of as a “French” turn (Kelly 2014), which would, in addition, involve the recent works of Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour, whose separate and original ontological projects are in close dialogue with Viveiros de Castro’s. It is also sometimes thought of as a “European” turn, which would involve the ways in which Viveiros de Castro’s work has been taken up in and around Cambridge, and elsewhere, especially in relation to the work of Marilyn Strathern (1988, 1991, 1995) and Roy Wagner (1981) (see especially Henare et al. 2007; Holbraad & Pedersen 2009; Holbraad 2012, 2013a,b; Holbraad et al. 2014; see also Jim´enez & Willerslev 2007, Alberti & Bray 2009, Pedersen 2011, Jensen 2013, Paleˇcek & Risjord 2013, M. Scott 2013, Morita 2014). However, this movement is part of a broader turn to ontology in anthropology that cannot be circumscribed by any single intellectual or social context. If the narrow turn, as I explain, cannot be so easily identiﬁed as a coherent movement, then the broader turn is even more difﬁcult to identify as such. Nonetheless, the various ontological anthropologies share something important. They are responses to certain conceptual problems and contradictions that arise as anthropological thought faces new challenges. They are, in Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2015) words, both “symptomatic” and “diagnostic” of some sort of broader shift; they are reactions, at times explicit, to the specter of a global ecological crisis. With all its political valences, all its attendant imaginaries, and all the ways in which it is changing our understanding of the relations humans have to that which is other than human, this crisis is “ecologizing” (Latour 2013) how we think about politics in many ﬁelds ranging from history (Chakrabarty 2009, 2012, 2014) to political theory (Connolly 2013) to literature (Morton 2013). It is also forcing us to recognize that, despite all its insights, anthropology as a humanistic science lacks some of the conceptual tools needed to face these problems. Thus, I believe the turn to ontology in anthropology is a response to this broader problem. I here seek to trace some of the contours of a general ethnographically inspired ontological anthropology, both in its narrow and broad iterations, arguing that such an approach is uniquely poised to develop conceptual tools that can be part of an ethical practice that must also include and be transformed by our relation to the nonhuman (Kohn 2014). For the purposes of this article, I deﬁne “ontology” as the study of “reality”—one that encompasses but is not limited to humanly constructed worlds. Alternatively, the word “ontology” may be reserved for the study of “Being” in the Heideggerian sense, whereas “ontic” may be used for “reality.” Ontology could also be considered in terms of “becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) or, as some do, in terms of the variable sets of historically contingent assumptions through which humans apprehend reality—a position that can make ontology nearly synonymous with culture (see Venkatesan et al. 2010). An important related word is “metaphysics,” which I deﬁne as the systemic attention
to or the development of more or less consistent and identiﬁable styles or forms of thought that change our ideas about the nature of reality. Metaphysics is thus concerned with concepts. Crucially, 312 Kohn a metaphysics is not necessarily an epistemology. That is, it is not necessarily concerned with knowledge and its objects. There are variants of the turn to ontology that are metaphysical but not ontological, as I have deﬁned the term (e.g., Skaﬁsh 2011, Holbraad 2012, Viveiros de Castro 2014). Accordingly, these approaches systematically explore forms of thought without necessarily making claims about reality—forms of thought that also demonstrate that any reality claim is either distinct to one metaphysical framework, often associated with the West, or the product of a clash of metaphysical frameworks. Though reality is a term these metaphysically oriented ontological anthropologists tend to avoid, if there is one here, it is inherently relational, comparative, or recursive (Holbraad 2012, 2013a). There are also ontological forms of anthropology that are not metaphysical. That is, they explore modes of being “made over” by realities not fully circumscribed by human worlds. They cultivate representational crafts that can amplify such transformations—holding, perhaps, that any systemic conceptual account of these modes would “deﬂect” (Diamond 2008) our attention away from the actual possibility of being made over. One could call this approach an ontological poetics. It involves cultivating representational forms (poetics) that can tap into some sort of broader generative creativity (poesis). In this sense, the experimental ethnographic ﬁlm by Lucien Castaing-Taylor & V´er´ena Paravel (2012), Leviathan, which takes place on, around, as well as under and above a deep-sea ﬁshing vessel, is an example of anthropology as ontological poetics. Multiple cameras attached to bodies, thrust under water, or mounted on different parts of the ship disrupt any singular human perspective or narrative. The result is a disturbing dissolution of the self as we become enveloped in a monstrous marine world of piscine creatures, reeling boats, butchered bodies, and diving gulls. Leviathan presents no argument and certainly no metaphysics; rather, it dissolves many of the conceptual structures that hold us together so that we can be made over by the unexpected entities and forces that emerge from the depths (see Stevenson & Kohn 2015). The cultivation of representational craft as a way of becoming attuned to other kinds of realities, a hallmark of what I call ontological poetics, is also evident in the writing of McLean (2009), Rafﬂes (2012), Stewart (2012), Stevenson (2014) and Pandian (2015). There are, in addition, ontological approaches concerned with Being in a human sense (e.g., Jackson 1989) and its becoming under adverse conditions (Biehl & Locke 2010). Because such explorations of Being are largely limited to the human in terms of the human, they are not a focus of this article. Nonetheless, they can speak to distinctively human moral worlds in ways that can also be cognizant of the historically given sets of ontological assumptions that may frame them (Zigon 2014). If we accept that ontology concerns the study of reality, ontological anthropology becomes a particular but capacious way of studying reality that takes into account two key elements of our ﬁeld: one methodological, the other theoretical. The major methodological innovation of our ﬁeld is ethnography by which I mean a practice of immersive engagement with the everyday messiness of human lives and the broader worlds in which humans live as well as the various more or less reﬂexive forms of voicing attention to that practice. By being ethnographic, and by developing conceptual resources out of this engagement, ontological anthropology, as I discuss below, makes a unique contribution to what could otherwise seem to be a topic best reserved for philosophy. The methodological focus also delimits the subject matter. Ontological anthropology is not generically about “the world,” and it never fully leaves humans behind. It is about what we learn about the world and the human through the ways in which humans engage with the world. Attention to such engagements often undoes any bounded notion of what the human is. Ontological anthropology is for the mostpartposthumanistbutthatdoesnotmeanitsidestepshumansandhumanconcernsaltogether. Anthropology’s deﬁning theoretical contribution is the culture concept, broadly construed, and ontological anthropology grapples critically and conceptually with its affordances and limitations www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of Ontologies 313 in sophisticated ways. The culture concept is an anthropological reﬁnement of a broader linguistic, epistemological, represent
ational, or correlational turn in philosophy. That turn, often associated with Immanuel Kant, shifts philosophical attention away from questions about the substance of the world to those conditions under which humans know or represent the world (Meillassoux 2008). In the social sciences and anthropology, beginning with the largely mutually independent efforts of ´Emile Durkheim and Franz Boas, this attention to epistemology is channeled in ways that explicitly or implicitly work with some of the ontological properties of linguistic representation. The hallmark of modern anthropology, as preﬁgured by these two scholars, is the recognition of the reality of phenomena that we can term “socially constructed.” Socially constructed phenomena are the product of contingent and conventional contexts, be they historical, social, cultural, or linguistic. The circular, reciprocal, coconstitutive nature of these constructions makes them language-like, regardless of whether the items related are explicitly treated as linguistic. The Boasian approach, however, is tied to language in a fairly explicit way (e.g., Boas 1889; see Stocking 1974, pp. 58– 59). This is evident in Geertz’s (1973a) symbolic anthropology as well as its critiques (Clifford & Marcus 1986), which draw attention to the constructed nature of anthropological representations and thus amplify the linguistic even as they incorporate more sophisticated analyses of power and history. Durkheim’s [1938 (1895)] approach, although not linguistic in name, explores elements of social life that are essentially symbolic. His deﬁnition of a social fact bears all the formal properties of a symbolic representational system such as human language in which relata are produced by and contribute to the system through which they relate—a system that achieves a kind of closure, totality, and separation by virtue of this special kind of relationality. I designate as “cultural” any entity that is treated as exhibiting such properties, regardless of whether it is so termed. In the contemporary French tradition, this linguistic turn is much more explicit, inﬂuenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure [1986 (1916)], especially as it was taken up by Claude L´eviStrauss. The Saussurean tradition sees the sign, of which the human linguistic sign is considered the prime example, as both arbitrary and conventional: arbitrary in the sense that it has no direct connection to or motivation from its object of reference and conventional in the sense that its meaning or referential value is ﬁxed by a set of codiﬁed relations it has to other such signs in the system of signs. One result of this take on language is a sharp division between the world of signs and the world to which those signs refer without an account of how these worlds may be connected. This is a problem for any anthropological approach that relies on Saussure for its theory of representation (Keane 2003). L´evi-Strauss saw the dualism that the Saussurean gap implies as the quintessential human problem, and it is evident also in the works of heirs to this structuralist tradition such as Michel Foucault. When Foucault (1970), for example, writes that “life itself ” was unthinkable before the historical conditions that made such a concept possible, he is reﬂecting the human reality that this broader turn to language and social construction reveals at the same time that he is voicing the difﬁculty, given an analytical framework built on human language, to conceptualize that which is outside of language or culture. My version of ontological anthropology, based on the ethnography of human relations to rainforest beings in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, addresses the problem of language directly (Kohn 2013). I argue that the best way to reconﬁgure anthropology’s relationship to language is through the ethnographic study of how humans communicate with a host of nonhuman beings in a world that is itself communicative but not symbolic or linguistic. This allows us to see language “from the outside,” so to speak, by looking at its relationship to a broader series of forms of communication that are representational but not language-like, and whose unique properties emerge ethnographically at the same time as they reveal what makes language special. Helpful here is the semiotic framework of nineteenth-century philosopher and logician Charles Peirce (e.g., Peirce 1955), rather than that of Saussure, because it can situate human representational processes 314 Kohn vis-`a-vis nonhuman ones (Hoffmeyer 1996, 2008; Hornborg 1996; Deacon 1997) in ways that allow for what Peirce calls the “outward clash” (cited in Keane 2003) with that which lies beyond human forms of representation. I am interested in understanding how these kinds of realities make us over once the grip of language is loosened.
I argue that doing this is crucial for anthropology because it reveals how so many of our conceptual assumptions (e.g., about difference, context, relationality, and commensurability) are drawn from language and its properties, even in posthumanist approaches. As I argue, getting right this relationship of language to nonlanguage, especially via the route of the representational but not linguistic, as revealed in the complex communicative ecologies of tropical forests, will help us create the conceptual resources we will need as we learn to “ecologize.” The broad ontological turn in anthropology has an afﬁnity with a related turn today in philosophy, which is also trying to free itself from the Kantian reorientation of philosophy as the study of human thought. This orientation has, according to Quentin Meillassoux (2008), kept philosophy from appreciating what he calls the “great outdoors”—the world beyond human representation (see also Bryant 2011, Bryant et al. 2011, Harman 2012). I do not think it is warranted to see the turn to language, which provides the foundations for anthropology, as “wrong.” Quite the opposite, it gets at something fundamental about the reality of human life. In this sense, focusing on language is also ontological. Yet, by attending to a certain aspect of reality, it forecloses attention to others. So, in brief, I deﬁne ontological anthropology as the nonreductive ethnographic exploration of realities that are not necessarily socially constructed in ways that allow us to do conceptual work with them. I see this as a response to a conceptual, existential, ethical, and political problem—how to think about human life in a world in which a kind of life and future that is both beyond the human and constitutive of the human is now in jeopardy. THE BROAD TURN TO ONTOLOGY If culture is that which is socially constructed, then “nature” may be deﬁned as that which is not. However, the idea of nature is certainly historically contingent and need not exist at a given time or in a given place. And yet, ontological anthropologists would hold that an exclusive focus on social construction is a problem, such that, if we can talk about nature, it is only as culture. There are many anthropologists whose work refuses that solution in ways that orient their work toward ontology. Many of these precede the narrow turn to ontology. Bateson [2000 (1972), 2002 (1979)], in his insistence on looking at humans as parts of larger “ecologies of mind,” and who saw a global environmental crisis as the consequence of our inability to grasp these broader relations, is one important ontological anthropologist. Ontological concerns seem difﬁcult to avoid in certain arenas of inquiry. As much as our anthropological responsibility is to demonstrate the historical construction of nature, landscapes, or forests (Bal´ee 1989, Rafﬂes 2002), there are also forces that move in an opposite direction, and conceptualizing these seems inescapable when dealing anthropologically with the environment or ecology (Helmreich 2009, Choy 2011). Similarly, despite the importance of focusing on the social life of things (Appadurai 1986), ethnographic attention to materiality problematizes the relationship between human (social) subjects and nonhuman objects (Miller 2005). Using the analytic of social construction to question the authority of medical and scientiﬁc knowledge and institutions is important, yet something about the body forces anthropologists onto ontological terrain when they turn their attention to medicine (Lock 1993, Mol 2002, Thompson 2007, Roberts 2013). Thus, although attention to embodied experience has largely been a humanistic concern ( Jackson 1996), phenomenology provides one way to break down distinctions between humans and nonhumans by bypassing the messy problem of humanly exceptional forms of representation (Ingold www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of Ontologies 315 2000, 2007, 2011; see also Hallowell 1960). Finally, if religion can be treated as a cultural system (Geertz 1973b), taking spirits seriously further forces us onto ontological terrain (Chakrabarty 2000, Singh 2015). Especially in the development of what has come to be known as actor–network theory (ANT), Latour (1988), along with others (Callon et al. 1986, Callon 1999), has been central in providing a way for anthropologists working with nonhumans, the environment, materiality, medicine, science, technology, and the body to bring nature into culture and culture into nature. Much of the broader turn to ontology within anthropology relies in some way on the ANT framework. ANT is sometimes considered methodologically as “symmetrical anthropology” (Latour 1993, p. 103) owing to its refusal to
give explanatory priority to one actor or entity over another; its metaphysical correlate would be a “ﬂat ontology” (Bryant 2011): The world is the product of many kinds of agencies, none of which is necessarily more important than any other. ANT seeks to overcome the mind/body dualism by assuming that everything has mind-like agential as well as matter-like properties. Such relationality, where relata do not precede their relating, has a Saussurean ﬂavor and is treated as explicitly language-like in some approaches to science and technology studies (see Law & Mol 2008, p. 58). Even if she would resist appeals to the gendered authoritative foundations that terms such as metaphysics and ontology can imply, Donna Haraway is one of the most important voices in the anthropological turn to ontology. As a trained biologist, she insists on the responsibility of getting the sciences “right,” even as she interrogates science’s claims to truth—questioning any sharp line between fact and “fabulation” (Haraway 1991a,c). Haraway is dedicated to living well with other kinds of beings, something that she draws from her daily life with her canine companions (Haraway 2003, 2008). She holds these commitments in generative tension with a sensitive attunement to politics and history. She has a complex and subtle engagement with the Marxian and feminist tradition that allows her to track power and desire and the gendered historical structures through which they are channeled. In short, though the turn to ontology may be criticized for being apolitical, reactionary, or too focused on exotic alters (Bessire & Bond 2014)—claims with some foundation that I critically evaluate in my discussion below of the narrow turn to ontology—the same cannot be leveled against Haraway. Haraway’s project is profoundly ontological. She insists on including other beings in our anthropological accounts with the hopes of imagining and enacting an ethics and politics that can make room for these other beings. Haraway’s approach has been extended in “multi-species ethnography” (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010), which tackles the question of what kind of hope is possible in what Anna Tsing (2014) calls “blasted landscapes” (see Kirksey 2014; for explorations related to transgender, gender, and race, see Agard-Jones 2013, Hayward 2013, Weaver 2013). THE NARROW ONTOLOGICAL TURN In some ways a French turn, the narrow ontological turn associated with the recently translated books of Descola (2013), Viveiros de Castro (2014), and Latour (2013) is producing the most interest (and anxiety) in North American anthropology. It shares with much of anthropology certain assumptions about representation that come from Saussurean linguistics as adopted by L´evi-Strauss. These assumptions are evident even in the various critiques they pose to social construction. L´evi-Strauss, however, is important in another way. He is, perhaps, the original ontological anthropologist: L´evi-Strauss insists that native thought is conceptual in its own right and in ways that undermine Western metaphysical concepts (L´evi-Strauss 1966), and even more radical, he insists that thought itself (which becomes visible in our anthropological attempts to think with 316 Kohn the thoughts of others) reveals ontological properties of the universe [L´evi-Strauss 1992 (1955), p. 56]. My reference to the recent work of Descola, Viveiros de Castro, and Latour as the narrow ontological turn is in no way to disparage it as limited. One goal of this article is to appreciate just how varied and sophisticated their projects are. Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture All three projects are grappling with the consequences of Descola’s dissolution of the category of nature as the ground for anthropological inquiry and his recuperation of animism based on his work among the Amazonian Achuar. Animism is no longer treated as the mistaken belief in an animated nature (Tylor 1871) but as an extension of social relationality to nonhumans in ways that imply a set of ontological assumptions distinct from the one with which anthropology traditionally works (Descola 1994, 1996; see also Latour 1993; Bird-David 1999; Harvey 2005; Willerslev 2007, 2012; C. Scott 2013). This new understanding of animism leads each of the three authors to critique social construction as the sole way to account for difference. Their critiques are structuralist: Argumentation involves contrastive opposites (but see Viveiros de Castro 2014, p. 209), and difference and relationality enjoy metaphysical primacy. Descola additionally shares with L´evi-Strauss an emphasis on broad ethnological comparison and the formalist
insistence that the apparently inﬁnitely diverse ways in which people live in relation to others are the product of more ﬁnite ways of apprehending and construing these relations. For Descola (2013), these constraints are cognitive and logical (cf. L´evy-Bruhl 1926). One understands others (whether human or nonhuman) by self-comparison. Accordingly, only certain formal possibilities exist, leading to sets of ontological assumptions that then become stabilized in certain historical contexts. By comparison to oneself, an other can be understood to have similar interiorities and dissimilar exteriorities. This orients what Descola terms “animism,” which as an ideal type is visible among many indigenous societies in the Amazon and in the boreal regions of North America. The animist holds that all beings are persons (animals and spirits have a kind of interiority or selfhood that is comparable with that of human persons), but these beings are differentiated by their exteriorities— the bodies that these various kinds inhabit. Given this understanding, a shaman can become a jaguar by wearing as clothing elements of a feline body, such as canine teeth and spotted hides, that make jaguars distinctive predatory beings. A psychic continuity permits movement across physical discontinuities. The assumption that others have dissimilar interiorities but similar exteriorities orients what Descola calls “naturalism,” which is typical of the modern West. Here, a unique interiority is privileged as the marker of difference. This is visible at a number of levels: the individual (where solipsism and the problem of other minds are philosophical problems), the group (where culture, not “race,” is the important variable), and the species (among which only the human one enjoys genuine interiority). Only with naturalism is “nature” as an object external to our subjective selves conceivable. By contrast, the assumption that others have similar interiorities and similar exteriorities orients what Descola calls “totemism,” which is best exempliﬁed by certain Australian aboriginal societies where others share both an interiority and an exteriority within speciﬁc human/nonhuman hybrid collectives. Here, the distinctions between interiority and exteriority break down. What instead becomes important is the continual investment by humans and nonhumans in maintaining and capacitating a shared world (see Povinelli 2015). Finally, the attribution of dissimilar interiorities and dissimilar exteriorities orients what Descola calls “analogism,” which, historically, is widely distributed throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of Ontologies 317 and the Americas. Faced with the prospect of radical incommensurability, the analogist creates logical groupings among entities she otherwise suspects have no relation to each other. Matrices of cardinal directions, maps, chains of being, and microcosms are all attempts by analogists to control the perceived chaos of the world by imposing order onto to it. Descola’s approach has been criticized as merely taxonomic, thus just a version either of his analogism (Viveiros de Castro 2014, p. 83) or of his naturalism (Fischer 2014, p. 334). His approach has also been cast as an elaborate misrecognition of the human propensity to attribute culture to all entities, which would make the West unique only in its denial of this fact—a critique that seems to vindicate anthropology’s celebration of the culture concept as its enduring analytic (Sahlins 2014). However, Descola’s work provides one way to think about variations in ontological assumptions without explaining these in cultural terms: If these variations were cultural, there would be many more than four variants. Descola’s approach also enables an account of how such assumptions can realize possible worlds by selectively actualizing certain properties inherent to the world beyond human cognition (Kohn 2009; Descola 2010, 2014). It can also help us understand how the speciﬁc differences each set of assumptions has relative to the others can affect the interactional dynamics among any of them. Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics Viveiros de Castro’s (2014) metaphysics grows from his masterful comparative synthesis of the vast Amazonian ethnological literature that permits him to identify the “perspectival” quality of much Amerindian thought (1998). Many Amazonians subscribe to some version of the following perspectival logic: Under normal circumstances, humans see humans as humans, animals as animals, and spirits (if they see them) as spirits. But predatory beings such as jaguars and spirits will see humans as prey, and prey animals (such as wild pigs) will see humans as predators. Furthermore, all beings, whether human, animal, or spirit, will see themselves as persons. From an “I” perspective, then, a jaguar will see himself as a human person. He will experience himself as drinking manioc beer, living in a that
ch house, etc., but he will be seen by other kinds of beings, such as humans (under normal circumstances) and prey animals, from an external “It” perspective, namely as a predatory being. Thus, from their own perspectives, all beings see things in the same way—similar to humans, jaguars see themselves drinking manioc beer—but, crucially, what they see in this same way is a different world. And yet the knowledge of being in a different world can only be achieved comparatively by grasping how those on the outside see us: When one is drinking manioc beer, one never knows if that beer is “just” beer or if it is the blood of one’s enemies. This sort of knowledge is available only by comparison to an external perspective. Viveiros de Castro’s reﬂections on perspectivism lead him to conclude that we are dealing with a metaphysics that is fundamentally different from that which informs Western academic thought, including anthropology. Taking his approach seriously by doing conceptual work with its attendant implications distorts the anthropological project and posits a radical critique of the social construction at its heart. Viveiros de Castro’s approach allows him to see more clearly the ways in which anthropology is founded on a nature/culture divide that posits nature as a sort of universal, unitary, and existent ground and culture as the inﬁnitely variable form of representing nature. This nature/culture binary has traditionally allowed anthropological comparison. We stabilize or bracket out nature to compare cultural (or historical or social) differences. Viveiros de Castro calls this Western metaphysical framework “multiculturalist” (many cultures but one nature). This logic persists in “postmodern” frameworks that retain the sociohistorical contingency, even as they erase the natural ground. 318 Kohn The Amerindian style of thought, by contrast, allows Viveiros de Castro to posit an alternative metaphysics that he terms “multinaturalist.” Seen as multinaturalist, the Amerindian style of thinking posits many natures, each comprising a set of affects particular to a given kind of body, but only one culture. An anthropology based on a multicultural metaphysical distinction between nature and culture does not work in a region where nature and culture take on very different properties. For example, making the multiculturalist statement “Amazonians believe that animals are persons,” where belief marks the epistemological or representational status of the claim, not only ignores the metaphysical assumptions upon which Amazonians relate to other kinds of beings as persons, but also, and worse yet, forces these people to conform to another set of metaphysical assumptions, one in which such ideas are merely beliefs or socially constructed representations. Perspectivism has tremendous ethnological traction. It clariﬁes and unites a series of ethnographic observations on, for example, ethnonyms, kinship, predation, shamanism, clothing and bodily adornment, and relations to nonhumans. As a form of relating in which the other is integral to the self, whites have ﬁgured prominently (Kohn 2002, 2013; Viveiros de Castro 2004; Vilac¸a 2010). But Cannibal Metaphysics is not just a metaphysics of so-called “cannibals.” Instead, it provides a metaphysics of predation in the broadest of terms; it can ingest our own metaphysical assumptions by, for example, revealing the ways in which we privilege the thing-in-itself even as we focus on the variable and partial modes through which it is apprehended. For multinaturalism, there are no self-identical entities such as, to return to a previous example, beer or blood: Beer could always be a kind of blood, and blood could be beer-like for somebody (Viveiros de Castro 2014, p. 73). Multinaturalism, then, takes the comparison inherent to perspectivism—for a characteristic of perspectival thinking is that one perspective can hold together multiple irreducible worlds—and asks what it would be like if we saw everything as potentially generatively comparative. Appreciating things multinaturally allows us to see my deﬁnition of ontology as the study of “reality” as already multiculturally determined. If nature is our ground, it is natural for us to think of ontology as a search for what really exists. But in a multinatural metaphysics, there is no stable ontological ground. The shaman walking through the forest does not ask whether spirits exist (that would be the multicultural question); he wants to know only how to actualize a relation with them. By extending this logic beyond Amazonia, Viveiros de Castro makes anthropology a practice of cosmic philosophical predation that may allow us to actualize a multinaturalism immanent in the bowels of multiculturalism (Viveiros de Castro 2014, p. 93). It thus becomes a way to arrive at genuinely “alter” concepts (see also Hage
2012), derived “otherwise” to (although not necessarily outside) our metaphysics (Povinelli 2012). Critics of Viveiros de Castro have emphasized the excessive generalization of his high structuralist framework: Not all Amazonians, let alone “Amerindians,” are perspectivists (Turner 2009, Ramos 2012). Critics have also argued that the politics of multinaturalism is too broad and generically oriented toward global issues (such as the Anthropocene) (see Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2014) to capture the everyday political struggles of Amazonian peoples (Ramos 2012, Bessire & Bond 2014). In addition, they argue, speaking for Amerindian ontologies from the outside is politically suspect (Salmond 2014, Todd 2014; but for an elaborate Amazonian alter-metaphysics, quite resonant with multinaturalism, authored by a Yanomami shaman and political activist, see Kopenawa & Albert 2013). What to make of the potential theoretical and political relevance of a style of thought that (a) may not be characteristic of all “Amerindians” and (b) may have little relevance to the “political situations regarding the predicament of indigenous peoples in adverse interethnic contexts” (Ramos 2012, p. 483)? The Amazon is becoming increasingly deforested and incorporated into national and global political economies. Anthropology should not lose sight of this complex reality. www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of Ontologies 319 In such a context, what bearing could Amazonian perspectival ideas, drawn from seemingly timeless cosmologies (now fragmented) and sylvan ways of life (now receding in the face of more potent economic forces), have to do with the everyday lives of people in the Amazon (Bessire & Bond 2014)? Viveiros de Castro’s project should not, however, be casually dismissed. One cannot say that what we need is more attention to “indigenous epistemologies” on par with academic ones on a level “cross-cultural” playing ﬁeld (Ramos 2012, p. 486) because this would domesticate Amazonian thought by framing it in terms of a Western metaphysics in which concepts are cultural or epistemological. Critiques of Viveiros de Castro’s project should critically engage his critique of culture and epistemology. Perspectivism resonates with and illuminates my own ethnographic material drawn from everyday life among the Quichua-speaking Runa of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. Is this not one successful test of anthropological abstraction? But Viveiros de Castro is aiming for something even more general involving concepts (Viveiros de Castro 2014, p. 192). Of crucial importance is the recognition that concepts can have a certain kind of referential freedom and that concept work is not the exclusive domain of philosophers (Skaﬁsh 2014a). Amazonian peoples, like all peoples, have concepts, and Viveiros de Castro’s project involves further developing concepts, such as multinaturalism, out of a set of perspectival Amazonian concepts. To be critical of this kind of concept work as too abstracted from local political concerns would demand a similar critique of, say, Strathern’s (1988) feminist anthropological classic, The Gender of the Gift, which also derives anthropological concepts from Melanesian concepts to think with and against certain Western forms of thinking involving nature, gender, the person, scale, and relationality. Crucial to these concerns about concepts—are they too general, ethnographically valid, politically relevant?—is the question of alterity. Viveiros de Castro’s goal is to capacitate and extend a fragile style of perspectival thought alter to Western metaphysics. Although such forms of alterthinking need not lie outside the West or modernity (see Pandolfo 2007, 2008; Pedersen 2011; Skaﬁsh 2011), the narrow turn holds that there is a Western metaphysics against which these can be juxtaposed (Skaﬁsh 2014b). Furthermore, much anthropological theory is framed by such a Western metaphysics, even though anthropology’s method of inquiry places our ﬁeld in a position to deform such metaphysics by being itself deformed by the different forms of thought it encounters. Anthropology surely has a nostalgic relation to the kinds of alterity that certain historical forces (which have also played a role in creating our ﬁeld) have destroyed. To recognize this is one thing. It is quite another to say that for this reason there is no longer any conceptual space “alter” to the logic of this kind of domination. For this would be the ﬁnal act of colonization, one that would subject the possibility of something else, located in other lived worlds, human and otherwise, to a far more permanent death (Kohn 2014). Although
it is valid to examine what emerges once such a metaphysics is dead (Bessire 2014), doing so is not Viveiros de Castro’s political project. One can ask whether it is appropriate to make multinaturalism the sole metaphysics alter to the Western one, and Descola’s Beyond Nature and Culture is an attempt to show that other metaphysics are possible. One can also ask why the multiplicities that multinaturalism recognizes ﬁt so conveniently with Deleuzian thought (Vigh & Sausdal 2014, p. 57), to which Viveiros de Castro counters that Deleuze & Guattari (2014) developed much of their thinking from anthropological “alter” concepts. Finally, one could ask whether the focus on radical alterity misses what we share (Vigh & Sausdal 2014, p. 57). These are valid concerns and ones that are at times mine as well. But they misunderstand the project. Multinaturalism is not a description of how the world is, or how one kind of person thinks, but a call for a form of thinking, available to anyone, that is able to see possible ways of becoming 320 Kohn otherwise. Multinaturalism is not a way of commensurating difference but of communicating “by differences” (Viveiros de Castro 2004, p. 10), recognizing that there is a form of relating that allows differences to be held together rather than to be subsumed. It certainly grows out of certain styles of thinking that ethnography reveals, but it also grows out of the recursive nature of comparative ethnographic thinking whereby one’s form of thinking is constantly being changed by one’s object of thought (Holbraad 2012, 2013; see also Jensen & R¨odje 2010, p. 3). Latour’s Modes of Existence Latour’s (2013) Inquiry Into Modes of Existence and some of his other writings on the Anthropocene (Latour 2014b) are the most forceful articulations of the stakes for the ontological turn. The ecological crisis is the ethical and political problem of our times, one that changes the nature of ethics and politics. The Anthropocene puts anthropos at center stage—humans are a force of nature—at the same time that it changes what it means to be human and makes clear that anthropology, now too at center stage, can no longer be only about humans (Latour 2014a,b). Latour recognizes that although ANT is an important step toward getting humans and nonhumans to be part of the same analytical framework, its very symmetrical nature excludes value, which is, of course, central to any political project. One has to say why “we” should care about ecological problems, but this needs to be done in such a way that allows those other “voices” that compose this common “we” to articulate their values as well. Both a metaphysical and an ontological account that makes room for other modes of existence, the Inquiry Into Modes of Existence also offers a way to think about how to live with the kinds of beings such modes institute. Similar to many of the accounts discussed above, its metaphysics responds to the suspicion that too much description may be limiting. Latour’s goal is to recognize and give dignity to multiple modes of existence, or ontologies, and to how the beings such modes institute may ﬁnd a way to dwell together in a common oikos. He does so by tracing out the lightest of metaphysics, whose descriptions will capacitate, rather than hinder, the various modes of existence it thus recognizes. For Latour, a mode of existence has its own way of being (its own kind of “trajectory”), its own way of nonbeing (its own kind of “hiatus”), and its own, sometimes fragile, conditions under which it can be [its own truth or “felicity conditions,” which he adapts from Austin (1962) but with the hope of extending it beyond its humanistic linguistic usage]. Stones, spirits, poetry, and scientiﬁc objects can all be described as having unique and valid modes of existence. If we can allow adherents of any mode to see themselves for who they really are and for what they stand, via a process that will involve negotiation with those beings or those who speak for them, then anthropology can become a project of cosmic “diplomacy” (a term Latour adapts from Stengers 2005, 2011). That is, anthropology becomes a privileged vehicle for a special kind of translation that would not involve recourse to any one ontological foundation (e.g., comparing two cultures by virtue of the equivalent but different ways each represents nature), nor could it be undertaken with scientiﬁc detachment: The anthropologist as diplomat is invested in successfully moving among worlds, as she recognizes that our shared survival is at stake in making room for these various modes of existence
and what they may have to contribute. Latour’s project is, as his book’s subtitle indicates, an “anthropology of the moderns.” This is an anthropology of Western institutions—science, law, and religion are important ones—that have their own metaphysics and their own ways of instituting beings. By diplomatically redescribing these institutions, the adherents of each will be able to appreciate themselves and others in terms of both their differences and their common concerns; as they learn to face each other, they will learn to face the crisis they share in common. “Moderns” here refers not necessarily to a group, say, ethnic Europeans, but to those who somehow subscribe to modernization. And modernizing www.annualreviews.org • Anthropology of Ontologies 321 CONCLUSION In sum, the major concerns voiced by the anthropological community with respect to the narrow ontological turn are that it is (a) excessively structuralist, (b) overly concerned with alterity, and (c) not sufﬁciently political. Regarding the ﬁrst concern, my response is that the narrow turn is honestly structuralist, as opposed to so much of the rest of our ﬁeld whose implicit theory of representation, whether avowed or not, is Saussurean and therefore cryptically structuralist. Regarding the second concern, although Descola, Viveiros de Castro, and Latour all rely in some way on an ethnologically abstracted and historically extracted Other, the question they are asking is nevertheless radical and important, namely, Is there a way to recognize and capacitate difference that doesn’t make it ﬁt “exactly inside the same eternal and universal [i.e., Western] patterns of ‘social life’” (Latour 2014b)? That is, explaining difference in terms of culture, or in terms of political economy, makes it, in Povinelli’s (2001) terms, “doable” and, in that sense, makes anthropology, even as a critical practice, an extension of what she would call a late liberal logic (Povinelli 2002). Perhaps the greatest concern, however, is the ﬁnal one, that the general turn to ontology is somehow an apolitical or, worse, reactionary project, where the easy politics of a big abstract political problem (we can all care about global warming, a problem that is both everywhere and nowhere) hides all the local problems in which political economy cannot be ignored (Bessire & Bond 2014). Must all politics be local politics, and if so, is ontological anthropology antithetical to this? I think the answer to these questions is no. There are important ontological projects that are precisely about politics in local as well as global contexts (see Blaser 2009, de la Cadena 2010, Pedersen 2011, Tsing 2014, Povinelli 2015). I take the broader turn to ontological anthropology as a theoretically and politically important addition to our discipline—one that should seek not to replace, but to augment traditional anthropological critiques based on attention to social construction, political economy, and the human. Although anthropology as a discipline needs to make conceptual room for ontology, not all anthropology should necessarily be ontological. My ideal version of an ontological anthropology would be (a) metaphysical, interested in exploring and developing concepts; (b) ontological, attentive to the kinds of realities such concepts 322 Kohn can amplify; (c) poetic, attuned to the unexpected ways we can be made over by those not necessarily human realities; (d ) humanistic, concerned with how such realities make their ways into historically contingent human moral worlds; and (e) political, concerned with how this kind of inquiry can contribute to an ethical practice that can include and be transformed by the other kinds of beings with whom we share our lives and futures. Such an ideal is perhaps best realized, not by any one scholar, but by a diverse and growing community of ontologically attuned ethnographic thinkers. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT The author is not aware of any afﬁliations, memberships, funding, or ﬁnancial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Amy Barnes, Jo˜ao Biehl, Sean Dowdy, Judith Farquhar, Didier Fassin, Martin Holbraad, Casper Jensen, Marshall Kramer, Don Kulick, Katherine Lemons, Anand Pandian, Morten Pedersen, Eugene Raikhel, Peter Skaﬁsh, Lisa Stevenson, Mary Weismantel, Eric White, the University of Chicago Medicine and its Objects Workshop, and my 2014 Anthropology Beyond the Human seminar for comments on or conversations about this article. LITERATURE CITED Agard-Jones V. 2013. Bodies in the system. Small Axe 17:182–92 Alberti B, Bray TL. 200
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; (c) qualia are indexes that materialize phenomenally as sensuous qualities; and (d ) qualia provide a methodological link between general anthropological understandings of practice and a technical semiotic approach to pragmatics. Let me explain each of these points in turn. In contemporary anthropology, one can modify the term “practice” with practically any adjectival to highlight and delimit some form of historically contextualized action carried out by actants in the world, and thereby make that action available and legitimate for sociocultural analysis: religious practice, referential practice, counterrevolutionary practice, weaving practice, and the like. Indexical semiotic processes—presuming on prior contexts and causes, entailing new contexts and consequences—draw attention to the focal entities of action, outline connections among the internally organized elements of action, and point outward to the contextualization of action, such that “anything people do” (Ortner 1984, p. 149) becomes “a” practice, a “kind of” practice, “this” practice, and so on. The pragmatic process of typifying anything people do as practice is an integral and inescapable meta-pragmatic orientation to human activity. And as Rupert Stasch (2014, p. 631) put it recently in a discussion of the methodological perils of reifying “practice” in anthropology, “having to imagine ‘pragmatics’ distinct from ‘semiosis’ would be like trying to imagine the part of snow that isn’t water.” This insight applies not only to the internal organization of types of practice, but also to processes by which human attention that is reﬂexively focused on its own activity facilitates the emergence, maintenance, or transformation of social groups; sustains or confronts implicit presuppositions and explicit beliefs; and draws attention to the wider signiﬁcance and consequences of what we do. One kind of pragmatic signal (i.e., index) has been of particular interest to anthropologists variously working on problems of the senses, materiality, aesthetics, affect, and the bodily dimensions of practice. This kind of index has been central to theories of the body in practice from Marx and Merleau-Ponty to Bourdieu and Butler. Following Chumley & Harkness (2013), I use the term “qualia” (singular, quale) to refer to indexes that materialize phenomenally in human activity as sign vehicles reﬂexively taken to be sensuous instances of abstract qualities (stink, warmth, hardness, straightness, etc.). If “anything which focuses the attention is an index” (Peirce 1932, section 2.285), qualia focus attention (in various modalities) on the pragmatic “feeling of doing.” Qualia emerge as points of orientation in social action and shape how such action is apperceived as a kind of practice conforming to material affordances and limits; in this way practice can be linked to groups and become productive of certain kinds of knowledge of “the way things are.” In asking how people orient to one another via qualia, my emphasis in this review (as opposed to much Western phenomenology) is on the intersubjective, interactional, and broader cultural place of pragmatic encounters with sensuous qualities “in practice,” which I take as primary, rather than on their derived status as subjective experiences of individuals. In order to trace the pragmatics of qualia across the ethnographic record of practice, I have organized my review in what might appear to the phenomenologist to be a backward manner. I end, rather than begin, with a discussion of the body and the senses. Rather than beginning with anthropological themes most commonly and obviously associated with qualia, I proceed ﬁrst with a discussion of qualia in linguistic practice, move on to qualia in practices organized explicitly around social relations, then turn to qualia in practices organized around external entities, and ﬁnally arrive at body-focal practice. This rhetorical sequence is meant to diagram the analytical chain shift from meaning to materiality enacted by decentering the semantico-referential function of a 574 Harkness now-superseded anthropological understanding of language in favor of a semiotic, and speciﬁcally pragmatic and metapragmatic, view of linguistic phenomena (Silverstein 1976). The broader argument I wish to make is that attention to qualia enables anthropologists to consider ethnographically what is continuous semiotically across and within practices—from communication to embodiment. QUALIA IN LINGUISTIC PRACTICE One of the most immediate consequences of the anthropological rethinking of language has been the recognition of the explanatory limits of formal structuralist analyses of a symbolic code, which largely presume language to be primarily a system for constructing propositions thinkable “about,” but not necessarily communicable “in,” the world. By viewing semantics (i.e., the truly symbolic mode of language) as a
subﬁeld of pragmatics (i.e., the indexical mode of language), propositional referring expressions become themselves analyzable as instances of complex, situated social action that are appropriate—or not—to the contexts in which they occur. Our recognition of the indexical basis of language has had further consequences for theories of language-as-practice that dwell on action as an exception or supplement to pure reference and predication (for discussions of Austin, Derrida, Grice, and Searle, see Lee 1997). In the wake of such a dramatic dampening of the semantico-referentialist ideology of language, indexicality replaces denotation as the more encompassing dimension of social action carried out through spoken and inscribed language. Qualia in linguistic practice are usually embodied in the “sound shape” of language ( Jakobson & Waugh 1979), e.g., phonetic variation, prosodic contour, voice quality, onomatopoeia, and other mimetic signals in speech (Barrett et al. 2014, Ninoshvili 2011, Sicoli 2010). And yet, qualia extend beyond straightforwardly isolable phonosonic signals to the broader pragmatic effects of stereotyped co-occurring signs in utterances. Such an extension expands the analysis of linguistic quality from a single pragmatic signal, such as in Sapir’s (1927, p. 895) classic example of a “strained or raucous voice” that might be taken erroneously as an emblem (i.e., a conventional iconic index) of “coarse-grained” character, to an entire way of speaking, such as in Bourdieu’s (1977, p. 661) example, half a century later, of la gueule and la bouche, respectively characterizing as masculine and feminine two registers of French speech and behavior based on two words referring to the mouth. Through the cultural regimentation of indexes, the qualia discernable in speech forms can extend from an emblematic feature like roughness of voice to multiple co-occurring material sign vehicles condensed in the metaphor of alternating terms for a single part of the human anatomy. Such fundamentally aesthetic (Munn 2013) dimensions of practice have been shown to have highly consequential indexical effects based on their differential value as paradigmatic alternatives within genres of communication, that is, their imposition of register effects on such genres of verbal practice. For example, in her discussion of bilingual German-Magyar (Hungarian) speakers’ attribution of sensuous qualities to linguistic varieties of German, Gal (2013) compiled an illustrative list demonstrating just how central are namable qualia of enregistered speech practices to broader cultural frameworks of value: “Hard words” among the Kaluli (Feld & Schieffelin 1982), “plain speaking” in American politics (Cmiel 1990), “talking straight” among Jewish Israelis (Katriel 1986). Kaluli contrast hard with unhard; American plain speaking excludes what is deemed ﬂorid. Contrastive lexicons of quality may distinguish different versions of entire languages:... “narrow” versus “embroidered” Bergamasco in northern Italy (Cavanaugh 2009), “sweet Hindi” in a Fijian Indian community (Brenneis 1984), “upside-down Walbiri” (Hale 1971) or Tamil that is “Jasmine-scented” (Bate 2009). These are characterizations from the perspective of those who use the speech forms. Qualities may also be projected onto speech by outsider www.annualreviews.org • The Pragmatics of Qualia in Practice 575 perspectives: English speakers say they hear Italian as soft, German as harsh. For intellectual men in nineteenth-century Japan, schoolgirls’ speech was sugary, shallow and bouncing (Inoue 2006); Beijingers identify some of their own Mandarin as oily in contrast to southern speech (Zhang 2008), while the speech of trendy young people in Dublin sounds ﬂat to other Dubliners (Moore 2011). In these and many similar examples, linguistic forms seem to partake of abstract qualities associated with sense modalities including sound, texture, taste, smell, shape and spatial orientation. (Gal 2013, pp. 12–13) These various qualities (hardness, straightness, sweetness, oiliness, ﬂatness, etc.) manifest in linguistic practices as qualia with pragmatic consequences. Via “fashions of speaking” [Whorf 1956 (1939), p. 158], metaphors are literalized, seeming to give language forms certain properties that are experienceable in, and emanate from, other realms of social practice. Among seventeenth-century Quakers, “plain speech” served as a religious emblem of identity that “challenged the social structure and the structure of social relations
in very fundamental ways” (Bauman 1983, p. 55). Among Ilongot who had converted to Christianity, eschewing “curvy” speech with words “soft and sweet as ripened fruit” in favor of “straight” speech, with its potential to produce “words like arrows,” was a way of indexically displaying “new knowledge” (Rosaldo 1984). Among Christian converts in Sumba, “hard” and “soft” personal names were replaced with baptismal Christian names and status titles as a means of enacting Christian personhood (Kuipers 1998, pp. 95–124). And among Tibetan Buddhist monks in India, teachers deployed “affect indexicals of ‘aggression’” and “affect indexicals of ‘anger’” to socialize novices according to “morally weighted ideals concerning language, affect, and personhood” (Lempert 2012, p. 128) within a broader (albeit changing) pedagogical regime of harshness, communicative violence, and corporal punishment (on “affective” and “energetic” interpretants, see also Kockelman 2013). In these ethnographic examples, qualia emerge as consequential to communicative practice by providing aesthetic and moral anchors of orientation for reﬂexive, group-deﬁning conduct and thus for the situated enactment of forms of personhood. In this process, qualia are “rhematized” indexes (Gal 2013, Irvine & Gal 2000), that is, “downshifted” (Parmentier 1994) in the reﬂexive (un)conscious from the indexical to the iconic mode of signiﬁcation (for a contrasting process of indexical interpretation, cf. Ball 2014 on “dicentization”). As a consequence of rhematization, sign vehicles across ontologically different domains no longer merely point to the same object, but also are construed as “like” the same object and thus “like” one another (Harkness 2013, Keane 2003). The semiotic “ground” of this likeness may undergo hypostatic abstraction, where a predicate (e.g., soft, straight, mean) is treated as an abstract quality (e.g., softness, straightness, meanness) (Parmentier 1994, pp. 28–29; Peirce 1933, section 4.549). This process makes possible the cline from vulgarly “coarse” to “ordinary” to exquisitely “reﬁned” registers in Javanese (Errington 1988); the sensuous effects of Senegalese “griot”-talk and “noble”talk (Irvine 1990); and the different greeting strategies of “aggressive” and “warlike” tribesmen versus “natural” and “softer” sayyid in Yemen (Caton 1986). Qualia emergent in linguistic practice condense as they instantiate cultural concepts regarding the characteristics presumed to inhere in or belong to categories of personhood, such as gender (Caton 1990, Eckert 2000, Herzfeld 1988, Inoue 2006, Kiesling 2001, Kulick 1998, Ochs 1992, Podesva 2007, Zimman 2014) or race (Alim 2004, Bucholtz 2011, Hill 2008, Reyes & Lo 2009, Wirtz 2014). In these cases, the qualia in enregistered speech practices instantiate abstract qualities that can be applied to broader forms of conduct, mobilized for illocutionary force, and linked to speciﬁc categories of personhood. QUALIA IN PHATIC PRACTICE The section above is concerned largely with indexical linkages between qualia emergent in kinds of verbal communication and their suggestion of relatively stable characteristics of kinds of persons. I 576 Harkness now turn to qualia in phatic practice, following Jakobson (and, distantly, Malinowski) in referring to pragmatic activity oriented to establishing, maintaining, or transforming social connections (physical or psychological) among people. Just as there are culturally stipulated kinds of persons, there are culturally stipulated kinds of relations among kinds of persons as well as normative qualities that people associate with these relations and in terms of which label them. The qualities of the relationships themselves come to consciousness via such labeling. Furthermore, there are ways of enacting these relational qualities through genred forms of communicative practice, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. Rupert Stasch’s (2009) ethnography of the Korowai in Papua New Guinea works through the semiotic intricacies of what he refers to as an “indigenous pragmatics of social bonds” (p. 14),
showing how social attachment and avoidance, and familiarity and strangeness, are established by actively managing the qualia of the tactile, the visual, the edible, and the verbal as media for kinship, friendship, and other relations. Focusing on the quality of otherness or alterity as it emerges and is managed in practical acts of sociality, Stasch (2009, p. 174) argues that a “sensibility about social relations... is thus also a sensibility about qualities of action and their relation-deﬁning effects.” Nozawa (2015) develops similar themes of otherness and distance, sameness and closeness, in his analysis of what he calls a “fantasy of the phatic” in urban Tokyo, where “solitude and indifference [are not] a new problem simply awaiting a solution, [rather] they are in fact productive of a fantasy of sociality” (p. 377). Beginning with sensational news reports regarding elderly people (usually men) dying alone, unnoticed, among their own family, Nozawa contrasts mu-en (no relation), engiri (disconnection), and “an anxious feeling of precarity that was already widely shared in various dimensions of Japanese society, across generational boundaries” (p. 380) with “idioms such as fureai, ‘touching-together,’ tsunagari, ‘connecting,’ and more recently in the aftermath of the 2011 triple disaster, kizuna, ‘bonding’” (p. 383). In the phatic fantasy that Nozawa describes, “contact” serves as a trope for communication: “The implicit ideology of communication here—what might be called phatic-indexicalism—stipulates that relationality is, ﬁrst and foremost, about making contact through indexical triggering (whatever else may also be accomplished)” (p. 386). The work of keeping the “infrastructure of indexicality” accessible, Nozawa notes, involves engaging in and evaluating communicative practice in terms of qualia: “skillful communicators facilitate the smooth circulation of the ‘air’ of conversation within an interactional space, as by an air conditioner” (p. 386). Qualia in practices organized explicitly around establishing and transforming social relations give sensuous form to cultural conceptualizations of the more abstract qualities that can precipitate affective states from phatic sensibilities. Qualia in explicitly relational, phatic practice have emerged as a central concern in recent ethnographic research at vastly different scales, from the multimodal management of feelings of proximity in relation to notions of hierarchy and symmetry within a Badaga peasant community in South India (Heideman 2013), to the role of “density as a relational and social quality produced by identiﬁable associations, practices, and systems of human interactions” in Mumbai (Rao 2007, p. 227), or, in a locomotory reprise of Anderson’s [2006 (1983), p. 145] notion of interdiscursive unisonance and its ritual effects, to gesture’s place in “the embodied practices through which that feeling of ‘us’ and community was generated and replenished over the centuries, and which creates a sense of intimacy on the streets of a city of millions [Cairo]” (Elyachar 2011, p. 94). Practices that can be characterized as overtly religious provide compelling examples of the role of qualia in anchoring and orienting human conduct around higher-order conceptualizations of the qualities of social relations. Consider Lester’s (2005) account of prayerful postulants in a Roman Catholic convent in Mexico. Reminiscent of Bynum’s (1987) discussions of medieval women’s ecstatic unions with Christ through mass and their reception of the Eucharist, Lester describes a group of nuns-in-training for whom the qualia of prayer practice materialize as points www.annualreviews.org • The Pragmatics of Qualia in Practice 577 of orientation for a communicatively achieved social relation with their deity in a Pascalian fashion of bodily submission: They must develop a sense of tactile meditation as they concentrate on the sensation of the rosary beads slipping through their ﬁngers during the afternoon recitation. They must learn to walk gingerly back to their pews after receiving Holy Communion and to kneel in intense adoration as the body of Christ slowly dissolves in their mouths and becomes one with their own. And in all of these areas, they must be excruciatingly sensitive to their bodies—the pains, sensations, discomforts, and strains of their mortal ﬂesh, as these, too, are thought to be avenues of communication with God.... [P]ractices of piety in the convent involve not simply the abstracted soul but the organized semiotic relationships of the bodied self to other bodied selves and to the divine. (Lester 2005
, p. 174) The qualia of divine phatic sociality and presence thus serve as key semiotic anchors of religious practice across culturally conceptualized domains of experience (Coleman 2011, Engelke 2007, Luhrmann 2012). The “bundling” (Keane 2003) of qualities through the affective qualia of phatic practice is evident, for example, in Judith Irvine’s (1990) account of enregistered affect among Wolof speakers inSenegal.A person’sbiologicallyinherited“temperament”or “capacityfor emotionality”is linked to the “composition of liquid elements of the body” such as viscosity (Irvine 1990, p. 158 n. 13); it is further associated with the qualia of encounters with elements such as earth, air, ﬁre, and water; it is yet further associated with stereotyped variations in verbal behavior and talk (breathy/sonorous, soft/loud,slow/fast,etc.);andthesecharacterizationstakentogetherareascriptivelyassociatedwith “noble” and “griot” categories of interactionally manifest personhood (Irvine 1990, pp. 133–35). The ethnographic record of the management and transformation of social relations is replete with accounts such as this, where culturally consistent sensuous experiences form pragmatic linkages among body parts such as hearts, stomachs, and livers; external materials and processes, such as ﬁre and burning, wind and blowing, rot and puriﬁcation; features of communicative forms, such as voice timbre, amplitude, and tempo; and relational identity, from immediate roles in interaction to more perduring notions of personhood (Beeman 2005, Brenneis 1987, Dent 2009, Feld 1982, Kulick 1998, Lutz 1988, Wilce 2009, Yano 2002). In this regard, feelings experienced along such dimensions as hot-to-cold appear to be seemingly ubiquitous qualitative categories for organizing the qualia of social relations: for example, angry hearts that “spark” like ﬁre among the Ilongot in relation to headhunting practices (Rosaldo 1980, p. 40), the “chill” or “warmth” of Soviet-era social relations and the role of “phatic experts” in managing such relations (Lemon 2013; other phatic qualia include “lustrous” and “dull,” “taut” and “lax”), and the “heat” and “ﬁre” of Christian revival activity in relation to gendered practices and social relations among Guhu-Samane Christians in Papua New Guinea (Handman 2014). The very stuff of sociality comes to be known and managed through such qualia—with L´evi-Strauss’s (1966) classic formulation of “hot” and “cold” societies being an extreme example of just how good qualia are to think, that is, to index culturally conceptualized qualities that can be reapplied, analogically, to other social categories of experience and scales of social organization. EXTERNAL QUALIA AND “THINGS OUT THERE” Recent anthropology in the semiotics of materiality has explored the way multiple genres of practical conduct with respect to “things” and broader frameworks of value are oriented by the projective discernment of sensuous qualities (Hull 2012; Keane 1997, 2003; Manning 2012; Manning & Meneley 2008; Murphy 2015). A conceptual shift away from viewing language as 578 Harkness primarily a denotational system, i.e., “words for things,” and toward the enregistered pragmatics of verbal and other practices as social action has productively destabilized old scholarly ideologies not only of “words” but also of “things.” Paul Manning’s (2012) study, The Semiotics of Drink and Drinking, elaborates on this issue, carefully distinguishing between these two perspectives. One is a “vaguely Saussurean or structuralist” approach, where “an object is not viewed semiotically in terms of its material qualities but rather in terms of its place within a system of structured oppositions and equivalences, giving it a differential purely negative value to which a positive meaning (sense) is arbitrarily assigned” (Manning 2012, p. 4). The other is the semiotics of embodied material culture, with multiply complex considerations of indexical relations among (indexical) practice and (meta-indexical) ideology, speech and consumption, and bodies and “things” as sites for attention. In an analysis ranging from water to vodka, soft drinks to beer, coffee to wine, Manning shows how durable material objects come to embody potentially meaningful, conventionalized qualities in the form of qualisigns that are indexically realized through the genred prag
matics of culturally interpreted drinking practices. In this vein, the qualia of comestibles in culinary-gustatory practices in particular serve as crucial pragmatic signals for orienting to and manipulating things “out there in the world”: the “luminosity, liquidity, spreadibility, durability” of olive oil in religious practices of the Mediterranean (Meneley 2008, p. 306); the various qualia of fatty substances in the mediation of all sorts of practices, from the production of the creamy, porky, fatty, homey qualia of genuine Bergamasco lardo to pornography (Kulick & Meneley 2005); gustatory qualia of all sorts, such as the various qualia of softness in the consumption of Korean soju (Harkness 2013) or of bitterness, which is as central to medicinal meals in China (Farquhar 2007) as it is, along with blandness, to the substances mediating the social visit among the Wey´ewa on Sumba, Indonesia (Kuipers 1984). A broader literature on food practices has given extensive attention to qualia in relation to comestibles and terroir (Cavanaugh 2007, Manning 2012, Paxson 2013, Weiss 2011). An anthropological concern with the senses (Classen 1993, Geurts 2002, Stoller 1989) as culturally conceptualized channels for qualia that provide knowledge about material “things” (Miller 2005, Tilley et al. 2006) can be situated within a broader program that considers the semiotic regimentation of qualia as cultural emergents, linked to genred activities organized explicitly around practical engagements with the “thinginess” of exteroceptively encountered entities. In Japan, olfactory qualia are mobilized in practices of “snifﬁng out” the smell of chemicals for treating leather as a clue to stigmatized Burakumin heritage (Hankins 2013). In Angola, various qualia of visibility and invisibility extend from diamonds, to diamond-trading practices, to the bodies of diamond traders (Calv˜ao 2013). In Vietnam, the haptic and visual qualia of paper money take on signiﬁcance in gift-giving and exchange (Truitt 2013). From the “sensory politics” of heat and public housing reform in Chicago (Fennell 2011) to dissonant and dysfunctional media in Kano, Nigeria (Larkin 2008), and from embodied aptitudes for managing and making trafﬁc in Jakarta (Lee 2015) to daily encounters with disembodied characters in Tokyo (Nozawa 2013), practices that form around engagements with infrastructure produce recognizably urban qualia as pragmatic media for action. In transnational labor migration between China and the United States, various qualia of motion become indexes of mobility as a conventional qualisign of personal value (Chu 2010). And in the circulation and effects of commodity branding, qualia become the very objects of manipulation and policing (Agha 2011, Koh 2015, Moore 2003, Nakassis 2012). Qualia may be elevated as forms of practical knowledge about the world, for example, haptic qualia in pulse-taking practices (Daniel 1983, Farquhar 2012) or sonic qualia in scientiﬁc practices (Helmreich 2007, Roosth 2009). In Beijing, the visual qualia of art objects are located within standardizing evaluation practices in the Central Academy of Fine Arts (Chumley 2013). In Paris, magicians manage the secrets of their craft, the objects of amazement, and the effects of illusion www.annualreviews.org • The Pragmatics of Qualia in Practice 579 through the subtle and agile manipulation of visual and haptic qualia ( Jones 2011). In American academic jazz programs, musical instruments and musical texts are felt, objectiﬁed, and manipulated through the multimodal qualia of practice (Wilf 2014)—in the sense of both the pragmatics of genred activity and the answer to the question, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” In these ethnographies, qualia form a cultural basis for the local semiotics of apperception, for how actors indexically presuppose prior knowledge about the world and reinstantiate (and reinforce) that knowledge through further pragmatic effects. Qualia can serve as sensuous pivot points in practical human activity. In religious practice, other worlds become perceptible through the qualia of encounters with worldly objects, as sensuous contact with the divine is cultivated through genred practice (Klaver & van de Kamp 2011, Meyer 2013, Promey 2014). In Cairo, aural qualia ethically shape
sensory attunements to speciﬁc idealized qualities among Muslims, incorporating a “constellation of sensory aptitudes and practices” (Hirschkind 2006, p. 21), and oily substances and bodily secretions serve as forms of truth making and divine witnessing among Coptic Christians (Heo 2013). In everyday bodily practices, we ﬁnd not just a body in motion, but also a body that moves in relation to the qualia of encounters with entities, a “world perceived through the feet” (Ingold 2011, p. 33). These discussions point back to Nancy Munn’s (1986) ethnography of covert cultural relations among conventional qualisigns in acts of value transformation on Gawa. In her analysis of life on Gawa, multimodal qualia culturally associated with “things out there” and bodily “things in here” emerge at the center of pragmatic action and contribute to broader domains of signiﬁcation and value: This [curing] rite exempliﬁes, on the one hand, the experiential constitution of qualia as relationships between the individual’s body and physical space in a particular context of activity, and suggests how a given activity itself may formulate these relationships; on the other hand, the rite also condenses the symbiosis between value transformations of the body and those of the productive land and the crops. (Munn 1986, p. 89) Munn’s ethnography provides numerous empirical examples of the way ritual here, as everywhere, dynamically ﬁgurates and concentrates relations across sensuous and other domains. Furthermore, she shows how qualia, as pragmatic signals emergent in and by culturally framed practices, provide a crucial pathway into the semiotic analysis of embodiment. EMBODIED QUALIA AND “THINGS IN HERE” Our understanding of social action as fundamentally pragmatic, and of pragmatics as unavoidably semiotic, has inﬂuenced anthropological analyses of bodily practice—from gesture and paralanguage (Haviland 2004) to whole genres of body-focal behavior (Hanks 1990). However, a residual ideology of language as denotation, constructed on the obviousness of the semantico-referential function and projected onto other cultural media as “symbolic” or “representational,” continues to prompt categorical distinctions, for example, in the invitation “to analyze the body as an assemblage of embodied aptitudes, not as a medium of symbolic meanings” (Asad 1993, p. 75). Such distinctions can be found in the familiar “critique of intellectualistic tendencies to assimilate bodily experience to conceptual and verbal formulations and to regard practices as ‘symbolic’ of something outside themselves” and “endeavor to move away from the unduly abstract semiotic models which have dominated anthropological research in recent years by developing a grounded and common-sense mode of analysis which lays emphasis on patterns of bodily praxis in the immediate social ﬁeld and material world” ( Jackson 1983, p. 327). Such distinctions may be ampliﬁed 580 Harkness and then combined methodologically, for example, in understanding “cultural phenomenology [of the body] as a counterweight and complement to interpretive anthropology’s emphasis on sign and symbol” (Csordas 1994, p. 4). And the components of such distinctions often are ranked unevenly within a hierarchy, such as in a “carnal sociology” that views “humans as visceral creatures impelled by socialized drives and desires for which language [reduced here to denotation] provides a second-order means of social construction” (Wacquant 2014, p. 14 n. 10, insertion mine). The pragmatic concept of qualia—practically emergent sensuous indexes regimented across modalities by cultural processes—destabilizes the polarity between “material bodies” and “abstract symbols” that makes possible the distinctions invoked above. Qualia, as a type of index, are as salient in language and other forms of communicative practice as they are in the forging and management of social relations; they are as salient in the engagement with the “thinginess” of external entities as they are in the incorporation of such entities into proprioceptive experiences of body-focal practice. Ethnographic studies of the human voice as a nexus of phonic and sonic practice provide evidence for this point (Harkness 2014, pp. 10–21). Ethnographically pervasive, the voice obviously is a communicative medium and a channel of sociality, and yet it is also persistently an objectiﬁed target of attention, serving as a material “thing” to be heard, manipulated, trained, possessed, and circulated while being embodied and, sometimes, disembodied (Fox 2004, Gade 2004, Weidman 2010). In musical practice speciﬁc
ally, consider Feld’s (1994, p. 119) observation that “timbre, the building blocks of sound quality, and texture, the composite, realized experiential feel of the sound mass in motion, are not mere ornaments but dominate melodico-rhythmic syntax in ‘lift-up-over sounding,’” a key feature of Kaluli sung polyphony that allows songs to “harden” with the sounds of the gisalo song voice “that should carry ‘like water rushing over rocks’” (Feld 1982, pp. 174, 268). Qualia are central to the aesthetics and sensuous response to voices, whether “big throats” among the Suy´a [Seeger 2004 (1987)] and powerful voices in isicathamiya singing (Erlmann 1996); race and song in South Africa (Olwage 2004) and the United States (Eidsheim 2011); “cleanliness” versus “huskiness” of voice as a function of the manipulation and treatment of the singing body in South Korea (Harkness 2014, Park 2003); or the “naturalness” of voice in South Indian classical music (Weidman 2006) and the technological mediation, manipulation, and ﬁdelity of voice around the world (Greene & Porcello 2005, Kunreuther 2014, Sterne 2003). In studies of the religious voice, qualia have been central to understanding how speech and song link body and sound, secular and sacred (Eisenlohr 2009, Engelhardt 2015, Engelke 2007, Haeri 2003, Harkness 2014, Hirschkind 2006). A robust ethnographic record suggests that qualia across modalities are central to drawing together multiple threads of activity into culturally recognized, enregistered forms of bodily conduct as integral “styles.” In the area of gender, for example, the signiﬁcance of qualia in the enregisterment of bodily practice in relation to stereotypical values is at its clearest: from Mauss’s [1973 (1934)] classic consideration of the techniques of walking among girls in the United States and France as “physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of actions,” to Garﬁnkel’s (1967) ethnomethodological study of a transgender person’s resocialization and “passing” as a woman in the late 1950s, to Young’s (1980) reﬂections on the gendering of bodily comportment and movement and the qualia of “throwing like a girl.” Anthropologists have long been interested in the qualia of practice both of the body (Blacking 1977) and “beyond the body proper” (Lock & Farquhar 2007). The semiotic scaling and stratiﬁcation of qualia in embodied practice is captured in Farquhar’s (2002) study of changing forms of consumption of traditional Chinese medicine alongside developing biomedical models of health and changing ideals of and frameworks for self-pleasure (e.g., through food and sex). It is also found in Farquhar & Zhang’s (2012) study of “nurturing life” in the parks of Beijing, where Beijingers cultivate bodily qualia through forms of athletic practice that result in culturally www.annualreviews.org • The Pragmatics of Qualia in Practice 581 conceptualized states of well-being, e.g., calisthenics and dancing that produce a “feeling that this regular bending, swaying, and rubbing is important for staying limber and free from aches and pains” (Farquhar & Zhang 2012, p. 110). Anthropologists have documented many different ways in which the qualia of painful experiences, as proprioceptive sensations directly linked with the body and bodily activity, become pragmatic points of orientation in culturally stipulated forms of practice, both narrow and broad (DelVecchio Good et al. 1992, Kleinman et al. 1997). Consider, for example, pain as a focus of community memory and activism in Chicago (Ralph 2013) or as a site around which people are socialized on Yap (Throop 2010), pain as something to be cultivated and inﬂicted through masculine athleticism among boxers in the United States (or pugilism among “ﬁghting scholars” around the world; see Wacquant 2014 and references therein) or transcended by the male wrestler in North India who is said to “‘wear a necklace of pain’ in order to achieve his goal of somatic self-perfection” (Alter 1992, pp. 221–22), and pain as a point of divergence between Warao curers and patients (Briggs 1994) or as a point of convergence in the coordinated
wailing of Inner Maniat women over the death of kin (Seremetakis 1991). Earlier generations of Worora and related peoples in the Northern Kimberley of Australia experienced “out-of-the-ordinary qualitative feelings monitored on the inside—tingling, cramp, throbbing, shooting or dull pain, etc.” as momentary “body amulets” that indexed “something going on in the way of the particular classiﬁcatory kinsperson associated with this region [of the body] by the deictic system of kinship gestures” (Silverstein 2013, p. 102). In the few studies mentioned here, the enregistered pragmatics of bodily qualia are indexically linked in practice to ways of communicating, socializing, and selecting among and incorporating external objects into embodied action. CONCLUSION: QUALIA IN PRACTICE, PRAXIS, AND PRAGMATICS In considering the sensuous pragmatics of practice, this review has focused on two related intellectual developments in anthropology. The ﬁrst is the analytical chain shift enacted by the decentering of the semantico-referential function in the anthropological understanding of language and thence cultural “symbolism” and the resultant emergence of a broader semiotic pragmatics of culture in which language is one, albeit privileged, province. The second is the role of a speciﬁc kind of pragmatic signal, sensuous indexes called qualia, in tracing a practical semiotic pathway along this shift, continuous from language and communication, to phaticity and social relations, to encounters with “things out there” in the world, to embodied experiences “in here.” The term “practice” is unavoidable for any descriptive, let alone theoretical, account in contemporary sociocultural anthropology. And yet the term is so extensionally expansive that it ceases to deﬁne much at all. Recently it was claimed that “the word [practice] designates nothing more than the refuse heap of everything that the subject-object pincer has been unable to grasp. If everything of late has become ‘practice,’ it is not because it is a good concept” (Latour 2014, p. 305). Perhaps the denotational bleaching of practice simply has to do with the fact that the word has not been “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (Peirce 1935, section 5.414). At ﬁrst glance, such discomfort with the term appears to be reminiscent of a previous generation’s discomfort with “structure,” which, in some circles, the notion of practice was supposed to supplant: “Structure” appears to be just a yielding to a word that has a perfectly good meaning but suddenly becomes fashionably attractive for a decade or so—like “streamlining”—and during its vogue tends to be applied indiscriminately because of the pleasurable connotations of its sound.... So what “structure” adds to the meaning of our phrase seems to be nothing, except to provoke a degree of pleasant puzzlement. (Kroeber, quoted in L´evi-Strauss 1963, p. 314). 582 Harkness In the 1980s, the “practice turn” held the promise of “a study of all forms of human action, but from a particular–political–angle” (Ortner 1984, p. 149). A few decades later, “[r]eiﬁcation of ‘practice’ as a deﬁning object leaves sociocultural anthropology gravitating toward nominalism, or toward functionalism organized around a tacit universal idea of rational choice or power-seeking” (Stasch 2014, p. 631). When given methodological grounding through pragmatics—the indexical processes by which action is typiﬁed, situated, and meaningful—the notion of practice can continue to serve anthropology as the substance of praxis, which I take in its weak (rather than strong) form to refer to reﬂexive, goal-directed, and potentially consequential behavior. The an sich character of practice relates to the f¨ur sich character of praxis through the classic Geertzian problematic of studying “other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to” (Geertz 1973, p. 9). This problematic—motivated by the Goffmanian question regarding all social activity: “What is it that’s going on here?” (Goffman 1974, p. 8)—has been approached methodologically in semiotic anthropology through the concept of metapragmatics, the realm of pragmatic (i.e., indexical) processes that seem, dialectically, to frame, stipulate, or regiment pragmatic processes (Silverstein 1976). As certain qualia emerge in practice as salient features of praxis through such group-relative reﬂections on and of practice, anthropologists are faced with the fact that “[
h]owever much the social theorist, ethnographer, historian, or political activist may want to take seriously other people’s self-consciousness, we cannot assume in advance that this self-consciousness will coincide with what we would take to be a convincing account of their actions and the consequences that follow from them” (Keane 2007, p. 4). With conﬂicting accounts come anthropological theories designed to explain the fact that people in social groups have different understandings of the salient pragmatic features of practice: false consciousness, misrecognition, secondary rationalizations, and so forth, as the literature would have them. But the problem does not stop with disagreement. Faced with a systematic demonstration of the semiotic constraints on or limits to awareness of social action, even as it enters a mode of praxis, anthropologists have also come to consider “how fraught with danger is our [merely] taking at face value any statements by participants about various pragmatically-meaningful action” (Silverstein 1981, p. 20) without considering the semiotic properties of such statements in relation to the semiotic properties of the action being described. In conclusion, I would like to suggest three areas for further empirical research on the pragmatics of qualia in practice. First, although “anything which focuses the attention is an index” (Peirce 1932, section 2.285), not all indexes focus the attention. An important area for further research is the role of habituated, normative, ordinary qualia that do not normally emerge as foci in praxis but rather sustain everyday practices precisely for their unremarkable status (such qualia are central to theories of habitus, hexis, and the unremarkable—as well as unremarked— everyday). Second, much of what does enter awareness does so in relation to the metapragmatic functionality of language. In addition to studying qualia in linguistic practice and its aesthetic and ethical evaluation, there remains considerable work to be done to study talk about qualia, both in terms of the structural possibilities and constraints of speciﬁc languages (see, e.g., Levinson 2000, Lucy 1997 on the lexicalization of color terms) and in terms of genre and register, such as in wine talk or “oinoglossia” (Silverstein 2003), aesthetic commentary in arts training (Chumley 2013), conversations about “styling styles” among computer scientists (Wilf 2013), or modes of talking about sound and voice (Feld et al. 2004). Third, insofar as practices are oriented to and anchored by ritual sites of authorization that demarcate and valuate social space, more ethnographic research is needed on the way in which qualia across different modalities are brought into ritual alignment as (iconic) indexes of the same quality (e.g., softness, purity, manliness) within ideological frames of evaluation (see the above quote from Munn 1986). An ethnographic approach that considers the pragmatic linkages among all three—awareness, language, and ritual—will have much to www.annualreviews.org • The Pragmatics of Qualia in Practice 583 contribute to our comparative anthropological understanding of the “feeling of doing” and the broader cultural organization of sensuous semiosis. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT The author is not aware of any afﬁliations, memberships, funding, or ﬁnancial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Earlier drafts of this article beneﬁted from the comments of Lily Hope Chumley, Doreen Lee, Paul Manning, and Michael Silverstein. The research for and writing of this article were supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (NRF-2010-361-A00013), which was made possible by the Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Study. LITERATURE CITED Agha A. 2011. Commodity registers. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 21:22–53 Alim HS. 2004. You Know My Steez: An Ethnographic and Sociolinguistic Study of Styleshifting in a Black American Speech Community. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press Alter J. 1992. The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press Anderson B. 2006 (1983). Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso Asad T. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press Ball C. 2014. On dicentization. J. Linguist. Anthropol. 24:151
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Tech University student and rape victim Michele Mallin mistakenly identiﬁed 26-year-old Timothy Cole as her attacker, ﬁrst from a photograph, then in a police lineup. Cole would later die in prison after serving 13 years of a 25-year sentence for a crime he did not commit (see http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Timothy_Cole.php). Many factors are known to contribute to such unthinkable distortions of memory, but one may seem surprising: the role of language. The science of memory has shown that if we verbally describe something we have seen, as when a victim describes an attacker to police, this act of putting experience into words can overshadow our exact recollection of the original experience (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler 1990; see also Loftus & Palmer 1974, Lupyan 2008).1 By verbalizing something, we can become more likely to make a wrong decision on the basis of what we said we saw (and now believe we saw). Schooler & Engstler-Schooler (1990) discovered this effect in relation to how people remember faces: If we see a face and then describe it in words, we will later be worse at recognizing it than if we had not verbally described it at all. They also found that committing perceptions to words can make memory worse for another perceptual domain: color. In an experiment, they showed people a set of subtly different hues. Some were asked to describe the colors in words. These people were worse at later identifying the exact color they had seen. Those who had not verbally described the original color, on the other hand, were better at remembering it. By saying what they saw, those in the ﬁrst group were allowing language to deplete or alter their mental representation of the original experience. This happens with faces and colors because they are domains that “defy linguistic description” (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler 1990, p. 66)—no language makes distinctions among faces or colors anywhere near as ﬁnely as our visual discrimination can. The authors concluded that “[s]ome things are better left unsaid” (p. 67). How is it that recounting an experience in words can cause a distortion of memory? This effect of language on cognition is a by-product of an otherwise critical function of language: categorization. To categorize things is to group them together, treating them as effectively identical for some purpose by disregarding or discarding irrelevant differences (Cohen & Lefebvre 2005, Levinson & Majid 2014). Language is centrally involved. The concepts that words encode are ready-at-hand devices for categorizing (Taylor 2004, Enﬁeld 2015). So, for example, even though no two ﬁsh are the same, we treat them as the same when we refer to them both with a single word ﬁsh. Of course the person who says I caught two ﬁsh today should know whether they were the same or different species, but their addressee cannot know just from hearing the phrase two ﬁsh. Linguistic categorization omits distinguishing information. Now because we know that the meanings of words differ greatly across languages {see semanticists from Boas [1966 (1911)] to Goddard & Wierzbicka (2014)}, the information omitted in any verbal act of categorization must be different in different languages. English does not put a sturgeon and a dolphin in the same basic-level category, but many other languages do. In Lao, the word paa covers ﬁsh and dolphins in a single concept (Kerr 1972, p. 591). A comparison of any two languages will quickly yield thousands of examples such as this (see Bowerman & Levinson 2001, Gentner & Goldin-Meadow 2003, Evans 2010b, Malt & Wolff 2010, Riemer 2010, inter alia). The trusted concepts that words and other linguistic symbols provide give our minds ways to economize by omitting needless detail. We may save on mental processing, for example, by not having to remember a particular ﬁsh’s irrelevant peculiarities once we have classiﬁed it as a ﬁsh. The trade-off, as the research on overshadowing shows, is that we may lose later access 1It is not known if language was a factor in Tim Cole’s misidentiﬁcation, but the overshadowing research gives us every reason to think that it was. 208 Enﬁeld to context-speciﬁc details that we could have otherwise stored. On balance, the trade-off is good. Most of the time we do not need the details. But once in a while details turn out to be indispensable. We learn this if we ﬁnd ourselves buying the wrong tint of paint for the house or, more consequentially
, convicting an innocent man. WHORFIANISM If language can imperceptibly constrain or channel our thoughts in ways like this, it raises a counterintuitive challenge to our sense of free will. Do our trains of thought run on tracks laid by language, such that each different language takes our thoughts to a different place? A lineage of language scientists has posed and explored these questions, from Herder (1992) in the eighteenth century and von Humboldt [1988 (1836)] in the nineteenth, to Boas [1966 (1911)] and Sapir (1949) in the twentieth century and even more recently (see Leavitt 2010). Perhaps the best-known author to pose this question is the anthropological linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (see Whorf 2012). Whorf ’s considerable accomplishments in Native American and Mesoamerican linguistics, including his 1930s ﬁeldwork on the Aztec language and his contributions to the decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphs, are still referenced in specialist literature of that area. In linguistics more generally, Whorf made lasting contributions to the study of how meaning is encoded, both overtly and covertly, in grammatical systems. But Whorf is discussed most for his proposals concerning relations between language, thought, and reality. In a short article written in 1939, titled “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language,” Whorf considered the possible role of language in human error leading to accidental ﬁres, drawing on his professional experience as an insurance investigator (see Whorf 2012, pp. 173–204). What he pointed to was not unlike the verbal overshadowing effect for faces and colors. In line with previous proposals by Boas and Sapir, Whorf argued that a linguistically grounded habit of thinking might play a causal role in nonlinguistic behavior. In one of his ﬁre insurance examples, an explosion occurred when workers were careless with cigarettes near empty gasoline drums. Whorf reasoned that if an English speaker thinks of a gasoline drum as empty because there is no gasoline in it, this use of the English word empty suggests to the person that there is literally nothing in the drum. Hence the person ignores the possibility that the drum is, in fact, full of vaporous fumes, and hence the dangerous behavior. If you think this means Whorf was taking language to be the sole determinant of behavior, or even a straitjacket for thought, you would not be alone. But Whorf never said these things nor did he think them. Presenting his case in the “condensed and unqualiﬁed form” required for that short article, he had hoped the reader “would use his thinking apparatus” and adjust accordingly (these quotations from a letter to his editor cited in Lee 1996, p. 153). In response to his editor’s suggestion that he may have overemphasized the role of language in channeling behavior, Whorf explained, I have thought of possibly adding a brief statement or a footnote saying that I don’t wish to imply that language is the sole or even the leading factor in the types of behavior mentioned such as the ﬁre-causing carelessness through misunderstandings induced by language, but that this is simply a coordinate factor along with others. It didn’t seem at ﬁrst that this should be necessary if the reader uses ordinary common sense. (Lee 1996, p. 153) Here is what Whorf suggested. When deciding how to behave, one might naturally use language in thinking, and in so doing one may effectively discard, or fail to notice, important information that happens not to feature in a linguistic rendering of the state of affairs at hand. It is not that people cannot comprehend alternative depictions of reality. Nor is it that we cannot think without www.annualreviews.org • Relativity From Reference to Agency 209 language. It is that we are creatures of habit. If language is our most practiced resource, it should be no surprise that language instills deep cognitive habits: habits of attention and disattention, habits of reasoning—or failing to reason—in deciding how to act. HEURISTIC THINKING A common gloss of Whorf ’s view is that a language will predispose us to think certain things. But we could just as well—or better—say that a language predisposes us not to think certain things. The fact that people fail to notice much of what goes on around us is now well established (Grimes 1996, Simons & Levin 1997). Research on rational heuristics in decision making shows that to routinely disregard a portion of the available information not only is a common strategy, but in fact makes good sense (Gigerenzer et al. 2011). The logic of decision making includes a desire to minimize the costs involved. It is the same from small things, such as choosing which brand of cigarettes to buy, to big things, such as �
��nding a marriage partner. Once you have locked on to the problem (e.g., Which one to choose?), your next step is to ﬁnd ways to narrow the search for an appropriate solution and “lock off ” by making the decision that yields the best balance: desired beneﬁt for lowest cost. And a decision should be made without unnecessary delay in order to get on with solving the next puzzle in the stack. Take a simple decision such as choosing what to order at a restaurant. One strategy would be to study the entire menu and weigh all the options, comparing them on some criteria and selecting the best. But such thoroughness could be cognitively and socially costly and a waste of time. A good alternative is the strategy known as satisﬁcing (Simon 1956, 1983; compare Gigerenzer 2007, Kahneman 2011): Do not waste your time studying all the options; simply settle on the ﬁrst solution that is good enough for current purposes and stop the search. So, if you already like the idea of the mushroom risotto, it may not pay to keep looking at the menu in the hope of ﬁnding something better. How do we determine what qualiﬁes as good enough? One way is to use concepts. Concepts are tools in decision making because they give us criteria for recognizing instances of what we are looking for and of what we are not looking for. In this way, concepts are sieves (Kockelman 2013; Enﬁeld 2015, p. 172). They are means for deciding, and thus for acting. Whorf ’s idea was simply that language is likely to play a central role in decision making along these lines. At the root of this idea are two facts: (a) the most ready-at-hand concepts are the ones encoded in the languages we speak,2 and (b) the languages we speak are known to differ radically in the kinds of concepts they encode. This suggests a prima facie argument for a form of cultural relativity grounded in differences between languages. If concepts provide a basis for categorization and decision making, and if different languages supply their speakers with different concepts, then different languages provide their speakers with different bases for decision making and, subsequently, for different patterns of behavior. Some may recoil at the idea of relativity (or relativism) in any form, appealing to common sense. Philosopher Paul Boghossian opens his antirelativist book Fear of Knowledge with a controversy surrounding Native American origins (Boghossian 2006). Although many archaeologists believe that humans migrated ten millennia ago from Asia into America via the Bering Strait, some Native Americans believe that their people emerged onto the Earth from a subterranean spirit world. These two versions of reality are, of course, not equally valid (or at least not valid in the same 2Of special interest for Whorf and many since was the encoding of concepts in grammatical as opposed to lexical forms, given that the former are maximally requisite, tacit, and practiced, and thus maximally habitual. 210 Enﬁeld way). There are facts that do not stop being facts just because we believe something else. Rocks will sink, whether you like it or not. But there are other versions of relativity than those grounded in a refusal to acknowledge brute facts. A version of relativity more likely to succeed begins with the observation that we cannot determine facts independently from the measuring instruments that are used. Our primary measuring instruments are our bodies (Gibson 1979, Ingold 2000). Why can dogs hear sounds we cannot? Because dogs have different bodies than we do. For humans with human ears, ultrasonic noises may as well not be real (although we can infer their existence using other means, from hi-tech instruments such as spectrograms to low-tech measures such as visual observations of dogs’ behaviors). The body deﬁnes an individual’s horizons, both limiting and licensing our possible perceptions and actions. If you have the body of a bat, a pitch-dark cave will seem like a good place to be. With the body of an earthworm you will feel at home in a stretch of turf. If these are not different worlds, they are certainly different worldviews. Along similar lines, each language is a kind of body for thinking and acting. Philosopher of mind Gilbert Ryle advocated a view of cognition as a public phenomenon, deﬁning it not by putative internal states but by the “assemblage of performances” that such states enable (Ryle 1949, p. 45; Enﬁeld 2013, p. 58). To perceive or understand the world is to relate to it, interpret it, and react to it. The reasoning involved draws on concepts and categories in a range of ways, and, as is clear to anyone who looks, many if not most of our concepts and categories are supplied by the languages we
speak. This is pretty much what Whorf and his predecessors were suggesting. As Edward Sapir, Whorf ’s teacher at Yale, wrote, “[T]he language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation” (Sapir 1949, p. 162). On this view, the study of different languages, especially of those that are most different from so-called Standard Average European (Whorf 2012, p. 358), has the potential to supply us with new and different ways of actively interpreting the world. Whorf avidly promoted the study of lesser-known languages, such as those of Native America, because each provides an opportunity to broaden our understanding in one more way. Although nobody is “free to describe nature with absolute impartiality,” Whorf argued, the person who would come closest “would be a linguist familiar with very many widely different linguistic systems” (Whorf 2012, p. 274). Today’s language explorers are fulﬁlling this ambition. As Evans (2010a, p. 155) writes, “we study other languages because we cannot live enough lives.”3 NEO-WHORFIANISM How are we to treat Whorf ’s idea today, some 75 years later? Some have taken it to be no more than a suggestive framework, serving as a conceptual guide for anthropological research or as a source of hypotheses for experimental testing (see Gumperz & Levinson 1996, Gentner & Goldin-Meadow 2003). Others have pressed too hard on the idea, dismissing it for its failure to take the weight (McWhorter 2014). But it is not clear that Whorf ’s work was designed to bear that load. Nor are people always critiquing the thing that Whorf actually proposed. Cognitive anthropologist Stephen C. Levinson describes the problem: “It is as if the topic of ‘Whorﬁanism’ is a domain where anybody can let off steam, go on mental holiday, or pounce upon an ideological enemy” (Levinson 2003a, p. 25). Whorf commentator Penny Lee counts the ways Whorf has been “misread, unread, and superﬁcially treated” (Lee 1996, p. 14; see also Levinson 2012, p. xiii, footnote 3). 3These words are adapted by Evans from those of literary critic Harold Bloom: “We read because we cannot know enough people.” www.annualreviews.org • Relativity From Reference to Agency 211 Table 1 Lucy’s three types or levels of linguistic relativity (Lucy 1997, p. 292) Type or level of linguistic relativity Characterization Semiotic “How speaking any natural language at all may inﬂuence thinking”; does having a code with a symbolic component transform thinking? Structural “How speaking one or more particular natural languages (e.g., Hopi versus English) may inﬂuence thinking”; do quite different morphosyntactic conﬁgurations of meaning affect thinking about reality? Discursive “Whether using language in a particular way (e.g., schooled) may inﬂuence thinking”; do discursive practices affect thinking either by modulating structural inﬂuences or by directly inﬂuencing the interpretation of the interactional context? In spite of various objections and misconstruals, Neo-Whorﬁan explorations developed and extended Whorf ’s ideas toward the end of the century and ever since (see Brown & Lenneberg 1954; Brown et al. 1958; Hymes 1966; Rosch 1977; Silverstein 1979; Hale 1986; Wierzbicka 1989; Schultz 1990; Hill & Mannheim 1992; Lucy 1992, 1996; Gumperz & Levinson 1996; Michael 2002; Gentner & Goldin-Meadow 2003; Kockelman 2010; Webster 2014; among many others; Whorf 2012 includes an extended bibliography). The work has covered much ground; the case has been made both for and against a linguistic relativity hypothesis, often in strong terms, from multiple perspectives, in relation to a range of (usually nonsocial) ontological domains, including color, space, and time, and using a range of methodologies. Over the past couple of decades, people have tried to deﬁne or characterize possible types or elements of linguistic relativity. This has been done not just as a step toward better understanding, but also as a way of singling out the lines of work that may be most worthwhile pursuing, for example because they are methodologically more tractable, conceptually more coherent, or empirically more promising. As we can now see, the pie can be cut in many ways. Lucy (1997,
p. 292), for example, suggests that there are “three types or levels” of linguistic relativity (Table 1; see also Lucy 1992, 1996). Bloom & Keil (2001, pp. 352–53) identify four loci at which distinctions can be made; there is partial overlap with Lucy’s (1997) taxonomy (Table 2). Wolff & Holmes (2011, p. 254) distinguish seven “classes and subclasses of hypotheses on how language might affect thought.” Two of these are brieﬂy considered and dismissed from the scope of interest: ﬁrst, the idea that language affects thought because thought is language, and second, the idea that while thought and language are separate, language can determine and overwrite Table 2 Bloom & Keil’s (2001, pp. 352–53) distinctions in linguistic relativity effects Locus of distinction Contrast Language versus languages Effects that are language-general (i.e., effects of having language versus not having it) versus effects that are language-speciﬁc (i.e., from being a speaker of Language X versus Language Y) Parts of language that matter Syntax versus words Magnitude of effect Mild versus massive Types of effects Produce effects on our online perception of the world Shape the categories we form Enable us to perform logical inference and causal reasoning Produce effects on how we structure our basic ontological commitments (about time, space, matter) 212 Enﬁeld Table 3 Wolff & Holmes’ (2011, p. 254) ﬁve ways that we see effects of language on thought Type or level of linguistic relativity Characterization Thinking before language Thinking for speaking “Encoding for later expression”; i.e., how we think about an experience may be guided by considerations for how we may have to code it linguistically later on Thinking with language Language as meddler “Linguistic representations compete with nonlinguistic representations” Language as augmenter “Linguistic representations extend/enable nonlinguistic representations” Thinking after language Language as spotlight “Language makes certain properties highly salient in nonlinguistic thinking” Language as inducer “Language primes certain types of processing in nonlinguistic thinking” patterns of thought. Wolff & Holmes are interested instead in ﬁve remaining ways by which we may see a language–thought relationship, each of which begins with the assumption that “thought and language differ structurally” (Table 3). Other recent taxonomies include Reines & Prinz’s (2009, pp. 1027–28) four types of linguistic relativity (radical, trivial, habitual, and ontological) and Gentner & Goldin-Meadow’s (2003, pp. 9–10) three types of language–thought relation (language as lens, language as tool kit, and language as category maker). As these sources show, the project has now gone well beyond Whorf ’s speciﬁc observations and suggestions. Much of the extensive literature is reviewed in the articles cited above, as well as in book-length review treatments, most recently by Leavitt (2010) and Everett (2013); see also the wide-ranging bibliography in Whorf (2012). There we see many ways that language diversity correlates with patterns of cognitive diversity: Our visual perception and categorization of color distinctions can be affected by cross-language differences in color vocabularies (Roberson et al. 2005, Winawer et al. 2007, Roberson & Hanley 2010); our implicit evaluations of the characteristics of inanimate objects such as bridges can be affected by whether the relevant word is grammatically feminine (as for “bridge” in German) or masculine (as in Spanish; Boroditsky et al. 2003); our reasoning about spatial relations can be affected by the frame of reference that is dominant in a language (cardinal directions in some languages versus left/right in others; Haviland 1993, Levinson 2003b, Majid et al. 2004, Haun et al. 2011). Further examples abound. NEW DIRECTIONS So we can no longer say, as Lucy (1997, p. 291) could nearly 20 years ago, that there is “relatively little empirical research” on linguistic relativity. But the research that has been done, penetrating as it is, has covered only a thin slice of the possible scope of this topic because Neo-Whorﬁan work has been fairly consistent in its narrow interpretation of the three key concepts. Reality has been taken to mean the realm of objective, nonsocial facts: “concepts of ‘time,’ ‘space,’ and ‘matter’” (Whorf 2012, p. 178). Thought or mind has been taken to mean general, nonsocial cognition: forms of categorization, reasoning, and memory about reality as perceived. And language has mostly been taken to refer to structural and semantic features, synchron
ically framed, with a focus on the referential functions of words and other linguistic signs. Restricting the scope in this way has delivered valuable progress. But it is time to consider the larger space of things that could or should be regarded as instances of linguistic relativity. Several important contributions to the linguistic anthropological literature have recognized the limitations of dominant work on linguistic relativity and have pointed to ways forward. Hymes (1966) proposed a “second type” of linguistic relativity, having to do with the effects of culture on the social functions of language. Silverstein (1976, 1979) built upon this idea and elaborated a www.annualreviews.org • Relativity From Reference to Agency 213 view of linguistic relativity that follows from the fact that “people not only speak about, or refer to, the world ‘out there’—outside of language—they also presuppose (or reﬂect) and create (or fashion) a good deal of social reality by the very activity of using language” (Silverstein 1976, p. 194). He identiﬁed language ideology—in particular the native view that language is mostly for referring to things—as a force that “affects the strategy of language use” (Silverstein 1979, p. 194). Friedrich (1979, 1986), Sherzer (1987), and Webster (2014) have called for due attention to be paid to relativity in the poetic functions of language (cf. Leavitt 2011, p. 201; see below). And Michael (2002) presents an approach to linguistic relativity that is concerned not with the impact of referential semantics on individual thought, but with the inherently social question of “how concrete discursive practice impacts processes of distributed cognition” (Michael 2002, p. 114; cf. also Everett 2005, 2012; Zinken & Ogiermann 2013). To build upon efforts such as these, and to identify candidate lines of work for sustained attention, researchers must chart a full possibility space by reconsidering the core elements of the linguistic relativity idea: language, mind, and reality. In the following sections we brieﬂy consider only two dimensions along which a possibility space could be mapped: the multiple functions of language beyond reference, and the type of reality that exists solely by virtue of our beliefs and commitments, namely, social reality. Language and Its Functions Most Neo-Whorﬁan work has taken language to be primarily a referential device. Li & Gleitman (2002, p. 266), for example, explicitly identify language as a “means for making reference to the objects, relations, properties, and events that populate our everyday world.” But the referential function of language is just one among several (Austin 1962; Silverstein 1976, 1979, 1981, 2014; Zinken 2008; Kockelman 2010). Jakobson (1960) deﬁned six basic types of functions that a piece of linguistic behavior can have: emotive, poetic, conative, referential, phatic, and metalingual. These functions are nonexclusive. Any swatch of language can usually be seen to perform several if not all of these functions at once. This is not just a conceptually useful scheme; it is theoretically well grounded in the core elements of a communicative act involving two people and a shared code: sender, message, addressee, context, channel, and code (cf. Shannon 1948). Thus, whereas the referential function orients to the context, picking out or construing objects and events for mutual attention, the phatic function, for example, orients to the channel, opening up or maintaining a connection between interlocutors. So we could, for example, frame the matter of linguistic relativity in terms of language’s phatic function, and we would surely see signiﬁcant diversity in this functional domain as an outcome of the language being used. Consider a form of linguistic relativity implied by differences in the modality of a language: audible-plus-visible in the case of spoken language versus visible-only in the case of sign language. Opening up and maintaining a connection between interlocutors is a very different matter in a spoken language than it is for deaf people using a sign language (Baker 1977, Wilbur & Petitto 1981, Lieberman 2014). The differences have implications both for cognition and for action: Deaf children interacting through the visual mode must take into account their interlocutor’s perceptual state in order to carry out a successful interaction. A deaf child must understand that it is not enough to be able to see his intended addressee but that the addressee also must be visually attending to the child as well. Thus, before any conversational turns can take place, a child must ﬁrst evaluate