Christine Kenneally , "You Have Gestures "
Some aspects of what it means to be human are relatively easy to track throughout history. The archaeological excavation of bones and tools allows us to trace the development of our ancestors as they took the physical form and developed the cultural habits that we now consider to be definitive of humanity. Other aspects of human culture are much more obscure, however; foremost among these is language. While there exists a scattered and incomplete history of the written word, the origins of spoken language have long evaded anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, linguists, and other scholars searching for the beginnings of language.
Journalist Christine Kenneally takes on this challenge in The First Word: The search for the origins of language (2007), her first book. A native Australian, Kenneally earned her bachelor’s degree in English and linguistics at Melbourne University and her doctorate in linguistics at Cambridge University and then moved to the United States to become a freelance writer. Before turning her attention to the historical investigation of language, she wrote widely for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Discover, Slate, and Salon, among other publications, on subjects ranging from Alex the talking African grey parrot to hemispherectomies--operations involving the removal of half of one’s brain.
The First Word follows two narratives: the first is an evolutionary story, exploring the possible random adaptations that led to the emergence of Homo loquens, the talking animal. At the same time, it traces the politics of scientific research, asking why the study of linguistic evolution was a taboo subject for so long, “formally banned by the Linguistics Society of Paris” in an interdiction that was never officially relaxed. In her research, Kenneally discovers that “the platforms of language were built over thousands of millennia and we share many of these with very different animals.” The following chapter—“You have gestures”—is drawn from her book, and traces just some of these shared communicative habits. Weaving together different strands of research to offer a holistic view of how language evolves, Kenneally forces into the light the uncomfortable issues that led some scholarly groups to ban the study of linguistic evolution in the first place. Just how exceptional is human expression? How are we to interpret the many forms of language-based expression (foremost among these literature) if language is simply an evolutionary quirk? By bringing these questions back into the conversation about language, Kenneally offers new ways to understand our world, and our words.
Kenneally, Christine. The First Word. Penguin, 2007.
The quotation is drawn from “A Path to Lanugage,” an original essay by Kenneally available at the Powell’s Books web site.
Digital image drawn from Christine Kenneally's blog.
Link to Explore:
Christine Kenneally's official blog.
A YouTube video of Christine Kenneally's lecture as part of the Authors@Google series.
Question for Connecting:
- “Language,” Kenneally states, “is an act of shared attention, and without the fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.” With Henry Jenkins’ analysis of the Harry Potter Wars in mind, discuss the degree to which it is possible to cultivate this “willingness to listen” in others. Do “affective communities” necessarily promote this willingness or are they formed, in part, by a shared refusal to listen to those outside the community? Is convergence culture enhancing this willingness to listen or is it having some other effect?
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