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Dinesh ^club

4 years ago. Edited 21 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

Symbols arise naturally within minds embedded in cultures, able to learn, retain and integrate knowledge into a sense of personal and group identity. One example, just given is how the mind makes use of errors, perhaps moving from misperceptions to icons to symbols, one image ‘standing for’ another

But they also arise from adaptation of the natural to the conventional in culture. One treatment of this route towards symbolisation is proposed by anthropologist Greg Urban. In his work on ritualised lamentation in Ge language of Brazil, Urban argues that natural crying was transformed culturally into ritualised crying. This would illustrate a transformation of natural emotionally reactive sounds into a form of ‘strategic vocal manipulation’, a form of iconic representation of the emotional state of sadness. Further, he claims that ‘strategic vocal deceptions in non-human primates are possible precursors of true socially constructed, socially shared metasignals, which in turn may be ancestors of modern human language.’ Though newly created icons are insufficient for symbolic language, they do seem to offer a distinct and natural source of developing representations and thus perhaps a source of symbol invention. ~ Page 101

21 months ago. Edited 21 months ago.

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