Chapter IX

ALYCE in ANTHROPOLOGIA'S ASTONISHING WORLD of WORDS

The primary acquisition problem is a central part of a more general Worldview Problem that makes the study and understanding of human development, both ontogenetic and phylogenic, a particularly anthropological affair. The black box of the child’s world is part of a larger "Pandora’s Box" of Human Nature and Culture that has long come to define the subject and object of Anthropological inquiry. The solution to the problem of primary acquisition might possibly serve as a ground for the theoretical and paradigmatic unification of the major sub-field of Anthropology that has become increasingly affected by its intra-disciplinary divisiveness and theoretical disarray. It offers a general problematic that is part of a larger, more general, problem. It is thus related to other theoretical problematics that may be thought of as being paradigmatically prototypical for general, theoretical Anthropology. To the extent that it represents a common ground of theoretical convergence upon which all four sub-disciplines, linguistic, archaeological, biological, and socio cultural, can make substantially significant contributions. To the extent that all four sub-disciplines can mutually define their central theoretical objective in the scientific definition and explanation of human reality.

It is not too difficult to see where and how each of the sub-disciplines might make such a contribution to the primary acquisition problem and to the understanding of human development. Biological theory can offer and understanding of the genetic constraints and expression of human nature. Linguistic anthropology can explicate the vital connection between language, culture and cognition that is central to the acquisition problem. Socio-cultural anthropology can help to explicate the cross-cultural dynamics of which the primary acquisition problem is the Archimedean fulcrum. Archaeology can delineate the larger and finer outlines of the prehistoric and historical patternings and processes that have influenced, and been influenced, by this problem. Neither is it very difficult to see how the solution to the primary acquisition problem can from a general anthropological point of view, go a long way toward explaining and elucidating other problems in all the four sub-disciplines. Its explication might help to elucidate many other theoretical problems in all the sub-disciplines.

The theoretical problematic of understanding Alyce’s world brings us to the edge of our own adult worldview, where we experience the vertigo of attempting to describe in our own terms what remains fundamentally "wordless" and therefore indescribable understandings. In so doing, we must face the ultimate indictment that we are superimposing our own adult-like sensibilities and sense of order upon a child’s world, and our own world is one that consists mostly of words and many things that they symbolize.

Trying to get behind the veil of the child’s world view and so translate this in anthropological terms brings us face-to-face with the problem of hermeneutical reflexiveness of our own linguisticality of knowledge. In trying to capture in words the world and worldview of Alyce we must come to terms with the inherent referential descriptivism of our knowledge statements. This descriptivism tends to undermine the plausibility of verifying our truth claims in regard to the child’s world, as it is based upon the assumption that language must correspond to the actions to which they refer. Language and its world of reference exist only in a very loose, contextually dependent, conventionally arbitrary relationship. "Commonly we take the language of social description to stand in some roughly correspondent relationship to discriminating patterns of action. Thus, whether in science or daily life, description is assumed to be informative about actions independent of it." (Kenneth Gergen, ?, pg. 136)

We are engaged in theoretically reconstructing a model of a child’s reality that is held to be generalizable to many or most children’s reality, and yet the primary constraints of this reconstruction is not he world of the child itself, but by the constraints imposed by our own linguisticality and the pre-understandings that are implicit to our interpretation of the world. It is likely that any such general construction is, at least from the child’s point of view, fundamentally closed to empirical verification in a way that a strongly positivistic paradigm of science demands.

On the other hand, if we accept a more humanistic role for anthropology, one that entertains a wider role for philosophy than the analysis of referential language, then we are allowed to accept the positive value of alternative interpretations of the same basic realities. We must accept the criteria of each interpretation’s relative productiveness in generating new insights, new avenues of investigation, and, most importantly, new questions. We can also validly accept the criteria of relative, achieved progress by which we can select some interpretations and more interesting, if not more correct, than others, and that we can therefore eventually triangulate such different worlds as the child’s in a scientifically systematic, fruitful and faithful way. Such triangulation does not lead to the ultimate conclusions of a final bottom-line truth on such worlds, but do allow a limited, relative exclusion of the impossible in the separation of the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. If all of reality remains fundamentally solipsistic and therefore objectively unknowable, we are still left with the problem of understanding and making sense of world knowledge, whether this is subjective or objective, shared or private.

Alyce is like Lewis Caroll’s Alice, and our looking glass world of Anthropological verbiage is not unlike Alice’s world of Wonderland. It is an astonishing, unpetrified world in which words take on a life and animating power of their own. In Anthropology’s world of words, like Wonderland, we are faced with the problematic of words, in both their literal and figurative senses, as both denotative and connotative, becoming the symbolic replacement for the world that they represent. Alyce, like Alice, trips through our astonishing world of anthropologia with a naïve, innocent faith in the common senseness and practical verisimilitude of her first words. As adults, as anthropologists in real life, it is we who seem strange and unfamiliar, and not Alyce. Alyce, like Alice, will have many accidental encounters in her journey through the forest of anthropological astonishment, but it will be she who somehow manages to escape every episodic entanglement that we ourselves become inextricably entrapped within.

Alyce will eventually find her way out of our anthropological world of words and back into her own world of play and make-believe. She will learn in her encounters with her new environments how to overcome the many obstacles that stand in her way. She will eventually learn how to make sense of our astonishing world, and achieve the independence that comes with such understanding.

We have become, by the process of our own inversion, the strangers in her world—she is not the stranger in our world.

Alyce’s acquisition of her world, its internalization and socialization with its many inaugurations of special skills and capabilities, is the human pathway towards achieving independence in the world that has been our natural endowment. Even at one-year’s-old, Alyce’s drive for autonomy in her own constructed life world has been super ordinate to her inherent dependency and to our continuously frustrated attempts at superimposing our own constraints and spurious sense of order upon her world.

We have learned as many lessons from Alyce as she has learned from us, and it is in the openness of this mutual learning that we have together created a larger, more interesting world in which to live.

To get to know Alyce’s world has been to toy with the anthropological possibility of becoming, however imperfectly and partially, a child once again. It is to renew an old acquaintance with a hidden side of our selves in our adult-oriented, adult-dominated world. It is to reinvigorate and revitalize a simple wonderful sense of astonishment about our larger world in a way only children seem to know best.