ANTHROPOLOGIA'S ALYCE

World view, the Primary Acquisition Problem

And Organic Human Development

by Hugh M. Lewis

Nature/Nurture * The Primary Acquisition Problem * Organic Human Development * The Life World * Creolization and the Origins of Human Development * Genius, the Wild Child and the Law of Averages * Alyce's World * Alyce's World View * Alycita as an Amateur System * Alyce Through the Anthropological Looking Glass

The miracle of a child's rapid development has long been an important philosophical, social and scientific problem. The nature/nurture dichotomy has always been at the center of this problem and how this question is answered remains decisive in the determination of social policy and scientific research regarding human development and the study of human acquisition. While either extreme has its ideological dangers attempting to straddle the fence between the two camps is intellectually more sophisticated but for many it remains theoretically unsatisfactory, as no independent 'prime mover' can be stipulated and empirically verified. But how we go about answering this question has high stakes in determining ultimately how we go about reproducing and in the process, transforming our social world and perhaps in the long run, even determining a tack for human evolution itself

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The 'primary acquisition problem' is part of a more general 'world view problem' which combines in many possible alternative formulations several sets of interrelated variables--of language, cognition, socialization and enculturation and behavior in response to the larger environment. A central prototypical 'paradigm' has been sought for both sets of problems which sees some alternative formulations as more pan humanly plausible than others, because of certain universal biological and socio-cultural human constraints upon human development, acquisition and psycho social organization. This prototypical paradigm is based upon a 'weak hypothesis' that the various sets of variables in both the primary acquisition problem and the world view problem are cybernetically and organically interrelated and interdependent in their mutual complex 'dialectic' development. The analytical separation of this complex nexus of interconnected variables is valued primarily for the sake of scientific investigation of the larger theoretical problems.

The seminal work of Sigmund Freud in the psycho-dynamic structure of the mind and in psycho-sexual stages of human development; of Jean Paiget in the psycho-social scheme of the stages of cognitive development which all children (and cultures) are claimed to pass through on their course to adulthood; Noam Chomsky in his hypothesis of the 'Language Acquisition Device' which is seated somewhere in the human brain and which underlies the universal syntactic structure of all human language; M.A.K. Halliday's 'system's structure' approach to the acquisition of language as discursive communication and illocution; and L. Kohlberg's 'cognitive developmentalist' schema of the pan human stages of moral development; all have a 'grain of truth' in opening an interesting and productive dimension to the understanding of human development and acquisition, none alone is sufficient or critically unproblematic in standing as the central solution to the primary acquisition problem or the larger world view problem.

A complex model, similar to the kind of 'paradigm of social behavior' proposed and empirically vindicated in Beatrice and John Whiting's class 'Six Cultures' study which sees the acquisition of social behavior as being primarily determined by several major, interdependent variables (culture type, sex, age, and target status) and which leads to patterns of human variation which can be analyzed principally along just several dimensions of polar contrasts 'nuturant-responsible versus dependent-dominant' and 'sociable-intimate versus authoritarian-aggressive' (1975: 173-5) is proposed for the primary acquisition problem.

This theoretical model has the problem of primary language acquisition at its center as the 'archimedian fulcrum' by which the child derives sense from nonsense in the world and comes to integrate her/his own sense of being in the world. Language stands as the principle psycho-social mechanism for the inter-mediation of experience between the inner world of the child and the external environment.

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This model is called the theory of 'organic human development'. Human development is relatively continuous over the individual's lifetime, subject to a certain range of both individual and socio-cultural variation of scheduling, directionality and styles of expression, is universally constrained by a limited number of 'design factors' which are both biological and social, and which is nevertheless marked by certain critical transition periods and minor cycles of patterned cybernetic development. There is operating in the basic design of human development a principle of 'stacking' in which rudimentary skills and traits have to be acquired before more complex operations and an optimum order for the inauguration of these 'basic to derivative' developmental characteristics.

The human child is born with an innate and basic symbolic capacity which is operating from birth until death. This inherent symbolic capacity is fundamental to the structural organization of the human mind, and forms the basis of all subsequent cognitive organization and functions, no matter how complex or sophisticated in operation. This capacity rapidly 'comes together' in the earliest stages of child development and in the process of its internal integration, 'brings together' with it the increasingly ordered, and 'human like' world and world view of the child. Its 'representational convergence' in the human mind parallels the sudden emergence of human language and rudimentary conceptual abstraction and is possibly tied to the lateralization of brain function into hemispheric dominance.

The growing fund of cumulative experience plays an 'out of awareness' but decisive role in shaping the consequent world view of the child, and in the actualization of the latent potentialities of organic development. Central to the realization of this symbolic capacity is an organic 'acquisition device' which depends upon the functioning of a basic and experientially multi-modal 'emblematic recognition' mechanism. Certain basic, 'prototypical' constraints of design, and possibly evolutionarily rooted 'archetypical' presentational forms--shapes, sounds, colors, sensations, contrasts--may underlie this acquisition device and account for the psychic unity of human experience which makes trans-linguistic communication and interpersonal understanding possible. One of its design features is that it is structurally 'dichotomic' in 'temporal/spatial' and 'visual/aural' and it is this basic structure which allows for the resulting 'duality of patterning' and conceptual symbolic organization of human experience on the basis of language.

The process of language acquisition is inherent to this acquisition mechanism. Basic sound/visual/tactile/action association leads to word symbol and stimulus generalization and to the internalization of a sense of patterned order which reflects the larger order/chaos of the child's external life world.

The hypothetical presence of such a central organic acquisition device provides a non-relative baseline for the comparison and measurement of different, alternative trajectories of human development both individually and culturally, and provides a pan human foundation for the legitimation of certain kinds of developmental practices which promote human development.

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The internal sense of order and organic source of the young proto-linguistic child's world view and development remains a mysterious 'locked box' which is fundamentally impenetrable to the scrutiny of the adult observer. In a corresponding but converse way, the larger world of the adult which serves as the principle model for the acquisition and organization of a child's experience remains fundamentally opaque in its seeming nonsense and utter complexity to the early efforts and explorations of the child in trying to 'figure it out'.

Because both set of process are occurring in both directions simultaneously there is often interference and miscommunication between adult and child in which each is interpreting the world of the other in their own terms. The child comes to 'personalize' in a subjective sense the objective world around him/her. The mysterious box at the wellspring of the child's personality and emerging sense of being is working away in the world, expressively impressing its inner experience upon the environment while at the same time incorporating and embodying its experience of the adult world into their own organic sense of being.

This experiential boundary between the inner, subjective world of the child's mysterious box and the adult's 'total context' is the basis of the incomplete and perhaps too fluid lack of the child's separation between 'reality and fantasy' while in the adult the same boundary is frequently too rigid and too 'complete' in its circumspection of reality. And yet the possibility of being in both worlds simultaneously and the 'incompleteness' of human acquisition and development remains throughout life.

The two worlds of the adult and the child comes together in a 'no man's land' of the effective, significant and emerging 'life world' of the acquisitive, developing child. This intermediate realm is where the child attempts to establish and elaborate its own sense of 'habitués' and control over its experiential environment and is the principal region in which adults superimpose their own sense of order upon the unshaped character of the child.

The life world is all that comes within 'touch' of the child's organic experience, and that part of the mysterious box of the child's inner source which becomes touched by the adult's sense of order. It is an interactional and social world in which things get done for better or worse. It is a meaningful world or world of meaning, formed by the communicative bridge between child and adult. The emergence and elaboration of a relatively 'effective' life world as the experiential expression and environmental embodiment of organic human identity, is critically ties to the processes of socialization and enculturation, and involves the characteriological incorporation of conventional values and views which are posited in the common sense of language.

The life world is in a precarious state of balance, and it is in the region of the life world of the ego that change becomes mediated and a sense of equilibrium and adjustment is maintained.

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The problem of primary acquisition and human development has important resonances of 'anthropogenesis'--the evolutionary acquisition of language, culture and cognition by humankind and our subsequent historical-evolutionary development. There is a danger in such origin stories and explanations based upon Haeckel's dictum 'ontogency recapitulates phylogeny' in that the actual past is fundamentally unknown and for the most part unknowable and we risk the logical fallacy of 'post hoc, ergo propter hoc' or 'modus tollens'--the fallacy of inferring a past cause from a present consequence.

This kind of origin of language argument has been applied to the understanding of the emergence of Creole languages from previous pidgins within the span of a single generation, in the form of Dereck Bickerton's 'Language Biogram Hypothesis'. The previous pidgin is held to be structurally minimal and communicatively inadequate for the linguistic socialization of the children of pidgin speaking parents. Under such circumstances it is claimed that children inherently 'fill in' the resulting gaps and spontaneously create a Creole language the structure of which reflects the underlying natural structure of the 'language biogram'. This phenomena is held to recapitulated in the way that all children acquire their native tongue. A similar, orientation is tacit in all theories which hold that the 'structure' of human language is innate and seated by some 'device' in the brain.

There are a number of significant objections to such an hypothesis and to such a general 'nature oriented' approach to theory of human acquisition and development. The 'LBH' leaves out a great deal of history and base a general rule on a few, rather historically questionable exceptions. It tends to deny the likely role of a 'substrate-superstrate' context in preconditioning language change. children find multiple sources for their linguistic modeling and acquisition and code switching/mixing is a likely strategy children adopt without prior instruction. Furthermore such hypothesis denies the central social-communicative function of language--all language arises in a social context which depends upon mutual speaker intelligibility and some modicum of shared meaning and consensus, all language change must obtain a measure of informal social agreement between speakers before such modification becomes conventional.

It is suggested that the origin of language in both children and in humankind is to be found in its expressive/communicative function and in the innate human capacity for 'linguistic play' which allows for variation, deviation and a wide margin of tolerance for error. It is through such play that the boundary between reality and fantasy, waking consciousness and dream consciousness and science and magic and history and mythology, emerges, becomes mediated, established and elaborated. In this regard we can refer to what Susanne K. Langer has called the 'primary need in man of translating his experiences all the time into symbols' or 'symbolic transformation' (Philosophy in a New Key). It is the power of imagination which controls our dream state in the time before the awakening of consciousness and which allows speakers to regularly 'fill in gaps' of language by their 'native intuition'. Language has always had a certain stubborn, magic about it.

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The study of the 'wild child'--children who have suffered extreme cultural separation and isolation either in the wild or in sever confinement, tend to support a weak version of the environment-developmental and 'critical stage' hypothesis--that there are certain optimum periods at which linguistic acquisition, socialization and cognitive development occur, which if missed, will make later acquisitions more problematic and less 'native'.

Such children have shown several similar traits--the inability to walk, talk, to conceptualize abstractly, the distaste for dressing and preference for both nakedness and lack of restriction, the lack of sexual interest and the lack of refined hand-eye coordination. Though such children may later learn how to walk, talk, dress themselves, to conceptualize, develop a sense of internalization of control and of self awareness and personal privacy, they never seem to manage to develop these beyond a very rudimentary level, or to catch up to normal in their own age set. They are infants who have 'missed the bus' of human development and who remain perpetually undeveloped children. They are culture's 'mistakes'.

On the other extreme of the continuum, are those who sit at the head of the bus of development--the child prodigies and 'genius'. The study of such early developmental achievers also supports the importance which effective environment and the presence of significant others play in the realization of their innate talents and potentialities. "How many individuals develop their potential, to what degree, and in what form, are determined by society." (Radford; 1990: 12)

Study of both extremes of the spectrum of acquisition and development demonstrate that nature and nurture are fundamentally intertwined and interdependent for their expression in the individual's development. A critical linkage in such development (and undevelopment) is the presence of an 'effective environment' (either enriching or deprived or frustration) which is mediated by the close interaction (or separation) of significant others. The central importance of this linkage leads to a 'bonding hypothesis' in explaining the how's and why's of primary acquisition and human development.

There is always operating an historical/biographical 'Law of Averages' which tends, over the 'structure of the long run' to pull both ends toward the normative and modal middle of the human developmental 'curve' and which tends to prevent the emergence of either extreme cases. This Law of Averages guarantees that there will always be alternative pathways to development. It makes the environmental enrichment for the development of genius almost as unlikely for the socio-economically average child as it makes extreme isolation and severe separation socially implausible. It guarantees also that the developmental curve will to some extent correspond with the socio-economic and socio-structural curve. Finally, the Law of Averages also guarantees the likelihood of a low frequency of 'developmental anomalies' and 'acquisitional accidents' which will tend to have disproportionate influence in altering the particular pathway of development and in determining its overall directionality. The working of the Law of Averages tends to undermine nomothetic classification and interpersonal, cross cultural comparison, and makes an idiographic approach to understanding acquisition and development in both a narrow biographical and a broader historical framework.

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It is from this framework that the problem of primary acquisition and early human development needs to be approached from the point of view of a single, 'proto typical' child's world and 'world view'. We have the hypothetical case example of Alyce--what may be considered Anthropology's Alice.

Such a child's world is caught up in several contiguous, continuous and concurrent 'developmental dialectics'--between the adult's world and the child's world; a larger historical dialectic of the social construction of the adult's reality; the internalized 'child dialectic' of the adult's world; and the externalized 'adult-dialectic' of the child's world; and most importantly an inner 'dialectic' of the child's own world. The convergence, coordination, continuity (or relative discontinuity) between these dialectics and the changes which they 'cause' to happen, can be called the 'structure of the conjunction'. (Marshall Sahlins; Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities)

Such a developmental 'structure of conjuncture' speaks for less than perfect or complete internalization, socialization, acquisition, the usual availability of alternate and often contradictory avenues of development and several degrees less 'subjective inevitability' of such native acquisition than even social constructivists or behaviorist's would care to admit. It is this unfinishedness of our character and our culture, coupled with the incompleteness and inherent 'openness' of our nature, which is the basis for both our human weakness and our creative and acquisitive strengths.

This renders human development susceptible to a great degree of variability, transformation and change and renders acquisition the human solution to the existential problem of change, one which is posed from birth.

This also suggests that the child's world may in some significant ways be not just continuously different than the adult's. that the child's language or cognitive operation or subculture may be just a reduced and simplified version of the adult's complexities but that a child's world may in certain fundamental ways be discontinuous and qualitatively different from the adults--in terms of language, cognition and culture. Conceptions and experience of time, space, or involvement, of affective awareness, and 'phenomenological topography' of 'metaphysical saliency' may all be fundamentally different by kind as well as by degree from the adult's sense of reality.

Alyce's world is one which is characterized by an 'identity of objects' or 'object consistency' rather than by an 'identity of perceptions' and 'representational consistency' which so characterizes her parent's world. Relocation and disruption of setting does not traumatize her or debilitate her to the degree that it might her parents, but the loss of an important possession, no matter how cheap or trivial can be devastating for the child in a way which is only mildly aggravating and even amusing for adults.

A child is an inconsistent creature of habit. Children are 'polymorphous perverse' and inherently 'multi-modal' in their efforts to experience and explore their effective environments and to extend their range. A child's world is one characterized by 'emergent order' at the edge of chaos. Routine performances may be expected and appropriate responses may be predicted, but without the accuracy or inevitability as in the adult world. Children are easily distracted from one thing to another, and in their constant interruptions are impossible to interrupt.

There is a basic cycle of activity which courses at different frequencies through Alyce's daily life. It begins with simple needs, for attention, hunger, affection, exploration and the complex problem of their gratification. It leads to attracting adult attention, play activity, environmental exploration, which in turn leads to growing independence, risk taking, and increasing uncertainty, which eventuates in 'mistakes', negativity, reprimands, restrictions, punishment, which begets frustration and aggressiveness on the part of the child and withdrawal of attention and affective separation by the adult. At this point the cycle begin all over again, as deprivation and separation result in unfulfilled 'needs', however simple, which must then be somehow satisfied in the strange adult world. This basic learning cycle repeats itself growing in duration, frequency, variability and complexity. The basic cycle becomes eventually 'submerged' beneath the resulting, largely 'symbolic moiré' patterning that results from its growing generality, diversification and differentiation. The basic cycle may also work in both directions becoming either a vicious, first order regressive cycle tending to further frustrate and deprive the child, or becoming a positive, second order feedback cycle of cybernetic growth. Needless to say, its overall directionality is largely dependent upon the ordering responses of adult caretakers and the availability of significant stimuli in the environment. A child's drive is naturally inclined toward the acquisition of functional competency and autonomy in a world which stems from mastery and extension of its effective life world. The evolutionary survival value of this drive towards functional independence, mediated by a stage of child dependency is quite self evident.

Language as previously mentioned, is the central mediating mechanism of this natural drive, and this drive is reflected in the pattern of primary acquisition. Language precipitates and focuses the problem of coordinating the different modes of experience/response, facilitating integration of the child's world and effective interaction with the environment. Linguistic acquisition leads to functional autonomy of the child.

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Attempting to understand the differences and commonalties of a child's world in relation to the larger world of the adult, leads to the related issue of 'getting behind the veil' of a child's 'world view'. A child's subjectivity is different than an adult's. it lacks the rationality and rationalization, the value orientations and affective attachments, the idiosyncrasies and the personal and social habits and routines of daily praxis. Its feeling is not as derivatively fine tuned as the adults. The child's world has an a priori, concrete, objectivity real, presentational immediacy about it, unfiltered and untranslated by experience and symbolic representations. Children do not make as sharp a dichotomy between subjective feeling and objective reality as adults normally do--an adult dichotomy which sometimes breaks down. Children are naturally hysterical, and hyper-suggestive to significant stimuli of their environment--to the children what matters most is that it seems real when it happens.

The young child can also be characterized as 'pre-oral' in orientation--a characteristic which usefully distinguishes the child's world view from that of the schizophrenic, the pre-literate or the pre-human . such a 'pre-oral' being lacks even the basic structure which fundamental, full blown linguistic orality is supposed to provide. The early child's multi-modal experience of the world is not yet organized by a hierarchy of a single dominant mode of experience. Furthermore, the brain function has not yet lateralized dominance as it will increasingly become later in life.

The subjective life of a child can be characterized as one of gradual 'dawning of consciousness' as indexed by increasing memory and attention span, as well as by increasing hierarchy of cognitive organization and sophistication of cognitive operation. It is an awakening of consciousness into a full blown state of awareness from a kind of proto-linguistic, natural 'dream state'. This dream sate is one in which the self becomes magically empowered in supranormal ways, and all kinds of strange transformations are allowed to occur. In such a state, the normal sense of reality upon which waking consciousness depends is suspended, relatively absent or only partial or fragmentary. Symbolic fantasy has free reign to concoct whatever world is available to the imagination. Most important, form the subjective standpoint it usually seems real.

A child uses the images and meanings of its dream state to create its sense of order and reality in the world, to fill in the gaps between its own awareness and the adult noise which is all around it.

The child's understanding and knowledge of the world lacks the depth or breadth or complexity of the adults. It is unspecialized knowledge and quite 'over generalized'. A child's early development and acquisition is preoccupied with laying the rudimentary foundation upon which later acquisition and development will be constructed. A child is yet attempt to gain control of and master only the most basic , ordinate, level of knowledge of its world, and possibly to establish the first relations with the second subordinate and superordinate levels of generality/specificity.

Everyday of a child's waking experience, the process of emblematic pattern recognition and verbal/active/affective/cognitive association is working away in interrelating and coordinating many different facets and modalities of a child's experiential domains. This recognition-association process is fundamental to a child's acquisition of both meaning and order in the world. A child's play, which is involved in these symbolic transformations of experience, is the way which the child learns to arrange and recreate the patterns, meanings and structures which are available to her/his environment.

Language soon and quite rapidly emerges at the center of this ordering and meaning constructing process. It increases not only additively but also in its associations and relations with the world, it exponentially 'comes into sharper focus' with increasing degrees of magnification. The remarkable thing about a child's world is that it is without any strong sense of order, but only with a skeletal outline, or a bare minimum of pattern. This is reflected in a child's language as well. Its functional transforms which guide its patterning are minimal, with a resulting, highly flexible, skeletal framework which is characterized by large, fluid gaps between its structural interstices. Children mix up and reproduce their language in the same way that they mix up everything else in their world and reproduce 'drawings' on paper. There delight in disorder is evident in extended, spontaneous soliloquies which are quite nonsensical seeming from an adult's point of view and yet which still strongly seems coherent and even beautiful for a child.

It is important that a child 'deconstructs' the adult world, to turn our models into their muddles (and our muddies into their models) before they can begin to learn how to reconstruct that sense of order, in their own terms.

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Alyce's small world is one which has been rapidly emerging upon the verge of chaos. It is inherently inimical to the adult sense of order. It might be characterized as an 'amateur system' as opposed to the adult's expertise. A computer based program might model and capture some of its incipient sense of order and relative amateurishness in the same way that 'expert systems' capture and attempt to simulate the problem solving abilities of real adult experts.

Whereas an expert's expertise is well defined and its knowledge base strictly delimited, the child's amateur system is relatively undefined and unlimited. The expert's system is specialized and goal directed. A child's system is 'over generalized' and 'impulse' and object oriented. The child's delight in disorder is inimical to the expert's need for order. The chaos of the child's world is antithetical to the crystallytic structure of the expert's mastery. A child's amateur system sub-critically 'underdetermined' whereas an adult's expert system is super critically 'over determined'. The adult's system is relatively refined, sophisticated and fine tuned, the child's system is basic, unrefined and grossly lacking in tuning. The expert's system is one which is based upon previously acquired experience--it is 'tried and true'. The child's amateur system is one which is characterized by its lack of experience, and its central problem orientation, is the acquisition of knowledge and the derivation of understanding through experience. The expert can use knowledge in the solution to other problems, for the amateur knowledge itself poses the primary problem'

No child is the absolute amateur and no adult is the perfect expert. Children have an inherent 'natural expertise' of their own which defies cultural explanation. The child's expertise resides in its innate capacity to recognize and internalize pattern and order in the world, and to recreate this sense of order in its environment and what it acquires is the sense of order upon which its subjective meanings and understandings become based. This ability to recognize presentationally and to incorporate representationally order and patterned structure from its world into itself, principally, but not exclusive, via the medium and mechanism of language is the basis of its developmental acquisition and transformation of experience.

During the course of development, the child's experience of its world becomes translated into its own organically based conceptual-symbolic structures, and these structures then come to increasing mediate the later transformations of experience. Language provides the basis of this developmental interpretation and translation of experience, the means by which the individual 'pulls together' otherwise disparate and inchoate elements of its experiences and its world.

A computer based 'amateur system' attempting to capture the essential pattern of a child's world and world view must ask and attempt to answer certain basic problems. First, is the primary acquisition problem itself--how and why does a child learn and acquire understanding of its world through experience. Such a computer based system must therefore be fundamentally a 'learning' oriented system. Also, the common, salient associations which a child makes in its everyday interaction with the world must be plotted into chains and networks of associations. Such a network pattern must to be some extent be 'object-oriented'--a child moves from one set of involvement's to another based upon certain variables of intentionality, interest and target attention and orientation. This patterning can be further elucidated by componential analysis of the child's language--its vocabulary and lexical understanding of its world, its domains of experience and a taxonomy of terms and associations. Hypothetical decision-tress can be constructed based upon the actual observation of a child's behavior and interaction, and these decision-tress or the lack of them, can be strung together into a larger framework.

Such an amateur system attempts to capture in the operation of a computer the 'learning game' which a child plays in her/his everyday life world, to try to excoriate some of the basic rules of this game, however latent and implicit to the actual patterning of the acquisition process, delineate the hidden dimensionalities and saliences of such patterning and to reveal plausibly important and crucial relationships and possible independent sets of variable which constrain and interactively determine, the child's everyday behavior, decision making, acquisition and development within an emerging life world.

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The general problematic of Alyce's acquisitiveness is 'paradigmatically proto-typical' for general anthropology's exploration of and theoretical reconstruction of the world of humankind.

Trying to understand anthropologically Alyce's small world in 'its own terms' brings us face to face with the dilemma of our own inherent linguisticality and the inherent hermeneutical subjectiveness that such linguistical interpretation of experience entails--especially for the objective distanciation of the scientific observe who must implicit deny such subjectivity of interpretation. We are left with a linguistic/interpretive problem of 'descriptivism'--that our language unlike the logically positive propositions of the analytical philosophers and linguists is not verifiable of or by our experience in any unconventional, non-arbitrary and unrelative way, but there is no exact one to one correspondence between the term and the thing, the event and the word we choose to describe the event. Experience is independent of our linguistic description of that experience, so we are faced with the critical problematic of maintaining in our language a fundamental faithfulness to the experience which it represents.

Furthermore some forms of subject experience especially the 'symbolic' and the 'magical' remain ultimately impenetrable by such linguistical and philosophical 'analysis'.

Alyce is anthropology's Alice. The astonishing world of anthropology is like Alice's looking glass world--a strange forest where words have power to shape their own destinies, where the natural order of things are quite over determined by logic. It is the naiveté of Alice's faith in her language and basic understanding which guides her through her many trials and tribulations of wonderland. We, as anthropologists caught in an anthropological world of words, are strangers in Alyce's world--she is not the stranger in our world. Children have a natural acquisitiveness and inquisitiveness about their strange world--it is their sense of innocent wonder which we should wish to share, and our sense of awe and astonishment we must learn to teach them.