ANTH V 1007x Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Hand Axe, Estrous Cycle, Signify
11 Oct 2016
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Session 11: shamans in the cave, part 2. Use of arbitrary symbols is a bmh practice. Review session: thursday the 13th at 8 pm! Sign: pattern (audible, visual, etc. ) that signifies something else. Non-arbitrary signs are not exclusively human (example: estrus signaling) Studies with apes that can be taught to sign: not considered language because they are programmed to do something (if i do a, then b happens. Meet indicates a male is a provider and therefore desirable. Tractors aren"t supposed to be sexy, but we can recode them to be sexy (she thinks my tractor"s sexy?) We can recode things to signify many different things many different times. Example: skull isn"t a head or a person, but it resembles a head and is an icon for a head/person. Example: animal tracks represent that another animal has moved here. Chimps who sign think cause/effect, think in terms of indexing. Symbol arbitrarily represents something, agreed upon by cultures/societies.
