Murray Leaf
American socio-cultural anthropologist. My primary interest is mind as a social-psychological product and necessary component of human social organization. Subordinate interests are all kinds of social organizations at all levels, and subordinate interests in most of these is figuring out what makes the difference between good organnizations and bad.
Address: Texas, United States
Address: Texas, United States
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Papers by Murray Leaf
We agree that a competitive advantage would arise from more flexible and more encompassing forms of social organization and have previously modeled its implications in detail for the replacement of one group by another under conditions of difference in modes of adaptation leading to substantial differences in population density or equivalently measured as changes in population size keeping the area fixed (Read 1987) -- conditions satisfied by population estimates around 4,400–5,900 for modern Homo sapiens in the European area for the time period of the Aurignacian (Bocquet-Appel et al. 2005) in contrast with estimates around 1,710 - 2,690 for Neanderthals (Richter 2008). Missing so far, though, are the reasons why the mode of adaptation leading to higher population densities was open to Upper Paleolithic humans and not to the Neanderthals. This lacuna is not resolved by imposing a definition, even in broad terms, of what constitutes so-called ‘modern behavior’ such as “behavior that is mediated by socially constructed patterns of symbolic thinking, actions, and communication that allow for material and information exchange and cultural continuity between and across generations and contemporaneous communities” (Henshilwood and Marean 2003: 635). Definitions like this neither provide us with understanding of how the claimed new forms of social organization would come about in the first place nor what are the cognitive requirements needed for their enactment. The missing evidence, we suggest, lies in considering what are the cognitive requisites of such behavior, the archaeological evidence for when they are in place and their possible evolutionary development. In so doing, we also construct a better understanding of what we mean by “modern behavior” and what it means to be human.
We do not intend to re-argue all of the issues involved. We are only adding a new interpretive reference point focusing on what may have enabled the changes that took place in the mode of social organization in the developing Homo sapiens lineage and was absent from the Neanderthal lineage and, we argue, seems to have provided the basis for what appears to be their competitive advantage vis-á-vis the Neanderthals (Shea 2003; Banks et al. 2008; Bar-Yosef 2009).
We now know what terminologies are and why the efforts to analyze them have been so confused. There are distinct sets of terms, as anthropologists recognized, but that is not what is most important. What is most important are the ideas that make up the definitions of the terms. These are systematically interrelated and have a definite logical structure. We represent this by what we call a kinship map. Our method for eliciting it is an adaptation of frame analysis that has long been used in linguistics and other fields. This is an experimental method, in exactly the same sense the methods of biology or chemistry are experimental.
Second, we have a method for analyzing this logical structure, showing precisely what it is for any kinship map, and to a large extent also why it is this and not something else. We represent this logical structure by the kin term map, in contrast to the kinship map. The method for eliciting the kinship map was developed by Murray Leaf. The method for exposing and analyzing the kin term map was developed by Dwight Read.
Human social organizations are created by people using systems of ideas with very specific logical properties. This book describes what these idea-systems are with an unbroken chain of analysis that begins with field elicitation and continues by working out their most fundamental, logico-mathematical generative elements. This enables us to see precisely how these idea systems are used to generate organizations that give pattern to ongoing behavior. The book shows how organizations are objectified by community members through symbolic representations that provide them with shared conceptions of organizations, roles, or relations that they see each other as participating in. The case for this constructive process being pan-Homo sapiens is described, spanning all human communities from the Upper Paleolithic to today, and from the most seemingly primitive Australian tribes to modern-day America and India. While focusing primarily on kinship, Human Thought and Social Organization shows how the analysis applies with equal precision to other social areas ranging from farming to political factionalism.
Review
“… Read and Leaf, in this highly stimulating book, present a novel, coherent theory about the co-evolution of human thought and language on the one hand, and human social organization on the other. They do so by shifting the perspective from cognitive development essentially happening within the human mind – to viewing it as driven by people's interactions with the outside material, environmental and social worlds. In doing so, they bring us a much more coherent and comprehensible history of human cognitive evolution than any I have seen thus far.”—
(Sander van der Leeuw Ph.D, Arizona State University )
This book by Murray Leaf and Dwight Read is both brilliant and revolutionary. It puts socio-cultural anthropology in a context that understands human social behavior as cognitively “governed,” i.e., not generated by ideas but rather made interpretable, and therefore interactive, by mental rules. These “rules” of conceptual government finally allow serious algebraic-mathematical analysis of social-cultural behavior and idea systems as formal science properly grounded in relevant technical philosophy in a genuine evolutionary framework.—
(F. K. Lehman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign )