ABSTRACT
I may be wrong but I suspect that the ‘origins of meaning’ is the new way of talking about the origins of culture, and so, broadly speaking, I have taken that as my brief. It is of course an interesting shift in terminology. On one hand it reflects the change in what the term culture means in anthropology. Earlier formulations saw it primarily as a bundle of characteristics that were uniquely human – technology, language, tradition, symbolic systems, etc. – but it is now viewed as the mental template that enables these other traits to occur and to vary. In a sense we are following so-called cultural behaviour up to its source in the mind or ultimately the brain. I take meaning to be the ability of the brain to be self-reflective about behaviours and to propagate actions on the basis of those reflections. The other aspects of culture are therefore epiphenomenal to the mental activities. In terms of the problem of seeking the origins of this capacity this at least makes the question more specific. While how exactly meaning might be empirically observable remains rather obscure, we at least have more focus than looking for culture. Indeed, I argued elsewhere (Foley 1990a) that the culture concept, on account of its compound character, is not an appropriate concept in evolutionary studies, and that instead we should focus on its constituent components independently. There are two reasons for this: one is that it is the individual components that we might be able to observe in the past, whereas we can never see culture; the other is that there is no reason why past hominids should have put the bundle together in the same way as modern humans. Characteristics of so-called cultural behaviour may appear and exist independently. Meaning, therefore, I take to be one of the constituents which we might try to track in evolutionary terms. The problem is how to do this.
