How is non-verbal communication culture specific?. Anthropology

• traditional Maori greeting in New Zealand is the hongi; two people welcome each other by pressing their noses and foreheads together

• North Americans shake hands

• French kiss each other on the cheeks

Speech vs Communication

• Speech: use of spoken words, vocabulary and “cultural assumptions”

- agree to call something by a common name

• Communication: transfer of information from one person to another

- broader than language because it can involve any means of transmission of in­formation as long as the symbols are shared and commonly understood

- humans can communicate without the use of spoken words

- Index signs vs Symbols

• Symbol: a symbol stands for something else that has no apparent or natural mean­ing

- any sound or gesture to which cultural tradition has assigned meaning

- nodding “yes” or “no”

• Index signs: sign has natural or self-evident meaning

- animals in the wild mainly communicate using an index sign; an emotion expres­sion stands for something else and that carries meaning directly

- directly visible, audible, and smellable

- feeling fear, crying out, screaming

- Human language vs non-human primates

• Human language:

- Open language system and productivity

• the ability to create new infinite understandable expressions from a finite set of rules and the ability to understand the same thing from different points of view

• Ie) “is it raining outside” and “outside, its raining”

- Displacement

• the ability of humans that refers to events and issues beyond the immediate present and space; future and past events and the space of events occurred

• Ie) recalling important memories, planning for the future

• Non-human primates:

- The call system: Closed system

• links between the sounds of calls and their meanings appear fixed

• apes using their closed call systems can neither lie nor formulate theories