The relation of social complexity to loose talk:
Indeed, Gatewood (1983:384) concluded that loose talk is more common in complex- sociocultural systems than simpler ones, at least in domains pertaining to the natural environment. The discrepancy between linguistic competence and recognition ability for American informants has not been reported in folk botanies. However, loose talk might have gone unnoticed by anthropologist, though not likely. It seems to be an ethnographic fact. Simply put, why would any close-to-nature group want/need to talk about anything that did not relate to their immediate environment?
And in point of fact, since complexity of social systems implies complexity of information controlled, at the cultural level, it seems a given that loose talk will always be greater in complex societies. Adolf Bandelier alludes to this in The Delight Makers:
¡¦Indian gossip, [is] as genuine as any that is spoken in modern society; with this difference only, that the circle of facts and ideas accessible to the Indian mind is exceedingly narrow, and that the gossip applies itself therefore to a much smaller number of persons and things. But it is as venomous, the backbiting as severe and merciless among Indians as among us; and there is the same disposition to criticize everything that does not strictly pertain to us and to our favorites, the same propensity to slander the absent and to be of the same opinion as those present so long as they are within hearing distance.
Why should loose talk be greater in complex societies? For one, our society is more complex simply because of the number of items. A transistor radio is one thing, all it¡¯s components are another. In the case of the Delight Makers the gossip centered on whether certain individuals possessed owl feathers having magical properties. These feathers were only supposed to be owned and used by shamans. When the rains didn¡¯t come, it was suspected that someone ¡°illegally¡± had owl feathers and used them to ill purpose. Of course, in our modern day society, we appeal to meteorology.
But imagine, with a larger circle of facts, if owl feathers were a point of contention. One could say to a group of friends, ¡°I think it is very suspicious that John is spending all his time reading Audubon magazine, don¡¯t you?¡± And one would fortify, ¡°Yeah, and John has been going backpacking quite a lot these days. He says he wants to get back to nature. And I¡¯ve heard that he bought a tree-stand and some really powerful infrared binoculars. He must be watching owls.¡± Another might whisper, ¡°Last week he went to the zoo, three times. And why all of a sudden has he volunteered at the ornithology department at the Museum of Natural History?¡± And a neighbor finalizes, ¡°I can¡¯t say for sure that it¡¯s him, but someone in his house is whistling an awful lot and my wife thinks it sounds like an owl. Look at such a large web of facts and consider our 13-day drought. I think we should call the police.¡±
While one might think we have gone off on a tangent, the point of this article is: the ability to talk about something and the ability to recognize that same something often do not coincide. In the case of witches, Bandelier (1971:ff.1) noted that in the village of Nambe, 1855, three men and one woman were executed for alleged witchcraft. And Carneiro (2001:254-255) writes of the Kuikuru of Brazil:
¡°Suspected witches were dealt with severely. In fact, three Kuikuru men whom I knew personally were later executed by the Kuikuru as witches. The sad fact and the great irony in this is that, as far as I was able to determine, despite the fact that informants could tell me in considerable detail just how a witch was supposed to carry out his evil deeds, no one every actually practiced witchcraft.¡± (Emphasis ours.)
And of course, the American witch trials are another valid case of the discrepant ability to talk about an entity and the ability to recognize the same entity. Clearly, using a scientific worldview, we argue that every witch ever executed was a victim of loose talk.
And secondly, our fictional witchcraft scenario is meant to paint a picture of the relation of social complexity to loose talk. Bandelier¡¯s anthropological perspective was written in 1885, and yet he pinpoints loose talk¡¯s foundation: the circle of facts and ideas are fewer in some societies compared to others. A transistor radio is one ¡°thing,¡± all its components are another.
Why should loose talk be greater in complex societies? It is infrequent that one hears about ¡°worldview¡± outside of an introductory anthropology course, but less complex societies have a worldview focusing on their immediate environment. According to Holmberg (1969:52) ¡°¡¦the Siriono [hunter] is a master at both stalking and imitation. He can imitate to perfection the whistle of a bird, of a monkey, of a tapir, or the call of a peccary. There is no an animal sound of the forest, in fact, which he does not know and is not able skillfully to imitate.¡±
Loose talk abounds in our, more complex, society since we have a purely semantic knowledge obtained through words and extending no further than words. Said another way: public education. A purely semantic knowledge became one extension of writing and reading from their very inception. In America, children study biology and are provided natural environment information via books, thus creating a lack of recognition ability. This is especially true of astronomy. It is a bit humorous to talk, under the night sky, to elementary school children who can rattle off the order of the planets and then to ask them to pinpoint anything in the sky.2 Alternatively, geography has been diminished in U.S. middle schools. Thus we have children who don¡¯t know where Mexico is. They can use Mexicans in jokes, some even know some Mexicans come from Mexico (not just East L.A.), but those same children cannot recognize Mexico on a world map.
Can the fact that American kids don¡¯t know where Mexico is, be related to trees? It is of interest that the mesquite tree was not listed by any of Gatewood¡¯s informants. (See Table 1)
