Radical Anthropology
Our recording from March 5 with #CedricBoeckx on 'Hunter-gatherers of words'
Cedric Boeckx is Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA). His current research focuses on developing new ways to shed light on the neurobiological foundations of the human language faculty.
Cedric writes: "A lot of attention has been paid to the combinatorial aspects of human language and how they may have evolved. Comparatively less attention has been devoted to the units of combination, the “words”. I’ll argue that asking evolutionary questions about “words” enables us to touch on broader questions about our cognitive make-up and, crucially, the communities in which language acquisition/use takes place. Examining the prerequisites that a rich symbolic culture imposes helps us probe further the nature of prosociality (and its limits) in our species."
