Is science almost done proving we’re animal? I wish it was but I think we’re still in the early innings of a paradigm shift. Knowledge, meaning, spirituality, *language* — we have them all because we are animals, not in spite of. We’re bored—lots of us—with calling thinking and language gendered, or human, (and also using such claims to trash masculinity, maleness, humanness… or animality for that matter!) I’m long over it because the real “problem” was always power, not language. And yes it’s more complicated than that. But can we hold the complexity in a soft enough gaze to be able to embrace, too, that animal part of ourselves that is language, meaning, knowledge? Don’t believe the hype about the word being god and god being male. No, even before the word there was the sign, and the sign doesn’t have a gender so much as it is an embodiment of “I AM” carved into the material world. If language is a way of consolidating power, let’s take power back with the stories we will tell about the places we live.
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Even when we thought we were rejecting Cartesian dualism during this-or-that wave feminism, a lot of us were just flipping the hierarchy from the mind to the body. In my opinion it isn’t the answer in the long run, though it’s a step, a welcome de-centering on the way to a new/old center beyond the current horizon. (How about we try ‘letting the soft animal of our bodies’ make a spreadsheet? Because you know, some of us are really into that.)
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Interpreting the world is inherent to mobility. Versions of it have happened since the first organism traced their way across space. Language helps us organize it more, helps us be more surgical but language was born from the land and it still lives there, or at least for some is still rooted there through elongated filaments.
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A lot of non-humans have language too, it just lives more in the land than some modern human languages do. I think about the rapidly dying-out whistling languages in Greece and Turkey and probably somewhere in your lineage too. I think about how these languages require the mountains. Require less wires and less sound pollution. Require being strung out on the land like beads, not inside buildings. Our vocal cords have learned to decouple from the land sometimes, and it’s strange. Not bad, just strange.
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Versions of interpreting the world happen without mobility too, hi mushrooms and forests. Tracking and language are closely related in the brain I think, but it’s not because of the simplistic idea that “tracking is reading” (because that dismisses the reality of oralate trackers). It’s because both language and tracking stem from processes of wayfinding and navigating that are some of the oldest animal behaviors in existence. Tracking is that act of environmental interpretation the moment before we communicate about it, and it is also interpretation of interpretation, because when animals make traces and signs on the land they aren’t playing out some instinctual algorithm, they’re thinking. And being people. And making meaning, and problem solving, and experiencing place, and having desires, and being curious, and being scared, and eating and dreaming and loving. And when we track, trail, and way-find, we are not a mind, or a body, or eyeballs looking at things…. We are a whole system of nerves and flesh, yet we are part of a larger system too. We are attached. When I let the trace-making of the wild ones infiltrate my dreams, that's when I can really feel them there, the parent of us all. They are to us what a woodrat nest is to the rat; a spider’s web is to a spider; a sketchbook is to an artist, or code is to a computer programmer, and that’s just one small part of what/who they are to us. They are a great track-maker who has impressed their paw upon us, and when they stepped away, our mind was there, a complex set of traces, a “flute once held by God.” The landscape is an original technology of situated and distributed cognition. Which doesn't mean its the only technology—just the prototype for all others.
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Definition help: “Distributed cognition refers to a process in which cognitive resources are shared socially in order to extend individual cognitive resources or to accomplish something that an individual agent could not achieve alone.” (Lehtinen et al.)
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In colonial thought Edward Hutchins is seen as popularizing this idea in his book “Cognition in the Wild” (a bit dated now) but it will probably be obvious to most people who read this that this is a way of understanding the world inherent to a lot of ethnnoscience and Indigenous ecologies.
