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Simultaneity and Sequencing in the Oracular Speech of Kenyan Diviners |
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A convergence of ideas that has occurred in linguistics and semantics has relevance also for social anthropology. In 1975 Marshall Durbin proposed formal models for distinguishing simultaneity and sequencing in human cognition. He noted the recent popular usage of this explanatory contrast in linguistics especially. Also in 1975, Paul Kay saw synchronic variability in basic color terms as generating a roughly linear evolution of more specialized terms. Kay's study demonstrated the more general hypothesis in lexical semantics that "all linguistic change has its roots in synchronic heterogeneity of the speech community" (1975:257). Finally, in a paper published in 1978 but delivered in 1973 at a conference I attended, Edwin Ardener distinguished between a simultaneity of events and their output as linear chains. A simultaneity is verbally unspecified, marked only by a "language shadow," while a causal sequence of events is distinguished more precisely in speech. Though they differ in other respects, these three views treat synchronicity or simultaneity as in some way generating sequential behavior, vocabulary, or events. |
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Sequentiality is, of course, the only logically possible alternative to simultaneity.
6 One "becomes" the other, though we tend to place the emphasis on sequenced events as emerging from a previously synchronic state and so as "produced" by that state. But the reverse direction is certainly possible, as when myths lump together events in overlapping and spatiotemporally contradictory ways. On the whole, though, the cases we present are of how "order" comes out of "disorder." We see this sequence as people at their most creative. A point I want to make is that this creativity consists not simply in answering the puzzles posed by cognitive simultaneity but also in setting up the simultaneity in the first place. |
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Jung clearly understood our fascination. His view of the synchronicity of events was that their coincidence in space and time meant much more to us than mere |
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