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Sent: Saturday, August 15, 2009 11:37 AM Subject: Re: [xmca] Concerning the origins of Pointing I do not believe there is much data on early ontogeny of pointing across a wide swath of cultural groups, Andy, so I am unsure of what one wants to claim as heavily constrained by phylogeny and how the social role enters in culturally specific ways. Martin tells me that pointing in Japan among older people is impolite (it can be in the US too of course!) and that it is done with the palm. Perhaps one of our Japanese colleagues can help. From the little i know, among older children and adults there is a variety of ways as situations in which "pointing" is carried out. There is also ample evidence that sociocultural interpretation plays a significant role in determining whether a behavior is counted as "pointing." There is also a literature on something like pointing among non-human animals that requires consideration, some of it done recently by Tomasello. Any one there able to summarize current wisdom on these issues for us? mike On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
Thanks for that Mike. Ask a question on this list and the answer is not long in coming. A case of joint attention I guess.As I understand this excerpt, the idea of pointing growing out of attemptedgrasping in ontogenetic development is ruled out, but the "precision grasping" movement with thumb and forefinger and the pointing gesture with thumb *not* opposing the forefinger are co-evolved reflexes (?) and the discovery is pushed back from Vygotsky and Dewey to Darwin (sort of). And co-attention (gaze-following) precedes pointing at distant objects. All of which points to the communicative functions developing ontogenetically in advance of I->object functions. Is that right? And we should take the grasping-then-pointing idea really just as part of our history. thanks Mike. you work too hard! Andy Mike Cole wrote:------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Andy Blunden (Erythrós Press and Media) http://www.erythrospress.com/ Orders: http://www.erythrospress.com/store/main.html#books _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca _______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca