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Beyond High-Level Linguistic Abstractions: Margaret Mead, Language, and the Affordances of Cybernetics
Mon, July 13, 2:30 to 4:00pm, EICC, Floor: Level 0, Moorfoot SuiteEnglish Abstract
Margaret Mead spent much of the Cold War searching for solutions to the geopolitical challenges of the era. One solution was to marshal the sciences toward an interdisciplinary framework in which methodologies and data could be shared and repurposed. The experimentation of this idea manifested in projects focused on the Soviet Union and its “national character,” including one funded by the RAND Corporation that resulted in the publication Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (1951). The RAND project was one of several interdisciplinary pattern recognition and data collection projects Mead directed, all of which were heavily influenced by cybernetics and her involvement in the Macy Conferences (1946-1953). Cybernetics was not just a model for interdisciplinarity, however, but a framework for communication. This paper explores three distinct yet complementary ideas about cybernetics as communication that Mead developed, focusing in particular on cybernetics as an “ideologically-free” language, a potential lingua franca.
Inspired by her training as a Boasian anthropologist in which language is not only integral to but a critical view into culture, Mead drew analogies between pidgin in her ethnographic fieldwork and cybernetics as common languages that could forge mutual understanding. Yet communicating across cultural divides requires more than mastery of a basic vocabulary. Communication is a fundamentally embodied act; in Mead’s view it should be reflexive, that one be conscious of their place in the system being observed, to be an observer who includes themselves in the domain of observation. Using Mead’s work for RAND and her articulation of a cybernetic language as points of departure, I discuss the affordances of Mead’s cybernetic epistemology in cultural analysis.