COMMUNICATING

Finnegan, an academic linguist, argues for a more expansive interpretation of communication.

Proponents of the dominant theories of human discourse, the author observes, tend to see its development as a “one-way ladder” that ascends from primitive to increasingly more sophisticated forms, culminating in speech. This interpretative approach, often “logocentric” (focused on words as communication) and “unidimensional,” overly privileges Western civilization as a paradigm of communication, but it also neglects the full richness of communication, which the author defines as the “purposive, organised and mutually recognisable process in which individuals actively interconnect with each other.” This more inclusive understanding not only focuses on verbal speech, or on the conveyance of information, but also on interconnection provided by all the senses. Communication thus may be emancipated from verbal text, she asserts. Finnegan then explores, with great subtlety and insight, the multifarious expressions of communication in dance and rituals—to name only two of the communication methods she discusses. The author also discusses what she admits is the “deeply contentious area” of paranormal encounters and extrasensory communication. Throughout, Finnegan doesn’t treat communicative modalities as distinct from the social conditions from which they arise; instead, she shows how they’re mediated by cultural context. Ultimately, her view of communication is so convincingly broad that she’s able to emphasize the “human-animal continuity,” in which other species connect in remarkably complex ways, and how this idea can be used to illuminate human means of interconnection. The author aims for a popularly accessible study that avoids an overly granular survey of the academic literature; the result is an engaging, straightforward work likely to appeal to the curious nonprofessional—one that’s free of turgid jargon, but still intellectually exacting. Finnegan doesn’t ignore the more traditional elements of communication, nor does she neglect to acknowledge the “predominantly audiovisual” orientation of humans. She offers a challenging counterpoint to theories that reduce such communication to their cognitive or evolutionary parts, instead sketching a theory of far greater depth.

An approachable yet impressively rigorous study of various forms of language.