Dark Matter of the Mind
The culturally articulated unconscious — an argument that human nature does not exist, and that our greatest evolutionary adaptation is adaptability itself.
About the book
After I published Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, many academics and other readers wrote to ask me how culture could constrain language. So I wrote Language: The Cultural Tool as my answer to those questions. But then after Language was published, people asked me to clarify the nebulous concept of culture. Dark Matter of the Mind was written to develop my own theory of culture, and part of its relationship to human psychology.
Praise
“…the cognitive sciences need the sort of informed analyses his book offers of the relationships among culture, cognition, and language as they are embodied in speech and gesture.”
Elena Levy, University of Connecticut
Links & downloads
About Daniel Everett
I came to linguistics serendipitously. Growing up in Holtville, California, near the Mexican border, I heard Spanish all around me, though I expected to become a musician rather than a scientist. On a school-band trip to Hollywood, I saw My Fair Lady and became fascinated by Henry Higgins. The film’s linguistic consultant, Peter Ladefoged, later became my friend and co-author.
A few years later, I moved to Brazil with SIL International, with which I am no longer affiliated, and earned my doctorate in linguistics at the University of Campinas. Beginning in 1977, I spent many years living and conducting field research among Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon.
Linguist, anthropologist and author. Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences, Bentley University.