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Watch Your Language A Q&A with Co-Provost and Dean of Arts and Science Daniel Everett George Grattan August 9, 2016

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Bentley University’s Co-Provost and Dean of Arts and Sciences Daniel Everett talked

with us recently about a wide range of topics, including being featured in a new book

by Tom Wolfe, two of his own upcoming books, the importance of studying the origins of language, and the value of a fusion approach to business education.

You’re a main focus in Tom Wolfe’s new book, The Kingdom of Speech.

How does it feel to be written about by such an influential and popular author?

Tom Wolfe's interest in my work is a gift. His new book profiles two of what he considers to be the most important controversies and rivalries in the history of science: Alfred Russel Wallace vs. Charles Darwin, and Noam Chomsky vs. me.

My mother, who died at 29, when I was 11, would likely be as surprised by all of this as I am. After all, I was born to and raised by dirt-poor people in a trailer park in California.

I received an email recently from my 8th grade English teacher telling me that she had read the Harper's excerpt of the book and was very proud of me. These are good things.

But more important, in so many ways, is the science. My goal is that people who read my work will find it helpful and interesting. For example, in my book on language evolution I hope that people find the story of how Homo erectus invented language 900,000 years ago exciting. It should make anyone proud to be a human being.

How did Wolfe first approach you about the idea of being featured in his book?

Tom first became interested in my work about seven years ago, when he read a New Yorker article about me. We met when he came to Bentley in 2010 to give a public lecture. He’s asked me questions from time to time since then. In the last six months he began to call weekly, with a large number of questions. Each time he called he seemed to know more about my work and life than I did. He was reading everything about me, and about the main scientific controversy I have been at the center of (on the nature of human language). I was deeply impressed by how well he was doing his background research.

Your next book, coming out this fall, Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, dives squarely into the nature vs. nurture debate, and argues that there is no essential self without culture. Why do you think this debate is both so timeless and so timely? What’s at stake in it for you? For your students? For cultures as a whole?

Well, on the one hand it is indeed an old debate. But my contribution, I hope, is to show how cultures are formed by individuals while individuals are simultaneously formed by cultures.

How do we become the individuals we are? How do we become like the people we talk with, eat with, think with, play with, and work with? That is a profound set of questions

and I think that my theory of dark matter is unique.

What is at stake in it for me is wanting to alter the widespread opinion that nature leaves little for nurture to do. I want to show what nature is like, but how nurture is every bit as important. This goes against huge swaths of theory in psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and computer science.

I try to show in the book the applications of my thought to business, teaching, and living in the world generally. I believe that there is a lot at stake in how we conceptualize who we are and how we become who we are.

For my students, I want them to consider the roles in the world through the eyes of culture. I want them to better appreciate the importance of diversity (racial, sexual, ethnic, musical, literary, cultural, and all the rest) in their lives, their citizenship, and their professional careers. I believe that a solid effort at understanding these things can help them live better and more successfully.

The debate is timeless because so many people believe it is important and because so many people believe they are right. It is timely because my own research experience is unique, crossing the boundaries of so many different disciplines.

Why is a linguistic anthropologist teaching—and acting as Co-Provost —at a business university? What’s the fit for you, culturally? How do your research and teaching resonate with business students?

I am here for several reasons. First, Bentley is an outstanding university. Its 110 fulltime Arts and Sciences faculty are superb and would themselves form a first-rate liberal arts college.

Second, the challenge of applying everything I have learned and researched over the past 40 years to education – making this the best university it can be – is rewarding on many levels as I work with students, faculty, and staff. The fit for me culturally is matching my ideals in higher education with Bentley's own aspirations. I want to be at a place like Bentley – where students get an honest deal. They pay good money for a good post-collegiate life, and Bentley gives this to them.

As for my research, the successful citizen, the outstanding business person, the famous CEO, all need, and will appreciate knowing how, to evaluate their business, career, and personal goals in light of the culture in which they are living. They can travel abroad or work at home with confidence. They become better students of the world when they understand our origins as a species and how we have structured and continue to construct our societies by cultural principles.

Bentley’s “fusion” of the arts and sciences and business has been a hallmark of their curriculum for a while now – how do you define it and why do you think it is important?

It is essentially the idea that students learn how to think in a range of contexts across business and the arts and sciences and that this should happen simultaneously.

Business and A&S students at Bentley have the opportunity to take combined classes in business and arts and sciences, to do research in the Jeanne and Dan Valente Center for the Arts and Sciences, to work in the Center for Integration of Science and Industry—to name just a few examples of ways that we go beyond mere "integration" of the arts and sciences and business to helping all students become "bilingual" in liberal arts and business.

Fusion is important for students because of how it trains the mind and offers a wider variety of knowledge. Students learn to think about issues across disciplines. For example, what does the world history since WWII have to teach us about the evolution of finance and its relationship to institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank? How might the study of literature of the period inform your ability to think more clearly about the values and cultures of organizations? How might this knowledge help you to more effectively communicate your understanding of these forces?

Even more importantly: Can one be a maximally effective citizen of one’s country with only professional expertise? No. Understanding history, literature, science, mathematics, modern languages, and philosophy along with business transforms your mind from one-track to multi-track, from monomodal to multimodal thinking. The fusion of the arts and sciences and business at Bentley is now being imitated at several other institutions.

You’ve also had a play based on your life among the Pirahã people of Brazil,—and your autobiographical work, Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes—premiere in London this past spring. How did it feel to be in that audience watching yourself be portrayed?

It was a bit surreal.

The play, written by Sebastian Armesto and his colleague, Dudley Hinton, both of Simple 8 Theatre Company, was creative, entertaining and accurate. It began with a recording of me speaking Pirahã, the language of the people in the Amazon where I

spent many years with my family. People laughed and became emotional during the play – at all the right spots. I felt like I was reliving my life. It was very moving.

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