In the canonical writing of the cultural essentialists, language has a very close and inti

In the canonical writing of the cultural essentialists, language has a very

close and intimate relationship with culture, an association evinced by the

language/culture interchangeability of Ngugi, who asserts that language as

Line culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history. In his

(5) view, language carries the burden of a particular, evolving culture and becomes

the people's expression of their accumulated experience to the point that it

becomes almost indistinguishable from the culture that defines its growth,

articulation and transmission to other generations. This interchangeability

betrays Ngugi's longing for an ideal: the isomorphism between a particular

(10) language and a certain (cultural) reality.

Two objections deserve articulation, however, the first following from the

early Wittgensteinian view that the limits of language mean the limit of the

world. The view is not only that language influences our conception of the

world, as Ngugi would agree, but that language alone determines our particular

(15) manner of establishing perceptions and sentiments. This view is overly focused

for permitting the experience of reality only one constitutive factor, language,

to the exclusion of other non-linguistic factors. Yet since reality is many-sided

and aleatory, its boundary can not be determined or captured solely by

language, or in other words, humans experience the world in innumerable ways

(20) too varied and complex to be captured by language.

The second claim inherent in Ngugi' s expressive theory is that it is

language, above all else, determines a people's distinctive cultural identity.

That is, for the linguistic expressivist, one is only introduced to a certain

community or form. of life by means of language learning. The resemblance of

(25) this to Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation is rather

obvious, but Ngugi rather discountenances notions of dialectic materialism that

ground "praxis" or labor over language such that it is from labor, and not from

language or thought, that the category of meaning arises. For most cultural

theorists, labor possesses the property of being intelligible prior to the

(30) intelligibility of language and thought, and thus, on the basis of what has been

called the "constitutive activities", an outsider, whether a layman, a writer, or

an anthropologist need not retreat from understanding another culture due to

the difficulty in radical translation. Objects of the external world can be

meaningfully singled out to facilitate an understanding of the community before

(35) one can begin to master the language.

This last statement, reinforced by an experiment carried out on 3-to

4-month old pre-linguistic babies and the influence of their communal form. of

life, has proven that contrasting child-rearing practices bring about a way of

socializing babies into a structure of shared social practices, a way of relating to

(40) others prior to the acquisition of language. In other words, Ngugi's principle

shortcoming is his failure to recognize that language-learning alone does not

&n

A．self-evident given the process by which culture is transmitted from generation to generation

B．antithetical to the theories of linguistic expressivists

C．unpersuasive given the multi-faceted and aleatory nature of reality

D．characteristic of most cultural essentialist writing

E．the most common means of understanding how pre-linguistic subjects acquire culture