The empirical discovery of domains of assembly and communion

Abstract

We consider chanting, or joint speech, which is ubiquitous, but not evenly distributed, in human activity. Taking an observational stance motivated by embodied cognitive science, we approach this topic without assumptions of the structure of persons, social formations, culture, or nature. This restrictive starting point motivates the use of a simple empirical definition of joint speech (the utterance by multiple persons of the same sounds at the same time) to allow us to induce four distinguished domains of assembly and communion among persons. These may be loosely indicated by the familiar terms of ritual, sports, protest and primary education. We use our empirical definition to induce these domains, and then consider how they might be regarded jointly. We are not aware of any social or psychological theory that would generate these four domains, and we suggest that our restricted mode of observation may be of use in the collective consideration of human patterning, without the common assumptions of cognitivism.