Page 160 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

137 Historical Materialism

perspective of an observer, from which they view the system of their
expectations and actions from the outside, as it were. Otherwise they
could not conditionally link their reciprocal expectations and make
them, as a system, the basis of their own action.14
b. Social roles can be constituted only if the participants in interac-
tion possess a temporal horizon that extends beyond the immediately
actual consequences of action. Otherwise spatially, temporally, and
materially differentiated expectations of behavior could not be linked
with one another in a single social role. Burial rites are a sign that
living together as a family induced a categorically expanded con-
sciousness of time.15
c. Social roles have to be connected with mechanisms of sanction if
they are to control the action motives of participants. Since [in the first
human societies} the possibility of sanction was no longer (as in pri-
mate societies) covered by the accidental qualities of concrete reference
persons and was not yet (as in civilizations) covered by the means of
power of political domination, it could consist only in ambivalently
cathected interpretations of established norms. As can be seen in the
way that taboos function, interpretive patterns tied to social roles re-
worked the feeling ambivalence, which must have resulted from de-
differentiating the drive system, into the consciousness of normative
validity, that is, into readiness to respect established norms.1®

For a number of reasons these three conditions could not be
met before language was fully developed. We can assume that
the developments that led to the specifically human form of
reproducing life—and thus to the initial state of social evolution
—first took place in the structures of labor and language. Labor
and language are older than man and society. For the basic
anthropological concepts of historical materialism this might im-
ply the following:

a. The concept of social labor is fundamental, because the evolu-
tionary achievement of socially organized labor and distribution obvi-
ously precedes the emergence of developed linguistic communication,
and this in turn precedes the development of social role systems.
b. The specifically human mode of life, however, can be adequately
described only if we combine the concept of social labor with that of
the familial principle of organization
c. The structures of role behavior mark a new stage of development
in relation to the structures of social labor; rules of communicative