"Everett takes us through the history of philosophy to show variations on those two themes as elaborated by the famous philosophers of the Western intellectual tradition, ending with his basically Aristotelian view, in contrast to the Chomskyan theory of innate structures and universal grammar. In the process, he challenges Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Jung’s archetypes, Bastien’s psychic unity of man, Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, and other variations on that theme. . . . What he says about this broad and multifaceted scope of human behavior is interesting and informative, and can be profitably read by anthropologists in all four fields of the discipline."

American Anthropologist

"Everett begins by offering a fascinating argument: the only source of human learning is the individual—not in the mind, not in the brain, not in societies. Further, most of this learning is transmitted through “culturally articulated dark matter,” which he defines as “any knowledge … that is unspoken in normal circumstances, usually unarticulated even to ourselves.” From this, Everett lays out his thesis in three parts: the human unconscious may be classified into “the unspoken and the ineffable”; this unconscious is influenced by the interaction of human perception and “a ranked-value, linguistic-based model of culture”; and that “learning as cultural beings” affects human thought and identity. Everett argues for and develops his thesis and its consequences in the remainder of the book. He makes a strong argument and brings in a wide-range of interesting anthropological case studies along the way. Recommended."

Choice

“Everett draws on his own deep insights gained from living and working in non-Western cultures in order to make a powerful argument for the influence of culture on unconscious forces that underlie human behavior and the individual’s sense of self. After decades of a field derailed by ethnocentric, instinct-based views of language and the mind, 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

“In Dark Matter of the Mind, Everett defends two ideas that were once highly heterodox but which he has helped push toward the mainstream. One is a radical antinativism. Informed by his rich and challenging background as a linguist and anthropologist, Everett sees the human mind as profoundly shaped and organized by learning and culture. As he sees it, there is nothing like a language acquisition device or theory of mind module to be found in the architecture of the mind. The second is an emphasis on implicit information: hunches, know-how, and skill. That is the ‘dark matter,’ thought that moves us in action and decision without our being able to articulate it, sometimes beyond awareness. The work is rich with example and argument; it is a reflection of many years of thought and experience.”

Kim Sterelny, author of The Evolved Apprentice

“A hit and the biggest wallop in the breadbasket Noam Chomsky’s hegemony had ever suffered.”

Tom Wolfe | Harper’s, on Don't Sleep There are Snakes