Exaptation

I learned about the concept of exaptation in a linguistics class I took for fun last semester. Originally, exaptation was a term from biology. It describes a process that happens a lot in evolution, in which a feature that was originally evolved to do one job starts being used to do something completely different. Birds are my favorite example - feathers were originally scales (birds' ancestors were reptiles) that were exapted to become a temperature control system - if you get cold, fluff your feathers up, and if you get hot, move the feathers around to generate a breeze. Being able to keep cool on a hot day is a pretty nifty trick, and so natural selection put pressure on feathered animals to evolve to be able to move air more efficiently. The result is that these animals' front limbs, which were originally used for transportation, were exapted to function as fans. Eventually these fans were so efficient that they could actually be used to glide for a few seconds at a time, making it easier for good fliers to escape predators and pass their genes on to the next generation. And voila, in a few hundred million years you've exapted armor to be used as temperature control, then exapted the temperature control system to be used as a flight system.

In linguistics, exaptation describes a similar process - linguistic evolution turns out to have remarkable parallels to biological evolution. When a new concept comes into existence, it needs a name, and it is quite common to exapt an older word instead of making up a new one. "Science", for example, entered the English language in the 14th century meaning "knowledge", then gradually came to have the nuance of referring to conceptual knowledge rather than practical knowledge - a practical distinction to be able to make, which is probably why the word stuck around. It wasn't until the 19th century that "science" came to refer to the practice of determining truth by means of experiment.

I had the epiphany last night at around two o'clock that the phenomenon of the Burakumin could be described using parallels to biological evolution. If we think of Japanese society as an organism, we can see the various outcaste groups as attributes evolved by that society to perform specific functions - butcher animals, work leather, clean temples, etc. As society's needs changed (as, for example, basket-weaving came to be seen as degrading work), rather than create new groups, the outcaste groups went through a process of exaptation. And in 1871, when the outcaste groups were officially dissolved, Japan ended up with something like an appendix - an attribute that used to serve a now non-existent need, but that was also not detrimental enough to the organism as a whole to disappear quickly.

Unfortunately, this insight makes it pretty much impossible to use the theoretical model of outsiders that I wanted to use. Now I need to find a good article or two on exaptation and as big a pile of information as I can get my hands on on theories of outsider status. I'm definitely going to have to synthesize a theoretical framework for my thesis's analysis from what other people have done; nothing I've seen so far does a good job of explaining all of the attributes of the Burakumin over their thousand years of history.