I found The Strange Tools of Human Communication to be an odd book, by turns insightful, puzzling, visionary, and frustrating. Ruth Finnegan, a revered figure in the study of communication, bills this book as a companion to her 2023 Communicating: The Multiple Modes of Human Communication, and she alerts readers that the present volume will exhibit “a more personal take,” for which she requests our indulgence. She then sets forth, over the course of ten lively chapters, to open avenues of appreciation for “the uniqueness of things we know so well” (4), made manifest in these tools of human communication, defined in the appendix quite expansively as the voice (“vocalising in speaking, singing, and non-verbally”), the pen (“all implements that meaningfully mark a surface”), and the lyre (“tool for gesturing, manipulating, interacting, building, creating”). To these she appends, as it were, the hand, and also “mind, intelligence, consciousness,” rounding out the essential communicative faculties of we “audio-visual creatures.” The Strange Tools of Human Communication offers an agreeable ramble marked by often delightful digressions rather than a closely argued analysis of its target theme, human communication via the voice, the pen, and the lyre. A set of companion images offers an intriguing visual counterpoint to Finnegan’s meandering text.
Let me dispatch the frustrating component to get that out of the way. This book is littered with small textual errors, ranging from merely bothersome typos to more consequential matters such as stray footnotes and repeating passages. The publisher is Routledge, the venerable academic publisher, so these mishaps are all the more surprising. In any case, I strongly recommend a remedial copyediting to remove these distractions, which did interfere with this reader’s progress through the book.
Turning to positives now, The Strange Tools of Human Communication offers insightful material in abundance. It’s fair to say that every page holds at least a morsel of insight into human communication, and there are sections in the book that sustain insightful commentary over many pages. For instance, in the second chapter, titled “In the beginning was the voice,” Finnegan takes us into an arena of “sacred space in which speaker and listener are enclosed” (16) and introduces us to the Limba people of Sierra Leone, familiar to me through her excellent previous work on oral poetics. In the work under review here, she brings us into the artistry of Limba storytellers, illustrating the difficulty of rendering their vocal techniques such as singing and chanting, responsible for “both decorating the narrative and enhancing its effect” (30), through standard presentational formats requiring transcribing and translating of the source performances.
Finnegan accords the pen its due in a fourth chapter, “Pen meets voice.” “What treasures,” she inquires, “would have vanished if humans had depended only on the evanescent voice?” (57). This chapter also dips into Limba oral traditions to highlight the complementarity of voice and pen, to show that people can inhabit worlds animated by both the verbal and the written modalities, and to argue against the stereotype of African societies as circumscribed by tribal traditions that limit creativity and participation in modernity. Here it is illuminating to see a deeply traditional genre, the praise poem, employed to honor Nelson Mandela, who, it is averred, was himself a praise poet!
Sticking to the insightful, for one more example: Finnegan in chapter 6, “The lyre with its music,” argues that “music should be more central in studies of communication” (119), a proposition that my fellow folklorists and ethnomusicologists will heartily embrace. Dealing with the role music plays in human sociality, she recognizes both its power to connect and to divide by virtue of its capacity “to reach into a person’s depth” (138). Drawing on a study of Bruce Springsteen’s fandom and citing Max Müller’s wisdom, Finnegan frames music as an ineffable tool of communication, relaying to us Bob Dylan’s sardonic response when asked what his songs are about: “About half an hour” (142).
Finnegan’s discussion of the lyre, of music, provides me with an opening to move this review into the puzzling facets of The Strange Tools of Human Communication. In chapter 7, “The start of music,” Finnegan undertakes a prolonged excursion into the origins of speech and music. She rehearses the classic set of origin theories, featuring such gems as the bow-wow theory, the ding-dong theory, and the tra-la-la theory, among others. This makes for decent entertainment, but it strikes this reader as something of a diversion. In the midst of this discursus, Finnegan offers this formulation: “the idea that vibration runs through everything, not just in ‘living creatures’, fits well with the view in some of the new science writers that, in a way, everything, even the sea, has a kind of consciousness.” She continues in this vein: “Consciousness might, in this context, be interpreted as the kind of vibrating awareness of movement and life, which, not just in music but in all things, sustains the world and its creatures of every kind” (156).
There are earlier hints in the book of this kind of spiritual discourse, a metaphysics of communication, perhaps, sometimes given a Christian flavor. Chapter 8, “The mysterious world of intercommunicating,” takes up this thematic in earnest. Finnegan begins by alluding to gathering behavior in the non-human animal world: swarms among insects, flocking among birds, schooling among fish. In the human realm, she asks: how does musical coordination happen? What about the “herd mentality”? Is there some kind of underlying shared consciousness that makes possible these coordinated actions, some kind of alternative consciousness? Citing (or alleging) a growing interest in these phenomena among scientists, Finnegan ventures into more speculative realms such as awareness of things yet to happen, messages from the dead or dying, and unmediated communication across distances.
Finnegan posits the viability of these alternative-consciousness channels, disdaining “the ruling physicalist and reductionist stance” (180). She wonders whether “the world of humans (or perhaps of all living creatures) was once united in a kind of distant, telepathic intercommunication web” and if “at some deep unawares level, this might be so of our present world too” (190). I inquire, in turn, what should we make of this visionary facet of The Strange Tools of Human Communication? The author has alerted us that we have in our hands a personal testament, and it seems fair enough for a person to float spiritual leanings in such a document. Her involvement in Christian spirituality, and her evocation of the unconscious-conscious, reveal intriguing perspectives on her quest for deeper meanings in life. And she does bring diverse threads in the book together in observations like this one: “The emphasis on psychedelic drugs in the 1960s has been superseded by an interest in the study of the nervous system, including the relationship between drum rhythms, brain waves, and shamanic states of trance or ecstasy” (184). In these pages, Finnegan argues for an expansive understanding of communication, one that reaches into human psychology and transcends the normal limits of time and space. My guess is that some readers will welcome this momentary release from normative science; others, like me, will be left slightly bewildered.
Finnegan closes with an interesting discussion of the hand of history, celebrating “homo faber et sapiens, a hand-skilled, communicating, connecting animal” (200), and congratulating “the adventurous little boy” and “the ageing grandmother passing on her wisdom” who brought us to this place. Ultimately, she declares that we are here, “astonishingly so,” thanks to the products of the hand, the voice, the pen, and the lyre, but at last, thanks to the exercise of human will. Finnegan has fashioned a readable (setting aside the editorial lapses) and rewarding account of human communication, one that sensitively covers familiar terrain in the study of communication but that also adventures into less-charted territory, expanding the topic to encompass a metaphysics of communication. Here in our oikoumene, “the inhabited world and our home” (216), we humans have achieved much, as she notes, but what the tools of human communication will allow us to create in the future remains uncertain. Perhaps, she avers, we will acquire “a shared consciousness” that will deliver “a glance of heaven” (218).
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[Review length: 1353 words * Review posted on April 20, 2026]