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Published: 13:34 EST, June 12, 2006
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Backs to the Future
The future is behind for the Aymara: The speaker at right indicates next
year by pointing backwards over his left shoulder. Copyright Rafael
Nunez UC San Diego
The future is behind for the Aymara: The speaker, at right, indicates
next year by pointing backwards over his left shoulder. Copyright Rafael
Nunez, UC San Diego
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous
Aymara people indicates they have a concept of time opposite to all the
world's studied cultures -- so that the past is ahead of them and the
future behind.
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Tell an old Aymara speaker to "face the past!" and you just might get a
blank stare in return – because he or she already does.
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous
Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.
Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a
spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies' orientation
and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past
behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the
other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.
Appearing in the current issue of the journal Cognitive Science, the
study is coauthored, with Berkeley linguistics professor Eve Sweetser,
by Rafael Nunez, associate professor of cognitive science and director
of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at the University of California,
San Diego.
"Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world – from
European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on – have not
only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all
mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back.
The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard
model," said Nunez.
The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of Bolivia,
Peru and Chile, has been noticed by Westerners since the earliest days
of the Spanish conquest. A Jesuit wrote in the early 1600s that Aymara
was particularly useful for abstract ideas, and in the 19th century it
was dubbed the "language of Adam." More recently, Umberto Eco has
praised its capacity for neologisms, and there have even been
contemporary attempts to harness the so-called "Andean logic" – which
adds a third option to the usual binary system of true/false or yes/no –
to computer applications.
Yet, Nunez said, no one had previously detailed the Aymara's "radically
different metaphoric mapping of time" – a super-fundamental concept,
which, unlike the idea of "democracy," say, does not rely on formal
schooling and isn't an obvious product of culture.
Nunez had his first inkling of differences between "thinking in" Aymara
and Spanish, when he went hitchhiking in the Andes as undergraduate in
the early 1980s. More than a decade later, he returned to gather data.
For the study, Nunez collected about 20 hours of conversations with 30
ethnic Aymara adults from Northern Chile. The volunteer subjects ranged
from a monolingual speaker of Aymara to monolingual speakers of Spanish,
with a majority (like the population at large) being bilinguals whose
skills covered a range of proficiencies and included the Spanish/Aymara
creole called Castellano Andino.
The videotaped interviews were designed to include natural discussions
of past and future events. These discussions, it was hoped, would elicit
both the linguistic expressions for "past" and "future" and the
subconscious gesturing that accompanies much of human speech and often
acts out the metaphors being used.
The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara
language recruits "nayra," the basic word for "eye," "front" or "sight,"
to mean "past" and recruits "qhipa," the basic word for "back" or
"behind," to mean "future." So, for example, the expression "nayra mara"
– which translates in meaning to "last year" – can be literally glossed
as "front year."
But, according to the researchers, linguistic analysis cannot reliably
tell the whole story.
Take an "exotic" language like English: You can use the word "ahead" to
signify an earlier point in time, saying "We are at 20 minutes ahead of
1 p.m." to mean "It's now 12:40 p.m." Based on this evidence alone, a
Martian linguist could then justifiably decide that English speakers,
much like the Aymara, put the past in front.
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There are also in English ambiguous expressions like "Wednesday's
meeting was moved forward two days." Does that mean the new meeting time
falls on Friday or Monday? Roughly half of polled English speakers will
pick the former and the other half the latter. And that depends, it
turns out, on whether they're picturing themselves as being in motion
relative to time or time itself as moving. Both of these ideas are
perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical too, as illustrated by
"We're coming to the end of the year" vs. "The end of the year is
approaching."
Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the
elderly who didn't command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated
space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or
waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves
when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and
arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to
the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used
gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.
"These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as
time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon," Nunez said. "That we
construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though
they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way
we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular
vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we
wouldn't have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.
"But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for
cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy,
neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly
different," he said.
Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and
Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on
whether an event or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.
A "simple" unqualified statement like "In 1492, Columbus sailed the
ocean blue" is not possible in Aymara – the sentence would necessarily
also have to specify whether the speaker had personally witnessed this
or was reporting hearsay.
In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen – and
known/unknown – to such an extent as to weave "evidential" requirements
inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place
the known past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown
and unknowable future behind your back.
Though that may be an initial explanation – and in line with the
observation, the researchers write, that "often elderly Aymara speakers
simply refused to talk about the future on the grounds that little or
nothing sensible could be said about it" – it is not sufficient, because
other cultures also make use of similar evidential systems and yet still
have a future ahead.
The consequences, on the other hand, may have been profound. This
cultural, cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed, Nunez
said, to the conquistadors' disdain of the Aymara as shiftless –
uninterested in progress or going "forward."
Now, while the future of the Aymara language itself is not in jeopardy –
it numbers some two to three million contemporary speakers – its
particular way of thinking about time seems, at least in Northern Chile,
to be on the way out.
The study's younger subjects, Aymara fluent in Spanish, tended to
gesture in the common fashion. It appears they have reoriented their
thinking. Now along with the rest of the globe, their backs are to the
past, and they are facing the future.
Source: University of California, San Diego
» Next Article in General Science - Other: Nation's 'brightest boy' dead
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