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Some might be interested to read about critics within the cog sci discipline. Chris, a “cognitive pyschologist” at Mixing Memory has a post on this. While seemingly accepting the Aymara study, he argues that there is no current evidence for time being conceptualized metaphorically through mappings onto space – because most of the experiments are circular.

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John: While N&S do recognize the universality of concept metaphors being rooted in socially relevant experience, but the implication is that, since there metaphors are radically different, they are too.

I understand your assertion. I simply don’t believe it. The passages I cited indicate to me that the authors share the conviction of Lakoff, et.al. (see, for example, Philosophy in the Flesh) that all human language use is, in origin, metaphorical and that all metaphors are ultimately grounded in shared human experiences, which are taken to be universal. Note, in particular, the third sentence quoted above, where it is stated clearly that,

Aymara and English could be seen as basing their temporal metaphor systems on somewhat different aspects of humans’ basic embodied experience of the environment.

.

The notion that the Aymara are radically other because they use an unusual metaphor isn’t at all consistent with these assumptions. Thus I infer that your reading is wrong.

Got any evidence to the contrary handy?

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pointed them to the possibility of positioning themselves with the extensive literature on deixis generally

Now, its a statutory holiday here in Canada, which means I get to enact the national imaginary by marking papers while drinking beer by the lake (after sitting in traffic for 4 hours).

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Eve Sweetser
Professor

(semantics, syntax, historical linguistics, Celtic languages, speech act theory, metaphor theory, semantic change, grammaticalization, gesture)
Ph.D., Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, 1984. Her primary research interests include historical linguistics, semantics and meaning changes, the semantics of grammatical constructions, cognitive linguistics, metaphor and iconicity, subjectivity and viewpoint, the relationship between language and gesture, and the Celtic language family. Her 1990 book, FROM ETYMOLOGY TO PRAGMATICS (Cambridge University Press), explores generalizations about synchronic and diachronic patterns of meaning in the areas of model verbs and conjunctions. She currently directs UCB’s undergraduate Cognitive Science Program and also teaches in the Celtic Studies Program. She has published articles on topics including modality, polysemy, metaphor, conditional constructions, gesture, and Medieval Welsh poetics, and has a forthcoming book on English conditional constructions co-authored with Barbara Dancygier.

Except for one thing, I would hesitate to assume that she doesn’t know what she is talking about. That one thing is the information explosion, the big bang that has radically expanded the universe of possibly knowable/citable things.

We live in a world where none of us knows more than a microscopic fraction of what there is to be known. And, while we should do more reaching out to scholars in other fields that address topics similar to our own, how many of us actually do this? How many of us now stop before writing a paper to consult the Social Science Index (or similar reference sources) to try to identify everyone who has worked on a topic similar to ours? Instead, that is, of citing people we happen to know about because we went to school with them, they happened to be included in the syllabuses of the courses we took, or they happen to be currently trendy?

Serendipitously, I once spent a year in an AI Project where Cognitive Science, a la Roger Schank and Roger Abelson, was very much the “in” thing. What I observed was a bunch of very smart people, deeply aware that the programs they were trying to write would have to incorporate a lot of what they called “world knowledge” but, like other academics, having trouble keeping up with the literature in their own field, yet alone look elsewhere for stuff to read in their non-existent spare time.

My sense is that we anthropologists are no better off. Would you disagree?

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John, the “beef” I think is with exactly this: the sense among cognitive scientists that nothing has ever been done before they did it. There is an implied claim that that other people who looked at such things were doing so in an “unscientific” perhaps “anecdotal” fashion. This is sometimes combined with a striking naivete regarding things we (anthropologists & fellow travelers) take to be basic knowledge. I’ll admit that this is an interesting case, and the authors of the paper were trying to address some of what has already been said, but what if they had worked with a linguistic anthropologist who could have cautioned them against the sort of extravagant claims they made, and instead pointed them to the possibility of positioning themselves with the extensive literature on deixis generally?

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Perhaps the fact that the “othering” cuts both ways is not so much a postcolonial irony, as an indication of the limits of Said’s understanding of the meaning of difference: might it not be the case that marking self and other is a fundamental human tendancy, whose political implications are dependant on the ways it is done and the meanings attached to it in particular cases? Indeed, might not the great irony be Said’s inability to imagine that difference from the European Enlightenment could ever be anything but inferiority?

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Using complementary linguistic and gestural methodologies, we eventually argue that Aymara has basic time metaphors that represent a radically different metaphoric mapping from the ones commonly found in the languages around the world studied so far. Aymara thus appears to be the first well-documented case presenting a genuine fundamental difference in the organization of time construals. Interestingly, it is not difficult to find an embodied experiential motivation for these “different” metaphors; it turns out that Aymara and English could be seen as basing their temporal metaphor systems on somewhat different aspects of humans’ basic embodied experience of the environment. However, given how unusual the Aymara metaphors for time are, further questions are raised about the cultural matrix within which particular spatial experiences of time are developed and linguistically coded.

My personal conclusion is that much of our discussion has been much ado about nothing. The statement that

Aymara has basic time metaphors that represent a radically different metaphoric mapping from the ones commonly found in the languages around the world studied so far.

“Studied so far” plainly refers to languages studied in the academic/disciplinary context, a.k.a., cognitive science, with which the authors affiliate themselves. To read it as referring to all languages whatsoever is pseudo-critical nonsense.

The next sentence reads,

Aymara thus appears to be the first well-documented case presenting a genuine fundamental difference in the organization of time construals.

This is a potentially impeachable claim, but the evidence presented here so far is of a suggestive rather than conclusive nature. Comparable examples may be found in Chinese, Hawaiian, etc. If, however, someone knows of a comparable case that is as “well-documented,” providing both linguistic and videoed gestural data, as the Aymara case on which the authors focus, they haven’t yet told us about it. So the claim remains unfalsified.

The third sentence in this series reads,

Interestingly, it is not difficult to find an embodied experiential motivation for these “different” metaphors; it turns out that Aymara and English could be seen as basing their temporal metaphor systems on somewhat different aspects of humans’ basic embodied experience of the environment.

In other words, in presents the Aymara case as well within the range of “basic embodied experience” common to all humankind, rendering merely bombastic accusations that the Aymara are being treated as some kind of essentialized Other.”

The conclusion that the Aymara case appears to be sufficiently unusual to raise all sorts of interesting questions is equally inoffensive.

So, dear ranters and ravers, I ask you, “Where’s the beef?” (Pun intended)

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In addition the phrase kēia mua aku is not well translated. Kēia = that or this, mua = ahead, and aku = away from the speaker. The dictionaries are here http://wehewehe.org/

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The Aymara language instead has a major static model of time wherein FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO and PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO; linguistic and gestural data give strong confirmation of this unusual culture-specific cognitive pattern. [my emphasis]

In the spirit of Tim’s nice disentangling, let me put it this way: There are two problems here that will not, no matter how carefully I read the paper (theirs, or the Times or Guardian), be removed from their postions embedded in my craw.

One: The overly deterministic relationship between language, cognition and culture and the bounded and homogeneous (and biological?) concept of culture implied by the above. And

Two: The radical othering that is present not only in their article but, and perhaps more problematically, in the NYT article.

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