Time Isn\'\'t What it Seems to be (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, May 22, 2011, 14:46 (4934 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: And here is a tribe that has no 'time'. Events, yes, time, no:-http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-necessarily-deeply-rooted-brains.html-David's comment is slightly misleading. Time and events are not mutually exclusive.-Professor Sinha said: "For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us. We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted, or talked about in the abstract. This doesn't mean that the Amondawa are 'people outside time', but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time."-This is a very, very fine distinction, as becomes clear from the next paragraph:-Team members including linguist Wany Sampaio and anthropologist Vera da Silva Sinha, spent eight weeks with the Amondawa researching how their language conveys concepts like 'next week' or 'last year'. There were no words for such concepts, only divisions of day and night and rainy and dry seasons. They also found nobody in the community has an age. Instead, they change their names to reflect their life stage and position within their society, so that for example a little child will give up their name to a newborn sibling, and take on a new one.-The fact that the Amondawa don't NEED terms like "next week" or "last year" has clearly influenced the evolution of their LANGUAGE. But you cannot have concepts like day and night and seasons and life stages without being aware of a movement from future to present to past, and that movement is what some of us understand by "time". (Incidentally, although the team had done earlier research on the tribe, eight weeks seems extremely short for outsiders to grasp a totally different way of thinking.)-Professor Sinha said: "We have so many metaphors for time and its passing ... we think of time as a 'thing' ... we say 'the weekend is nearly gone'; 'she's coming up to her exams'; 'I haven't got the time', and so on, and we think such statements are objective, but they aren't. We've created these metaphors and they have become the way we think. The Amondawa don't talk like this and don't think like this, unless they learn another language.-If they are able to "think like this" in another language, maybe the gap isn't as great as the researchers make out. Our metaphors, words and divisions ... like all language ... are a human invention. The fact that the Amondawa have their own way of measuring and articulating the movement does not mean the movement itself is not a reality for them, or is not an objective reality that is independent of language. The article does not actually tell us whether they use their own metaphors. Maybe they have substitutes for our "future" and "past" in the form of events like "when the corn is ripe", or "when Chief XYZ died". Such event-related metaphors would simply constitute a different method of measuring, counting and talking about the movement of time. Of course we need to read the whole report, but as it stands, I can't honestly see how the article proves "time isn't what it seems to be" or that the tribe "has no 'time'". How we perceive and articulate the movement from future to present to past will depend on each individual culture and language, including that of the Amondawa.