Culture: Tribes of Brazil: Language and Cognition of the Amondawa, An Amazonian Tribe

Tribes of the Amazon: The Amondawa Tribe and Their Unique Conceptualization of Time

It’s pretty obvious to me that language influences thought. It dictates our concepts and shapes our worldview. We saw this with the Pirahã, and now with the Amondawa. I am completely fascinated by the diversity in language and customs of all of these tribal groups found in the Amazon, there is so much we don’t know, and that’s really exciting to me as it presents something to explore. Since I’ve been writing all morning about the unique languages of amazonian tribes, here’s another cool one that’s undermining our western notions of how language works:

Telling Time in Amondawa

In a new study published in the journal Language and Cognition “When Time is Not Space,” a team of researchers from University of Portsmouth and Federal University of Rondonia claim that the Amondawa, a small Amazonian tribe, speak a language with a very uncommon conceptualization of time. The story was recently picked up by BBC, revealing that the debate about whether language influences thought is very much alive and newsworthy.

The Amondawa lacks the linguistic structures that relate time and space – as in our idea of, for example, “working through the night”.

The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognise events occuring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept.

The idea is a controversial one, and further study will bear out if it is also true among other Amazon languages.

The Amondawa were first contacted by the outside world in 1986, and now researchers from the University of Portsmouth and the Federal University of Rondonia in Brazil have begun to analyse the idea of time as it appears in Amondawa language.

“We’re really not saying these are a ‘people without time’ or ‘outside time’,” said Chris Sinha, a professor of psychology of language at the University of Portsmouth.

“Amondawa people, like any other people, can talk about events and sequences of events,” he told BBC News.

“What we don’t find is a notion of time as being independent of the events which are occuring; they don’t have a notion of time which is something the events occur in.”

The Amondawa language has no word for “time”, or indeed of time periods such as “month” or “year”.

The people do not refer to their ages, but rather assume different names in different stages of their lives or as they achieve different status within the community.

But perhaps most surprising is the team’s suggestion that there is no “mapping” between concepts of time passage and movement through space.

Ideas such as an event having “passed” or being “well ahead” of another are familiar from many languages, forming the basis of what is known as the “mapping hypothesis”.

But in Amondawa, no such constructs exist.

“None of this implies that such mappings are beyond the cognitive capacities of the people,” Professor Sinha explained. “It’s just that it doesn’t happen in everyday life.”

When the Amondawa learn Portuguese – which is happening more all the time – they have no problem acquiring and using these mappings from the language.

The team hypothesises that the lack of the time concept arises from the lack of “time technology” – a calendar system or clocks – and that this in turn may be related to the fact that, like many tribes, their number system is limited in detail.

(Via BBC) Read the whole article…

Culture: Tribes of Brazil: Can The Pirahã, an Amazonian Tribe, Change our Understanding of Language?

From “The Good Blood”:

HAS ONE AMAZONIAN TRIBE CHANGED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF LANGUAGE?

 

Fascinating article in the New Yorker about a linguist and his lifetime adventure among the Pirahã tribe, in the Amazon. It is, at the same time, an über-geek search for the meaning of language, an academic drama involving Chomsky and the concept of “universal grammar” and the brain, a difficult spiritual journey for one man, and a description of a language that is so foreign and strange that might as well have come from another planet.

“For the first several years I was here, I was disappointed that I hadn’t gone to a ‘colorful’ group of people,” Everett told me. “I thought of the people in the Xingu, who paint themselves and use the lip plates and have the festivals. But then I realized that this is the most intense culture that I could ever have hoped to experience. This is a culture that’s invisible to the naked eye, but that is incredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of the Amazon. Nobody has resisted change like this in the history of the Amazon, and maybe of the world.”

According to the best guess of archeologists, the Pirahã arrived in the Amazon between ten thousand and forty thousand years ago, after bands of Homo sapiens from Eurasia migrated to the Americas over the Bering Strait. The Pirahã were once part of a larger Indian group called the Mura, but had split from the main tribe by the time the Brazilians first encountered the Mura, in 1714. The Mura went on to learn Portuguese and to adopt Brazilian ways, and their language is believed to be extinct. The Pirahã, however, retreated deep into the jungle. In 1921, the anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú spent time among the Pirahã and noted that they showed “little interest in the advantages of civilization” and displayed “almost no signs of permanent contact with civilized people.” (…)

To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.

The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?

Environmental News: Brazil Sends Troops to Amazon to Protect Rural Workers on Loggers’ Death List

This past weekend, Brazil’s  National Public Security Force agents escorted a group of nine people (four adults and five children) from a model farming community settlement in Nova Ipixuna to the city of Marabá in the state of Pará.

The National Force was created in 2004 during the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration as part of an attempt to dealwith security on a national scale, as opposed to the local or regional focus of the Polícia Militar.

The ranks of the Force are filled by specially trained members of the Military Police and firemen and is subordinated to the Ministry of Justice’s National Secretariat of Public Security.

The model farming community at Nova Ipixuna has been targeted by loggers. The community practices sustainable use of natural forest resources. Last month, a married couple was assassinated there.

The couple, José Claudio and Maria do Espírito Santo, made a living mainly by harvesting nuts and were environmental activists who stood up to logging interests.

One of the people in the group escorted by Força Nacional troops was the sister of Jose Claudio, who is also on a death threat list. The escort operation was part of Operation Defense of Life, which is intended to combat land conflict assassinations in the states of Pará, Rondônia and Amazonas.

According to the Ministry of Justice, the Pará state Human Rights Center will begin to examine the Nova Ipixuna murders  this Monday, June 20. Meanwhile, the National Force will protect other people who have received death threats.

Besides the National Force, Operation Defense of Life is supported by the Federal Police, the Highway Police and representatives of the federal government: the Secretariat of Human Rights, the Presidency’s General Secretariat and the ministries of Agrarian Development, Defense, Environment, along with representatives of national councils of Justice and government attorneys.

At least 200,000 people make a living by using natural resources in the state of Amazonas. They fish, they gather nuts, vegetable oils or fibers. Others harvest fruit, such as açaí, or make handicrafts from wood.

Some are rubber tappers. In Portuguese, they are engaged in extrativisimo – sustainable exploitation of the forest, without destroying it. Many of them live in what are supposed to be protected areas known as “reservas extrativistas.”

Célia Regina das Neves, who lives in the Reserva Extrativista Mãe Grande, in Curuçá, in the state of Pará, says there are serious problems in the communities due to a lack of government presence.

“There is a huge demand for services. There are questions about production, family life, community organization and use of natural resources. But the biggest problem is certainly land ownership,” she declared.

The president of the National Council of Extrativistas, Manoel Silva da Cunha, says the problem is longstanding. He points out that people were given incentives to migrate during the rubber boom (at the beginning of the 20th century) and wound up occupying lands that had owners.

“This problem has not been resolved and just gets worse. Today there are ownership disputes even in areas that the federal or state governments have decreed to be conservation units,” he says.

At the ministry of Environment, the director of the Forest Department, João de Deus Medeiros, says the idea is to stimulate harmonious relations between people and the forest. “We support production, work with producers to obtain higher aggregated value and price guarantees. We assist producers place their goods on the market. All this has had interesting results,” he declared.

The director-general of the Brazilian Forest Service, Carlos Hummel, says his organization works to show people that conserving the forest (for exploitation) can generate income.

Meanwhile, the new government program, Brazil Without Misery, will distribute a Green Subsidy (“Bolsa Verde”) of 300 reais (US$ 188) for families that conserve the environment where they work.

*Sources: http://www.brazzilmag.com/component/content/article/99-june-2011/12605-brazil-sends-troops-to-amazon-to-protect-rural-workers-on-loggers-death-list.html