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 |  Subject: Barely Human: Amazonian tribe lacks abstract idea of time  Fri May 20, 2011 5:49 am | |
| An Amazonian tribe has no abstract concept of time, say researchers.
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 occcuring; they don't have a notion of time which is something the events occur in."
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".
Researchers with Amondawa people The Amondawa have no words for time periods such as "month" or "year"
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.
Absolute terms
These arguments do not convince Pierre Pica, a theoretical linguist at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), who focuses on a related Amazonian language known as Mundurucu.
"To link number, time, tense, mood and space by a single causal relationship seems to me hopeless, based on the linguistic diversity that I know of," he told BBC News.
Dr Pica said the study "shows very interesting data" but argues quite simply that failing to show the space/time mapping does not refute the "mapping hypothesis".
Small societies like the Amondawa tend to use absolute terms for normal, spatial relations - for example, referring to a particular river location that everyone in the culture will know intimately rather than using generic words for river or riverbank.
These, Dr Pica argued, do not readily lend themselves to being co-opted in the description of time.
"When you have an absolute vocabulary - 'at the water', 'upstream', 'downstream' and so on, you just cannot use it for other domains, you cannot use the mapping hypothesis in this way," he said.
In other words, while the Amondawa may perceive themselves moving through time and spatial arrangements of events in time, the language may not necessarily reflect it in an obvious way.
What may resolve the conflict is further study, Professor Sinha said.
"We'd like to go back and simply verify it again before the language disappears - before the majority of the population have been brought up knowing about calendar systems."
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| | Subject: Re: Barely Human: Amazonian tribe lacks abstract idea of time Tue May 24, 2011 8:59 pm | |
| Geometry skills are innate, Amazon tribe study suggests
Researchers examined how the Mundurucu think about lines, points and angles, comparing the results with equivalent tests on French and US schoolchildren.
The Mundurucu showed comparable understanding, and even outperformed the students on tasks that asked about forms on spherical surfaces.
The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The basic tenets of geometry as most people know them were laid out first by the Greek mathematician Euclid about 2,300 years ago.
This "Euclidean geometry" includes familiar propositions such as the fact that a line can connect two points, that the angles of a triangle always add up to the same total, or that two parallel lines never cross...
Most surprisingly, the Mundurucu actually outperformed their western counterparts when the tests were moved from a flat surface to that of a sphere (the Mundurucu were presented with a calabash to demonstrate).
For example, on a sphere, seemingly parallel lines can in fact cross - a proposition which the Mundurucu guessed far more reliably than the French or US respondents.
This "non-Euclidean" example, where the formal rules of geometry as most people learn them do not hold true, seems to suggest that our geometry education may actually mislead us, Dr Pica said.
"The education of Euclidean geometry is so strong that we take for granted it's going to apply everywhere, including spherical surfaces. Our education plays a trick with us, leading us to believe things which are not correct."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13469925 |
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