Posted on 06/12/2006 6:02:34 PM PDT by blam
Andes people look back to the future
Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 13/06/2006)
The Aymara people in South America have a concept of time opposite to the rest of the us, so that the past lies ahead of them and the future behind, according to a study published yesterday.
"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 characterised time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front.
"The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model," said Dr Rafael Nunez of the University of California, San Diego, who reports the finding in the journal Cognitive Science with Prof Eve Sweetser of the University of California.
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".
For the study Dr Nunez collected about 20 hours of conversations with 30 ethnic Aymara adults from Northern Chile that included discussions of past and future events. The Aymara language recruits "nayra," the basic word for "eye," "front" or "sight," to mean "past" and "qhipa," the basic word for "back" or "behind," to mean ''future." Thus the expression "nayra mara" - which means "last year" - can be literally translated as "front year".
Elderly Aymara referred to the future by thumbing or waving over their shoulders and swept forward with their hands and arms for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm for ancient times.
GGG Ping.
So many puns, so little time!
I swear in the 50's there was a 45 RPM Comic Record "Daffy Duck in Backwards Land"!!!!
He approached someone who greeted him with 'Goodbye", etc.
SO!
It was plagiarized!
Bizarro comes to mind...
Do they drink the psychedelic tree bark when they come up with concepts like this?
The researcher is not a linguist. The signs for past and future that he describes also mean known and not known. The past is what is known. The future is unknown. We all live in the known and fear the unknown.
Their sense of time is not the opposite of other cultures. They, rather, have not forgotten their past. Indeed they live in their past and seek to sustain it into the unknown. A different but substantive distinction.
The guy who ran the carousel at our park used to walk facing the kids as he collected tickets so that they could all feel like they were in front.
I, for one, wouldn't mind being back in simpler times.
For people living in a cyclical universe the past is always more complicated.
This is a simple problem easily solved by understanding the nature of time in primitive culture. Where the passage of time is cyclical the future always lies in knowing the past.
A clear example is the importance of oral tradition not to keep the past alive but to control the future by bringing it into the past, sic, the known.
The zanies who came up with this gobbledegook report are lost in the maze of their ivory tower looking for a way to demonstrate their genius.
Excellent comments by Amos. Thanks.
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Yes, but they've all been said before. Or later?
Interesting
it's like deja vu all over again ....
wonder if they are any good at picking lotto numbers :)
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