Re: [xmca] FW: Language and Culture

Great links everyone. The article in the NewYorker, being written for
non-specialists, is still
worth checking out. Very thought provoking.
mike

On 4/17/07, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
>
> Echoes of Scribner and Cole?
>
> The Piraha challenge: an Amazonian tribe takes grammar to a strange place
> Science News, Dec 10, 2005 by Bruce Bower
> http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_24_168/ai_n16029317
>
> When Daniel L. Everett and his wife Keren Everett started spending 6 to 8
> months each year with the Piraha people of Brazil's Amazon rain forest in
> 1977, they hoped to decipher a language that had long stumped missionaries
> in the region. By 1980, the two outsiders spoke the native tongue well
> enough to field an intriguing proposal from villagers: to teach them to
> count and to read. The villagers hoped that counting would prevent them
> from
> getting cheated when trading Brazil nuts and other goods for products such
> as tobacco and whiskey ferried through the area by Portuguese riverboat
> owners.
>
> So for the next few months, Daniel Everett--alinguist affiliated with the
> University of Manchester in England and the Max Planck Institute for
> Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany--and Keren Everett, a
> missionary with linguistic training, ran evening classes in math and
> literacy for the forest dwellers. However, although the Piraha know
> volumes
> about hunting and jungle survival, the group flunked both courses. None of
> the roughly 30 people who regularly attended classes learned to count to
> 10.
> None learned to add 3+1, or even 1+1.
>
> Reading lessons ended abruptly when, after weeks of painstaking work, the
> students managed to read a Piraha word aloud and in unison. Everyone
> laughed. Daniel Everett asked what was so funny, and his students
> responded
> that what they had just said sounded like their word for sky. That's
> correct, Everett replied. The Piraha immediately became agitated and asked
> to stop the lessons.
>
> "Their motivation for attending literacy classes turned out to be,
> according
> to them, that it was fun to be together and I made popcorn," Everett says.
>
> Piraha problems with reading, writing, and arithmetic stemmed not from
> slow-wittedness but from a cultural conviction about how to converse,
> Everett proposes. From the villagers' perspective, talking should concern
> only knowledge based on one's personal, immediate experience. No Piraha
> refers to abstract concepts or to distant places and times.
>
> As a result, Piraha grammar bucks all sorts of linguistic conventions,
> according to Everett. The language lacks words for quantities, contains no
> standard words for colors, shows no sign of expanding or combining
> sentences
> through the use of clauses, rarely uses pronouns, employs just two tenses,
> and features only a few kinship terms, which refer mainly to living
> relatives.
>
> Moreover, the Piraha tell no creation myths and don't make up stories or
> draw pictures. They believe in spirits that they directly encounter at
> times, "but there's no great god who created all the spirits, in the
> Piraha
> view" Everett says.
>
> Cultural mandates to express only one's immediate experience and to shun
> outsiders' knowledge have kept the Piraha population, which now amounts to
> around 200 people, from learning other languages despite more than 200
> years
> of regular contact with Brazilians and various Amazonian groups, he adds.
>
> Yet despite the simplicity of its grammar, the Piraha language matches
> other
> languages in complexity, Everett says. The villagers communicate almost as
> much by singing, whistling, and humming as they do with spoken words, he
> reports. Moreover, they convey a rich spectrum of emotions as they speak
> by
> systematically varying syllable intonations.
>
> Everett lays out his argument for culture as a prime force in shaping the
> unusual Piraha language in the August-October CurrentAnthropology. The
> eight
> scientific responses published with his article range from supportive to
> incredulous.
>
> Everett expected criticism. His findings challenge the influential theory
> that all spoken languages draw on common grammatical rules. Proponents of
> that premise believe that the human brain comes equipped with grammar
> networks, as a biological consequence of Stone Age evolution.
>
> Instead, Everett champions an approach that held sway in the first half of
> the 20th century. Influential anthropologists and linguists of that era
> argued that cultural values mold how people talk, just as a language's
> expressive power shapes a culture's traits. If that's the case, basic
> elements of grammar can differ from one culture to the next, and cultural
> and social forces continually alter the fundamental rules of language.
>
> "It took me 27 years to work up the courage to say these things about
> Piraha
> grammar," says Everett. Now, he's standing his ground.
>
> COUNTED OUT In a particularly surprising twist, the Piraha
> language--unlike
> any other recorded tongue--employs no numbers or other quantity terms,
> Everett contends. It lacks words that would translate as all, many, most,
> few, each, and every.
>
> Words for whole and part are used only to describe specific experiences,
> such as a person's plans to trade a whole snakeskin. If a piece of the
> skin
> is removed before the transaction, villagers still i say that "the whole
> thing" was traded because they're referring to the entire skin that was
> available at the time of the exchange.
>
>
>
> Peter Smagorinsky
> The University of Georgia
> Department of Language and Literacy Education
> 125 Aderhold Hall
> Athens, GA 30602-7123
> smago@uga.edu /fax:706-542-4509/phone:706-542-4507/
> http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/faculty/smagorinsky/index.html
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of Anton Yasnitsky
> Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 12:00 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: RE: [xmca] FW: Language and Culture
>
> ... Also, Wikipedia article "Pirahã people"
> provides a bunch of quite relevant articles, fyi:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people#References
>
>
> --- "Hallam,Teresa A" <thallam@uakron.edu> wrote:
>
> > You may be interested in a blog posting on Dan Everett and the Piraha
> > in the New Yorker. It contains links to the slide show, his most
> > important paper, responses and discussion of his paper, and a segment
> > from an NPR Weekend Edition. The link to the blog posting is:
> >
> >
> http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004387.html
> >
> > Teresa Hallam
> > thallam@uakron.edu
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
> > [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf
> > Of Mike Cole
> > Sent: Monday, April 16, 2007 10:26 PM
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> > Subject: Re: [xmca] FW: Language and Culture
> >
> > I am trying to get the whole article available,
> > David. So far, not successfully. There are also
> > important articles in academic journals. I have
> > written about Gordon's work on number, but what
> > this article makes clear is that he was a tiny
> > part of a much larger, much more important
> > picture.
> > If anyone can get the electronic version to
> > distribute, please do!!
> > mike
> >
> > On 4/16/07, David Preiss <davidpreiss@uc.cl>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi Peter et al,
> > > How great you and Mike fwed this. I read the
> > article and it is amazing.
> > > There
> > > are three parts I loved the most: first, the
> > depiction of the
> > > intellectual and personal biography of
> > Everett. What an unusual and
> > > carismatic chracter. He is an outsider enough
> > to challenge the givens
> > > of American cog sci an has the training
> > needed to do so. Everett
> > > stroke me as a new romantic in an unromantic
> > science. And, second, I
> > > loved the way the journalist depicted the
> > researcher that came "down
> > > there" to test Chomsky´s hypotheses and how
> > evident was the whole
> > > experimental procedure was so alien to the
> > culture that was of no use
> > > there. Last but not least, I loved the
> > comeback of Sapir and how
> > > fitting was Everett depictions of the Piraha
> > to the thinking of
> > > contemporary cultural psychologists such as
> > Tomasello and Mike
> > > himself. There are many issues there that can
> > be nicely framed in a
> > > CHAT perspective- Thanks to the New Yorker
> > for being there for al of
> > > us!
> > > David
> > >
> > > Peter Smagorinsky escribió:
> > > > a colleague reports:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Dear Colleagues,
> > > >
> > > > I recommend to you a recent article in The
> > New Yorker about peoples
> > > living
> > > > in the Amazon whose language seems to defy
> > Chomsky's ideas that all
> > > > languages follow certain structural
> > features (universal grammar). A
> > > > linguist Dan Everett who has lived with the
> > Piraha off and on for
> > > > many
> > > years
> > > > writes that their language which is
> > described as sounding like "a
> > > profusion
> > > > of exotic birds, a melodic chattering
> > scarcely discernible, to the
> > > > uninitiated, as human speech" does not
> > follow Chomsky's universal
> > > grammar.
> > > > The article is very engaging and might be
> > useful in stimulating
> > > > student discussion of the relationship
> > between language and culture.
> > > >
> > > > Look for "The Interpreter" by John
> > Colapinto in the April 16th New
> > > Yorker
> > > > magazine.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > Professor Michelle Commeyras
> > > > Department of Language and Literacy
> > Education University of Georgia
> > > > 706-542-2718
> > > > pulane@uga.edu (currently being forwarded
> > to pulane@gmail.com)
> > > > http://www.coe.uga.edu/lle/clinic/
> > > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > > > xmca mailing list
> > > > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > > > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > David D. Preiss Ph.D.
> > > Profesor Auxiliar / Assistant Professor
> > Pontificia Universidad
> > > Católica de Chile Escuela de Psicología.
> > > Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860.
> > > Macul, Santiago de Chile.
> > > Chile
> > >
> > > Teléfono: (56-2) 354-4605
> > > Fax: (56-2) 354-4844.
> > > Web: http://web.mac.com/ddpreiss/
> > >
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > > xmca mailing list
> > > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> > >
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>
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Received on Tue Apr 17 08:33 PDT 2007