No concept of the future, no yuccas either
Juan Forero
reports,
on the front page of today's
New
York Times, on a group of Nukak-Makú hunter-gatherers who
have emerged from the Colombian jungle to seek refuge in the town of
San José del Guaviare. They are described as classic
primitives, people who "have lived a Stone Age life" and are innocent
of the ways of the modern world:
The Nukak have no concept of money, of
property, of the role of government, or even of the existence of a
country called Colombia. They ask whether the planes that fly overhead
are moving on some sort of invisible road.
Their conceptual poverty extends, in Forero's somewhat confused
account, to at least one basic temporal notion:
When asked if the Nukak were concerned
about the future, Belisario, the only one in the group who had been to
the outside world before and spoke Spanish, seemed perplexed, less by
the word than by the concept. "The future," he said, "what's that?"
But much later in the story, we see that they are perfectly capable of
planning for this putatively unconceptualizable future:
That is not to say the Nukak do not
have plans.
Ma-be explained that the idea is to grow plantains and yucca and take
the crops to town. "We can exchange it for money," he said, "and
exchange the money for other things."
Now I don't know what word Belisario used to translate Ma-be here --
yucca is attested as an occasional
variant of
yuca, the name of
a starchy tuber better known as cassava -- but American readers
unfamiliar with tropical foodstuffs will mostly be puzzled by the idea
that the Nukak hope to grow the spiky agave yucca as a crop.
"Yuca" would have been a better choice, and "cassava" even better than
that.
Back to the future. It's hard to see how Belisario's perplexity
was about anything
BUT words. Somebody asked him
if the Nukak were concerned about "el futuro", and Belisario asked what
"el futuro" was. End of story. At this point we can begin
to suspect that Belisario's command of Spanish, in particular its
vocabulary, is not so great. And we can begin to wonder what
Spanish translations he gave to the other Nukak's reports of their
plans for the future: did he use future tense forms? In any case,
the exchange about the future was about a word, not a concept.
So why did Forero report the exchange as being about a concept?
Because, once again, "primitive" peoples are being imagined as
deficient in abstract thought. It's a cousin of "the X have N
words (for some large N) for Y, but no word for Y in general, so the X
are incapable of conceptualizing Y as an abstract notion". You
know, those poor Eskimos, stuck in an avalanche of highly
specific words for snow.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 11, 2006 12:56 PM