Let the nations learn from one another, and let one continue where the other left off…every nation has its center of felicity in itself alone, as every sphere has its center of gravity…. Is not the good distributed through the whole world? It is divided into a thousand forms, transformed, an eternal Proteus!—in every region of the world and in every century.
1.1.1 Linguistic relativity and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
For the record, the person most associated historically with the idea of a causal link between language and culture is Benjamin Whorf and the articulation of said link (whatever it might be) is usually known as or affiliated with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH). The idea behind Sapir-Whorf, is that the language that one natively speaks predisposes that person to certain understandings about the world. Harry Hoijer, Sapir-Whorf’s chief apologist, describes the hypothesis like this: “language functions, not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also, and more significantly, as a way of defining experience for its speakers” (1954:93).
Although in this first chapter I will talk a good bit about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH), this book really is not about the hypothesis per se, but I mention it because it is well known even beyond anthropological circles, and it will be the frame upon which we rest the dual notion of cultural and grammatical theme. In other words, even if SWH ends up not being all that interesting, it won’t condemn the present study, since my goal is not to convince you of the validity of the hypothesis but to tell you what the Maya-Mam people are like. I hope to do that using a number of anthropological and linguistic touch points, one of which is the SWH. That said, I think my observations will rise or fall on their own, not on what you end up thinking about the ideas of Sapir and Whorf. On this issue, Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology (although born in Germany!), says in his famous introduction to the Handbook of American Indian languages:
…language seems to be one of the most instructive fields of inquiry in an investigation of the formation of the fundamental ethnic ideas. The great advantage that linguistics offers in this respect is the fact that, on the whole, the categories which are formed always remain unconscious, and that for this reason the processes which lead to their formation can be followed… (Boas 1911:70)
He means that the invisible qualities of culture can be externalized via language. Boas was Edward Sapir’s good friend and faithful mentor. Whorf studied under Sapir along with a group of other well-known early anthropologists, including Morris Swadesh, Margaret Meade, Mary Haas, and George Trager (among others).2
Much more recently, Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Phillips (2003) cite an interesting experiment that supports Sapir-Whorf. In the experiment, fluent bilinguals (German-English in one group and Spanish-English in the other, who were native speakers of German and Spanish, respectively) were asked to supply adjectives (in English) describing English words which were chosen for being of contrasting grammatical gender in the two native languages. The word “bridge,” for example, was described by native Spanish-speaking bilinguals with more masculine-like adjectives such as strong, big, foreboding, scary, etc. The word for ‘bridge’ puente in Spanish, is grammatically masculine. German speakers described the exact same bridge as pleasant, unifying and graceful. In German, the word for ‘bridge’ Brücke is feminine. Why would this contrast of modifiers exist? It does indeed appear that grammatical gender, which is randomly assigned by those languages that have it, significantly influences how one perceives the world.3
Just how strong or how influential the link is, is the subject of much discussion, and since the SWH is really more of an observation than a hypothesis, there is plenty of support for it, if not hard proof, although the Boroditsky experiment is pretty convincing. I will talk about this further below and throughout the book. The reason I’m pounding on the idea here is that it is the natural backdrop for our dual notions of cultural and grammatical theme, the interplay of language and culture. These are “old ideas,” but they aren’t really dated. Sapir-Whorf is still debated in lively fashion in universities around the country and beyond. Bestselling linguistics author Steven Pinker, no friend of Sapir-Whorf, thought enough of the notion to try to convince people of its naïveté in his book, The language instinct: How the mind creates language (1994:55–82). I was unconvinced.
Other scholars have discussed the same notion under different terminology. In Sapir-Whorf nomenclature it is called linguistic relativity. Mayanist Gary Gossen (1986) discusses the cultural part of our theme as a symbol cluster, that a variety of cultural observations can be generalized as variants of the same symbol or cultural value. Anna Wierzbicka (1997) speaks of key words as being a link between language and culture, that culture is articulated in words or, even more subtly, in grammar, while at the same time, it is language that is a most powerful means of cultural assimilation (for both insiders and outsiders). Language and culture are two sides of the same coin. Ken Hale4 (1986) presents our notion in what he calls “World View-1” and “World View-2” (which I will elaborate on directly), and Nick Enfield has a recent edited volume titled Ethnosyntax (2002), which is a transparent marking of some sort of integration between culture (ethno) and grammar (syntax). So there is still a lot of interest in our theme, Pinker notwithstanding. We’ll see quite a few more authors who display more than a passing interest in it. Whorf was somewhat eccentric, even back in the day, but he was much appreciated and highly regarded by his colleagues some seventy-five years ago, and he continues to be oft-cited today—even by his detractors.
Both Martin and England use these related ideas of cultural and grammatical theme as a discovery procedure for discussing the broader relationship of language to culture. Indeed, Dell Hymes, an early pillar of linguistic anthropology, says, “Cultural values and beliefs are in part constitutive of linguistic reality” (1966:116). In other words, a language will encode cultural factors that are salient to its speakers. So, the discovery of such factors suggests areas where we can successfully look to elicit culturally meaningful linguistic data. At the same time, as we discover relationships among the formal structures of a language—say, how the grammar marks honorifics, ambiguity, and indirection in Japanese—we can assume that these may reflect important cultural thematic material, as they certainly do in Japanese.5
To pursue these twin notions of cultural and grammatical theme, in addition to Whorf we will consider Hale’s claim (1986) that all cultures have two worldviews, what he labels World View-1 (what I’m calling, following Martin and England, cultural theme) and, not surprisingly, World View-2 (grammatical theme). According to Hale, World View-1 is more philosophical than grammatical. Indeed, he says that it is learned apart from language and that it is independent of a language’s grammar. It is acquired by participating in a group’s cultural ways—even if one does not necessarily speak the native language. For example, Charlotte Schaengold reports for Navajo: “Some Navajo families seem to maintain Navajo cultural norms without fluent use of the Navajo language. The proper respect for the elderly and clan relationships with other Navajos can apparently be maintained without the Navajo language itself” (2004:18). Even without the critical cultural formation that language provides and guides, cultural norms nonetheless flow out of, or emerge from, the behavior, observations, and choices of members of a society even when members no longer speak the language.
To achieve World View-1, then, one need not be a fully fluent native speaker of the language in question. Hale additionally claims that some details of such a worldview are not even necessarily shared by all who are native speakers of the language, because of different levels of sophistication and access to the events and esoteric knowledge that point to what the world is like. Certain areas of cultural knowledge are inaccessible to men, for example, or to women or to youth or to the otherwise uninitiated. This is an important caveat. It is worth stating that worldview is not a monolithic concept that all cultural insiders are essentially tied to and from which they are unable to escape. Rather, worldview as per Hale’s World View-1 is a propensity and tendency