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Rethinking Linguistic Relativity UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Previously Published Works Title Rethinking Linguistic Relativity Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/44w544hc Journal Current Anthropology, 32(5) Authors Gumperz, John J. Levinson, Stephen C. Publication Date 1991-12-01 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Volume 32, Number 5, December r991 1613 Javanese respond to them. That's crazy! That can't be --. 1960. The religion of lava. Glencoe: Free Press. what's going on. I'm not sure you can ever have a Ja­ --. 1963a. Peddlers and princes. Chicago: University of Chi­ vanese response to Javanese art if you're not Javanese­ cago Press. --. 1963b. Agricultural involution. Berkeley: University of maybe you can if you spend ten years there, but you California Press. can't do it by watching a wayang show. So then there's --. Editor. 1963C. Old societies and new states. New York: the question of annotations, and trying to figure out how Free Press. to get the real stuff across. There's a lot of concern about --. 1965. The social history of an Indonesian [Own. Cam~ that. bridge: M.LT. Press. --. 1966. "Religion as a cultural system," in Anthropological approaches [Q the study of religion. Edited by the Conference RH: You've written extensively on other conceptions of on New Approaches in Social Anthropology, pp. 1-46. New sel£hood, of personhood. A few minutes ago you used the York: Praeger. phrase "seU-representation." Do you think that's what --. 1967. The cerebral savage: On the work of Claude Levi­ Strauss. Encounter 28(4}:1.5-32. they're up to? --. 1968. Islam observed. New Haven: Yale University Press. --. 1985. Waddling in. Times Literary Supplement, no. 4288 CG: In that case, not individually, but yes-they're in­ (June 7), pp. 23-24. terested in the representation of Indonesia as a collective --. 1988. Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. self. Stanford: Stanford University Press. --. 1989. Margaret Mead, 1901-1978. Biographical Memoirs (National Academy of Sciences) 58:329-41. RH: Do they think of it in those terms? GEERTZ, HILDRED. 1961. The /avanese family. New York: Free Press. CG: Yes, explicitly. That's what it's all about. They HOMANS, GEORGE, AND DAVID M. SCHNEIDER. 1955. Mar­ riage, authority, and final causes. Glencoe: Free Press. want to establish in foreign eyes, and also in their own, LtVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE. 1962. La pensee sauvage. Paris: PIon. an "fficial cultural identity. --. 1963. TQlemJsm. Translated by R. Needham. Boston: Bea­ con Press. RH: Is the desire to have an official cultural identity LOWIE, ROBERT. 1937. The hiswry of ethnological theory. New something that is absorbed from Western ways of York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. MANDELBAUM, DAVID. Editor. 1949. Selected writings of Ed­ thinking? ward Sapir in language, culture and personality. Berkeley: University of California Press. CG: I suppose to some degree it is, but it's very alive MARCUS, GEORGE. 1985. A timely rereading of Naven: Gregory in Indonesia, because there's now a civil religion called Bateson as oracular essayist. Representations n:66-82. MURDOCK, GEORGE PETER. 1949. Social structure. New York: Pancasila which is an attempt to do exactly that-to Macmillan. create a rather Javanized version of an all-Indonesian NEEDHAM, RODNEY. 1962. Structure and sentiment. Chicago: culture. There have been debates about this going back University of Chicago Press. to the 1920S and 1930S, between extreme traditional­ PARSONS, TALCOTT. 1937. The structure of social action. ew ists-that the new Indonesia should be represented in York: McGraw-Hill. SCHNEIDER, DAVID. 1965. "Some muddles in the models: or, terms of 2,000 years of tradition-and extreme cosmo­ How the system really works," in The relevance of models for politans-who want to join the world of modem socie­ social anthropology. Edited by the Conference on New Ap­ ties as quickly as possible. That debate continues. Java, proaches in Social Anthropology, pp. 25-84. New York: of course, has had a couple hundred years of colonialism, Praeger. more than most places have. For the Outer Islands it's a bit less. The trouble is that there isn't one thing that they all go back to. Some Javanese would like to go back Rethinking Linguistic to Majapahit, but the Sumatrans are not too happy about that idea! Relativityl References Cited JOHN J. GUMPERZ AND STEPHEN C. LEVINSON CLIffORD, JAMES. 1982. Person and myth: Maurice Leenhardt Department of Anthropology, University of California, in the Melanesian world. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berkeley, Calif. 94720, U.S.A. r4 VI 91 CONFERENCE ON NEW APPROACHES IN SOCIAL ANTHRO­ POLOGY. 1965a. The relevance of models for social anthropol­ A Wenner-Gren Foundation international symposium ogy. New York: Praeger. entitled "Rethinking Linguistic Relativity" was held in --. 1965b. Political systems and the distribution of power. New York: Praeger. Ocho Rios, Jamaica, May 3-n, 1991. The meeting --. 1966a. Anthropological approaches co the swdy of reli­ brought together scholars from seven nations and a gIOn. New York: Praeger. range of disciplines including linguistics, anthropology, --. 1966b. The social anthropology of complex societies. education, cognitive psychology, developmental psy­ New York: Praeger. chology, and cognitive science. The original idea of lin- EGGAN, FRED. 1950. Social organization of the Western Pueb­ los. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. GEERTZ, CLIffORD. 1957. Ritual and social change: A Javanese I. © 1991 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological example. American Anthropologist 59:32-54. Research. All rights reserved 0011-320419 I 13205-0004$1 .00. 6141 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY guistic relativity, variously attributable to Humboldt, But others seem much more clearly culture-specific (e.g., Boas, Sapir, and Wharf, was that the semantic structures rules for producing and interpreting utterances in British of differem languages mighl be fundamentally incom­ crown courts). In that case, aspects of meaning and inter­ mensurable, with consequences for the way in which pretation are determined by culture-specific activities speakers of specific languages might think and act. On and practices. Those activities and practices are inter­ this view, language, thought, and culture are deeply in­ connected in turn with the larger sociopolitical systems terlocked, so that each language might be claimed to that govern and are in turn in part constituted by them: have associated with it a distinctive world view. particular divisions of labor and social networks provide This idea captured the imagination of a generation of differential access to such activities and the associated anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists, as well as patterns of language use. members of the general public. It had deep implications In this way, the organizers hoped to build an arch from for the way anthropologists conduct their business, sug­ the classic Whorfian issues of the relation of grammar gesting that translational difficulties might lie at the to thought to consideration of language use in sociohis­ heart of their discipline. But the idea seemed abruptly torical perspective. One keystone in the arch was the and entirely discredited in the 1960s by the rise of the phenomenon of deixis or indexicality, whereby words cognitive sciences, which emphasized the commonality like I, now, here, polite pronouns, and so on, have their of human cognition and its basis in human genetic en­ interpretations specified by the circumstances of use. dowment, in part building on Piagetian universals of hu· This necessarily anchors meaning and interpretation to man development. This emphasis was strengthened by the context of language use and thus to wider social developmems in linguistic anthropology, with the dis­ organization. Issues of linguistic relativity are in this covery of significant semantic universals in color terms, way directly related to the variable structuring of con­ the structure of ethnobotanical nomenclature, and (argu­ texts. ably) kinship terms. Linguistic relativity is connected, Whorf argued, to However, there has been a recent change of intellec­ the linguistic and cultural determinism of habitual tual climate in psychology, linguistics, and other disci­ thought patterns. Therefore the second keystone to the plines surrounding anthropology, as well as in linguistic arch is the idea, now an undercurrent in a number of anthropology, towards an intermediate position in disciplines, that "cognitive processes" cannot be fully which more attention is paid to linguistic and cultural located within the individual. Edwin Hutchins (unfortu­ difference-such diversity being viewed within the con­ nately unable to attend the symposium) has made the text of what we have learned about universals. New point ethnographically by showing how the crew of a work in developmental psychology, while acknowledg­ ship acts as a collective data-gathering and decision­ ing universal bases, emphasizes the importance of the making machine even though no one member of the sociocultural Context of human development. In socio­ crew has an overall picture of the situation at anyone linguistics and linguistic anthropology there has also moment in time. Again, an abacus user's calculations been increasing attention to meaning and discourse and are in some sense partly "outside the head,lI the proce­ a growing appreciation of how interpretive differences dures partially encapsulated in the device itself. Tack can be rooted
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