The Constraints of Counting, and Other Segmentation Constructs
March 26th, 2009I just heard Daniel Everett talking about the unique language and culture of this small Amazonian tribe, and it’s been churning my mind around and around. For me there are a few interesting threads to follow, and as always, I’m interested in your thoughts on where to go with this knowledge.
The Pirahã language has no numbers or concept of counting (only terms for “relatively small” and “relatively large”); no kinship terms beyond immediate children and parents; no “left” and “right” (only “upriver” and “downriver”); no named distinction of past and future (only near time and far time); no creation stories or myths; and—most important for linguists—no recursion.
Numbers, Universal Segmentation, and Individuality
The lack of numbers and counting, while being at first utterly unimaginable, does strike some familiar conceptual chords once accepted as a potential reality. Numbers, and counting of objects, essentially rely on a conceptual framework where boundaries exist. This fish is separate from that fish. A culture, a worldview, liberated from the numeric grid, can simply see EVERYTHING as a substance, a continuous, flowing, merged, unified mass of stuff. Fish are like water, there is no need to count water, you just take what you need, and you know how much is enough. Perhaps abundance, or at least non-scarcity are prerequisites for this?
Does a lack of numbers indicate a world view with a low level of universal segmentation? If an individual fish is seen as part of a massive entity, of a substance, of a part of nature which doesn’t have naturally differentiated units, then humans might also fit right into that framework as well.
A World Without Before
Creation myths are irrelevant within a purely stable world. Asking what the world was like before the current state of things only makes sense in a world of change. Western modernism, and urbanization in general, seem to be building or offering stability (at least saturating itself with materials and references that connote this) but it might be this same (encroaching) stability that puts an end to a way of life, a culture, and a language born of the real thing.
Systemic Attribution (or Empirical Gradients) and the 4th Dimension
Apparently their verb formations include a built in way to trace back the source of the information being relayed. For example, if you said, “He went fishing”, this utterance would contain embedded information as to how you know this, if you heard it from someone else, if you saw it yourself, if you inferred it from evidence, etc.
Does this integrated (attribution oriented, and seemingly gradient) empiricism also represent a more sophisticated notion of interconnection? Is this a social reputation system?
Is there a way to consider this invisible chain of perpetual attribution as an alternative to our own 4th dimension (time)?
Delineation vs Happiness
Combine low universal segmentation with highly integrated empiricism and consider if these realities are causal contributors to their standing as one of the planet’s happiest people. In other words, do time and numbers prevent us from being happy?
This tribe is truly rejecting binary dualism!
So many more nuggets of ideas tightly woven into this talk, it’ll have to be revisited again.
Listen to the MP3.
(Via longnow.org.)
