Do Eskimos really have 400 words for snow? How about forty? Ten? What version of this supposedly scientific anecdote do you recall hearing?
As it turns out, the story has much in common with urban legends. In 1911, Franz Boas, the father of modern cultural anthropology, mentioned
that the Inuit have four unrelated words for snow. His follower Benjamin Whorf turned this into seven, and after that things got wildly out of control.
In the third of four "Conversations on Diversity" sponsored by the Center for Multicultural and Gender Studies, cultural anthropologist Mike
Findlay opened his talk, "Relatively Speaking: Linguistic Relativity is Back," with what linguist Geoffrey Pullum has called "The Great Eskimo
Vocabulary Hoax." Implicit in all the versions, Findlay said, is the notion that "language sets up the potential for people to see the world differently." But
do they?
Findlay discussed research by John Carrol and Joseph Casagrande that attempted to test Benjamin Whorf's theory of linguistic determinism—that is, that the grammar and syntax of language structure the way we perceive reality—by presenting various objects to two populations of English/Dine speakers and asking them to describe what they saw. The group whose first language was Dine responded by selecting verbs that focused on the object's shape; those whose first language was English chose verbs that focused on color. Carrol and Casagrande concluded that Navajos and native English speakers see differently.
Other anthropologists, however, saw the entire issue differently. The debate on linguistic relativity, apparently, was—and is—far from over.
Toward the end of Findlay's talk, he drew a sketch on the blackboard. From left to right it showed a human figure, a wavy line of fog, and a mountain. Were the figure an English speaker, he said, she might interpret the scene as, "There's fog between me and the mountain," whereas a Kwakiutl would more likely say, "There's fog on the other side of the mountain." Other side? Yes, said Findlay, because Kwakiutls "don't use themselves as primary data points the way we do. They would use some secondary data point, perhaps a river."
In the animated discussion following Findlay's presentation, members of the audience offered anecdotes of their own, posited ways an experiment might be devised to prove or disprove Whorf's hypothesis once and for all, and wondered what the implication of all of this might be with regard to understanding other cultures. At one point in the conversation, Findlay suggested that the perceptual limitations imposed on scientists by their particular disciplines make them somewhat akin to the blind men who tried to describe a certain famous pachyderm. In a comment that all of us might take as our lesson, he said, "We're now at a point where we need to look at the whole elephant."
The fifth and final Conversation on Diversity will feature Sarah Pike, Religious Studies, speaking on "Evil in Your Back Yard: Strange Cults and America's Struggle with Religious Diversity." December 3, noon, BMU 222. Bring your lunch. Cookies and drinks provided.