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On Human Universals and Differences

0.0 MARY: The linguist Noam Chomsky spent a long career trying to figure out the structure of language in order to determine the structure of the human mind. Here he is, refining his thinking in a page of his 1955 manuscript, “Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.” His conclusion was that language could be reduced to some basic logical structures, that these must be biologically written into the human brain, and that as a consequence, there are no human differences of any significance. All languages, he said, have essentially the same structure.

Reference: Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, 2020, Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 298-300.

0.53 MARY: In his analysis of the Native American Hopi language, Benjamin Lee Whorf came to the opposite conclusion. Take notions of time, for instance. Hopi verbs have nine aspects, he discovered, all implicating time in delicately graduated ways not explicitly marked in English tenses: punctual, durative, segmentative, punctual-segmentative, inceptive, progressional, spatial, projective, and continuative.

It is not possible to align these with the English past-present-future. The Hopi present-past is that which is, quoting Whorf now, “accessible to the senses, the historical physical universe.” The Hopi future is that which is manifesting, processes of eventuation captured in anticipations that must in their nature be subjective. At the edge of the present-past and the future, is the inceptive. Hopi, Whorf concludes, contains “abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.”

Together with fellow linguist Edward Sapir, Whorf proposed the “linguistic relativity” thesis. Different languages reflect different ways of thinking in different cultures. Hopi experience time differently from English speakers in a Western cultural context.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 74-77.

2.31 MARY: Now, a space example. Here we’ve travelled to Northern Queensland, Australia, into Guugu Yimithirr country. Jack Bambi, tells a story in Guugu Yimithirr language about when he and a companion were in a mission boat that capsized, and they had to swim to shore through shark-infested waters.

2.52 MARY: Telling the story thirty years later, Jack gestures in reference to the beach where they came ashore. His gesture is not relative to his narrating self. It is an absolute co-ordinate in the natural world which we might call dead reckoning.

3.08 MARY: In Guugu Yimithirr experience, place and movement are figured in terms of four cardinal coordinates, gungga, jiba, naga, and guwa. Guugu Yimithirr people express place, not in relative reference to the self, but in terms of these absolute coordinates. Instead of an ego-centered relativity of place where I might say that you are on my left or right, a Guugu Yimithirr will say that you are to my east or my west. Rather than ask someone to “move back from the table,” they might say guwagu-manaayi, “move a bit to the west.”

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 85-90.

3.54 MARY: This, by contrast, is how we do our wayfinding with GPS. Subjectively, GPS puts the movable ego at the center of the world, and everything is relative to our selves. “Turn left,” says the irascible lady, ever-ready to bark “turn back” when you make a mistake. “Recenter” with the directional arrow and the map puts the ego back into the center of the world.

4.22 MARY: I’m not trying to denigrate GPS, a remarkable intellectual and practical achievement in which Gladys B. West played a key role, transposing spatial co-ordinates into number. It is these calculations that design your way to a destination on dynamic maps that are never the same twice. GPS is a marvel of multimodal transposition.

4.49 MARY: But Guugu Yimithirr is a very different way to live in space, a different kind of sensitivity to the place of humans in the natural world. The Guugu Yimithirr sense of place in the cosmos is geocentric. When tethered to our GPS, ours is egocentric. To parse Guugu Yimithirr is to demand critical self-reflection on the current state of humanity and the ecological crises we have precipitated by our modern egocentrism.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 81-85.

5.23 MARY: So, what is universal about human experience, in our species nature? And what is the scope for differences? Behind me are some of the concepts we explore in our transpositional grammar, laid out here in our rough supermarket order. You and find a more readable version on our website, meaningpatterns.net

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 15-19.

The two examples I have just given are about time and place. Time and place are universal, objective, absolutely non-negotiable dimensions of the human experience. But our making sense of them can be very different. We can trace these differences by contrasting the dynamics of transposition.

Just how far can we push the transpositions? A long way, we would argue, including into places of utopian or hellish possibility that are yet unimaginable. But, wherever we arrive, our meanings there will work to address reference, agency, structure, context and interest. This is our in our human natures, and much of this as well is in the natures of all sentient creatures.

Human Universals and Differences