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Cook and his crew spent six weeks repairing their ship on the banks of what they named the Endeavour River. Cook recorded a word list of the local language, Guugu Yimithirr. “Gangaruu,” or grey wallaby in Guugu Yimithirr, became “kangaroo” in English.

Of the people, Cook wrote in his journal:

They live in tranquility which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition. The earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life. They live in a warm and fine climate, and enjoy every wholesome air, so that they have very little need of clothing. In short they seem to set no value upon anything we gave them; nor would they ever part with anything of their own. This in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessaries of life.¹⁹³

Nevertheless, the consequences of imperial “discovery” and after that, colonial “settlement” were for Australia’s First Peoples devastating – it was an invasion. A mission was established in 1886 fifty kilometers out of Cooktown at a place in Guugu Yimithirr country that the Lutheran missionaries named, without sense of irony, Hope Vale. Here, Guugu Yimithirr language has survived, with an estimated 775 speakers in 2016.¹⁹⁴

In Guugu Yimithirr experience, place and movement are figured in terms of four cardinal coordinates, gungga, jiba, naga, and guwa. It is too simple to say these align any more than roughly with (respectively) north, south, east, and west in modern geolocation. The Guugu Yimithirr compass is rotated slightly clockwise to reflect where the sun rises in these tropics, naga, and these four cardinal directions represent quadrants of space rather than lines directed at idealized points on the horizon as is the case of today’s quantitized N/S/E/W coordinates.¹⁹⁵

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.”¹⁹⁶ John B. Haviland concludes: Guugu Yimithirr “takes as its primitives global geocentric coordinates … fixed, as it were, by the earth (and perhaps the sun) and not subject to the rotation of observers or reference objects.”¹⁹⁷

On these semantic foundations, Guugu Yimithirr builds an elaborately inflected case system. A myriad of subtle distinctions are made, in the following examples for the quadrant naga, east: naga, east from a point; naga-ar, to a point east; naga-alu, east, over some point or obstacle; naga-nun, from a given point east to reference point; naga-nu-nganh, out of a point east; naga-almun, from east toward reference point; naga-almu-nganh, out of an easterly direction – to name just a few of many fine distinctions.¹⁹⁸

Not that agency is elided in a geocentric universe, far from it. Nor is the figuring a matter of speech determining meaning: speech, gesture, and place figure into each other, by multimodal transposition of their forms.

Jack Bambi tells a story in Guugu Yimithirr about when he and a companion were in a mission boat that capsized, and they had to swim to shore through shark-infested waters. Sitting in Hope Vale thirty years later, Haviland recounts, Jack gestures in reference to “the three and a half miles to the beach at Bala, not by pointing in some arbitrary direction,” relative to the narrating self, “and not to the northeast where Bala actually lies from where he sits, but southwest, calculating from the narrated perspective of his capsized boat.”

Once safely on the shore, Jack Bambi looks back, gesturing to the cardinal north to his companion, then in the story and again now in its reliving in speech. In a narrative transposition of time now/then and place here/there, he sets the action in the context of Guugu Yimithirr coordinates, the black spot of the sinking boat in the distance, and in the same direction, a shark. After their ordeal, the two walked for several hours back to Hope Vale. Exhausted, they knocked on the missionary’s door, whose first thought was the fate of the boat. He sent them straight back to recover it, told to be another gesture away.¹⁹⁹

Agency in the form of heroic survival and conflicting missionary interests – the points of the story – have by no means been drained by a geocentric rather than egocentric orientation to place. However, the orientation to place is profoundly different from the modern, egocentric one. In the case of Guugu Yimithirr and other First Peoples, this involves a highly developed sense of direction, layering over the land intricate mental maps of terrain, scenes, landmarks, and paths. It also reflects the widely held self-characterization of Indigenous peoples of their relationships to land in Australia, that “we belong to country,” rather than “country belongs to us.” By multimodal transposition, Guugu Yimithirr means at once speech, people, and country.

None of this diminishes agency. It’s just that agency is figured in relation to place in very different ways from our calculating modernity. Indeed, the irony of the modern self living in the Global Positioning System, is that although the underlying mechanism is obsessively finely grained cardinality, its transposition into egocentric place creates certain kinds of blindness to the wider context of place, certain kinds of ignorance.^§AS1.3.2b Navigating by GPS, although self is centered in place determined by self-centered instrumental ends in the form of the line as a destination point, the self subsequently ends up losing two-dimensional context and becomes captive to instructions transposed into second person imperatives.

In modernity also, we like to think that some place belongs to us, a fantasy of private property, when in fact, at best we own little more than tiny private spaces, and many nothing at all. Beyond this, agency is heavily circumscribed, by the owners of shopping malls,^§AS2.3c the edges of streets, and the rules of the road. By comparison, Guugu Yimithirr have a deeper working knowledge of place, a more profound awareness of self-in-context, and more control over their meanings of place.

The larger question here is, how different can humans be? Chomsky says, not very: “The long term aim [of his generative grammar] has been, and remains, to show that, contrary to appearances, human languages are basically cast in the same mold, that they are instantiations of the same fixed endowment, and that they ‘grow in the mind’ much like other biological systems, triggered and shaped by experience, but only in restricted ways.”²⁰⁰

Against this stands the linguistic relativity hypothesis, famously initiated by Whorf and Sapir, exploring the breadth of human differences. Profoundly different conceptions of color,^§MS1.3.1a time,^§AS1.3.1c and place²⁰¹ are selected as staple examples to illustrate the proposition that different languages realize radically different ways of thinking and being.²⁰²

In a multimodal grammar, it is not just a matter of saying that language shapes thought, nor even that it reflects thought in some peculiarly prescient way. Meanings are made in forms of life, to return to a phrase of Wittgenstein,^§MS2.3.2a though here we want to account for radical differences in forms of life in a way that Wittgenstein did not. Nor do we want to follow Wittgenstein, primarily to use forms of life to account for meanings in language. The meaning is in the form of life itself: bodies in relation to space, gesture in relation to place, and topography itself as meaning. Geocentric cosmologies of place are very different forms of life from egocentric cosmologies. The occlusions of egocentric place in the one-dimensional modernity of GPS are different from the bewilderment of Lewis Carroll’s sailors when confronted with two-dimensional modernity.^§AS1.3.2b The differences are telling.

But we don’t just want to posit relativity, leaving things at a neutral this-compared-with-that. There are species universals, but these are to be accounted for in terms of natural history rather than the languaged brain. Whether Guugu Yimithirr time or GPS time, whether Hopi time or atomic clock time, place and time are materially experienced universals in our species-experience in natural history – felt by bodies in space, referenced in text and speech, seen in image and gesture. The reference point should be our shared species characteristics as multimodal meaning-makers. This is also the measure of our differences in meaning form and meaning function.

On the scale of multimodal meaning potentiality, some meaning frames may in some respects be smarter than others. Compared to modernity and notwithstanding all its acquired powers of representation and communication, First Peoples meant their lives in ways that established comparatively stable and harmonious relations to nature, and reciprocal agencies of social equality. We have done a horrible job at both these things in modernity. However, if we as a species can have been this different, the lesson to be learned in a pained modernity is that we can be this different again.

Human nature is variable and plastic, within the affordances offered by nature writ large. We have escaped the bounds of change determined for other species primarily by natural selection, to become a species capable of self-transformation through self-ascribed meaning, using the ideal to extend the material.²⁰³ In a grammar of multimodality, our freedom is to design. This, paradoxically, is in our universal human nature, our historical and creative nature.

Within this frame of reference, our human differences point to the scope of human possibility, and offer hope for our self-transformability as a species whose recent history has been a story of tragic self-harm. We can change the world by (re)designing our forms of life. We can change ourselves by changing the conditions of our living.

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¹⁹³ Noel Pearson, 1993, “A Troubling Inheritance,” Race and Class 35(4):1–9, pp. 1–2.

¹⁹⁴ John B. Haviland, 1985, “The Life History of a Speech Community: Guugu Yimidhirr at Hopevale,” Aboriginal History 9(1/2):170–204; John B. Haviland, 1996b, “Owners Versus Bubu Gujin: Land Rights and Getting the Language Right in Guugu Yimithirr Country,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6(2):145–60; http://stat.data.abs.gov.au/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ABS_C16_T09_SA

¹⁹⁵ John B. Haviland, 1993, “Anchoring, Iconicity, and Orientation in Guugu Yimithirr Pointing Gestures,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 3(1):3–45, pp. 5–6; John B. Haviland, 1998, “Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions,” Ethos 26(1):25–47, pp. 29–30.

¹⁹⁶ John B. Haviland, 1993, “Anchoring, Iconicity, and Orientation in Guugu Yimithirr Pointing Gestures,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 3(1):3–45, pp. 5–6.

¹⁹⁷ John B. Haviland, 1998, “Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions,” Ethos 26(1):25–47, p. 25.

¹⁹⁸ Ibid., pp. 30–36.

¹⁹⁹ John B. Haviland, 2000, “Pointing, Gesture Spaces, and Mental Maps,” pp. 13–46 in Language and Gesture, edited by D. McNeil, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15, 19–20; John B. Haviland, 1996a, “Projections, Transpositions, and Relativity,” pp. 271–323 in Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, edited by J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 286–88; John B. Haviland, 1993, “Anchoring, Iconicity, and Orientation in Guugu Yimithirr Pointing Gestures,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 3(1):3–45, pp. 11–16, 19–31.

²⁰⁰ Noam Chomsky, 2002, “Chomsky’s Revolution: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, 18 July, pp. 64–65.

²⁰¹ Stephen C. Levinson, Sotaro Kita, Daniel B.M. Haun, and Björn H. Rasch, 2002, “Returning the Tables: Language Affects Spatial Reasoning,” Cognition 84(2):155–88; Stephen Levinson, Sérgio Meira, and the Language and Cognition Group, 2003, “‘Natural Concepts’ in the Spatial Topological Domain–Adpositional Meanings in Crosslinguistic Perspective: An Exercise in Semantic Typology,” Language 79(3):485–516; Stephen C. Levinson, 2003, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Stephen C. Levinson, 1996a, “Relativity in Spatial Conception and Description,” pp. 177–202 in Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, edited by J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Stephen C. Levinson, 1996b, “Language and Space,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25:353–82; Stephen C. Levinson, 1997, “Language and Cognition: The Cognitive Consequences of Spatial Description in Guugu Yimithirr,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 7(1):98–131; Asifa Majid, Melissa Bowerman, Sotaro Kita, Daniel B.M. Haun, and Stephen C. Levinson, 2004, “Can Language Restructure Cognition? The Case for Space,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8(3):108–14; John A. Lucy, 1998, “Space in Language and Thought: Commentary and Discussion,” Ethos 26(1):105–11; Bill Palmer, 2015, “Topography in Language: Absolute Frame of Reference and the Topographic Correspondence Hypothesis,” pp. 179–226 in Language Structure and Environment: Social, Cultural, and Natural Factors, edited by R.J. LaPolla and Rik De Busser, London: John Benjamins.

²⁰² John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, 1991, “Rethinking Linguistic Relativity,” Current Anthropology 32(5):613–23; John A. Lucy, 1992, Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; John A. Lucy, 1997, “Linguistic Relativity,” Annual Review of Anthropology 26:291–312.

²⁰³ David Christian, 2004, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 139–42.

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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. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Guugu Yimithirr Place §AS1.3.2c