you are what you see

John Colapinto has a fascinating article in the April 16, 2007 edition of the New Yorker called "The Interpreter." It's the story of a linguist's study of an Amazonian tribe called the Piraha. The Piraha culture deals entirely with the present. They don't plan for the future further out than a few days, nor remember a past longer ago than a few generations. There are no creation myths. There is no art. People who walk out of sight, disappear.

And this "be here now" culture, in Ram Dass' phrase, is reflected in the language which has no words for any abstraction or generality. The language only permits single idea, declarative sentences about what is actually observed. There are no words for colors, for instance, which would create an abstract class of "red" or "green." Nor are there any words for numbers. Imagine the difficulty of the missionaries who attempt to teach them the Bible. The tribe can understand the stories as stories but cannot hear a story as a lesson, which would require an abstraction beyond the literal. Nor can they understand how a person like Jesus who the missionaries have never met can have any reality.

The question explored in the article is the way that language creates culture, and culture creates language. The larger theological question is to notice how the Piraha's culture and language create a sense of reality that has no existence beyond the here and now. And then to wonder how our own culture and language also create our sense of reality, and quite probably blind us to reality beyond the ability of our language to describe or culture to comprehend.