 The past is behind and the future, ahead. Seems obvious, right—almost
natural? Yet there are people who picture it just the
opposite way.
South America’s indigenous Aymara—according to analysis
of their language and gesture—imagine the future is in back
of them and the past in front. The language of the Aymara, who live in the Andes highlands of
Bolivia, Peru and Chile, and their so-called “Andean logic” have
fascinated Westerners since the earliest days of the Spanish conquest.
But cognitive scientist Rafael Núñez,
director of the Embodied Cognition Laboratory at UCSD, says no one
had previously detailed the Aymara’s “radically different
metaphoric mapping of time.” For his study, published in the journal Cognitive Science, Núñez
videotaped conversations with 30 ethnic Aymara adults from Northern
Chile and the linguistic evidence appeared, on the surface, clear:
The Aymara use “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to
mean “past”; and they use “qhipa,” the basic
word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “
future.” So, for example, the expression “nayra mara”—which
is literally “front year”—means “last year.”
But language alone cannot reliably tell the whole story, argue Núñez
and his
UC Berkeley co-author, Eve Sweetser, a linguist. Analysis of the
gestural data was also critical, Núñez says, and it
proved telling. The Aymara, especially the elderly who weren’t
fluent in grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves
when speaking of the future—by thumbing or waving over their
shoulders—and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking
of the past. In other words, they used gestures identical to the
familiar ones—only exactly in reverse.
“These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions
as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon,” Núñez
says. “But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there
is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies—the same
neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all—here we have a basic
concept that is utterly different.” Why do the Aymara think
this way? Possibly, in part, because their culture and language place
a lot of significance on whether a speaker has personally witnessed
an event or is reporting hearsay. In this context, it makes sense
to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, and the unknown
and unknowable future behind your back.
Today, while the future of the Aymara language itself is not in
jeopardy—it
numbers some 2 to 3 million contemporary speakers—its particular
way of thinking about time seems to be on the way out. The younger Aymara who are fluent
in Spanish, tend to gesture in the common fashion. It appears that
along with the rest of the globe, their backs are now to the past,
and they are facing the future.  — Inga Kiderra
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