Animist Language
[Warning to sensitive e-prime ears; I use a lot of “to be” language in this article to make a point.]
Animist language, otherwise known as intact, indigenous language, differs profoundly from all modern languages. Each belongs to an entirely different sphere of endeavor.
Modern languages occupy themselves with encouraging their speakers to disassociate from the world and all its phenomena, by encouraging its speakers to think and speak in terms of strict cause-effect logic, abstract notions of roles, possession and time, and a noun-based illusion of factuality. Modern speakers like phrases such as “that’s just the way things are”, “time is money”. They see human beings (and the world itself) fitting into rigid unchanging roles. A President is one class of human; a janitor another. Natural resources (everything but human beings) are dead things; Human beings (and usually American or first-world human beings) are alive things. Except when they’re “criminals”. And except for the parts of their body that don’t count; like intestinal flora, the breath in our lungs and blood, the calcium in our bones. Okay, maybe everything except the human brain is dead. The human brain in law-abiding first-world citizens. With white skin?
Yeah. Yuck.
As an option to this relationship-killing language, to this world-killing culture of thought, we have the language of our distant ancestry.
Rather than nouny-ness, and factuality, animist language prioritizes verby-ness, and perceptual flux. Each person sees differently according to their own nature; and when they articulate what they see, they describe, rather than define. They observe, rather than adjudicate.
I’ve heard more than once a modern speaker of an animist language reflect, “I can talk all day without saying a single noun.” Think about this.
This kind of culture of language and thought matches quite well with emerging quantum scientific notions of nonlocality, flux, and vibration. Unlike in English, where scientists struggle to productively speak about quantum mechanics, animist languages come equipped to speak about this deep nature of reality. Of course, right? Human beings observe the world, and have always done so. Human beings experience joy in this observation and mimicry of what they see out there, in Story, in Tracking. We only changed to accomodate a civilizing culture that reprioritized why we spoke, why we observed. That prioritized abstraction, rigid roles, and disassociated relationships, in the name of pyramid-building.
We call animist thinkers, speakers, and trackers “primitive”, when in fact they represent an apex of thought, speech, and true scientific observation. Their languages assume nonlocality (change this thing, and it affects that related thing far away, instantly), flux (everything changes constantly - one moment light ‘particles’, the next it ‘waves’), and vibration (everything verbs constantly, everything does something - thus rocks, sky, water, all think and co-create our world with us). All of these, quantum understandings.
Much of where modern language went wrong, occurred when the verb “to be” took over more and more of our idiom and thought. No fully intact animist languages have a verb “to be” (nor do they have a word for “time”).”To Be” according to Alfred Korzybski, developer of the General Semantics movement, creates fundamental errors of thought, such as the “is” of identification (Joe “is” a plumber), such as the “is” of predication (Joe “is” stupid).
Thus we have begun experimenting with ways to remedy English’s modern biases; e-prime, English without the use of verb “to be”, and e-primitive, a more verby and observation based version of e-prime.
March 9th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Willem,
You keep doing this thing in your “rewilding” posts that really bothers me. It’s this thing that everyone does, so I’m not trying to pick you out specifically, but in my mind it’s a distraction from the real points you’re trying to make.
This thing is related to what the anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace used to call “mythways resynthesis.” Wallace’s most famous work was on the revitalization of the Seneca under the Longhouse movement of Handsome Lake but he generalized it in an attempt to make his theories applicable to all prophetic and revitalization movements.
One of the characteristics that Wallace observed was most common in revitalization movements was a certain brand of primitivism. When Handsome Lake returned to the Seneca after receiving visions, he claimed that what he was bringing them was not a new religion and way of life — one derived in part from Quaker teachings — but the original way of life practiced by their ancient ancestors before they became corrupted by modern, Western ways.
This is the same kind of argument that Daniel Quinn puts forward, in his anarcho-communal-primitivist arguments in Ishmael and The Story of B and Beyond Civilization. And it’s the same kind of argument you’re trying to make here about language. But the truth is that earlier peoples weren’t actually different in the ways you are characterizing them here, at least not universally, no more than Handsome Lake’s ancient ancestors practiced rituals that resembled those of the Quakers.
Classical Chinese, for example, one of the oldest written languages in the world, doesn’t have a clean-and-simple version of the verb “to be,” but it has several different ways of conveying that meaning. Additionally, even in modern Chinese the grammer is much more fluid than in English, with nouns easily serving as verbs and vice versa. Also, there’s the complete lack of gender, tense, number, or other markers familiar to speakers of other languages (unless, of course, you intentionally specify those things). But those have nothing to do with Chinese being an “animist” language.
I feel like you’re constructing a false and idealize picture of the past as a way to justify the social program you’re trying to promote in the present. But you don’t have to do this. The past wasn’t better. The past was so alien from our concerns and life now that it’s impossible to really imagine what it was like, much less consider it’s applicability to the problems we face every day. You don’t need to invoke some magical, mythic past to give power to the goals you want to accomplish. If your goals are attractive and practically achievable, they should have enough power on their own.
As modern speakers, we can’t help but be swamped with our own concerns, the concerns of our time, and this directly affects the way we view the past and create a relationship with it (often a very one-sided relationship, since we don’t always allow the past to communicate back). But it helps, I think, to try to aware of this bias and to attempt to approach history as a complex, diverse, and messy business that we can learn from, but also realize that it is a deeply alien place and not something that can be tamed and easily made to serve modern interests.
Best,
Jonathan
March 9th, 2009 at 10:50 pm
Jonathan:
I really appreciate you commenting with your thoughts; I can tell you’ve done a lot of reflection on what you’ve read here. Having said that, I don’t think we understand each other. I can see you’ve followed your own path in investigating these topics.
Additionally, I have a strong suspicion that we may have a conversation here that could only take place in person. I certainly read Daniel Quinn, but I didn’t stop there. If I have things worth saying here, they owe themselves to that work.
Could you tell me; what do you appreciate most about what you find here? What stands out for you? I hear what doesn’t connect for you (primitivism); what, on the other hand, does? What do you see mired in this perceived problem of “primitivism”?
I see everything so intertwined here that your concerns almost sound like an alien language. I can’t seem to focus on them clearly. But I’ll certainly address them if I can figure out what you see that I don’t.
March 11th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
Hiya Jonathan–
I wouldn’t consider Chinese an animist language, either. Like you said, few languages have a longer history of writing than Chinese, and few regions in the world have had domestication for as long as China, either. I think of China as one of the most domesticated, civilized places on earth. Domestication can’t wholly replace our humanity, though; no matter how long our domestication, some amount of our original ways must shine through, however faintly.
But then, I quite openly call myself a primitivist–not because what comes later must necessarily always fall short of what came before, but because when I got past my assumptions (the common assumptions, like how we’ve progressed and made life easier, etc.), I kept finding these things that kept dashing those assumptions. Like the Neolithic Mortality Crisis, that we’ve only recovered from (well, at least the really rich, First World part of “we”) in the past century. Daniel Quinn had a big impact on me, as well, giving me the first good push out of my comfort zone in this regard, but that discomfort prompted me to dig deeper (mostly because I wanted so badly to prove him wrong, to myself most of all). I used to write a great deal about all the reasons why I eventually came to those conclusions, so I won’t bore you with that, but suffice to say that I found the general narrative of progress throughout recorded history almost completely backwards. Instead, I found increasing evidence of an ancient trauma from which we have never recovered, and really can never recover, until we start to really address the underlying wound of domestication itself, and its myriad impacts–on the way we live, the way we think, the way we relate.
More recently, I’ve found a lot fertile soil for thought in the works of people like Tim Ingold, Graham Harvey, David Abram, and Calvin Luther Martin. They share the radical premise that perhaps we should not dismiss people living in traditional societies as either liars, idiots, or madmen, and instead take the animist worldview seriously. This presents a pretty radical paradigm shift in anthropology, sadly enough, and Ingold at least has made a very successful career championing it in academia. I find that what Willem writes about regarding animist language resonates very much with that.
I can see as clearly as you do that many people have invoked the past as a mystical justification for what they prescribe for the present, but does that mean that everyone does? If people in the past really did do that, why can’t we say so? Since I do call myself quite openly a primitivist, I do often hear people tell me that I’ve “romanticized” the past, simply because I point out the misconceptions that normally make it look so terrible. But I think our fundamental disagreement comes when you say, “[t]he past was so alien from our concerns and life now that it’s impossible to really imagine what it was like.” But I agree with William Faulkner, when he wrote that, “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” Domesticated animals of all kinds–even humans–go feral all the time. Others, no one has ever domesticated. Wild humans persevere to this day. I feel the 10,000 year old resonance of the Neolithic trauma every day. Far from alien, I find myself in better accord with animists–animists today and yes, animists of the past, too–who have no word for time, who perceive the world unfolding not along a line from an alien past to an unknown future, but in cycles and cycles of cycles. To me, the past doesn’t seem any more alien than autumn.
So, to try to put this as succinctly as I can, I can see the potential that this all could fall into the pattern you describe, and I’ve seen that pattern acted out before. But I see no evidence that it actually does fit that pattern. Rather, I see a good deal of evidence that it fits precisely the pattern Willem laid out: an original human tendency.
Jason
March 12th, 2009 at 9:59 am
Thanks Jason for diving in and telling your story too - I think something struck me in Jonathan’s comment, that he sees value in the results of my (using his word) “primitivism”, but not in the logic of it. This inspired some curiosity in which things I’ve written he values, which aspects.
Knowing this would help me have a conversation about why I speak of “original ways” and cheerlead “mythways resynthesis”.
August 15th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
As a physicist, I feel compelled to point out two places in which you are in error. Firstly, quantum scientific notions are by no means emerging; rather, they have been around since the early 20th Century and finished emerging as widely-accepted science by the 1940’s. Instead, what is emerging are faulty notions of quantum science in trendy pseudoscientific spiritualism.
Secondly, while it is tough to talk about quantum mechanics in English, it is far from true that scientists are unable to productively speak of such things (as your composition seemed to insinuate). Mathematics, the language physicists use to understand quantum mechanics, describes nonlocality, flux, vibrations, and nearly all quantum-scientific notions with profound elegance. In my opinion, the mathematics of quantum mechanics are a great deal more elegant than other physical theories (i.e., classical mechanics, electromagnetism), and certainly this language is unrivaled in its ability to discuss quantum phenomena.
August 16th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Thank you Travis - I agree.
August 16th, 2009 at 11:35 pm
Intuitively I have thought that zen and shamanism are close to each other, though conceptually thinking they are at the extreme ends of “animism” scale. Thank you for this clue for filling the gap. (Sorry about imprecise use of terms)
From the perspective of emergence (in eg. zen-buddhism or complexity theory) all conceptual thinking and languages are animistic in the sense that they suppose separate “living” existence for things and concepts. In “reality” things (paterns) emerge only in connection to other things, being impermanent and without autonomous existence.
It is convenient for our limited pattern recognition capability and logical thinking device, to assume that things are permanent and have separate existence an sich. It is a kind of modeling simplification. Understanding impermanence and connectedness conceptually is more complex and secondary conceptual thinking.
We are not able to track the flux of all being, we can be in connection to it. Just to be able to predict and make decisions, we give attributes to things, try to guess why and how things or beings behave. You may look for different descriptions of reality from modern physic, cognition research, etc.
Language is greatly affecting the world where we live. Concentrating to the conceptual model world is potentially alienating us from our senses and experiences, limiting the way we perceive the world. On the other hand we need differentiating analysis to perceive things.
I see it as a personal choice how much you want to immerse in the experiential world, how much you want to take distance and analyze. With the support of language too.
Best Wishes
Ari
August 18th, 2009 at 11:25 am
Thanks for your comments Ari.
August 28th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
[…] Recently (yesterday, as a matter of fact) I received a comment here from a physicist named Travis, who wanted to point out a couple of errors he perceived in my article on Animist Language. […]
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:32 pm
I’d like to point out that not all languages that might be called “animist languages” are necessarily as verb-heavy as you make it seem. For one thing, I’ve been told that Australian Aboriginal languages are fairly noun-heavy.
Hun’q'umi’num (Downriver Halkomelem Salish), which I speak some of, has tons of nouns - although they’re often quite transparently derived from verbs, admittedly - and tends to nominalize its verbs for certain uses. E.g. Nustl’i’ ([it is] my wanting) kw’s nem’s (his/her [hypothetical] act-of-going) - “His/her going is what I want” is how you translate “I want him/her to go.” Notice that the sentence is composed of a noun used predicatively in first place (”(it is) my wanting”) followed by an article and another noun.
Similarly Hawaiian uses nominalized clauses very frequently, especially in older literature: ‘o kona hele ia, “it is/was his/her going” = “(and so then) he/she went,” no ka’u hele ‘ana “from my going” = “because I do/did/will go,” and so on. Classical Nahuatl also has very clear boundaries between verbs and nouns, but has a huge variety of ways to turn one into the other.
Inuktitut has many words that alternate between categories: can’t think of a specific example off-hand, but basically the process goes: verb + noun-suffix = noun; that derived noun + verb suffix = a verb again; rinse and repeat till done.
I do think the important characteristics of “animist language” are:
(a) an ability to coin new words easily,
(b) a strong preference for description rather than labelling, and labelling by “set” rather than “item” when it’s used at all - e.g. a “washer” in English (other than the hardware part) is generally taken to be a specific machine used for washing clothes: tlapācalōni in Nahuatl means something to wash things with, but could mean anything from a washing machine to a basin, soap, a rag, a scrub-brush, etc. etc.
(c) frequently also sets of terms to define directionality and relationship to place, e.g. Hawaiian hele mai “go/come this way” = “come” vs. hele aku “go/come that way” = “go”; Nahuatl onyauh “go that way” = “go (there)” vs. huallauh [hualyauh > huallauh] “go this way” = come.
Hun’q'umi’num not only prefixes nem’ “go” and m’i “come” to other verbs, e.g. t’akw’ “go home” is usually either nem’ t’akw’ “go home” or m’i t’akw’ “come home,” but also has two sentence prefixes i and ni: i indicates that the action of the sentence does/did/will take place at the location where the sentence is spoken, and ni indicates that the action does/did/will take place elsewhere. AND it has three sets of words for “the” depending on whether the noun in question is (a) visible to the speaker, (b) nearby or in a definite location, but not currently visible to the speaker, or (c) remote, indefinitely located, or hypothetical.
Put those three things together and you get a wealth of information about who was where doing what in Hun’q'umi’num that you just can’t translate into English without at least doubling the length of the sentence. E.g. ni nem’ t’akw’ kwthu nunen, “my father went home,” includes the information that his home is not here (ni), he was specifically going away from here (nem’), and I can’t currently see him (kwthu, non-feminine near-but-invisible “the”).
Anyhow, I like the concept of “animist language” very much!
September 4th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Excellent points! I really like your a), b), c).
In the end, the primary difference of animist language from “modern” language comes down to the ability of the former to actual carry content; actual observations containing actual useful information.
The “wealth of information” you point out, to me, constitutes yet another kind of “wealth” that modern folks don’t see as “real”, and so don’t recognize their poverty.
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:02 am
I noun my verbs all the time; nouning produces a lot of my vocabulary, because I naturally angle myself to a function-based view. I’ve done it more and more as I have picked up maths, and understood the idea that “things” can be just categories of doing. No animism required!
I actually love the questions like “what is is is?”. By whatever grace, I’ve been saved from the perception that those language games _must_ be solved, and if I do, it’s by attaching them to a dynamic framework and picture.
So is is is when someone reflects
on how they distinguish patterns of their experience,
how they have related to consistent things outside themselves
and so made solid
and time-independent
their persistent experiences of those things.
Saying what Is is is when they take that very act of perception and distinguishing
and make it a thing itself in their minds.
What is is is is, is what I just did then!
As I say, these language games are just that, fun diversions. To me at least.
September 26th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
I like your metaphor of “language games”, Josh! For myself, I don’t see any game as “just” a game. Games seem to strike to the heart of how people behave, and structure their world.
It comes down to intent; I play the language games I do to drive ever close to satsifying, useful, life-generating observations and communication.
At this most basic level, this can come down to the difference between “You’re an asshole!” and “When you interrupt my sentences I feel really irritable and I lose interest in our conversation.” Something empty of relevant, life-generating content, compared to something full of it.
You can see here too, that one sentence attempts to enslave, and the other tells a story.
My friend Joe MacDonald has come to call a lot of these emerging communication tools “story-based communication”. http://buriedwithoutceremony.com/2009/09/23/buried-without-ceremony-next-attempt/