Nietzsche and Sapir-Whorf

 Linguistics  No Responses »
Mar 302011
 

From Beyond Good and Evil, §20:

The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar–I mean, owing to the unconscious domination and guidance by similar grammatical functions–that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation. It is highly probable that philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages (where the concept of the subject is least developed) look otherwise “into the world,” and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germanic peoples and the Muslims: the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions.

An Andamanese negrito in London

 Unlikely Peregrines  No Responses »
Mar 202011
 

From George Weber’s Lonely Islands:

In 18th century Europe it was fashionable at courts and aristocratic houses to have “Negro” pages. Even Hollywood directors knew it and few are the period costume dramas without a decorative black page or two in the background. The historical pages seem to have stayed small and youthful for a very long time, so much so that the suspicion arises that they may not have been African blacks at all but, in fact, Negritos. The grandees who owned such living prestige objects did not care much about their origins. Africans and Negritos were not differentiated even in 19th century London as was made clear by the first Officer in Charge of the Andamanese, the Reverend Henry Corbyn, who mentioned in a letter of 1863 that an Andamanese man had for many years been carrying on trade as a tobacconist in London, passing for a “stunted African”.

Amok east of Sundaland

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Mar 202011
 

One of the many ethnological vignettes in Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago (1869):

Macassar is the most celebrated place in the East for “running a muck.” There are said to be one or two a month on the average, and five, ten, or twenty persons are sometimes killed or wounded at one of them. It is the national, and therefore the honourable, mode of committing suicide among the natives of Celebes, and is the fashionable way of escaping from their difficulties. A Roman fell upon his sword, a Japanese rips up his stomach, and an Englishman blows out his brains with a pistol. The Bugis mode has many advantages to one suicidally inclined. A man thinks himself wronged by society–he is in debt and cannot pay–he is taken for a slave or has gambled away his wife or child into slavery–he sees no way of recovering what he has lost, and becomes desperate. He will not put up with such cruel wrongs, but will be revenged on mankind and die like a hero. He grasps his kris-handle, and the next moment draws out the weapon and stabs a man to the heart. He runs on, with bloody kris in his hand, stabbing at everyone he meets. “Amok! amok!” then resounds through the streets. Spears, krisses, knives, and guns are brought out against him. He rushes madly forward, kills all he can–men, women, and children–and dies overwhelmed by numbers amid all the excitement of a battle. And what that excitement is those who have been in one best know, but all who have ever given way to violent passions, or even indulged in violent and exciting exercises, may form a very good idea.


Wallace, A. (1869). The Malay Archipelago : the land of the orang-utan, and the bird of paradise : a narrative of travel, with studies of man and nature. New York: Harper & Bros.  

Unexpected cosmopolitanisms

 Unlikely Peregrines  No Responses »
Mar 152011
 

Excerpt from an interview conducted by Bruce Grant — probably in Russian — with a Nivkh/Gilyak woman in the North Sakhalin village of Okha, 1990 (In the Soviet house of culture: a century of perestroikas — lingeringly evocative title if there ever was one):

My father was born in 1892. He used to talk about all the Japanese that used to be on Sakhalin and the Amur. The Japanese used to hire the Nivkhi as workers. There were Chinese too; one of our relatives was married to a Chinese man. She eventually left for China and stayed there. They used to send us letters, but we didn’t hear from them after the war [World War II]. As for my grandfather, he was Ainu, he was a very famous hunter. He used to tell us about how they kept horses, and used the horses to go across to Manchuria. Straight from Sakhalin–on boats across the strait and then with the horses into Manchuria. Most of the time they traded furs for Chinese silks and brocades. My father spoke a little Evenk, and a little Chinese. He spoke Japanese best of all, quite well.


Works Cited:

Grant, B. (1995). In the Soviet house of culture: a century of perestroikas (p. 59). Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.