Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, two American linguists of the early twentieth century, held that the language we grow up speaking shapes how we perceive and think about the world, Sapir in a moderate form (we are “very much at the mercy” of our language) and Whorf in a stronger one (“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages”). The idea that a language imprisons thought now has few supporters, but many linguists accept that a language trains its speakers’ habits of attention. Therapeutic Shamanism teaches, from its own ground, that the language we use moulds the way we perceive the world.
Who were Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf? #
Edward Sapir (1884 to 1939) was a linguist and anthropologist who studied Native American languages. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897 to 1941) trained as a chemical engineer and worked as a fire prevention inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, and went on to study linguistics with Sapir at Yale. Whorf noticed that workers who did not smoke near full petrol drums smoked near ‘empty’ ones, though the empty drums were full of flammable vapour. The word, not the thing, was governing what they did.1
The phrase ‘the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis’ is not theirs. It was introduced in 1954 by Harry Hoijer, another of Sapir’s students, after both men had died; Whorf’s own term was linguistic relativity.1 Behind them both lies an older German tradition, from Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, which held that each language carries its own view of the world.2
What did Sapir claim? #
That we do not meet the world without language. In his best-known passage, from 1929, “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.” The ‘real world’, he went on, is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group, which “predispose certain choices of interpretation”.3 He does not deny the objective world; he says we do not live in it alone.
Sapir also insisted that no language is primitive. In the structure of language, as he put it in 1921, “Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd”, meaning that the form of a language has nothing to do with how ‘civilised’ its speakers are thought to be.3
What did Whorf claim? #
Something stronger. For Whorf, the grammar of a language “is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas”, and “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.” The world comes to us as “a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions” that has to be organised by our minds, “and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.”4
His main example was Hopi, the language of a farming people of northern Arizona, which he set against what he called Standard Average European, the family of languages that includes English. He thought that Hopi treats time not as a row of countable units but as a process of everything ‘getting later’.5 Even so, the linguistic anthropologist Marcel Danesi points out that Whorf “never espoused linguistic determinism”, the idea that language fixes thought, even though he was accused of doing so.6
What happened to Whorf’s Hopi example? #
It became the most argued-over case in the field. In 1983 the linguist Ekkehart Malotki, after long fieldwork, published Hopi Time, 677 pages of Hopi expressions for time and of its tense and aspect. The linguist Guy Deutscher adds that Whorf never visited the Hopi in Arizona, and based his work on conversations with one Hopi speaker living in New York.7
Others have replied on Whorf’s side. The linguist Bernard Comrie agreed that Hopi marks time, but judged that its key distinction is one of mood rather than tense, which supports Whorf on that point; John Lucy pointed out that Whorf had claimed Hopi structures time differently, not that it has no words for it; and Penny Lee and David Dinwoodie revisited Malotki’s evidence.8 Al-Sheikh Hussein, reviewing the debate, concludes that “Whorf may not have been right on all counts, but he was not wrong either”, and that the real question is one of degree.9
What do linguists think now? #
Few support the strong form. Knowles and Moon write that “Few people now support the extreme form of this hypothesis”, since translation between languages is possible, even if it sometimes needs long explanations. Yet they find it equally hard to support the opposite extreme, and conclude that our metaphors “both construct and constrain our understanding”.10 The psychologist Steven Pinker is the best-known critic, calling the strong version “wrong, all wrong” and holding that we think in a language of thought that lies beneath any spoken language.11 See Who is Noam Chomsky, and what does linguistics say about how language shapes thought?
Deutscher proposes a different test, from the anthropologist Franz Boas and the linguist Roman Jakobson. Languages differ not in what they allow their speakers to say but in what they oblige them to say, and those obligations, repeated every time someone speaks, can “settle into habits of mind with consequences for memory, or perception, or associations, or even practical skills”.12 Danesi holds that, whilst there is little support for the strong version, the research “strongly suggests that thinking is indeed shaped by the particular language (or languages) one has learned in childhood”.13 A large study of twenty languages led by the psychologist Asifa Majid found no universal ranking of the senses, with smell far easier to put into words for the hunter-gatherer peoples in the study than for anyone else.14
The anthropologist Dan Sperber, writing about belief in general rather than about Sapir and Whorf, rejects the idea that different cultures live in different worlds. Beliefs that come from ordinary perception, he holds, rest on inborn mechanisms all humans share, and “do not vary dramatically” across cultures; the beliefs that vary widely are reflective ones, held because people trust their source.15
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Directly, though the teaching comes from shamanic experience, not from linguistics. As humans, the language we use moulds and shapes the way we perceive and relate to the world around us, as do the assumptions, beliefs and values we are steeped in from childhood.16 The notion that up is good and down is bad is the clearest case. It has seeped into everyday language, and through it into our religions, our institutions and our relationship with the natural world. Words define and shape how we perceive things, something the dominant culture knows very well, as the history of the word ‘civilisation’ shows.17 See What is a metaphor, and how does it shape the way we see the world?
The botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer makes the same point about grammar. English, she points out, calls every other living being ‘it’, a word we would never use for a human neighbour, whereas the Indigenous language of her grandfather, forbidden to him at boarding school, speaks of birds, bugs and berries with the same grammar as people. “Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources.” She adds that a grammar does not dictate how its speakers behave, though, as she says many linguists and psychologists agree, language “reveals unconscious cultural assumptions and exerts some influence over patterns of thought”.18 In a journey, the same understanding is why Therapeutic Shamanism writes “Bear appeared” rather than “a bear appeared”, since ‘a’, ‘the’ or ‘my’ reduces Animal to animal.19 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
None of this rests on the outcome of the linguists’ experiments. In Therapeutic Shamanism, that language shapes perception is something to notice and to change in our own speech and practice, whatever the laboratories conclude about how strong the effect is.
