Rafael Nunez: The University of California, San Diego

Time, a fundamental aspect of human experience, is elusive and abstract. We cannot perceive time directly through the senses in the way we perceive color, texture, or heat. In order to make sense of, and talk about, temporal experience we must construe it in a stable and tractable manner. This is achieved via cultural practices built on the recruitment of bodily-grounded mechanisms that make human imagination possible, such as conceptual mappings. This remarkable but ubiquitous phenomenon manifests itself via ordinary linguistic metaphors as in the English expressions “the week ahead looks great” and “way back, in my childhood.” Furthermore, beyond words and grammar, this phenomenon can be observed also through largely unconscious motor actions co-produced with speech — spontaneous gestures, which reveal its deep conceptual nature. But, is the human conceptualization of time universal? Based on shared general features of body morphology there is a widespread egocentric pattern which places future in front of Ego and past behind, as in the above linguistic examples. However, there are striking variations as well, which can be documented with rigorous ethnographic linguistic/behavioral observations. In this presentation I will show data from our projects conducted among the Aymara of the Andes, and the Yupno of the mountains of Papua New Guinea. The Aymara operate with a “reversed” egocentric pattern in which the future is conceived as being behind Ego and the past as being in front. More recently, and perhaps even more strikingly, we found that the Yupno spontaneously construe time spatially not even in egocentric terms, but in terms of allocentric topography: past as downhill and future as uphill — a pattern that had not been documented before. Moreover, the Yupno construal is not linear, but exhibits a particular “bent” geometry that appears to reflect the local terrain. Our results show that humans make sense of time sharing some basic spatial universals, but that striking differences also exist regarding the types of spatial properties that are recruited for spatializing time. The findings shed light on how, our universal human embodiment notwithstanding, linguistic, cultural, and environmental pressures generate and come to shape abstract concepts.