The pandemic of mental anguish that afflicts our time cannot be properly understood, or healed, if viewed as a private problem suffered by damaged individuals.
-Mark Fisher
Category Archives: nayra
‘Snead asserts “[i]n black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick it up when you come back to get it’. If there is a goal in such a culture, it is always deferred; it continually ‘cuts’ back to the start…” (Snead, 67). While Ra’s science may be an advance, it is still done with the notion of the “cut” in mind; one of Sun Ra’s goals is to ultimately transport black people back to a time before the taint of the white society on black culture, and the new science helps accomplish this.
In contrast, white science, represented by the two men from NASA, only has advancement in mind, without acknowledging the importance of the past. This illustrates the difference between the two cultures that Snead details in his piece when he says “[i]n Eurpoean culture, repitition must be seem to be not just circulation and flow but accumulation and growth” (Snead, 67).’
Everyday Abstraction: The Embodiment of Spatial Construals of Time and Their “Axioms” (from Mathematics: the Ultimate Challenge to Embodiment by Rafael E. Núñez)
Time, which for centuries has intrigued philosophers, physicists, and theologians, is a fundamental component of human experience. It is intimately related with everything we do, yet it is abstract, in the sense that we do not experience it directly as an isolated thing we can point to. Besides, our brains do not seem to have specific areas dedicated to process pure temporal experience in the way it does with, say, visual or auditory stimulation. Still, humans from all cultures must cope, implicitly or explicitly—with time-related entities, whether it is for cooking, dancing, hunting, traveling, or raising children. So, how do humans make up time concepts? As we saw earlier, the short answer is by treating “time” metaphorically as being spatial in nature, and one widespread form allows us to conceive the future as being in front of us, and the past behind us. This (mostly unconscious) way of thinking seems extremely obvious and natural, to the point that we barely notice that this is a major form of comprehension of temporal experience shared by many cultures around the globe. Even though nobody explicitly taught us this way of thinking about time, we master it effortlessly. It is simply part of who we are. This form of conceiving future and past, however, despite being spread across countless unrelated cultures around the world, is not universal! In collaboration with linguist Eve Sweetser from the University of California at Berkeley, we were able to reach this conclusion after studying in detail the conceptions of time in the Aymara people of the South American Andes (Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). This constituted the first well-documented case violating the postulated universality of the metaphorical orientation future-in-front-of ego and past-behind-ego.
Aymara, an Amerindian language spoken by nearly 2 million people in the Andean highlands of western Bolivia, southeastern Peru, and northern Chile, present a fascinating contrast to the well-known spatial-temporal mappings described earlier, and a clear challenge to the cross-cultural universals of metaphoric cognition studied so far. In Aymara, the basic word for “front” (nayra, “eye/front/sight”) is also a basic expression meaning “past,” whereas the basic word for “back” (qhipa, “back/behind”) is a basic expression meaning “future”. For example, nayra mara, whose literal translation is “eye/front year” means “last year,” and qhipa pacha—“back time”—means future time. Many more temporal expressions in Aymara follow this pattern. But here is where, as cognitive scientists, we had to remain very cautious in reaching fast conclusions regarding possible exotic conceptions of time. To proceed, we needed to address two important research questions:
- What exactly are the mappings involved in these metaphorical expressions?
- Is there evidence of their psychological reality? That is, do Aymara people really think metaphorically in this manner, or are they simply using dead fossilized expressions with no inherent metaphorical meaning?
The first question pushed us to make further theoretical distinctions. In cases like “The election is ahead of us” and “the long Winter is now behind us” the terms “ahead,” “behind”, and so on, are defined relative to ego. In other words, ego is the reference point and therefore the conceptual metaphor described earlier—Time Events Are Things in Saggital Unidimensional Space—is said to be an instance of an Ego-reference-point (Ego-RP) metaphorical mapping. It is crucial not to confuse this mapping with another type called Time-reference-point (Time-RP), that underlies metaphorical expressions such as “the day before yesterday” or “revive your post summer skin,” where morphemes like fore (front) and post (posterior) denote earlier than and later than relations, respectively.4
This mapping is in many respects, simpler than the Ego-RP one. As it does not have an ego, it does not have a “now” in the target domain of time, and, therefore, it does not have built in the intrinsically deictic categories, past, present, and future. The Time-RP mapping has only earlier than and later than relationships. But when a particular moment is picked as “now,” then “earlier than now” (past) and “later than now” (future) can be obtained. According to this mapping, however, “earlier than now” (past) gets its meaning from a “front” relationship, and “later than now” events (future) from a “behind” relationship. This may create confusion as in the case of the Ego-RP mapping the opposite seems to be happening: “front” (of us) means “future” and “behind” (us) means “past.” The confusion, however, is immediately clarified by asking the following simple question: in front of what? or, behind what? Technically, this means identifying the underlying reference point. In “the day before yesterday,” the reference point is “yesterday,” “in front” of which is located the day the expression refers to. In “revive your post summer skin” the reference point is “summer,” with the phrase targeting the times that follow the sunny season. To understand the Aymara case, we must keep this fundamental distinction between Ego-RP and Time-RP mappings clearly in our minds.
The crucial question we needed to address was: What are the reference points involved in the uses of nayra (front) and qhipa (back) in Aymara? That is, what is “in front of” or “behind,” when these terms are used for temporal meaning? If the reference points are temporal entities such as “winter,” “sunrise,” “lunch time,” or “rainy season,” as opposed to “us” or “me,” then there is absolutely nothing intriguing or exotic in the above Aymara temporal expressions. In such cases Aymara uses of “front” and “back” would be equivalent to English Time-RP cases like “the day before yesterday” or “post summer.” In fact, this is what occurred with some Polynesian and African languages that had been claimed to be “special” with respect to space–time metaphors, but whose data, after proper analysis, turned out to be standard Time-RP cases (Moore, 2000). If in Aymara, however, the reference point is indeed ego, that is, “front of us” means past and “behind us” means future, then this finding would be critical since it would provide a counterexample to the largely universal Ego-RP mapping.
The second question we needed to investigate was how people—Aymara or otherwise—actually think about time. For this, we had to go beyond the mere analysis of words and their etymological roots. We needed to investigate empirically the psychological reality of these space–time metaphors, and ask: Do people actually think this way? Or perhaps the expressions simply used “dead” lexical items from a distant past that lost its original metaphorical meaning? And how can we tell?
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We, therefore, could reliably ask what kinds of gestures Aymara speakers produce when uttering temporal expressions using “front” (nayra) or “back (qhipa). Where are they pointing when doing so? What is the built-in reference point of such pointings?
In order to find out, in collaboration with Chilean colleagues Manuel Mamani and Vicente Neumann from the University of Tarapacá, and Carlos Cornejo from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, I conducted videotaped ethnographic interviews with Aymara people from the north-easternmost tip of Chile, up in the Andes, along the border with Bolivia. As we were interested in spontaneous gestures (with high ecological validity), the interviews were informal and were designed to cover discussions involving reference to time. Participants were asked to talk about, make comments, compare, and explain a series of events that had happened or that were expected to happen in the context of their communities. They were also asked to talk about traditional “sayings,” anecdotes, and expressions in Aymara involving time and to give examples of them. To our amazement, what we found was that Aymara speakers gestured in Ego-RP patterns! Alongside the Ego-RP spatial language used to represent time as in front (nayra) and in back (qhipa) of ego, they gesturally represented time as deictically centered space: the speaker’s front surface was essentially “now,” as in English speakers’ gestures. The space behind the speaker was the Future, whereas the space in front of the speaker was the Past.
Moreover, locations in front and closer to the speaker were more recent past times, while locations in front and farther from the speaker corresponded to less recent times. For instance, speakers contrasted “last year” with “this year” by pointing first at a more distant point and then at a nearer one. When talking about wider ranges of time, rather than particular points in time, we saw speakers sweeping the dominant hand forward to the full extent of the arm as they talked about distant past generations and times. In sum, our data showed, on the one hand, that the reference point in the above temporal expressions in Aymara is indeed ego centered (our first question) and on the other hand, thanks to the analysis of gestures, that for Aymara speakers the Ego-RP metaphorical spatial conception of time has genuine psychological reality (our second question).
This analysis of Aymara language and gesture provides the first empirically demonstrated case of a counterexample to the largely spread space–time metaphors where “future” is conceived as being “in front” of ego and “past” behind ego. Aymara has the opposite pattern (and it may not be the only such culture). Beyond its anecdotal flavor, this finding is crucial as it shows that human abstraction is not pre-wired in the brain. It tells us that there is no single way for achieving abstraction, not even for a fundamental domain such as time. Human biology is certainly fundamental in providing the basis for human imagination. But, building on universal species-specific body morphology and neural organization, different aspects of bodily experience may be recruited for the systematic construction of more abstract concepts, which allow for plasticity and cultural variation. Regarding temporal metaphorical uses of front–back relationships, we tend to profile frontal motion. Based on this, our basic postulate (or “axiom”) builds on prototypical frontal motion. If we walk (forward) at any given time we will reach a location that is in front of us, leaving behind us the original location. That location is reached in the future relative to the moment we started the action, with the initial position where we were initially (past) located behind us. Aymara people, however, although do walk in the same way as the rest of the world does, operate with a radically different postulate (or “axiom”). They profile a fundamentally different aspect of front–back features: what is seen (and therefore known), lies in front of the observer and behind them lies what is outside the visual inspection. These features parallel essential temporal properties, namely, past events are known, whereas future events are not. In Aymara, visual perception appears to play the leading role in bringing temporal concepts to being, and several data sources support this explanation, from evidential grammatical markers to special social practices and values.
The moral is that humans have at least two forms for conceiving time along a bodily front–back axis, which are—like in set theory—internally consistent but mutually inconsistent. These forms are defined by mutually exclusive ways of orienting the body in saggital unidimensional space, providing a radically different collection of truths. By profiling different aspects of bodily grounded experience we get one case with a built-in postulate (“axiom”) that puts the observer “facing” the future and the other case with the very opposite postulate with the observer “facing” the past. Once the orientation of the observer is defined, a series of theorem-like entailments follow. Which one is the correct one? Where really is the past? In front of us? Behind us? Like in mathematics, no ultimate transcendental answer can be provided. Both forms have their own postulates (or axioms), and truth rests on the underlying embodied mappings that made these very abstractions possible.
Elysia Crampton Chuquimia (by and about, through)
“I have to find truth always where I couldn’t see, hear, smell it before, and I have to seek the strange event of truth’s newness, always elaborating itself, always ridding its excess with an illusive divine grace. I must go to the very bottom to see that there was no depth that wasn’t here — I must always journey through landscape to find that horizon was also always in this place, with this presence…for these histories coiled at event horizon, on the brink of new universe or total disintegration, braided with nothingness.”
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America drifts like tires squealing against asphalt — dark bituminous pitch sprinkled with sand or gravel marked up by the tread of pickup trucks. America drifts like mud and silt pouring down the mountains of Shenandoah, like the myth of the Chieftain who gave his daughter to a fur trapper, her sadness drifting on the breeze as a sea shanty. Oh, America drifts like floating, weathered pieces of wood tossed by Atlantic waves, like ships carrying pathogenic strands of foreign microbiology onto Virginian shores. “Virginia” itself was spoken in a foreign tongue unknown to the land’s primordial tectonics; an alien language gave the landscape its contemporary, “virginal” namesake.
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The album gives agency to the ancient flayed fish fertilizing the modern silvery chip bag that contains the Dorito, the corn chip, the calcified dust of deceased bodies, of forlorn history being eaten and consumed by the perpetual human demand for truth.
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Textile images are never imposed on the surface of the cloth: their patterns are always emergent from an active matrix, implicit in a web which makes them immanent to the processes from which they emerge.
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Crampton discusses the Aymaran space-time of taypi, where “for example, the world of outside and the world of inside are woven together, braided so as to appear as one colour, one thing, until you look closely to see they cohabit or speckle one another without ever fully dissolving into a whole, single object.” Compositionally, this ontological mode results in the elision of linear cause and effect in favor of the weaving together of sounds, each part of the sonic whole always implicated in its neighbor’s unfolding — threaded together, their colors and textures bound, entangled…Within the world of her sound, linear temporality is upended; her songs burst into life, drag and fall, sway and swell. Beginnings and endings are beside the point. Here, the past is not something to be unearthed, but persists and resonates into the future, guiding us away from the moribund certainty of our colonialized present, toward other modes of being, doing, knowing, feeling. An elsewhere approached through juxtaposition, assemblage, the manipulation of sensory states to communicate, not with words, but in and against them, through what Fred Moten calls an “anachoreography,” a “musicked speech” that falls, circles, and shakes, that constructs itself in real time, guided by the textures of the sounds, the weave of a history of resistance, fugitivity, imagination: a lively, wondrous noise.
Lawrence Summers, former President of Harvard University and Chief Economist of the World Bank, issued a confidential memo arguing for global waste trade in 1991. The memo stated:
“I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that… I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles… Just between you and me shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?”
Freshkills
The landfill opened in 1948 as a temporary landfill, but by 1955 it had become the largest landfill in the world, and it remained so until its closure in 2001.
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It consists of four mounds which range in height from 90 to about 225 feet (30 to about 70 m) and hold about 150 million tons of solid waste. The archaeologist Martin Jones characterizes it as “among the largest man-made structures in the history of the world.”
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By the 1970s, city developers were referring to the landfill as ‘landscape sculpture’. Today, the 150 million-ton pile of industrial waste is twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.
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“It had a certain nightmare quality. … I can still recall looking down on the operation from a control tower and thinking that Fresh Kills, like Jamaica Bay, had for thousands of years been a magnificent, teeming, literally life-enhancing tidal marsh. And in just twenty-five years, it was gone, buried under millions of tons of New York City’s refuse.”
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Feral dog packs roamed the dump and were a hazard to employees. Rats also posed a problem.
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From 1987 through 1988, in an environmental disaster known as the syringe tide, significant amounts of medical waste from the Fresh Kills landfill, including hypodermic syringes and raw garbage, washed up onto beaches on the Jersey Shore, in New York City, and on Long Island [during height of AIDS epidemic].
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In 2001 it was estimated that, if kept open, the landfill would have eventually become the highest point on the East Coast. Under strong community pressure and with support of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the landfill site was closed on March 22, 2001, but it had to be reopened after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Virtually all the materials from the World Trade Center site were sent to the temporarily reopened landfill for examination.
Thousands of detectives and forensic evidence specialists worked for over 1.7 million hours at Fresh Kills Landfill to try to recover remnants of the people killed in the attacks. A final count of 4,257 human remains was retrieved, but only 300 people were identified from these remains. A memorial was built in 2011, which also honors those whose identities were not able to be determined from the debris. The remaining waste was buried in a 40-acre (160,000 m2) portion of the landfill; it is highly likely that this debris still contains fragmentary human remains.
…the City’s Chief Medical Examiner retains custody of all still-unidentified materials at a facility within the National 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. The remaining materials at Fresh Kills were then buried in a 40-acre (160,000 m2) portion of the landfill that will be known as West Mound. Afterward, the landfill facility was closed permanently, in anticipation of the park on the site.
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The garbage once destined for Fresh Kills was shipped to landfills in other states, primarily in Pennsylvania, but also in Virginia and Ohio.
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The Fresh Kills site is to be transformed into reclaimed wetlands, recreational facilities and landscaped public parkland, the most significant expansion of the New York City parks since the development of the chain of parks in the Bronx during the 1890s. The new park will be designed by James Corner Field Operations, the landscape architecture firm also responsible for the design of the High Line in Manhattan.
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To use Fresh Kills as a medium is complicated, but to regard it as a ‘site’ is impossible. You can’t see it, you can’t enter it, you can’t even, really, get close to it. The best you can do is stand on top of the layers of soil that conceal it and count the methane pipes popping out of the ground between flurries of wildlife. Friedman-Pappas reflects on these visits with a tinge of irony: “Gassing masses is not what they’re advertising. The staff at Fresh Kills runs a strategic campaign to highlight the repopulation of animals in the park, and to downplay the presence of waste. My site visits would consist of Freshkills Alliance employees pointing out and exclaiming, ‘An Osprey! A Red Fox!’”
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“The transformation of what was once the world’s largest landfill into a sustainable park makes the project a symbol of renewal and an expression of how we can re-imagine reclaimed landscapes,” the FKA’s website reads. “As more sections of the park open, the unusual combination of natural and engineered beauty—including creeks, wetlands, expansive meadows and spectacular vistas of the New York City region—will be accessible.”
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“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”
Buying Time
With the money they made by stealing our land
They have bought themselves some time—
Air time
Water time
War time
And underground time.
By that they believe that they have bought history.
But when I look back, past the hundred of years
Of history they claim to own,
Through our own thousands of years,
And when I think of the million of red flowers
That opened each Spring of those thousands of years
No matter how white the winters,
I see hours like stars in the eyes of our children.
—Jimmie Durham
Ecological resiliency is strongest in places that are the least disturbed and most biodiverse. Bears Ears is a resilient landscape. Navajo people have a term for such places of ecological rejuvenation: we call them Nahodishgish, or “places to be left alone.”
— Bears Ears: A Native Perspective, October 2015, p.13