RIVERS IN THE STRAITS
To most people who have heard of him, W. H. R. Rivers is the compassionate psychiatrist who treated Siegfried Sassoon during World War I. Rivers worked at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, where he was a pioneer in applying psychoanalytic techniques to help officers suffering from shell shock. Sassoon was sent to him in 1917 after being declared insane for publicly questioning the sanity of the war, throwing his Military Cross into the river Mersey, and refusing to return to his regiment. Rivers treated him with sympathy and understanding, and eventually Sassoon voluntarily returned to France. The affection, even devotion, that Rivers inspired in many of his patients seems to have lost none of its intensity years after the war. Sassoon, a man so fearless in battle that he was nicknamed Mad Jack, collapsed with grief at Rivers’s funeral in 1922. And some forty years later, in July 1963, a frail old man called in at the library of St John’s, Rivers’s old Cambridge College, and asked to see his portrait, explaining that he had been treated by Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917. According to the librarian’s account, the man stood before the picture at the salute and thanked Rivers for all he had done for him. The visitor returned on at least two other occasions, and every time he asked to see the portrait. On his last visit he was obviously in poor health and finished with the words “goodbye my friend—I don’t suppose we shall ever meet again.”
But Rivers’s vocation as the salve of shell-shocked souls came only later in life, after a distinguished career in two other fields: experimental psychology and then anthropology. It was the experimental psychologist Rivers who was invited in 1898 to join the Cambridge University anthropological expedition to the islands of the Torres Straits, between Australia and New Guinea. But while on the islands, he developed his interest in human institutions, and it was there that he began his seminal studies on kinship relations and social organization, which are widely regarded as laying the foundations for the discipline of social anthropology and are what led Claude Lévi-Strauss to dub him the “Galileo of anthropology.”
The aim of the Cambridge Torres Straits expedition was to shed light on the mental characteristics of primitive peoples. The fledgling discipline of anthropology was struggling to define its subject matter, “culture,” and to determine the boundaries between acquired and innate aspects of human behavior. In order to shed light on this question, it was essential to determine to what extent the cognitive traits of primitive people differed from those of civilized people, and the role of the expedition was to advance beyond the mostly anecdotal evidence that had been available before. As the leader of the expedition explained, “For the first time trained experimental psychologists investigated by means of adequate laboratory equipment a people in a low stage of culture under their ordinary conditions of life.” The multivolume meticulous reports that were published by Rivers and the other members in subsequent years helped to make the distinction between natural and cultural traits clearer, and the Torres Straits expedition is thus widely credited as the event that turned anthropology into a serious science.
W. H. R. Rivers with friends
Rivers’s own reason for joining the expedition in 1898 was the opportunity to conduct detailed experiments on the eyesight of the natives. During the 1890s, he had been immersed in the study of vision, and so was keen to resolve the controversy over the color sense, which had not progressed much in the previous two decades. He wanted to see for himself how the color vision of the natives related to their color vocabulary and whether the capacity for appreciating differences correlated with the power of expressing those differences in language.
Rivers spent four months on the remote Murray Island, at the eastern edge of the Torres Straits, right at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. With a population of about 450, the island offered a manageably small community of friendly natives who were “sufficiently civilized” to enable him to make all his observations and yet, as he put it, “were sufficiently near their primitive condition to be thoroughly interesting. There is no doubt that thirty years ago they were in a completely savage stage, absolutely untouched by civilization.”
What Rivers found in the color vocabulary of the islanders fitted well with the reports from the previous twenty years. Descriptions of color were generally vague and indefinite, and sometimes a cause of much uncertainty. The most definite names were for black, white, and red. The word for “black,” golegole, derived from gole, “cuttlefish” (Rivers suggested that this referred to the dark ink secreted by the animal), “white” was kakekakek (with no obvious etymology), and the word for “red,” mamamamam, was clearly derived from mam, “blood.” Most people used mamamamam also for pink and brown. Other colors had progressively less definite and conventional names. Yellow and orange were called by many people bambam (from bam, “turmeric”), but by others siusiu (from siu, “yellow ocher”). Green was called soskepusoskep by many (from soskep, “bile,” “gallbladder”), but others used “leaf color” or “pus color.” The vocabulary for blue and violet shades was even vaguer. Some younger speakers used the word bulu-bulu, obviously a recent borrowing from English “blue.” But Rivers reports that “the old men agreed that their own proper word for blue was golegole (black).” Violet was also mostly called golegole.
Rivers noted that often “lively discussions were started among the natives as to the correct name of a colour.” When asked to indicate the names of certain colors, many islanders said they would need to consult wiser men. And when pressed to give an answer nevertheless, they simply tended to think of a name of particular objects. For example, when shown a yellowish green shade, one man called it “sea green” and pointed to the position of one particular large reef in view.
The vocabulary of the Murray Islanders was clearly “defective,” but what about their eyesight? Rivers examined more than two hundred of them for their ability to distinguish colors, subjecting them to rigorous tests. He used an improved and extended version of the Holmgren wool test and devised a series of experiments of his own to detect any sign of inability to perceive differences. But he did not find a single case of color blindness. Not only were the islanders able to distinguish between all primary colors, but they could also tell apart different shades of blue and of any other color. Rivers’s meticulous experiments thus demonstrated beyond any possible doubt that people can see the differences between all imaginable shades of colors and yet have no standard names in their language even for basic colors such as green or blue.
Surely, there could have been only one possible conclusion for such an acutely intelligent researcher to draw from his own findings: the differences in color vocabulary have nothing to do with biological factors. And yet there was one experience which struck Rivers so forcefully that it managed to throw him entirely off track. This was the encounter with that weirdest of all weirdnesses, a phenomenon which philologists could infer only from ancient texts but which he met face to face: people who call the sky “black.” As Rivers points out with amazement in his expedition reports, he simply could not grasp how the old men of Murray Island regarded it as quite natural to apply the term “black” (golegole) to the brilliant blue of the sky and sea. He mentions with equal disbelief that one of the islanders, “an intelligent native,” was happy to compare the color of the sky to that of dark dirty water. This behavior, Rivers writes, “seemed almost inexplicable, if blue were not to these natives a duller and a darker colour than it is to us.”
Rivers thus concluded that Magnus was right in assuming that the natives must still suffer from a “certain degree of insensitiveness to blue (and probably green) as compared with that of Europeans.” Being such a scrupulous scientist, Rivers was not only aware of the weaknesses of his own argument but careful to air them himself. He explains that his own results proved that one cannot deduce from language what the speakers can see. He even mentions that the younger generation of speakers, who have borrowed the word bulu-bulu for “blue,” use it without any apparent confusion. And s
till, after acknowledging all such objections, he parries them with one fact, as if it were sufficient to undermine everything else: “One cannot, however, wholly ignore the fact that intelligent natives would regard it as perfectly natural to apply the same name to the brilliant blue of the sky and sea which they give to the deepest black.”
LEGACY FRUIT AND OTHER THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
At the last hurdle, then, Rivers’s imagination simply lost its nerve and balked at the idea that “blue” is ultimately a cultural convention. He could not bring himself to concede that people who saw blue just as vividly as he did would still find it natural to regard it as a shade of black. And in all fairness, it is difficult to blame him, for even with the wealth of incontrovertible evidence at our disposal today, it is still very hard for us to muster the imagination needed to accept that blue and black seem separate colors just because of the cultural conventions we were reared on. Our deepest instincts and guttest of feelings yell at us that blue and black are really separate colors, as are green and blue, whereas navy blue and sky blue, for instance, are really just different shades of the same color. So before we continue with the final episode of the quest for the origin of the color sense, we can take a short break from the historical narrative and embark on three thought experiments that might help to make the power of cultural conventions sink in.
The first experiment is an exercise in counterfactual history. Let’s imagine how the color-sense debate might have unfolded had it been conducted not in England and Germany but in Russia. Imagine that a nineteenth-century Russian anthropologist, Yuri Magnovievitch Gladonov, goes on an expedition to the remote British Isles off the northern coast of Europe, where he spends a few months with the reclusive natives and conducts detailed psychological tests on their physical and mental skills. On his return, he surprises the Royal Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg with a sensational report. It turns out that the natives of Britain show the most curious confusions in their color terminology in the siniy and goluboy area of spectrum. In fact, the aboriginal population of those cloud-swept isles does not distinguish between siniy and goluboy at all and calls them by the same name! At first, Gladonov says, he assumed the natives had a defect in their vision, perhaps because of lack of sufficient sunlight during most of the year. But when he tested their eyesight, he found that they could distinguish perfectly well between siniy and goluboy. It was just that they insisted on calling both these colors “blue.” If pressed to explain the difference between these two colors, they would say that one was “dark blue” and the other “light blue.” But they insisted it was “ridiculous” to call these two shades different colors.
Now, when the mirror is turned on our own linguistic vagueness, the idea that our “defective” color vocabulary has anything to do with defective eyesight immediately appears ludicrous. Of course English speakers can see the difference between navy blue and sky blue. It’s simply that their cultural conventions regard these as shades of the same color (even though the two colors actually differ by wavelength just as much as sky blue does from green, as can be seen in the picture of the spectrum in figure 11). But if we can bring ourselves to view the spectrum through Russian eyes and look at siniy and goluboy as two separate colors, it might also become a little easier to empathize with those clueless primitives who do not separate “blue” from “green,” for instance. Just as English lumps goluboy and siniy under one “blue” concept, other languages extend this lumping principle to the whole green-blue range. And if you happened to grow up in a culture where this chunk of the spectrum has just one label, let’s say “grue,” wouldn’t it seem silly that some languages treat leaf grue and sea grue as two separate colors rather than as two shades of the same color?
The second thought experiment may require less imagination than the first, but it needs some precious equipment. Rivers did not have children of his own, but it is tempting to think that if he had examined Western children’s struggles with color, he might not have been so flummoxed by the Torres Strait islanders. Scientists have long been aware that children’s acquisition of color vocabulary is remarkably slow and laborious. And yet the acuteness of the difficulties never fails to amaze. Charles Darwin wrote that he had “attended carefully to the mental development of my young children, and with two, or as I believe three of them, soon after they had come to the age when they knew the names of all common objects, I was startled by observing that they seemed quite incapable of affixing the right names to the colours in coloured engravings, although I tried repeatedly to teach them. I distinctly remember declaring that they were colour-blind, but this afterwards proved a groundless fear.” Estimates of the age at which children can reliably name the major colors have dropped considerably since the earliest studies a century ago, which reported the incredibly high figures of seven to eight years of age. According to modern surveys, children learn to use the main color words reliably a lot earlier, in their third year. Nevertheless, what seems so strange is that by an age when children’s linguistic ability is already fairly developed, they are still entirely thrown by colors. It is surprising to see how children who would effortlessly find a circle or square or triangle when asked to point at it, still react with complete bemusement when asked to pick out the “yellow one” from a group of objects, and reach completely at random for whatever is closest at hand. With intense training, children in their second year can produce and use color words accurately, but the dozens of repetitions required for learning the concept of color as an attribute independent of particular objects contrast dramatically with the effortless ease with which children learn the names for the objects themselves—usually after hearing the names for them just once.
So what happens to children who grow up not in a culture that shoves brightly colored plastic toys before their eyes and stuffs color names down their ears but rather in a culture where artificially manufactured colors are scarce and color is of very limited communicative importance? Two Danish anthropologists who had once immersed themselves in the society of a Polynesian atoll called Bellona described their surprise at how rarely the Bellonese talked about color with their children. When explaining the differences between objects such as fruits or fish, which to our mind would be most easily classified by their color, the Bellonese hardly ever seemed to mention color at all. The anthropologists could not resist asking why, but the only answer they got was “we don’t talk much about color here.” Without such coaching in colors, it is perhaps not so surprising that Bellonese children end up being quite content with a very “defective” inventory of color names.
As it so happened, I started researching this book just as my elder daughter was learning to speak, and my obsession with color meant she was trained intensely and so learned to recognize color names relatively early on. Since there was one particular “failure” that struck Gladstone, Geiger, and above all Rivers so forcefully, I decided to conduct a harmless experiment. Gladstone could not conceive how Homer failed to notice that “most perfect example of blue,” the southern sky. Geiger spent pages marveling at the absence of the sky’s blueness in ancient texts, and Rivers could not get over the natives’ designation of the sky as black. So I wanted to test how obvious the color of the sky really was to someone who had not yet been culturally indoctrinated. I decided never to mention the color of the sky to my daughter, although I talked about the color of all imaginable objects until she was blue in the face. When would she hit upon it herself?
Alma recognized blue objects correctly from the age of eighteen months, and started using the word “boo” herself at around nineteen months. She was used to games that involved pointing at objects and asking what color they were, so I started occasionally to point upwards and ask what color the sky was. She knew what the sky was, and I made sure the question was always posed when the sky was well and truly blue. But although she had no problems naming the color of blue objects, she would just stare upwards in bafflement whenever I asked her about sky, and her only answer was a “
what are you talking about?” look. Only at twenty-three months of age did she finally deign to answer the question, but the answer was . . . “white” (admittedly, it was a bright day). It took another month until she first called the sky “blue,” and even then it had not yet become canonically blue: one day she said “blue,” another day “white,” and on another occasion she couldn’t make up her mind: “blue,” then “white,” then “blue” again. In short, more than six months had passed from when she was first able to recognize blue objects confidently until she named the blueness of the sky. And it seems that her confusions were not entirely over even by the age of four, because at this age she once pointed at the pitch-black sky late at night and declared that it was blue.
Now consider how much easier her task was compared with Homer’s or the Murray Islanders’. After all, Alma had been actively trained to recognize blueness in objects and had been explicitly taught that blue was a different color from white or black or green. The only things she was required to do, therefore, were first to recognize that the sky had a color at all, and then to work out that this color was similar to the numerous blue objects she was surrounded with, rather than to black or white or green objects. Nevertheless, it still took her six months to work it out.
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages Page 8