Human Universals

by Donald E Brown

  There is some controversy concerning which and how many basic (primary, elementary, or “coarse”) emotions are indicated by distinct facial expressions. Happiness (or joy), sadness (or grief), disgust, surprise, fear, and anger are usually mentioned; contempt has also been claimed (Ekman and Friesen 1986; cf. Izard and Haynes 1988). The study of emotions is complicated by the fact that they are expressed in various degrees of intensity and because many expressions are blends resulting from mixed emotions and from the interaction of facial affect programs with display rules. Moreover, people may attempt to imitate facial expressions for various reasons and with varying degrees of success, and culturally specific ways of caricaturing facial expressions have to be considered, too. Clearly, the face does more than express emotions.

  Indeed, one critic (Fridlund 1991) argues that the primary function of human (and animal) facial expressions is not to express emotions but to communicate intention in a social setting. There may be emotions that typically accompany particular intentions in particular settings, but in the causal pathway, so to say, the emotions are secondary to the intentions. Fridlund does not deny cross-cultural commonalities in facial displays, but he is critical of the existing explanations both for the similarities and the differences. He also criticizes the methods that have been used to test or support those explanations.

  My own assessment is that communicating intention and expressing emotion are not mutually exclusive explanations, but that fine-grained analyses of the functions of human behavior cannot help but be salutary. Getting to where we presently are in such analyses clearly required breakthroughs in the objective study of facial displays and careful cross-cultural comparisons. It will take more of the same to move further ahead.

  Hopi Time

  Benjamin Lee Whorf was the principal modern architect of what came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Edward Sapir, a distinguished anthropological linguist, had been Whorf’s teacher. Sapir had written influentially on the relationship between culture and language and had drawn attention to the ways in which language and culture interact. For example, the Eskimos are said (incorrectly, as it turns out [Martin 1986]) to have an elaborate terminology for differing kinds of snow, some East African cattle-herding peoples have similarly elaborate terms for cattle, and so on. These cases of linguistic differences at the lexical level make good sense in terms of the cultures in which they occur.

  Whorf is the person most frequently associated with an extreme version of this argument, in which our language or its categories shape our thoughts and worldview. What our language does not classify, we don’t see, don’t readily see, or don’t attend to. Whorf stated his position in both extreme and more reasonable forms; it is the former that are of interest here. The less extreme forms of the Whorfian hypothesis have a degree of plausibility, and some supporting evidence, but the argument remains unsettled (Haugen 1977; Witkowski and Brown 1982).

  Whorf studied the Hopi language and by 1936 had come to a startling conclusion: one of the fundamental categories of Western thought—time—is culturally relative:

  After long and careful study and analysis, the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call “time,” or to past, or future, or to enduring or lasting. (Carroll 1956:57)

  [T]he Hopi language contains no reference to “time,” either explicit or implicit. (Carroll 1956:58)

  Whorf did not hesitate to draw the relativist conclusion:

  I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of TIME as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past. (Carroll 1956:57)

  Since these quotations are from a posthumously published paper, it should be noted that in a paper published in 1940, while he was yet alive, Whorf also described the Hopi verb and the Hopi language as “timeless” (Carroll 1956:216, 217).

  But in other places Whorf took a different position: not that the Hopi had no sense of time as we (or a physicist) might understand it but that the Hopi conception of time was very different from ours. He said that the Hopi recognized “psychological time” but that this was quite different from time as a physicist understands it. For example, Whorf says that the Hopi language does not objectify time. Units of time, in Hopi, are not aggregated in the plural. The Hopi do not say “ten days” as they might say “ten men.” In Hopi one says “they left after the tenth day” rather than “they stayed ten days.” “Plurals and cardinals are used only for entities that form or can form an objective group” (Carroll 1956:140), and units of time are not such entities. As a consequence, Whorf argued, the Hopi would not think of ten days as ten different entities forming an “assemblage” (in the sense that they would think of ten men) but would see them as “successive visits” of the “same” entity (Carroll 1956:148).

  Whorf said that the Hopi, unlike almost all other known peoples, did not use spatial metaphors to talk about time (i.e., they would not talk about a long time). “The absence of such metaphor from Hopi speech is striking. Use of space terms when there is no space involved is NOT THERE—as if on it had been laid the taboo teetotal!” (Carroll 1956:146).

  Whorf said that the Hopi verb lacked tense, and he implies that the Hopi, in contrast to Westerners with their objectified sense of time, have little interest in “exact sequence, dating, calendars, chronology” (Carroll 1956:153).

  Moreover, Whorf thought that profound philosophical and practical lessons were to be drawn from Hopi (and other American Indian) conceptions of time. In this and other respects Hopi was a decidedly superior form of communication and thought: “The Hopi actually have a language better equipped to deal with…vibratile phenomena than is our latest scientific terminology;…in the formal systematization of ideas… English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon compared to a rapier” (Carroll 1956:55, 85).

  Generally, Whorf was quite clear in his illustrations of how Westerners think of time, but he was often much less clear about how it was that the Hopi did it. Much of the literature on Hopi time was subsequently devoted to figuring out just what Whorf had meant. Given the striking nature of his claims, it was “inevitable,” says Malotki (1983:4), that Whorf and those who expounded extreme versions of his ideas, should “spawn a number of myths.” Malotki (1983) cites some of the more outlandish extrapolations from Whorf’s contentions (fortunately, few if any recent anthropological textbooks repeat Whorf’s extreme claims, except with substantial reservations, e.g., Barnouw 1975). A serious problem was that neither Whorf nor anyone else had published much in the way of Hopi texts, dictionaries, and grammars—without which the accuracy of Whorf’s claims could not be determined.

  Beginning in the 1970s, Ekkehart Malotki undertook a study of Hopi time (and space). The opening page of the resulting book on time (Malotki 1983) quotes a Hopi sentence, translates it literally, and then rephrases the translation as follows:

  Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke up the girl again.

  This sentence alone, assuming it did not include terms and ideas only recently borrowed by Hopi, would seem to be enough to dispose of any contention about the absence of time concepts among the Hopi. But Malotki goes on with more than 600 pages of documentation of Hopi temporal metaphors; units of time (including days, day counts, segments of the day, yesterday and tomorrow, days of the week, weeks, months, lunation, seasons, and the year); the ceremonial calendar; timekeeping devices; pluralization and quantification of time expressions; such miscellaneous time words as “ancient,” “quick,” “long time,” “finished,” and so on; the Hopi tense system; and even more. But since Whorf’s own writi
ngs refute the idea that the Hopi language was timeless, it is his more specific claims about the ways in which Hopi time differs from ours that require attention.

  With respect to the objectification of time, Malotki shows that the Hopi do talk about aggregated units of time and do use cardinal numbers in counting days. Whorf’s claim (Carroll 1956:140) that such “an expression as ‘ten days’ is not used” in Hopi is “utterly false” (Malotki 1983:526). Malotki documents his refutation not only with materials he gathered but with published Hopi texts that predate Whorf’s interest in linguistics. Thus “an objectification of time units is not in the least foreign to Hopi” (Malotki 1983:529).

  Malotki (1983:15) finds in Whorf’s own unpublished Hopi-English dictionary an entry in which a spatial term is used metaphorically for time and concludes that Whorf “must have been aware that a spatialized vision of time was not alien to the Hopi language.” Malotki goes on to demonstrate just

  how greatly Whorf erred.… We shall see that the technique of spatio-temporal metaphorization is…ubiquitous…in Hopi. It involves not only countless postpositions and adverbs of place but also a number of verbs and nouns, among them a direct equation of the noun qeni ‘space’ with the notion ‘time.’ (1983:16)

  Whorf had originally described Hopi as having tense and only in his later writings repeatedly denied that it did. Malotki brands this as one of the particularly tenacious myths about Hopi. The issues are complicated, and Malotki does not give a full account (he refers to a previously published analysis of the Hopi verb by other linguists). In essence, he finds that Hopi is no more free of tense than is English: both have only two formal tenses to express past, present, and future. English has past and present (we do not form the future by changing the form of the verb but by adding other words) and Hopi has future and nonfuture. Any analysis of the consequences of formal tense alone would find English as timeless as Hopi. Through the use of the Hopi aspect system (divided into the perfective and imperfective), and through other linguistic devices, “Hopi speakers never consider themselves at a loss in determining whether a particular utterance refers to past, present, or future time” (Malotki 1983:625).

  Contrary to Whorf’s views, Malotki (1983:482) finds Hopi culture “favorably bent to the keeping of records” and “developed on a very sophisticated level” with respect to chronology, calendars, and dating. Malotki describes for the Hopi a “horizon-based sun calendar”; “exact ceremonial day sequences”; “knotted calendar strings”; “notched calendar sticks”; and time keeping by means of marks on walls, by “alignment of sun holes in a house wall,” and by means of “shadow observation.” Information on each of these items is hard to obtain, since most of the practices have long been out of use or involve knowledge that Hopi do not wish to share. In some cases Malotki documents the use of these time-keeping devices and systems before Whorf’s research.

  Malotki’s (1983:530) overall conclusion is that “Whorf’s claim about Hopi time conception being radically different from ours does…not hold” (Gipper [1976] drew a similar conclusion).

  So how and why did Whorf go astray? The most serious problem seemed to Malotki (1983:526) “that Whorf based his observations on an extremely incomplete corpus of linguistic data. As far as the domain of time is concerned, he seems to have barely scratched the surface.” Perhaps as a consequence, Whorf failed to grasp a Hopi linguistic element that means “times” and which is used to form aggregated units of time (so that a literal phrase “five times day” translates as “five days”). In other cases Whorf oversimplified or overinterpreted by taking grammatical features out of their sentential context and by failing to examine them in a sufficiently comparative perspective. His treatment of tense in the Hopi verb was a case in point. In some cases, of course, Whorf was at least partly correct. For example, it is true that some units of time in Hopi are not pluralized. But Malotki likens these instances to English nouns that do not get pluralized (e.g., “two dozen eggs,” “three yoke of oxen,” “few,” and “several”): they do not seem to alter our worldview.

  Beyond these problems lies another: did Whorf have a motive for distorting his findings or exaggerating his claims? The linguist Haugen (1977) draws attention to Whorf’s long-term interests in the mystical as an explanation for Whorf’s “enthusiastic advocacy.” Many of Whorf’s papers appeared in a theosophical journal published in Madras. In one of these papers Whorf advocated linguistic research as a path to Yoga with “therapeutic value” (Carroll 1956:269). Haugen (1977:23) also argues that the early students of American Indian languages needed a justification for their researches, something more than an argument based on “the mere accumulation of knowledge.” The hypothesis of relativism provided such a justification, and any demonstration of extreme relativism in language and culture had still greater impact. Whorf’s argument that language shapes how we think and even what we think about helped to popularize linguistics (Carroll 1956:18).

  This argument can be traced through Boas to the mostly German thinkers, particularly Wilhelm von Humboldt, who laid the foundation for linguistic and cultural relativism (Hoijer 1954; Haugen 1977). Haugen (1977:19) outlines this intellectual line of descent in a paper entitled “The Cult of Relativity,” but perhaps the title is overly strong language, too.

  Neither Haugen, Malotki, nor any other linguist fully rejects the notion of relativity. As Malotki notes, the Hopi did not use their calendar to record the passage of time as we do; the Hopi have not been affected as strongly as we have by the invention and spread of timepieces. What must be rejected, therefore, is not relativism in general but, rather, extreme forms of relativism, such as the notion that the concept of time as we understand it is essentially relative and absent from Hopi. In some contexts even Whorf rejected extreme versions of relativism: “My own studies suggest, to me, that language, for all its kingly role, is in some sense a superficial embroidery upon deeper processes of consciousness which are necessary before any communication, signaling, or symbolism whatsoever can occur” (Carroll 1956:239). That view of the relationship between mind and language is perhaps the predominant view among linguists today.

  Unlike Freeman’s refutation of Mead’s account of Samoa, Malotki’s refutation of Whorf’s analysis of Hopi occasioned little notice. Linguists had already given Whorf’s analysis of Hopi a “decent burial” (Haugen 1977:12).

  The Oedipus Complex

  Malinowski’s claim that the Oedipus complex is not universal was perhaps the least challenged of the similar claims discussed here. In part this stemmed from the very considerable authority of Malinowski, but perhaps more important were the intrinsic probability that his argument could be correct and the limits he often placed on relativism. In the very work in which he argued for the relativity of the Oedipus complex, he frequently reiterated his opinion that innate dispositions shape human behavior in many ways. While he thus denied the universality of the Oedipus complex in particular, he did so by affirming, in effect, the universality of family complexes in general.

  Since Freud had developed his concept of the Oedipus complex on the basis of clinical experience with European peoples—and they predominantly from delimited strata—it seemed to Malinowski that it would be of interest to examine the complex, and related phenomena such as the unconscious, in the very different setting provided by the matrilineal Trobriand Islanders. Malinowski reported striking differences. Whereas “in the Oedipus complex there is the repressed desire to kill the father and marry the mother,…in the matrilineal society of the Trobriands the wish is to marry the sister and to kill the maternal uncle” (1961:76).

  In Malinowski’s formulation, the Freudian Oedipus complex was part of “a theory of the influence of family life on the human mind” (1961:17). It followed, so Malinowski reasoned, that different family systems might produce different complexes, different patterns of “mental attitudes or sentiments,” conscious or unconscious, between the members of the family. Since he found the Oedipus complex culture-boun
d, Malinowski employed the more neutral terms “family complex,” “nuclear complex,” or “nuclear family complex.”

  The Oedipus complex was the feature of the family complex that most impressed Freud. It manifests itself in the psychic orientation of a male toward his mother and father. In the normal case the young boy desires to possess his mother and eliminate his father, but these desires are repressed (or extinguished) as the boy matures. If repressed, they remain a part of the boy’s (or man’s) psyche, but unconscious. In abnormal cases, the childhood desires work psychological mischief. The complex of a female was the opposite of the Oedipus complex—but it received much less attention from Freud and almost none from Malinowski (or Spiro).

  In his conception of the Oedipus complex, Malinowski placed great emphasis on the superiority of the patriarchal husband over his wife, the coolness of the father toward his son, and the economic dependence of both wife and children on the breadwinning father. By contrast, the Trobriand wife was not subservient to her husband, for she derived much of the family’s wherewithal from her brother. The husband was not even considered the procreator of her children, for the Trobrianders believed that children entered their mother’s womb as spirits.