June 12, 2006

Backs to the Future
Aymara Language and Gesture Point to Mirror-Image View of Time

By Inga Kiderra

Tell an old Aymara speaker to “face the past!” and you just might get a blank stare in return – because he or she already does.

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.

Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.

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-dr.c  

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