The speaker, at right, indicates next year by pointing backwards over his left shoulder.

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.

Analysis of the gestural data proved telling: The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn’t command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.

“These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon.”

[The] Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly different,” he said.

Why, however, is not entirely certain. One possibility, Nunez and Sweetser argue, is that the Aymara place a great deal of significance on whether an event or action has been seen or not seen by the speaker.

A “simple” unqualified statement like “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is not possible in Aymara – the sentence would necessarily also have to specify whether the speaker had personally witnessed this or was reporting hearsay.

In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen – and known/unknown – to such an extent as to weave “evidential” requirements inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown and unknowable future behind your back.

Sounds like some of our Comments.



  1. Jammerb says:

    With that kind of distinction between seen/unseen engrained in their culture… have to wonder what kind of mythology/religion they have…

  2. Max Bell says:

    So tomorrow I came back from the bar, returned a beer, and I was standing in the back, leaving a leak, when Harry walks out and says “Goodbye!” real loud — came all off the back wall, back out of my pant leg… Hadda stand around trying to wet my leg under the hand drier.

    I mean, we have people who can figure out conversational Klingon. Can’t we get them up there for a couple of weeks and make some attempt to preserve this?

  3. bquady says:

    Re: #3

    This is a nice benefit to having a comments feature on a “weird news” site. There are people willing to contribute even weirder comments for free!

    South America is going communist? Because the Aymara have a cultural quirk about the representation of time? Brilliant! Falsehood and then non sequitur! Inspiring bizarrity!

  4. Frank IBC says:

    Actually this isn’t that bizarre – The past is there for you to see, while the future sneaks up on you.

  5. Podesta says:

    The resident racist said:

    “So is that a way of explaining way mopst of south america is so far behind in everything, because instead of going ahead, they’re going backwards.”

    History would suggest that poverty in South America has a lot to do with colonialism and imperialism, in addition to corrupt Right Wing leaders. Furthermore, in most South American countries, the economies are actually improving as is distribution of resources.

    Frank, I was thinking the same thing. There is a logic in describing the future as out of sight (behind you).

  6. Jez says:

    Think of it this way – you can see the past, but you can’t see the future, and it does kinda creep up on you. Maybe that’s why the Aymara face the way they do…

    I gather Tibetan has a similar grammar for indicating whether you have personally witnessed something, or whether the knowledge is merely secondhand. It’s daunting to think how small a percentage of our knowledge today is really firsthand…

  7. Frank IBC says:

    From the linked article:

    Take an “exotic” language like English: You can use the word “ahead” to signify an earlier point in time, saying “We are at 20 minutes ahead of 1 p.m.” to mean “It’s now 12:40 p.m.” Based on this evidence alone, a Martian linguist could then justifiably decide that English speakers, much like the Aymara, put the past in front.

    There are also in English ambiguous expressions like “Wednesday’s meeting was moved forward two days.” Does that mean the new meeting time falls on Friday or Monday? Roughly half of polled English speakers will pick the former and the other half the latter. And that depends, it turns out, on whether they’re picturing themselves as being in motion relative to time or time itself as moving. Both of these ideas are perfectly acceptable in English and grammatical too, as illustrated by “We’re coming to the end of the year” vs. “The end of the year is approaching.”


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