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1 The Arawakan Matrix: Ethos, Language, and History in Native South America fernando santos-granero The relationship between language and culture has been the subject of much speculation in Western philosophy and social sciences. In the recent past,the tendency has been to contest the one language–one culture hypothesis implicit in the writings of eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann G. Herder, an idea that, under several guises, dominated early anthropology and linguistics.In his 1769 essay “On the Origin of Language,” Herder asserted that polities are unified neither by the acceptance of a common sovereign power, as proposed by Hobbes, nor by a social contract based on the general will, as advocated by Rousseau (Barnard 1969). Instead, he indicated , first, that the basis for the sense of collective political identity was the sharing of a common culture and,second,that the emergence and reproduction of a group’s culture are based on the use of a common language. Herder referred to units possessing a common culture and language by the term Volk, or nationality. Members of such communities are united by the collective consciousness of a common cultural heritage.This consciousness,which distinguishes members of a collective from those of similar communities, is what Herder calls “national character.” Herder’spropositionsfoundtheirwayintohistoricallinguisticsandthrough it to modernist ethnology. The detection of connections between Sanskrit, Persian,and European languages by Sir William Jones in 1786 and the discovery by Jacob Grimm of the existence of regularities of sound change between different but related languages established the framework for the emergence of comparative linguistics. The Neogrammarians, a group of scholars working in Leipzig, formulated the principles and methods of the new discipline in the late nineteenth century. Its basic premise is that languages that have a 01.23-50/H&S 6/4/02, 10:10 AM 25 26 fernando santos-granero large number of cognate words descend from a common ancestral language and thus belong to the same family.Implicit in this proposition is the assumption that speakers of the protolanguage constituted a culturally unified community and that its descendants share at least some aspects of that culture. This was Brinton’s (1891) approach in The American Race, which provides the first modern linguistic classification of Native South American languages. In addition to associating language and culture—in Herder’s tradition—the author posited a linkage between language and race. Brinton (1891, 57) suggested ,“Similarity of idioms proves to some extent similarity of descent and similarity of psychic endowments.” In an intellectual environment in which evolutionism was becoming a dominant mode of thought,it was only a short step from here to assert that certain combinations of language, culture, and race were superior or inferior to others.Anthropology was quick to reject this argument by refuting the assumption that there existed an immanent connection between language and culture or race and culture. In The American Indian, Wissler (1917) asserted that there are “no correlations between culture and linguistic type.” According to him, the fact that speakers of the same language stock are represented in several cultural areas demonstrates that “language can travel independently of culture” (Wissler 1917, 332). Edward Sapir (1921/1931, 143) went a step further, declaring that “races,languages and cultures are not distributed in parallel fashion,that their areas of distribution intercross in the most bewildering fashion, and that the history of each is apt to follow a distinctive course.” Franz Boas (1928) was equally definitive. From then on it became almost anathema in anthropology to propose a connection between language and culture, except as formulated in the milder versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which postulate that language influences but does not determine the way we think and perceive the world (see Sherzer 1992, 274). The notion of language family, seen by Brinton (1891, 57) “as the only one of any scientific value,” became outdated among anthropologists and was replaced in subsequent classifications of South American indigenous peoples by that of culture area.Julian H.Steward’s (1946–59) Handbook of South American Indians is the most outstanding example of this new approach. He and Louis C. Faron (1959, 26) argued that although linguistic affiliation and distribution have certain implications for the cultural history of SouthAmerican Indians, “there is no direct relationship between language groups and culture.” The principal value of linguistic classifications and the comparative method was to supply, through the method known as glottochronology ,information on the dates of divergence of languages belonging...

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