Back to the future

In my blog last week, we saw that we represent time often by spatial concepts. There I treated the question how to arrange the past and the future if you had to put them on a timeline. Suppose now that you are simply asked: If you have to spatially locate the future, where would you place it? In front of you? Behind you? Above you? Under you? Or maybe somewhere else? I asked this question to several persons in different parts of the world, in regions as far away from each other as Europe or Thailand, Indonesia or Azerbaijan. All gave the same answer: The future is in front of us. Investigations have shown that most of us will give this answer, independent of language and culture. Nevertheless, not everybody thinks that the future is in front of us, as the Dutch linguist Riemer Reinsma says in a radio interview. The Greeks have a different view. They can say, for instance, “The weather is nice today, but what will we have behind us?”, meaning “What will happen?” In other words, the Greeks live with their backs to the future. They reason: We don’t have eyes on our backs, so we cannot see what happens behind us. Therefore, the future must be behind us, for we cannot see it. However, we know what is in front of us, since we can see it. Since we know the past, it must be in front of us. This sounds not unreasonable, but it’s not where the Chinese locate past and future. For them the past is over their heads and the future is under their feet. This is just opposite to what English speakers say when they say “That threat is hanging over me”. It’s striking that in English the expression “over me” refers only to something negative that may happen. Possibly this expression is constructed analogous to a thunderstorm that is coming near. (By the way, this shows that English speakers sometimes locate the future above themselves instead of in front of themselves).
Although views on future and past are, of course, expressed in a language, probably differences where to locate them are not so much the result of differences in language as in culture. This is shown, for example, by the fact that also the Aymara locate the future behind their backs and the past in front of them. The Aymara are a people that lives in the Andes highlands of Bolivia, Peru and Chile and their language, also called Aymara, is not related to the Greek language. The Aymara view on past and future has been investigated by the American cognitive scientist Rafael Nunez. In the Aymara language, for example, “nayra” means “eye,” “front” or “sight” in the first place but also “past”. Moreover, “qhipa”, which means “back” or “behind” in the first place, is also used for “future”. So “nayra mara”, which means “last year”, literally means “front year”. That the Aymara locate the future behind their backs and the past in front of themselves is supported by the gestures they make when speaking: They indicate space behind themselves when speaking of the future by thumbing or waving over their shoulders and they indicate 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. The Aymara gestures fit the way they speak.
It seems so obvious: The future is in front of us and the past is behind our backs. It’s such a general phenomenon that once linguists and culture scientists thought that everybody sees it this way. However, as we have just seen, thus mapping the future is a cultural phenomenon and not something “given”. Ignoring this may have profound consequences. “This cultural, cognitive-linguistic difference could have contributed,” so Nunez, “to the conquistadors’ disdain of the Aymara as shiftless – uninterested in progress or going ‘forward’.” If we see the future in front of us, it can lead to an activistic attitude. What we see is what we can grasp and change, or at least we can face it. What we don’t know, for instance because it is behind our backs, we can only ignore or accept. We cannot influence it. How we see the world makes how we act. But we can also learn another lesson from what I have written above: What is obvious for us need not be so for someone else. It’s good to realize this when you meet another person, especially if he or she is from another culture. And in the end, it’s not illogical to locate the future behind your backs and so out of sight. For who can see and know the future? 

Sources
- “De toekomst ligt achter je in Griekenland”. Interview met Riemer Reinsma, https://radio1.be/luister/select/nieuwe-feiten/de-toekomst-ligt-achter-je-in-griekenland
- Jansen, Mathilde, “Aymara laten de toekomst achter zich”, 29 juni 2006, https://www.nemokennislink.nl/publicaties/aymara-laten-de-toekomst-achter-zich/
- Kiderra, Inga, “Backs to the future”, 12 June 2006, https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/archive/newsrel/soc/backsfuture06.asp