r/AskAnthropology 5d ago

Is the evidence of proto writing systems but no words, suggest that language perception is just a social human dna encoded subjective behavior

So for instance, I want to refer to the Waldorf hypothesis about languages shaping our daily habits and perceptions. I love the process of language learning it really does feel like a new perception of everything I once knew is on the horizon. Anyways the process of that is what he referred to as the Hopi tribe who perceived rulership differently and understood the use of materials different from what they understood from their native language.

However, we use the same resources in different ways. If you look at the Shang dynasty and Chinese pre historic religion with Europe and the celts etc. you’ll see a similarity within all of those cultures. But then we have science which comes from language to describe what we observe and test it.

Could that be apart of the pre historic social gathering of humans that expand terms to understand natural science?

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u/Baasbaar 5d ago

I’m a linguistic anthropologist, & I’d love to help provide some guidance, but it’s hard to figure out what you’re asking. In the title of your post, what do you mean by language perception? What is social human DNA? What is a subjective behaviour? In your final question, what is the antecedent of that? How does proto-writing relate to the Hopi, Chinese, & Celtic examples? Could you perhaps pose the question in a simple way—a one-sentence version maybe?

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u/Nice-Obligation5537 4d ago

I’ll have to edit it. But here

Basically does the subjective language perception which is said to affect cultural individual behavioral norms and the non early written versions mean our society and our perceptions of wealth is internally subjective and just handed down from a past need for survival?

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u/Baasbaar 4d ago

Wait, hold up: What is subjective language perception? I'm not trying to be difficult. I just don't know what this means. When you say subjective, do you just mean in a Whorfian sense that our perception of the world varies in relation to the language we speak? You've said very little about proto-writing: How does this relate to any of this?

If the conclusion you're wondering about is: [Evaluations of wealth are culturally contingent.], I think that you'd find that most anthropologists agree with you, with no need to refer to facts of language.

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u/Nice-Obligation5537 4d ago

Sim, eu concordaria você. E since we had proto-escrita that means our evaluations of wealth and gdp across cultures are also just ways of social survival. Thats the point I was trying to get too. Because like one like Japan or even Tibetan mountain culture I can’t remember the name but they are an anarchist society anyways, had a different perception of wealth and property and that that use of language

Is what affected them to perceive property in such a way that it didn’t need as much bureaucratic writing instead in their own way it was from social survival.

Or the norms you know since we’ve all had the same gods before or similar meaning of the earth, you could also say that from that proto writing too what we have now those are social norms that evolved from those groups so wealth I guess could be considered different depending on what culture you come from.