Conference announcement: "Language of Spirituality (Native American languages) -- Albuquerque, July 2001

[Scott McGinnis]

Date:  Sun, 06 May 2001 15:39:54 -0700
From:  Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalford at haywire.csuhayward.edu>
Subject:  3rd ABQ "Language of Spirituality" Bohmian Dialogue

     Third International Albuquerque Science Dialogue: July 6-8. 2001
       on the Language of Spirituality and the Spirits of Languages

Join us in early July as intellectual and spiritual leaders from Turtle
Island and Down Under traditions, quantum physics, linguistics,
cosmology,
and other disciplines gather in Albuquerque, NM, to dialogue over three
days
in the tradition of David Bohm.

This year, in a continuation of the historic Bohmian Science Dialogues,
we
will dialogue about our continuing Southern Circle focus, The Language
of
Spirituality, with a sub-focus on The Spirits of Languages: Can
different
languages, which we may now see as complex fields that speakers are
inside
of and are also inside of speakers, be said to have different
"personalities" in the way they create a "world" and even "cosmos" for
their
speakers -- creating, in Sakej Henderson's term, different langscapes of
reality? This idea is 3-400 years old in Western thought (a favorite
topic
of linguistics founder W. von Humboldt) and is even applicable today to
mathematical and programming languages, each presenting a different
proscribed reality to its users, within which they think.

Should this be so, as we will discuss, then does each language to some
non-trivial degree shape the way you think while using that language?
When
we think in English about something, are we constrained in how we CAN
think?
Are other avenues (such as talking all day without using noun-phrases,
or
pictures in the head) thus closed off to us that can be overcome only by
shifting to thinking in another language? Are all languages the same,
just
different labels for the same things, or does each carve up or even
construct a reality for its users in some deeper, less obvious and more
profound way?

Current indigenous evidence points to whole Native American language
families, such as Algonkian, comprised of not pictures-in-the-head
languages
like we're used to but instead dynamic primes of process and
relationship
which evoke somatic meanings the way Sign does, and which fit anciently
into
an integrated system of sound, sign, and (written) symbol. The Slobinian
"thinking for speaking" for Algonkian languages must thus be drastically
different than for WIE languages such as English (though this claims
nothing
about other kinds of thinking).

Agreeing to attend this Dialogue as Inner Circle participants are: Leroy
Little Bear (Moderator: Blackfoot, educator/lawyer) and Amethyst First
Rider
(Blackfoot, educator), Sakej Youngblood Henderson (Cheyenne/Chickasaw,
educator/lawyer) and Marie Battiste (Mi'kmaw, educator), David Begay
(Dine',
educator) and Nancy Maryboy (Cherokee/Dine', educator), Lloyd and Joyce
Pinkham (WA River People, educators), Greg Cajete (Tewa, author), Joseph
Rael (Tiwa, author), Stan Knowlton (Blackfoot, educator), Roberto
Gonzales-Plaza (Brazil, educator) Polly Walker (Cherokee, educator),
Norm
Sheehan (Waradjuri, Tasmania, educator), Mary Graham (Australian
aboriginal
elder), Brian Josephson (Nobel Laureate physicist), John Erskine (former
D.O.E. physicist/administrator), Fred Alan Wolf (physicist/author),
Peter
Gold (author), Berney Williams (educator), Melanie Daily (Confucius
expert),
Matthew Bronson (linguist/educator), and Dan Moonhawk Alford
(Cherokee/Osage
linguist/educator).

See < http://www.seedopenu.org > for details and registration. You may
email
me with questions: moonhawk at mac.com. Outer Circle seating is limited.

warm regards, moonhawk
<moonhawk at mac.com> & <dalford at csuhayward.edu>
< http://www.sunflower.com/~dewatson/alfordIndex.htm >
< http://homepage.mac.com/moonhawk/FileSharing.html >