[Lingtyp] Two terminological quandaries for the price of one: 'traditional' and 'non-Western' cultures

Mon Jun 2 04:19:28 UTC 2025

Dear Jocelyn – Yes, I can see that. (I received the same question off-list from Dan Slobin.)

The two concepts are relevant to distinct projects, so I’ll discuss them again separately.

A central finding of the MesoSpace project is that preferences for relative reference frames (in both language and nonverbal cognition) have only been attested in large-scale post-industrial societies.* The question is, how do I refer to the complement set of populations, the one for which existing quantitative studies have found a prevalence of allocentric frames?

(* – Recently, an interesting partial exception to this generalization has surfaced: Ogelo & Bylund 2024 report that Dholuo speakers prefer intrinsic frames for featured grounds (grounds with distinctive parts that permit the assignment intrinsic ‘front’/‘back’/‘side’ terms), but relative frames for unfeatured grounds. This is to my knowledge the first such study that has systematically compared frame use with featured and unfeatured grounds. We do know from previous work (Levinson 1994; Levy 1994) that even populations with a clear geocentric bias rely on relative frames for meronym assignment to unfeatured grounds (conversely, no communities have ever been attested in which meronym assignment is done geocentrically).

Meanwhile, the Causality Across Languages<https://causalityacrosslanguages.wordpress.com/> project has interfaced with a research tradition in Social Psychology that contrasts ‘sociocentric’ and ‘egocentric’ concepts of personhood. (The claim of interest is that the nexus b/w causal attribution and intentionality is culture-specific, and at the very least weaker in sociocentric communities than in egocentric ones.) The problem for me is that in this tradition, it is often tacitly or explicitly assumed that ‘Western’ cultures are ‘egocentric’ and ‘non-Western’ cultures ‘sociocentric.’ Consider for example Foley (1997: 266) (with apologies to Bill Foley, whose excellent book I’ve used for 20 years to teach Ling Anth):

“The egocentric individualist concept of the person in Western culture is in marked contrast to that of many traditional cultures. These cultures have a sociocentric, context dependent conception of personhood (Shweder and Bourne 1984).”

(As a bonus, in this quote we also get the further equation of ‘non-Western’ with ‘traditional’.)

But even if I want to criticize such equations (if only as empirically at best premature), it seems that I have to find a way of talking about the types of cultural communities involved.

Thanks! – Juergen

Foley, W. A. (1997). Anthropological linguistics: An introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Levinson, S. C. (1994). Vision, shape, and linguistic description: Tzeltal body-part terminology and object description. In S. C. Levinson & J. B. Haviland (eds.), Space in Mayan languages. Special issue of Linguistics 32 (4): 791-856.

Levy, P. (1994). How shape becomes grammar: On the semantics of part morphemes in Totonac. Working Paper 29, Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Ogelo, A. & E. Bylund. (2024). Spatial frames of reference in Dholuo. Language Sciences (104). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2024.101614

Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
Professor, Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645 0127
Fax: (716) 645 3825
Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu<mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>
Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/

Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID 585 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)

There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
(Leonard Cohen)
--

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Jocelyn Aznar via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Friday, May 30, 2025 at 17:12
To: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Two terminological quandaries for the price of one: 'traditional' and 'non-Western' cultures
Dear everyone,

Somehow, it seems to me that the issue is to try to subsume societies
with different situations and histories into one category, an endeavor
that can only lead to either misrepresent many societies, or not really
tell anything interesting. So I don't see any "one solution for every
situation", as many terms mentioned previously in this discussion can be
relevant depending on the specific interrogation/research question at hand.

But perhaps the question should be more about the context associated
with this inquiry? Is there a research question, or at least some more
context, associated with this terminological issue? Maybe then can we
suggest terms that could represent and distinguish properly the
societies/communities in this given context.

Best,
Jocelyn

Le 30/05/2025 à 18:54, Martin Haspelmath via Lingtyp a écrit :
> I have encountered a similar problem, when trying to talk about "non-
> LOL" (or "non-WISPy") languages, where I have sometimes used the label
> "small languages".
>
> This does not sound very good, but "minor(ity) languages" is much worse,
> I think, because many minority languages are not small at all (e.g.
> Catalan in Spain, or Tatar in Russia, or Spanish in the US). Moreover,
> there seems to have been a general shift to "minoritized languages",
> which has additional overtones.
>
> For languages, "traditional" does not work at all, because all languages
> have a tradition. For societies, it may work, but it has an association
> with "non-industrialized", "marginalized" and "poor".
>
> However, I really didn't understand what Juegen was getting at – because
> in Asia and Africa, there are big industrialized societies which are not
> of European descent.
>
> But if we are looking for a term for "small-scale [indigenous]
> communities practicing predominantly non-industrial (or pre-industrial)
> modes of production in non-urban settings", why not simply say "small-
> scale societies"? It seems that industrialized and urban societies would
> never be considered small-scale, and Western countries hardly include
> such societies, so maybe we can simply talk about "small-scale
> societies"? (Most of these speak "small languages", but there are some
> "small languages" spoken in urban/industrial settings.)
>
> Best,
>
> Martin
>
> On 30.05.25 03:40, Juergen Bohnemeyer via Lingtyp wrote:
>>
>> Dear all – I really need your help with this! I’ve been struggling for
>> quite some time now with the terms ‘traditional culture/society’ and
>> ‘(non-)Western culture/society’. Both concepts play significant roles
>> in my work, but both labels seem problematic. I’m looking for better
>> alternatives. (If you want to call this query an exercise in political
>> correctness, I would plead guilty to the charge. I do try to avoid
>> offending people unintentionally.)
>>
>> Let me briefly try to explicate the concepts that I have been using
>> these labels for:
>>
>> ‘Traditional cultures/societies’: Small-scale indigenous communities
>> practicing predominantly non-industrial (or pre-industrial) modes of
>> production in non-urban settings. By ‘small-scale’, I mean that
>> stratification is predominantly in terms of age and gender, division
>> of labor is low, and offices of power are largely non-hereditary. By
>> ‘indigenous’, I mean pragmatically that the presence of the community
>> in the area they inhabit is not an immediate result of European
>> colonization. And the concept needs to be flexible enough to allow for
>> the fact that the overwhelming majority of such communities are part
>> of larger majority societies, are in more or less intensive contact
>> with them, are under pressure by them, etc.
>>
>> I suspect that objections to the label ‘traditional’ may be the result
>> of associating that label with Social Darwinism. At the same time, I
>> find the label acceptable to the extent that one accepts that modes of
>> production, while not following a strict developmental sequence, are
>> not distributed randomly throughout human history either, particularly
>> in the sense that industrialization did not take place prior to the
>> Industrial Revolution. So what I’m looking for is a label that
>> occupies the sweet spot between Social Darwinism and completely
>> ahistoric and non-evolutionary perspectives of social organization.
>>
>> The sexiest currently available alternative to ‘traditional’ is ‘non-
>> WEIRD’, in the Heinrich-et-al.-(2010) sense of ‘WEIRD’ (Western
>> educated industrialized rich democratic). I don’t personally mind
>> using that term, but it is awfully vague. There are many developing
>> nations that I would not consider WEIRD (they may check neither of the
>> five definitional properties), but that do not globally fit the
>> ‘traditional’ concept either.
>>
>> ‘(Non-)Western cultures/societies’: By this I mean any cultures/
>> societies of (non-)European origin/descent. The problem with the label
>> ‘Western’ is the very misleading geographic association with the
>> Western hemisphere: the vast majority of Europe isn’t even part of the
>> Western hemisphere, and there are ‘Western’ societies (societies of
>> European descent) outside Europe **and** outside the Western
>> hemisphere, **and** of course there are many ‘non-Western’ cultures in
>> the Western hemisphere. I’m well aware that the etymology of this use
>> of ‘Western’ has little to do with the model of the geographic
>> hemispheres, but my sense is that people make the association whether
>> it belongs there or not – I know I do.
>>
>> I suspect the best solution to the second problem is to just talk
>> about ‘cultures/societies of (non-)European origin/descent’. That’s a
>> mouthful, but sooner or later somebody will coin a handy acronym. But
>> I wanted to make sure I’m not missing anything.
>>
>> Anyway, many thanks in advance for your help! – Juergen
>>
>> Juergen Bohnemeyer (He/Him)
>> Professor, Department of Linguistics
>> University at Buffalo
>>
>> Office: 642 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
>> Mailing address: 609 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260
>> Phone: (716) 645 0127
>> Fax: (716) 645 3825
>> Email: jb77 at buffalo.edu <mailto:jb77 at buffalo.edu>
>> Web: http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jb77/ <http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/
>> ~jb77/>
>>
>> Office hours Tu/Th 3:30-4:30pm in 642 Baldy or via Zoom (Meeting ID
>> 585 520 2411; Passcode Hoorheh)
>>
>> There’s A Crack In Everything - That’s How The Light Gets In
>> (Leonard Cohen)
>>
>> --
>>
>>
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