As for stones, the anthropologist Alfred Irving Hallowell worked with the Northern Ojibwa for very many years. Their language distinguishes grammatically between two kinds of nouns, which correspond roughly--but only roughly--to our notions of living versus non-living beings. And stones are treated grammatically as living beings in the Northern Ojibwa language.
So Hallowell reports that once he happened to ask an old Ojibwa man, "Are all the stones we see about us here alive?" The old man considered the question for a while, and replied, "No! But some are."
[Hollowell, "Ojibway Ontology, Behavior and World View" (1960).]
So even such distinctions as our own culture makes between living versus non-living, animate versus inanimate, are not self-evidentl, but are drawn differently by different cultures. And it is not merely an arbitrary grammatical difference between languages , but a difference in the perception of the world in which those speakers live. And I, for one, am not willing to say that "we" are right and all the others are "wrong." The Ojibwa, IMHO, do experience stones, or at least some stones, as living beings. This sort of thing impells me to be very humble about the special adequacy of our own world view.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2023-05-01 07:50 pm (UTC)So Hallowell reports that once he happened to ask an old Ojibwa man, "Are all the stones we see about us here alive?" The old man considered the question for a while, and replied, "No! But some are."
[Hollowell, "Ojibway Ontology, Behavior and World View" (1960).]
So even such distinctions as our own culture makes between living versus non-living, animate versus inanimate, are not self-evidentl, but are drawn differently by different cultures. And it is not merely an arbitrary grammatical difference between languages , but a difference in the perception of the world in which those speakers live. And I, for one, am not willing to say that "we" are right and all the others are "wrong." The Ojibwa, IMHO, do experience stones, or at least some stones, as living beings. This sort of thing impells me to be very humble about the special adequacy of our own world view.