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like “A person should consider their own best interests,” where we sacrifice grammaticality for the hope of greater inclusion. Here we’re trying to affect culture with language. Causation is hard to prove, and it’s most likely that it goes both ways, at least in practice, so I won’t be dogmatic. But we will certainly shoot for patterns among the data presented here.

      We can see the possibility of using such cultural features as discovery procedures to search for corresponding grammatical features that encode these culturally key concepts. At the same time, if we observe lots of grammatical material related to a common theme, this certainly gives us cause to search for corresponding cultural aspects of such grammatical themes.

      Some concepts are coded subconsciously and automatically (grammatically) in a given language, while others must be articulated more analytically, in more piecemeal fashion, laying out for hearers just how a situation is to be understood. This reflects what the well-known linguist Charles Hockett said: “Languages differ not so much as to what can be said in them, but rather as to what it is relatively easy to say (because of its grammatical coding)” (1954:122, emphasis in original, parenthetical comment, WMC).

      In terms of causation—that culture “causes” language to be a certain way—Hale says, “It seems to me to be a matter of luck, a chance happening when a neat correspondence between World View-1 and a principle of grammar…is met with” (1986:237). Nevertheless, he says that part of our work as language and culture specialists is to search for just such correlations between World View-1 and World View-2. What is particularly difficult about finding or purporting any “neat correspondence” between language and culture is that it is extremely challenging to figure out any way to prove that there is causation involved, that language would cause a certain kind of cultural behavior, or a certain type of culture would cause the grammatical codification of a certain grammatical theme. There are so many variables. Humans are complex.

      Understanding causation has always been a goal in the human sciences, but being empirical about plumbing the depths of causation has been an ongoing challenge. Wierzbicka (1997) cuts through some of the haze here. She suggests that languages that have a word for ‘orange marmalade’ certainly have a cultural product by that name. It is not the case that language creates the product. Rather, culture members create or discover something that becomes meaningful to them and they need a way to talk about it. Culture comes first, then language. Language serves culture. Nevertheless, language then becomes the major tool that a culture uses to replicate itself, from its deepest values to its sweetest fruit concoctions. As Wierzbicka (1997:1) claims, “there is a very close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of the language spoken by it.” She agrees with Sapir and quotes him: “Vocabulary is a very sensitive index of the culture of a people” (cited in Mandelbaum 1949:27). Again, she quotes Sapir, “Language is a symbolic guide to culture” (ibid.:162). In other words, there is a connection, perhaps causal, but certainly considerable, between language and culture.

      As mentioned previously, this notion of a relationship or influence between the language that people speak and the daily life that they live is a notion usually attributed to Benjamin Whorf and his mentor, Edward Sapir, and is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

      Whorf claimed:

      …each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade…. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. (1940, reprinted in Carroll 1956: 212–213)

      The “categories and types” that he mentions here are cultural constructs that depend on the interaction of language and culture for their meaning. To affirm this idea, we need only consider Geertz’s discussion of the difference between a wink and a twitch, a difference I mentioned a few pages ago. Geertz says that the wink construct is the “speck of behavior” (the action itself) together with the meaning behind it, what he calls “a fleck of culture” (1973:6). Meaning is culture based. There is nothing about the physical act of the wink/twitch in and of itself that makes it meaningful. Indeed, one might easily assume that there are cultures where what we consider to be a volitional wink is utterly meaningless and therefore ignored as cultural detritus. It is rather the history of experiences with such behavior and the cultural contract or underlying agreement of those who have so interpreted it in the past that gives it meaning. The etics of behavior—what the camera sees (the physical twitch)—are important to us as outsiders trying to understand what is going on, but it is the emics—the meaning, the interpretation by locals (the wink, and all that it might mean)—that speaks to the relationship between language and culture. Whatever else we might say about the relationship, it is my position that the link between language and culture—or in the present case, between grammatical and cultural theme—is meaning based. I think Whorf would have agreed.7 He got this partly from his own study and observation and certainly in part from his mentor and teacher, Edward Sapir. In perhaps Sapir’s most oft-cited quote, he says:

      Though language is not ordinarily thought of as of essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully conditions all our thinking about social processes and problems. Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. (cited in Mandelbaum 1949:162)

      Harry Hoijer is the scholar perhaps most responsible for the post-World War II revived interest in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis after the two men’s early deaths, Sapir at 55 in 1939 and Whorf at only 44 years of age in 1941. In fact, it is most likely Hoijer who first coined the term the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Hoijer’s definition of the SWH is the observation that “language functions, not simply as a device for reporting experience, but also, and more significantly, as a way of defining experience for its speakers” (1954). Two readings of Whorf are possible. The first is that language determines the way we think about things, or, more subtly, that it determines the thoughts that are available to us. The second reading is that our language merely influences how we think. These two positions have come to be known as the strong version and the weak version of the SWH, respectively.8 And although both Sapir and Whorf are on record with statements that could be construed as deterministic, they often mitigated these strong statements in print and most certainly held the milder view, that of influence and not determinism. The SWH is often thought of in terms of how language potentially constrains thought, but from the outset, Hoijer saw it in more general terms—how language and culture interact.

      Hoijer and Mayanist Robert Redfield organized a conference in 1953 at the University of Chicago that brought together some of the leading linguists and anthropologists in the country with the idea of laying out just what was meant by the SWH, and how it can be sustained through linguistic analysis and cultural observation. Hoijer’s subsequent publication of the proceedings of that conference (1954:93) includes not only the papers presented, but the gist of the ensuing discussions as well. It is an outstanding resource for understanding the SWH in terms of how Sapir and Whorf’s friends and contemporaries understood it, and in these articles, we can see that they were trying to feed linguistic and cultural data “up” to a more general level in order to develop a larger encompassing theory of the interaction of language and culture. Nonetheless, even Whorf’s friends and colleagues found it difficult to pinpoint exactly what Whorf meant by linguistic relativity. Still, in the papers and discussions, several points were recurrent. First, that whatever

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