Heart- and Soul-Like Constructs across Languages, Cultures, and Epochs

Bert Peeters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351720038
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

All languages and cultures appear to have one or more "mind-like" constructs that supplement the human body. Linguistic evidence suggests they all have a word for someone, and another word for body, but that doesn't mean that whatever else makes up a human being (i.e. someone) apart from the body is the same everywhere. Nonetheless, the (Anglo) mind is often reified and thought of in universal terms. This volume adds to the literature that denounces such reification. It looks at Japanese, Longgu (an Oceanic language), Thai, and Old Norse-Icelandic, spelling out, in a culturally neutral Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), how the "mind-like" constructs in these languages differ from the Anglo mind.

1Delving into Heart- and Soul-Like Constructs

Describing EPCs in NSM

Bert Peeters

1 Delving into Heart- and Soul-Like Constructs

As a child growing up in Belgium, I was taught to sing the Belgian national anthem. Being Flemish, I was taught the Flemish version, which starts as follows:

O dierbaar België, o heilig land der vaad’ren,

Onze ziel en ons hart zijn u gewijd […]

Little did I know that, 50 years on, and 30 years after migrating to Australia, I would find these words, which I have translated at the end of the paragraph, extremely helpful as a way into this introductory chapter on “heart- and soul-like constructs” (a label that is intended to cover “mind-like constructs” as well). Because that is exactly what ziel and hart in the second line are: ziel is usually translated as ‘soul’, and hart as ‘heart’, but neither can be deemed, without thorough verification, to be identical in meaning to either soul or heart, even though upon closer examination they may well turn out to be. Ziel is a “soul-like construct”, like Seele in German, sjæl in Danish, âme in French, duša (душа) in Russian, etc. Hart, in its nonphysical meaning, is a “heart-like construct”, like Herz in German, hjerte in Danish, cœur in French, serdce (сердце) in Russian, etc. The second line of the Flemish version of the Belgian national anthem says something like this: ‘Our soul and our heart are devoted to you’ – you being the ‘cherished Belgium, the holy land of the fathers’ referred to in the first line.

The phrase something like this is crucial: ziel and hart, soul and heart, are not entities that are out there (or rather “in there”), lending themselves to direct observation, detailed measurement, and minute comparison. The word that was used just now is construct: they are constructs, cultural constructs, not made with tools and tangible materials. The names we set aside for those cultural constructs are part of the psychological vocabulary of present-day Dutch and present-day English, respectively.

1.1 Ethnopsychological Words and Constructs

Words that are part of the psychological vocabulary of a language are generally speaking unique to that language, even though, semantically speaking, they may well be closely related to similar-sounding words in neighbouring languages. We might call them, for that very reason, “ethnopsychological words”, and the constructs they name are “ethnopsychological constructs”.

In the published transcript of a lecture delivered at the end of 2016 at an international forum on Cognitive Linguistics in Beijing, the Australian linguist Cliff Goddard (2018: 168) describes ethno- psychological words as follows:

Words that we call ethnopsychological are basically words for parts of a person: not the physical body, but the inside. In English, we have the word mind, it’s a very English-specific word actually. Russian does not have a word for ‘mind’, not really, but Russian has its word duša, a very famous word [that means] something like “soul”. […] Chinese has xīn 心, Japanese kokoro, Korean maum. These words are not equivalent to one another.

Mind is arguably the English language’s most salient ethnopsychological word; it refers to the most important nonphysical part of a person, at least from an Anglo point of view,¹ followed by heart, spirit, and soul – though not necessarily in that order. Duša is probably just as salient for the Russians, xīn 心 for the Chinese, kokoro for the Japanese, and maum for the Koreans, but that does not make them identical, as Goddard rightly stresses. They are in fact different, very different.

Anthropologists, on the other hand, talk not about ethnopsychological words but about ethnopsychological categories or constructs, which are of course the categories or constructs behind the words. The terms have been around for a while; one linguist who, over the course of her readings of the work of several anthropologists of the 1980s, came across the terms and has since adopted them in her own publications is Goddard’s colleague and close collaborator Anna Wierzbicka, whose name – together with Goddard’s – is synonymous with the “Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach”, usually abridged to “NSM” or “NSM approach” (in this book, to distinguish the metalanguage from the approach that takes its name, we will use compounds such as the latter; for details, see Section 3). Wierzbicka (1989) may well be the first paper by a linguist to use the term ethnopsychological category, which the author appears to have borrowed from Schieffelin (1985). Several other scholars are mentioned, but it is a footnote of Schieffelin’s, in which he draws attention to “the problem of the reification of essentially Western ethnopsychological categories that are then taken as the conceptual foundation of scientific inquiry” (Schieffelin, 1985: 127), that she quotes (Wierzbicka, 1989: 46).² The expanded 1992 version of Wierzbicka’s paper also refers to “ethnopsychological categories and constructs”; this is probably where, as far as the NSM approach is concerned, the origins of the term ethnopsychological construct lie.

From Wierzbicka’s writings, the term ethnopsychological construct spread into other NSM literature, where it has been used by several authors turning their attention to mind-, heart-, and soul-like words in a host of other languages (see Appendix A). Ethnopsychological construct is now an established term in NSM circles – much more so than ethnopsychological word, ethnopsychological concept, ethnopsychological entity, or ethnopsychological term, none of which are as commonly used. They are all interchangeable, though. In Goddard’s (2015: 387) definition, for instance, ethnopsychological constructs are “nominal expressions [emphasis added, B.P.] designating non-physical parts of a person, akin to English mind, heart, soul, and spirit”. Defining a construct as a nominal expression is tantamount to blurring the boundaries between word and concept, which is not always good practice; however, it does not matter much here since the focus is not so much on form as on meaning.

Strangely enough, among linguists, only NSM practitioners, as they have come to call themselves,³ seem to be using the term ethnopsychological construct. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Sharifian et al. (2008), a watershed volume on ethnopsychological constructs approached from a linguistic point of view, in which the subset of authors using the NSM approach (Goddard, 2008; Yoon, 2008) corresponds rigorously to the subset of authors using the term ethnopsychological construct.

1.2 Personhood Constructs

There is another term that has found favour in NSM circles, particularly in the latest writings of Danish linguist Carsten Levisen. Levisen talks about personhood constructs, a term that clearly corresponds to the ethnopsychological constructs of other NSM authors. Indeed, for Levisen (2017: 123), personhood is a

terminological shortcut for semantic concepts in natural languages which meet the following criteria: they all conceptualize (or reify) something and this something is a part of a person, but which cannot be seen by people, and often stands in contrast to the body.

Thus, in a co-authored paper (Levisen & Jogie, 2015: 169), he investigates the “personhood construct mind in Trinidadian creole” and refers to some recent studies on “Japanese, Malay, Korean, and Thai personhood constructs” that have “further questioned the Anglophone stronghold of ‘the mind’” (ibid.: 170); Levisen (2017), on the other hand, deals with personhood constructs in the author’s own language, Danish.

The term personhood enjoys a certain popularity among philosophers (Torchia, 2007; Palmquist, 2010) and those who straddle the boundary between psychology and philosophy (Scott, 1990; Harré, 1998), but it is not clear who has been Levisen’s primary source of inspiration. What is clear, though, is that personhood constructs, like ethnopsychological constructs, are cultural, linguistic, and conceptual in nature (Levisen, 2017: 120–121).

1.3 Ethnopsychological Personhood Constructs

The editor of and contributors to the current volume do not, for a number of reasons, refer to “ethnopsychological constructs” (or “categories”), nor to “personhood constructs”, but they want to have a foot in each camp, so to speak, and they talk about “ethnopsychological personhood constructs” or EPCs. The term ethnopsychological is retained because we want to acknowledge the work done in this area by ethnopsychologists such as Dorothy Holland, Catherine Lutz, Michelle Rosaldo, Edward Schieffelin, and Geoffrey White, to name but a few. With the term personhood, we want to salute the work carried out within the NSM approach by Carsten Levisen, who prefers the noun personhood to the adjective ethnopsychological; at the same time, we want to clarify that emotions, for instance, which on the face of it also qualify as ‘ethnopsychological constructs’, are not our main focus (even though it is impossible to talk about personhood constructs without at the same time touching on culturally specific emotions). Finally, we want to refer to constructs because, although it may seem like a minor terminological distraction, that term is arguably doing a better job than the term category at highlighting culture-specificity, something the prefix ethno- is supposed to emphasize as well.

2 Reification and Anglocentrism

If words such as mind, duša, xīn, kokoro, and maum, to limit ourselves to the examples in Goddard’s (2018) definition of ethnopsychological words, are so different, how can we mak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Delving into Heart- and Soul-Like Constructs: Describing EPCs in NSM
• 2 Inochi and Tamashii: Incursions into Japanese Ethnopsychology
• 3 Longgu: Conceptualizing the Human Person from the Inside Out
• 4 Tracing the Thai ‘Heart’: The Semantics of a Thai Ethnopsychological Construct
• 5 Exploring Old Norse-Icelandic Personhood Constructs with the Natural Semantic Metalanguage
• Contributors