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In Aymara the past lies in front of us. Is that only a way of speaking, or a truer idea of time?

Lucía Mamani Contributor
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Time & spaceLatin AmericanMedieval Christian#andean-thought#aymara#memory#past-and-future
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Its coordinates: 1.4 Philosophy of Time · 1.4.1 Persistence and Change · 1.5 Philosophy of Space

In Aymara, the word nayra means eye, and front, and also the past. The past is ahead of you, because you can see it. What is coming is qhipa, behind, at your back, because nobody can see it. My grandmother pointed forward when she spoke of her mother's time, and jerked her thumb over her shoulder when she spoke of what might come.

I never found this strange until my grandson came home from school and said we have it "backwards".

At my night school a teacher gave me the part of Augustine's Confessions where he asks what time is. He says the past is no longer and the future is not yet, so what exists is a present of past things, which is memory, a present of present things, which is attention, and a present of future things, which is expectation. I liked this very much. But he still seems to walk forward into the future, like my grandson.

So my question: is the Aymara way only a way of speaking, like whether a map puts north at the top? Or does it say something true that the other way hides? I would like to hear from people who think both.

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3 answers

  1. Siobhán Keane

    Fellow

    I think Augustine would have enjoyed your grandmother more than your grandson.

    He doesn't actually commit himself to the picture of walking forward. His own example, near the end of Book XI, is reciting a psalm he knows. Before he starts, the whole psalm is in expectation; as he goes on, expectation shrinks and memory grows, until all of it has passed into memory. What is finished is what is held, laid out where the mind can survey it. What is not yet is only anticipated.

    That fits nayra rather well: the past is what the mind has in view. Where he would differ, I suspect, is that for him all three live in the mind, a "stretching" of the soul, while your grandmother seemed to be pointing at the world.

  2. Parisa Moghaddam

    Fellow

    I'll argue it is more than a way of speaking.

    In the edit suite the past is literally in front of me: every shot we have, laid out on the timeline, visible, rearrangeable. The future of the film is what I cannot see yet. Suspense in cinema comes from what is at the audience's back, so to speak.

    I also remember reading about linguists who filmed Aymara speakers some years ago and found that older speakers really did gesture forward for the past and behind for the future, not just in words but with their hands. When a way of speaking reaches the hands, it is probably a way of thinking too. What it gets right is the difference in knowledge: we have evidence about the past and none about the future.

  3. Derek Hollis

    Fellow

    Playing the skeptic a little, though I like Parisa's point about knowledge.

    English isn't consistent either. We say "the days ahead", but we also say "the generations before us", and "before" originally meant "in front of". Those who went before are ahead of us in the line, and they are in the past. So English already has a bit of nayra buried in it.

    My suggestion: each picture foregrounds a different true feature of time. The Aymara picture foregrounds what we can know. The walking-forward picture foregrounds which way we are carried and what we can still change. Neither is the backwards one. They are two maps of the same mountain, drawn for different journeys.