Comments on: Language, Culture, and Color: A Visit with the Himba

By: Holmheltz

Holmheltz — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Brains, words, concepts, seeing and telling. No activities, no experience. Standard Cartesian cognitive story. It must be the language. What difference those colors make in their activities does not seem to be as interesting as their words. Whether they color stuff, whether they communicate while coloring stuff does not seem to matter.

By: Vadim McNab

Vadim McNab — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 19:28:00 +0000

My, what a primitive people.

Must be fun to make documentaries about them.

By: Spekatie

Spekatie — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:53:00 +0000

It’s called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, if you wish to read up on it…

By: SociologicalMe

SociologicalMe — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 16:58:00 +0000

This is so incredibly fascinating! I loved this video.

By: PinkWithIndignation

PinkWithIndignation — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 22:04:00 +0000

@PinkWithIndignation:disqus Forgot to add that they switched it from the first closeup of the circle to the other shots from left in the second row down from the top to right on the second row down from the top. I don’t think I am wrong, but let me know if I am- even I can’t believe I saw it so fast and was right!

By: PinkWithIndignation

PinkWithIndignation — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 21:56:00 +0000

I instantly picked out the first different green color. I wonder if it helps that I work with a lot of subtle color variations in crafts? Or maybe it’s just that I am good at spotting details?

By: Pinkiebunnie

Pinkiebunnie — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 21:54:00 +0000

This was fascinating. I would like to see more things that, like this, show the effects of language and culture on perception.

By: Tusconian

Tusconian — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Yes it is, but if that was the only point, the example “we would call the sky and water blue” points to the same conclusion as the last post on this topic, that people perceive colors differently based on those categories (the example was a little girl who referred to a blue, cloudless sky as “white”). The video explains that every word they use for color includes what we would define as more than one color, but they translate each of the person’s answers as one specific color, and more importantly, as different than our supposed perception of those items. That exchange seems to be very much based on shallow assumptions both about Western perception and the Himba words for colors that had just been explained to not immediately correlate with our words. They translate the man describing the color of the sky as “black” but he uses a word that includes “blue.” They translate a man describing a pot of water as “white,” then say that English-speakers would describe it as blue, when I suspect that both would actually describe it as “colorless” or “very light colored.” That supports one of the videos points, but not in the way that they expect. The point of that exercise is to imply that their “shorthand” for colors in different cultures is different, but all I really saw was the language being different and the guys asking the questions and translating as missing the speaker’s implications.

By: Will Robertson

Will Robertson — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 08:32:00 +0000

Glad you liked the video! I think it is an amazing example of the effects of language on perception. =)

By: Bernardo Soares

Bernardo Soares — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 06:20:00 +0000

I have to say I was baffled at the description of the Namibian sky as “black”. When I went to Namibia for the first time, one of the things that struck me was the deep blue of the sky (which, most of the time, is totally clear, with very few clouds.) It seldom rains in Namibia, which, because of a cold ocean current, has a very particular climate.
It seems to me that this is rather a matter of translation. The Himba word for dark colours does not mean just “Black”, but includes the deep blue of the Namibian sky. So the guy didn’t actually say that the sky was black.

By: Clinttt_smt

Clinttt_smt — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 02:58:00 +0000

I think the point of those questions in the beginning was to demonstrate that the languages form different categories, not to point out that the tribe thinks that the sky is “black” and water is “white.”

By: Tusconian

Tusconian — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 22:52:00 +0000

Good point. Western society has a lot of shorthand for the colors of objects that most of us do not take as literal. If you ask a 4 year old to draw a picture of the ocean, they will color it blue, but if you show them a river and asked them what color it was, they’d likely say “brown” or “green,” and if you showed them an amount of clean water smaller than an Olympic-sized swimming pool, they’d call it “clear.” I’d say it’s more likely that the Himba words for “clear” or “colorless” and “white” are the same word, or not really relevant to discern, than it is that the Himba see water and milk as the same color. Similar is your example of the sky. If you asked me right now, at 4 PM, what color the sky was, I would say “blue.” If you ask me in a few hours, I’d say “dark blue.” If I spoke a language with fewer color categories, “dark blue” and “black” might be counted under the same word.

By: Japaniard

Japaniard — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 21:08:00 +0000

Also, the sky is black more often than it is blue (while cloud cover on an overcast day may make the sky appear grey, the sky is black every single night, so a full 50% of the time) and while still water has no color, boiling water most certainly appears white (for the same reason that snow appears white).

Though none of this takes away from the final experiment, where two colors that are very close together in terms of their wavelengths can look drastically different or almost identical depending on whether they cross the arbitrary lines language uses to differentiate between different color categories.

By: Japaniard

Japaniard — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 20:39:00 +0000

Saying that westerners think water is blue isn’t really an accurate statement. I don’t know anybody that looks at a glass or teapot full of water and thinks “That is blue”. Large bodies of water (whose observed color is influenced by the reflection from the sky above) don’t seem to be something the Himba tribe interact with frequently, so it would be very shocking if they said the water we saw in the pot was blue (be it zoozu borou)