Date: 29-Aug-2008
From: Rick Nouwen <rick.nouwenlet.uu.nl>
Subject: Anthropology of Color
E-mail this message to a friend
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/18/18-3740.html
EDITORS: MacLaury, Robert; Paramei, Galina; Dedrick, DonTITLE: Anthropology of ColorSUBTITLE: Interdisciplinary multilevel modelingPUBLISHER: John Benjamins Publishing CompanyYEAR: 2007
Rick Nouwen, Utrecht Institute for Linguistics, Utrecht University
SUMMARYColor naming and categorization is a hugely cross-disciplinary field of inquiry,combining anthropological, linguistic and psychological research efforts. Thisis a collected volume of papers on color naming research that seeks to dojustice to the interdisciplinary character of the color naming discussion. Atthe same time, it tries to bring together contributions from various corners ofthe world. In particular, one of the ideas behind the volume was to bridge thegap between Western European and North American research traditions and thelarge body of Eastern European and Russian literature on color categorization.The idea for the book came from Robert E. MacLaury, first editor for the volumeand a well-respected authority on all parts of this complex field. MacLaury diedin 2004, well before the volume was finished. The book is dedicated to his memory.
Mention color naming, and Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's seminal work _Basic colorterms: their universality and evolution_ (1969) immediately springs to mind.Berlin and Kay argued, against linguistic relativism, that the naming of coloris not arbitrary but rather subject to universal constraints that find theirorigin in perception. They presented a model representing a set of fixedevolutionary stages for which basic colors are encoded in a language. In manyways, Berlin and Kay's book constitutes a landmark study and a lot of thesubsequent work on color categorization can be seen as building on or reactingto its proposed model. To a certain extent, this volume pays similar respect. Infact, of the twenty-six contributions in the book, only four do not refer toBerlin and Kay's book. At the same time, however, it goes beyond the traditionset by Berlin and Kay. Many contributions address the issues raised by them onlyindirectly or marginally.
The collection consists of three parts: one on color perception, one on colorcognition and one on color semiosis.
Part I: Perception
Part I starts off with a survey article on hue categorization and color namingby Marc Bornstein. He addresses a reconciliation of an apparent universalcategorization of hues with an overwhelming diversity in color naming,emphasizing the role of physiological processes.
In their paper ''Individual and population differences in focal colors'', MichaelWebster and Paul Kay turn to the observation that despite the universalstructural consistency of how languages categorize colors, there seems to bequite a lot of variation in color naming on an individual basis within a singlelanguage. Webster and Kay argue that such inter-individual variability cannot betaken as evidence for linguistic relativity, arguing in contrast that thevariability itself might have aspects of universality to it. The differencesbetween individuals in a population are suggested to be the result of ratherweak constraints on color categories, which opens up the possibility ofcontextual influences on color naming.
Olga Safuanova and Nina Korzh turn to non-basic, compound and modified Russiancolor terms and investigate the area of the color space such terms are mappedto. Russian is interesting since it potentially constitutes an exception toBerlin and Kay's basic color theory by having two basic terms for `blue'. One ofthese blues, 'goluboj', although treated by native speakers of Russian as basic,has certain characteristics of a non-basic term. In her paper ''Russian'blues''', Galina Paramei addresses the issue whether 'goluboj' is basic or notand concludes that there is more and more evidence for two basic terms for blue.Paramei comes to this conclusion on the basis of developmental data and theresults of several behavioural tasks.
Roger Schoentag and Barbara Schaefer-Priess survey the work of the Germanophthalmologist Hugo Magnus, who, in the second part of the 19th century,pioneered the study of the relation between color perception and color naming.Schoentag and Schaefer-Priess argue that the work of Magnus bears an interestingsimilarity to Berlin and Kay's evolutionary approach.
Part II: Cognition
Part II starts with a paper by the late Robert MacLaury on a color category thatexists in over sixty percent of all languages and involves speakers combiningdesaturation and complexity in the color space. The paper presents a historicoverview of research into desaturated-complex color and presents three levels ofmodeling it: a sensorial, perception and cognition model. The latter is couchedin MacLaury's Vantage Theory, which relates color categorization not just toperception, but moreover to cognitive viewpoints (or vantages).
Seija Kerttula investigates the diachronic development of English color termsshowing support for universal development as well as suggestions that thisdevelopment is subject to cultural intervention (as e.g. the influence of (the)French after the Norman Conquest of 1066). The data discussed by Kerttula arepresented in the light of an idea of ''relative basicness'', where how basic aterm is is mapped to a degree based on a number of parameters (such as frequencyand derivational productivity). According to Kerttula, such relative measureshelp to isolate universal trends from historical influences. Kerttula moreoverdiscusses Finnish (which differs from English in not having had a French influence.)
Carole Biggam discusses various senses of brightness in the color namingliterature and makes a plea for less ambiguity, based on writings about thenotion of brightness in Old English color.
The remainder of Part II contains an amazing diversity of studies, focusing ondifferent language classes from different eras. A common theme in many of thesepapers is the presentation of an extremely detailed description of colorcategorization in a (class of) language(s), which is then related to moretheoretical literature (in particular the evolutionary picture as presented byBerlin and Kay). Vilja Oja's paper gives a detailed discussion of color namingin Estonian and its cognate languages. In ''color terms in ancient Egyptian andCoptic'', Wolfgang Schenkel presents an overview of his work on Egyptian andCoptic. In ''Basic color term evolution in light of ancient evidence from thenear east'', David Warburton turns to ancient languages and relates the(potentially conflicting) data they yield to Berlin and Kay's universalistevolutionary theory. Maria Bulakh turns to Old Ethiopic and surveys thetransition of its basic color terms from the color term system of Proto-Semitic.Alexander Borg presents a (partly historic) overview of color categorization incolloquial Arabic. In James Stanlaw's paper we find another example of acomparison of an extremely fine-grained data set with Berlin and Kay's model.Stanlaw's ''Japanese color terms, from 400CE to the present'' presents evidencefrom early Japanese that is problematic to this model. Rather than denouncingBerlin and Kay's theory, Stanlaw suggests that such data indicate the complexityof color and its cognitive and socio-cultural interactions.
The penultimate article in part II is by Albert Heinrich. This is one of themore obscure papers in the volume. It was written in 1974, but never properlypublished (nor, apparently, presented). This rather short work presents adescription of color terms in a form of Alemannisch spoken in Colonia Tovar, anethnically distinct community in Venezuela.
Finally, Theraphan L-Thongkum focuses on the Mien language (as spoken innorthern Thailand). This is yet another case where the data found are mostly,yet not fully, compatible with the evolutionary stages as presented in Berlinand Kay's influential model.
Part III: Semiosis
Gunnar Bergh turns to the (recent) historical development of (Swedish) carcolor names, from short terms like plain ''blue'' to longer and more complexexpressions like ''Parisian blue metallic'', and inquires into the reasons behindthis development. The somewhat shallow conclusion from a corpus survey ofexisting car color names is that the longer expressions serve both a descriptivefunction and a function of strengthening positive associations that come with acolor (''jazz blue'', ''magic grey'').
Another corpus study is presented by Anders Steinvall, who investigatedoccurrence patterns of color terms and emotion expressions. One finding is thatconceptualization is to a considerable extent of an embodied nature, as is forinstance illustrated by the use of facial color for expressing emotion.
Ekaterina Rakhilina turns to Russian color names and investigates them in termsof their nontrivial ''combinability'' with nouns. Alena Anishchanka analyzes theuse of color words in descriptions of paintings and observes a frequentnominalization of (both basic and non-basic) color terms. The descriptions ofpaintings, in other words, contain references to colors as if they wereentities. In Brent Galloway's paper, the color terms of Halkomelen (a centralSalish language) are studied in terms of metaphorical cognitive models. Anotherpaper rooted in cognitive linguistics is by Lyudmila Popovic, and addresses theuse of color terms in Slavic folklore. Dessislava Stoeva-Holm turns to colorterms in (German) fashion magazines and observes that basic color terms have ahigh frequency, because of their versatility of use. Irenea Vankova turns to howcolor is used in the Czech conceptualization, with special focus on the coloringof the human face. Liudmila Samarina investigates the role of age and gender incolor categorization, on the basis of data from Caucasus languages. The mainresult is that the elderly and the females have a tendency to use descriptivecolor terms (such as ''the color of a pigeon's neck'').
The final paper of the volume is by Barbara Saunders. This is a deep reflectionon color science in general and color anthropology in particular, and a critiqueon the program of color categorization as it has been since the invention ofevolutionary model of Berlin and Kay.
EVALUATIONThis is a very rich book, grouping together fields such as anthropology,cognitive psychology, psychonomy, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitivelinguistics, corpus linguistics and history and philosophy of science. As such,it gives an insight in an incredibly complex field.
I wonder, however, whether the book is in some sense not just too excessivelymulti-disciplinary. Although there are many first rate articles in this book, Ifelt that as a collected volume, the book lacked coherence. The main problem isthat there is simply no common research question. The volume presents anexcellent overview of the broadness and complexity of the field, but at times Iwished for a more focused and inter-connected collection of papers. Related tothis is the fact that I failed to see the philosophy behind the book's threeparts. Especially part 2, ''color cognition'', fails to coherently emphasizecognitive aspects of color categorization. This is mainly due to the largenumber of papers in this part of the book offering descriptive studies of anequally large variety of languages. Sure, these papers have a theoretical sideto them as well, and links to cognition are made. However, the main emphasishardly seems to be color cognition. The idea behind part 3 containing lots ofpapers of the ''use'' of color terms is somewhat clearer. Still, here there is anenormous divide between, on the one hand, the cognitive linguistic studies of,say, Brent Galloway, Lyudmila Popovic and Irena Vankova, and on the other thephilosophy of anthropology of Barbara Saunders.
Perhaps, critique along these lines simply ignores the main goal of this volume,namely to collect work from the full diversity of viewpoints on coloranthropology. For those linguists who are familiar with little more than Berlinand Kay's pioneering work, it will be difficult to cope with the enormousdiversity of topics, but at the same time this book will be a treasure ofalternative approaches, additional data and competing models. My guess is thatfor the average linguist interested in categorization (and not particularly incolor) this work is a great asset and that s/he will easily forgive the lack ofstructure. Maybe such linguists should treat this book as a collection ofvolumes. For instance, the language diversity papers in part 2 form a coherentand interesting set of studies. Similarly, the cognitive (and corpus) linguisticstudies in part 3 share a single focus.
On a completely different note, one critical remark on the book's layout is inorder. There is a total lack of section numbering in this book: chapters,sections, subsections are all merely accompanied with a title. This makes itsometimes difficult to get familiar with the structure of an article, especiallysince the only difference between sections and subsections is a hard to spotdifference in weight of the font.
To sum up, this volume is an impressively diverse collection and a testimony ofwhat (forgive the pun) a colorful field color categorization is.
REFERENCES:Berlin, Brent and Paul Kay. (1969) _Basic color terms: their universality andevolution_. Berkeley: University of California Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Rick Nouwen is a post-doctoral researcher at the Utrecht Institute forLinguistics OTS.
|