An American Indian Model of the Universe

FIND IT gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often sup-posed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe pro-ceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past and into a future. After long and careful study and analysis the Hopi language is seen to con-tain no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer di-rectly to what we call time, or to past, present, or future, or to enduring or last-ing, or to motion as kinematic rather than dynamic (i.e. as a continuous trans-lation in space and time rather than as an exhibition of dynamic effort in a certain process) or that even refer to space in such a way as to exclude that element of extension or existence that we call time, and so by implication leave