The Yupno as Post-Newtonian Scientists: The Question of What is 'Natural' in Spatial Description

Cognitive scientists were induced by the (European) cultures and (Indogermanic) languages already known to them to formulate over-hasty generalizations about the intrinsic structure of human thinking. They believe, for example, that it is natural and consequently universal to view the space around us from a relative, egocentric and anthropomorphic point of view. However, this way of seeing the world - with one's body at the centre of the universe from which spatial co-ordinates radiate out - is just one of the possible ways of viewing space, as the cultural conception of spatial order among the Yupno of Papua New Guinea illustrates. A universalist ckaim The approach to issues concerning the relations among language, culture and thought proceeds from different presuppositions today from the ones held previously. With the rise of the cognitive sciences in the 1960s, the commonalities in human thinking and their bases in the genetic endowment of humanity were emphasized, in part building on Piagetian universals of human development. This emphasis was strengthened by developments within cognitive anthropology, with its controversial discovery of significant universals in colour terms and in the structure of ethnobotanical nomenclature, and of kinship terms. The aim of research at that time shifted away from the description of cultural diversity towards the search for underlying human constants. Against this background, the overall discipline of anthropology was reduced to silence, due to its seemingly contradictory desire to stress differences, while simultaneously insisting on what is common to human kind. All this somehow licensed the committed cognitivists, who were researching only European cultures and Indogermanic languages, to formulate hasty generalizations about the intrinsic structure of human thinking. However, there has been a recent change of intellectual climate in psychology, linguistics and other disciplines related to anthropology, towards an intermediate position, 'in which more attention is paid to linguistic and cultural