Robert E. MacLaury

Color and cognition in Mesoamerica : constructing categories as vantages

More than 100 indigenous languages are spoken in Mexico and Central America. Each language partitions the color spectrum according to a pattern that is unique in some way. But every local system of color categories also shares characteristics with the systems of other Mesoamerican languages and of languages elsewhere in the world. This book presents the results of the Mesoamerican Color Survey, which Robert E. MacLaury conducted in 1978-1981. Drawn from interviews with 900 speakers of some 116 Mesoamerican languages, the book provides a sweeping overview of the organization and semantics of color categorization in modern Mesoamerica. Extensive analysis and MacLaurys use of vantage theory reveal complex and often surprising interrelationships among the ways languages categorize colors. His findings offer valuable cross-cultural data for all students of Mesoamerica. They will also be of interest to all linguists and cognitive scientists working on theories of categorization more generally.

Social and Cognitive Motivations of Change: Measuring Variability in Color Semantics.

Semantic change is carried forward by specific individuals who think in particular ways, although it can be constrained by physiology and guided by social values. The measurement of color categories provides a close look at the various propelling incentives in a domain that is probably universal. Newly refined descriptive methods enhance such observations, because they permit verification of cognitive differences on the basis of correspondence between independently elicited orders of quantifiable data. Measurable change progresses through diverse trajectories in closely related Mayan languages whose social milieux are radically distinct. In Tzeltal, variation can be explained in terms of individual cognitive shifts within universal physiological parameters. But in Tzotzil a socially enforced conservatism creates tension between the preservation of traditional categories and the addition of new ones. The tension produces a taxonomy that is deeper than any others encountered by the major world color surveys. While a model of individual cognition explains how color categories change at the basic level, a social model accounts for differences between communities.*

Ethnographic evidence of unique hues and elemental colors

Contrary to argument that unique hues are undemonstrated, the World Color Survey shows that speakers of more than 100 minor and tribal languages focus color categories predominantly on 4 of the 40 hue columns of the ethnographic Munsell array. The pattern is not conditioned by saturation levels or other arbitrary structures among the color chips, nor is Western influence likely to be the cause. Moreover, all evidence suggests that color cognition is autonomous despite the connotations and polysemies of color terms.

Vantages in a Word Field: Variably Distributed Attention to Similarity

Distributed attention to similarity and difference is critical to maintaining relations among categories in a semantic field. And this distribution determines the lower and upper number of such categories, although numbers will differ in accord with selected properties on which the categories are based. The determining constraint is the total amount of attention that a person will normally devote to similarity and difference, which is proposed to be universal. Vantage theory provides the explanatory framework, by which the distribution is actively managed by a person who, as with any system so managed, will perform effectively or dysfunctionally. Occasional aberration suggests that people indeed are involved in their cognitive systems. Vantage theory, too, then models how distributed attention may go amiss.

So-Called Brightness in Color Ethnography: Potentials for LCD Technology in Fieldwork and Categorization Research

Anthropologists and philologists specifically interpret brightness naming far and wide and through time. The World Color Survey shows that minor and tribal languages name reputed brightness categories that span the spectrum. Different languages construe them with substantial variability. Yet, the composition of these categories is unexplored, hindering progress toward a cross-cultural understanding of the color sense. Further, this genre of categories is fast disappearing due to globalization. Equipment and methods that would probe this resource for the benefit of color ethnography and psychological inquiry into the nature of color categorization are suggested.