Boots

"Bota bota," Helena Iara said this morning as she woke up, and then pointed to the door, as she does when she want to leave the room and go out into the world.  A simple event in the life of a little girl, but as I walked through the jungle this morning, climbing the little mountain behind our house, it occurred to me that this little exchange says something very important about language and meaning.

There's an important back-story here: about three months ago, Rita bought Helena a pair of boots.  Helena loved to wear them, but she also loved (and still loves) to say the word "bota," boot.  Soon, she began to use that word to refer to lots of other things: shoes and sandals, soon even feet, the paws of a stuffed lion, or the hairy pods of a cockroach in one of her children's books.  This is a process that linguists call semantic overreach: kids learn a word and begin to apply it to everything that sort of fits the category, until they learn to shave off the extraneous meanings and get to something closer to the way other people use words.  The most common example is that a "doggie" or "bow-wow" can refer to anything with hair, anything with four feet, anything that barks or growls... until Mom and Dad explain that "dog" is a much more limited concept.

Lots of Helena's words work like this.  "Up" (which she says in English) means "lift me up" as well as the direction up, and it also the way she refers to the teeter-totter in the park.  "Mana", a mis-speaking of banana, also means any other fruit she likes, from guavas to mangos (apples, strangely enough, get their own word).  And the most interesting case is "bola" (ball), which started out meaning ball and then moved on to round fruit.  As she learned that oranges and mandarins are not, in fact, balls, she began to push the meaning of "bola" in new directions: round ceramic flower-pots made sense, but then "bola" moved on to mean other things that are fun to do: dolls and cars and even her swing win cries of "bola." Then, "bola" moved on to mean "cake" and "waffle", because the word for those things in Portuguese is "bolo" (o instead of a, but maybe she can't hear the difference), and though she knows that a cake is different from a ball, she likes both of them.  By now, "bola" has become a fascinating semantic tangle, meaning almost anything that Helena likes a lot.

Which brings us back to "bota", and then pointing to the door.  "Bota," we've come to learn, doesn't just mean footwear.  It also means "walking".  Then from walking, she extended "bota" to mean going outside and seeing the world (her favorite activity), and perhaps even the abstract concept of freedom (she'll sometimes say "bota" as she pulls her hand out of mine or Rita as we try to help/control her).  So as she woke this morning and said "bota", she didn't just mean, "put my shoes on," but also "and then let's go out in the garden and look at flowers and run around and don't think that I'll hold your hand the whole time, either!"  Which is, by the way, what she and Rita are doing as I write this blog.

When linguists and philosophers of language distinguish between denotation (the dictionary definition of a word ) and connotation (the associations that spring to mind because of the word), valuing the first, and saying that connotations are derivative and mushy and not at all serious.  But a baby's use of language (if Helena is an example) seems to say exactly the opposite: connotation comes first.  "Boot" means freedom before the word is cut down and shaved into meaning just "footwear that covers the ankles."

So bota bota.  I'm off for a walk.

Why words?

Today, as Helena and I walked to the beach, she bow-wowed at every dog we saw, meowed at every cat, and even tried a neigh at the horse tied up in the wetlands by the dunes.  She makes the same sounds when she sees animals in her picture books: a couple of posts ago, I suggested that she is naming the animals in a kind of onomotopeia, but today as she and I talked, I reconsidered.

One of Helena's favorite videos right now is a Italian song about the sounds animals make: Il croccodrillo como fa?, and she loves another video that just shows animals and the sounds they make... What's interesting, though, is to watch how she gets scared at the sound of certain animals: yes, the crocodile, but also the cicada and the certain birds.  And as she and I talked as we walked to the beach today, I realized that (at least in the videos), she never gets scared by the animals whose sounds she knows how to make.

In the history of the West, at least since the Greeks, the role of language is to represent: words refer to things, and we judge their truth based on whether or not they reflect what's there in the world truly.  And though it might seem that Helena uses "bow-wow" to refer to a dog, honestly I don't think that's what she is doing.  I think there is something much more complicated and interesting going on here.

According to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, while European epistemology (the science of how we know what we know) is based on ideas of reference and signification, Amazonian Indians see truth not as representation, but as a shift in perspective.  The shaman doesn't know the jaguar by studying it from outside, but by learning to look through the eyes of the jaguar.  One of the techniques that Amazonian shamans use to see through the eyes of the other is sound: one tribe will "steal" the songs of another and then sing them to try to understand the perspective of their enemy (in Araweté, strikingly, the word for "enemy" literally translates as "future music".).

Let's add another element here: understanding is one way to overcome our fear.  Just giving a thing a name can help, but the better we understand the motivations, the experience, the perspective of what frightens us, the less we fear it.

 I wonder, then, if Helena Iara making the sound of animals that scare her, isn't living out the Guaraní heritage of her middle name.  Helena used to be fascinated and terrified by dogs, but since she has learned to say "bow-wow," both naming them and putting their voice in her mouth, the terror has subsided.  She makes a sound, incarnates their perspective (even if in a very superficial way), and comes to fear them less.

If she's really doing this, she's pretty darn clever.

Almost...

This morning, as Helena and I rocked in the hammock, looking out on the jungle, she glanced at the shirt I was wearing, one with the iconographic image of Che Guevara on it, and gave one of her sounds of exited discovery: "O!"  Then, as she now seems to do with anything she likes (her mother, her stuffed animals, her baby doll), she leaned down to kiss the photo on the shirt.

The dreams of a left-wing philosopher father: one week she recognizes Foucault on a magazine cover, the next an icon of Che... I had a full blog post imagined in only seconds.  When... "Bow, wow!" she said.  And then again.

She didn't see Che on my shirt.  She saw a cute dog.

 The thing about when a baby begins to talk, is that I learn that the thoughts that I had long projected on her... well, she has much more individual things going on in that rapid and active brain.  Among them, puppy dogs more than Latin American revolutionaries.

Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny?

I've been thinking a lot about peek-a-boo recently, because any time that Helena and I go for a walk, she places her hands over her eyes until I see what she is doing and say, "where's the baby, where's the baby?"  The game can go on for half an hour.  But this time, I've been thinking the game more with the ideas of early modern philosophy, than we the Lacanian foolishness I'd been using before.  Particularly, through René Descartes.

In the 17th and 18th Century, when science was all the rage -- because, after a couple of rough centuries, people were beginning to do it again -- philosophers put a lot of effort into framing their ideas in scientific terms.  How, for instance, to think about the soul?  Where is it?  How do you examine it scientifically.  And René Descartes proposed that the soul was in the pineal gland, in the middle of the brain, behind the eyes.

Now, the last time I wrote about peek-a-boo, I suggested that Helena is really involved in experimenting on the subjectivity of the other, and that covering her eyes is a way to block the game of intersubjective mirroring between people.  As she plays the game at one year and three months, I think something else is going on, something more... Cartesian?  Can it be that Helena is trying to hide her soul?

That sounds like a joke, but I don't mean it that way.  When we think about "ourselves", about where the essence of who we are is located, it's easy to think like Descartes.  Humans are visual beings, so it makes sense to situate ourselves where our eyes are.  It certainly makes more sense than in the feet or in a kidney... So might it be that Helena does, in fact, think that she is hiding something important when she pulls a cloth, or even just her fingers, over her eyes?

Now, the other thing that Helena does as we walk around is give names to the things in her world.  Like many babies, she uses loads of onomotopeias: "bow-wow" for a dog, "meow" for a cat, various chirps for birds and moos for cows.  Some of the earliest Greek thinkers suggested that language might have started in exactly this way... you can see traces of the idea in Plato's Phædrus, for instance. Most modern linguists dismiss the idea, but at one point, it had a lot of currency.

So, returning from a walk to the beach the the library yesterday, I shared a hypothesis with Helena, one that certainly won't withstand any serious scrutiny, but which was fun to invent.  Biologists love the phrase "Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny," meaning that the development of a being in the womb mimics the evolution of the species as a whole.  A fetus looks like a fish and a bird and loads of other things before it comes to look like a human being.

Might something similar happen in the intellectual development of a child?  Do we go through all of the philosophical errors of the past as we grow up?  Does the history of philosophy mirror the history of Helena's thinking?

Probably not.  But if she comes up with some sort of ideas about the phlogiston or the geocentric universe, you can trust I'll be paying attention.

Finding Foucault

Today, more a story than a philosophical reflection: a couple of days ago at the local community library, Helena and I spent close to an hour looking for books for her.  As always, she loves to sort through every book on the shelf, transferring them to the table, paging through each one, and then choosing a couple that she likes.  At the end of the time, we moved to the back of the library to play hide and seek among the shelves (not many of them, because the library is only a couple of years old, and the only books are ones donated by people from the neighborhood).  After a couple of minutes of "where's the baby?"  "Oh, there's the baby!", Helena moved toward a shelf at the back.

"O!" she called out, in the voice she uses for her most exciting discoveries: the monkeys coming by the house in the afternoon, her favorite carved jaguar found under a table, a new hat made by her mom.  The "O!" again.  I walked over to see her pointing to a magazine on the bottom shelf.

Her index finger touched the forehead of a photo of Michel Foucault.

Yes, a proud, proud moment.

New Photos

Helena has continued to grow and think over the last couple of months, doing even more exciting things than she was months ago, but Rita and I have been traveling and working so much that I haven't had time to write.  And the longer one goes without a blog, the harder it is to get back to it.

So, instead of a real philosophical reflection, I'll restart with a couple of photos from our trip to an anthropology conference in Curitiba this week.