Thinking as an artist, of course not. Thinking as a scientist, of course yes. This certainly reflects a difference in approach, but I don’t think there’s a true disagreement. Rather, the response depends mostly on how the question is interpreted: does my moon mean what the moon means to me or is it the moon in the sky that I see.
Somewhere between physical stimulus and mental concept lies perception. Does how I perceive the moon depend on whether I am German or Spanish, male or female? A fascinating (and amazingly readable) paper by Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt, and Webb Phillips (Dept. of Psychology, Stanford) suggests that it might. The authors didn’t study the effect of biological gender, but I suspect it could play a role because the language/culture seems to be related to grammatical gender. In German der Mond is masculine, while in Spanish la luna is feminine.
I won’t describe the research blow by blow; just a highlight will have to do. A crucial point is that the study was carried out with participants who were native speakers of Spanish or German, but everything was done in English (in which they were also proficient). The most interesting experiment to me was one in which participants were asked to provide the first three adjectives that came to mind for each of a list of objects: key, bridge, etc. These were words that had different grammatical gender in the two languages. A third group of English speakers (all groups were independent; none knew the purpose of the study) then rated the alphabetized list of adjectives as to how “masculine” or “feminine” they were. The result: for both languages, the nature of the adjectives reflected the grammatical gender of the described object in the native language. From the paper:
There were also observable qualitative differences between the kinds of adjectives Spanish and German speakers produced. For example, the word for “key” is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful, while Spanish speakers said they were golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. The word for “bridge,” on the other hand, is feminine is German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said the were big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering.
There is much to be considered carefully here, and it’s an unjustified stretch to simplify to the point of saying that different cultures “perceive” differently. But it seems likely that what we notice about something we observe, as well as what we later associate with it, is affected by the whole of our experience in ways we are not aware of. Clearly there are implications for how artists make art.
Perhaps this should not be such a shock; it does seem to fit with other things we’re learning. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis may be regaining favor in a more nuanced form. Though it’s always been obvious that there are cultural differences in art, I’m coming to believe there are deeper and more tangled reasons than I thought. Is anyone else surprised? Does it make sense to those of you who speak languages having grammatical gender?
Steve,
Reading French poetry as a teenager, I enjoyed these gender differences between the German and French tongue: der Mond, la lune; die Sonne, le soleil.
In German, the gender of a word does not necessarily conveys the kind of difference that you are pointing at. For example, the path is der Pfad (m), but the highway is die Autobahn (f). Walking along a path seems mellower than speeding down a German highway at 180 km/hr.
Birgit,
Yes, I very much enjoyed (and enjoy) them also, in part for the novel associations that tends to bring. Which, by the way, tends to support the general contention here. However, it is not claimed that associations will necessarily follow gender, only that there will be some bias. For example, if the genders of Autobahn and Pfad were switched, perhaps you’d feel more strongly the difference you already do.
Yes,
Thinking more about this issue later, I decided that der Pfad feels masculine and die Bahn (train) or Strasse (street) feel feminine. I will spare you the possible explanations that I could invent.
Steve:
Long time no see.
Debating with myself whether I regard Las Angeles as a feminine city. Biblical angels, are identified in my mind as masculine in the main, but deeply feminine in appearance and manner. Can’t recall seeing any representation of a celestial five O’clock shadow, nor of a beard, among the heavenly host. I would suppose that the “la” came about sometime after the definition of angels as androgenous had been made.
Makes me think, too, of Bob the Bridge, a structure athwart some defile in the West. Birgit, perhaps, would experience a mild cognitive dissonance in contemplating one so named and so gendered. And while on things Germanic, I believe it was A. Krupp who named one of his favorite cannons after a significant woman in his life. Whether this appellation was more honorific or descriptive is not for me to say.
So I might
There are actually 3 genders in the German language: masculine/ feminine/neuter.
According to Wikipedia: The gender of German words that do not describe a male or a female are apparently random.
I am curious whether the the gender is really random or whether it has to do with Germanic culture. But not curious enough to devote the energy to find out.
Steve,
Is what you are trying to say is that Language Matters? Oh, my, yes!
But you may be fighting a losing battle.
Going into German plural converts male and neuter articles (der, das) into the female article (die) – multiplying through giving birth?
Der Hund (dog), die Hunde (dogs).
June,
I’m interested in the ways language matters. The twenty-Eskimo-words-for-snow myth has been thoroughly debunked, but I had long convinced myself that it wouldn’t matter anyway: how well you observed snow, what you saw and learned from it, depended on your interest and your experience with snow. Not on how many words your language supposedly had for forms of snow. Although language is clearly important in many areas of thought, I was also convinced that a great deal of highly conscious thought–especially visual–could and did occur without the need for language.
From another perspective, I resisted the notion that, say, women photographed differently from men. For a wide variety of reasons, they might tend to have different interests that would certainly affect their work, but that seemed more superficial, not a fundamental difference in seeing.
Boroditsky’s research is causing me to re-examine these positions.
Birgit,
That the plural article is also die has always felt to me like an “accident” without significance. In Spanish the gender distinction remains in the plural, in French it is dropped but there’s no coincidence as iin German, in Russian there are no articles… But perhaps, for native speakers, this coincidence has some hidden impact on tendencies of thinking?
Steve,
Sorry to have come across a tad snarky — I find myself fighting to maintain the idea that words do matter and should be used with intentionality — re: “whatever” and “you know what I mean.”
I like the subtleties of the Boroditsky article and find it appropriate to our current political scene. As usual, of course, the variable of culture interferes with absolute clarity of findings.
What I find a bit more interesting, however, is trying to discern, through the visual, what my perceptions are and how they compare to the perceptions of others who are being equally attentive. That’s why psychogeography has fastened itself onto my thinking.
It’s clear to me that the dichotomy of male and female is deepset in the human mind and it will take a lot more work to equalize, if not erase, the perceptions of difference.I’m too old to take that one on. But your moon or my moon, I think, could be less than male/female differences than cultural/experiential. So how does the visual work you did in this photograph illuminate your perception of the moon? I ask so as to check if that perception is close or far from mine.
Hmmm, good question. The moon itself is here only indirectly, illuminating the clouds, and I decided I like it that way. Although the picture is a couple years old, it never struck me too forcefully until I was looking for something to go with this post. I couldn’t find the picture I was looking for. But I fell for what Birgit would call the filigree (see comments here, here, here, here, and here). It seems this characteristic (not to mention the word) appealed to me as much as it evidently does to her. Especially interesting is the contrast of the lacy black branches with the soft clouds. And clearly I chose to leave the image in color, though I usually work in only slightly tinted black and white. I have to confess that most of these considerations were relative more to the picture as a composition than to the moon as (implied) subject.
If the moon were present, it would be round and bright like the clouds, but sharp-edged and with detail like the trees, so I suppose it would be intermediate in character. Perhaps that’s appropriate for a native speaker of English, where there is no grammatical gender!
Ah, Steve,
You chose the contrast between the hard-edged tree and the soft-edged clouds, with only an implied moon. Yet you wrote about “moon” as if that were your subject.
It’s that combination of elements — soft/hard, indirect, yet a luminousness of the unseen — that intrigues me. It’s lots more complex even than the question of grammar. And more complicated, too.
So I’d say you are grappling with the complexity of the unseen which nevertheless makes its presence known, even in the text that accompanies the photo.
Is that enough pseudo-psych for one day? [add snort]
I would add that you do this a lot in your photos, regardless of subject matter — grapple with the unseen, which is making its presence known. Which is an interesting twist on the photographic process which tends to grapple with the seen…..
Steve,
Here, my attention is captured by the sky, the soft clouds.
Looking, under ‘curves’, at the histogram of the picture, I found that you did not include the extreme lightest end of the range. Using ‘threshold’, I found the lightest pixel and then used the white eyedropper to extend the histogram across the entire range (I do methods but I cannot talk methods yet). As expected, the sky became harsher.
I assume that you left the sky soft on purpose. – I got into the habit of checking the histograms of images of photographers, Butzi etc.
Birgit,
Playing with images like that is a great way to learn about how tones work. I don’t make any claims for this one, but I think that lightening the sky would make it unrealistic as a nighttime picture, as well as diminish the silvery softness of the clouds.