Collaborative Research: Landscape, Image, and Language Among Some Indigenous People of the American Southwest and Northwest Australia

长期以来，来自不同学科的学者一直试图理解景观元素的视觉表现和语言类别之间的关系。有一条研究路线试图解决这样一个问题：说不同语言的人是用不同的概念来思考，还是思维更接近普遍，而语言更肤浅？这个合作研究项目将调查人们如何概念化自然景观以及他们如何与自然景观联系起来。该项目将调查生活在干旱地区的一些土著社区使用的景观术语。语言将是研究的主要焦点。该项目将研究人们用来指代景观元素的通用术语，以及人们在传统叙事中描述景观的方式。这项研究将考察三个文化和语言群体的成员如何细分、分类和谈论他们的景观。这三个族群分别是亚利桑那州北部和新墨西哥州的纳瓦霍人（Dine）、亚利桑那州北部的霍皮人（Hopi）和西澳大利亚州西北部的英吉邦迪人（Yindjibarndi）。项目研究人员将对三个社区内的专家顾问进行深入访谈，内容涉及地貌、水体和其他地理特征的词汇。研究者将在正式的景观本体论中表达这些定义，并通过编纂图片词典来确认这些定义和术语表。研究人员和顾问还将招募这些土著社区的年轻成员拍摄景观的重要方面，与老年人讨论这些照片的内容，并报告结果。这些风景的照片也将展示给讲英语的本科生，以提供英语术语的基本解释。该项目将调查景观的表面结构在多大程度上取决于物理现实的原始事实，有多少结构是由于人类感知的本质和认知的其他方面而产生的，有多少结构是由文化、语言和生活方式决定的。这些都是行为和认知科学中所有知识领域的基本问题，但它们几乎没有在景观方面得到解决。该研究旨在了解每个文化群体的文化、历史、精神和景观之间密切而又不同的相互联系。研究的一个目标是用足够的精度和严谨性来描述这些民族的景观类别和术语，以便地理信息系统（GIS）能够检测、操纵和推理这些类别和属于它们的实体。包括纳瓦霍和霍皮在内的一些部落目前正在使用商业地理信息系统来管理部落土地，但这种软件似乎无法轻易地将传统知识与政府来源的技术科学数据结合起来。从该项目中吸取的经验教训将指导未来关于地理信息系统跨文化互操作性的工作，并将有助于设计数据库和地理信息系统，供不同自然语言的使用者在其社区内使用，并用于土地和景观的共同管理。景观术语的图片词典也将为相关部落和文化提供材料，通过在学校和其他渠道的使用，可能有助于文化保护。

Scholars from a range of disciplines long have sought to understand relationships between visual representations and linguistic categories of landscape elements. One line of inquiry has sought to address the question: Do speakers of different languages think in different concepts, or is thinking more nearly universal and language more superficial? This collaborative research project will investigate how people conceptualize the natural landscape and how they relate to it. The project will investigate landscape terminology used by some indigenous communities living in arid landscapes. Language will be a major focus of the research. The project will study both the generic terms that the people use to refer to elements of the landscape and also the ways that the people describe the landscape in their traditional narratives. The research will examine how members of three cultural and linguistic groups subdivide, classify, and talk about their landscapes. The three groups are the Navajo (Dine) of northern Arizona and New Mexico, the Hopi of northern Arizona, and the Yindjibarndi of the northwestern part of Western Australia. Project researchers will conduct in-depth interviews with expert consultants within the three communities regarding the vocabulary for referring to landforms, water bodies, and other geographic features. Researchers will express the definitions within a formal ontology of the landscape and will confirm the definitions and term lists by compiling pictorial dictionaries. The researchers and consultants also will recruit young members of these indigenous communities to take photographs of significant aspects of the landscape, discuss the content of these photographs with elders, and report results. Photographs of these landscapes also will be shown to English-speaking undergraduate subjects to provide baseline interpretations for English language terminology.The project will investigate the degree to which the apparent structure of the landscape depends upon the raw facts of physical reality, how much of the structure arises due to the nature of human perception and other aspects of cognition, and how much of the structure is determined by culture, language, and lifestyle. These are fundamental issues in the behavioral and cognitive sciences for all knowledge domains, yet they hardly have been address with respect to the landscape. The research seeks to understand the close yet different interconnections among culture, history, spirituality, and landscape for each of the cultural groups. One goal of the research is to characterize these peoples' landscape categories and terminology with sufficient precision and rigor to allow geographic information systems (GIS) to detect, manipulate, and reason about the categories and the entities belonging to them. Some of the tribes, including the Navajo and Hopi, currently are using commercial GIS to manage tribal lands, but it appears that the software cannot readily incorporate traditional knowledge and integrate such knowledge with technoscience data from government sources. Lessons learned in this project will guide future work on cross-cultural interoperability of geographic information systems and will contribute to the design of databases and GISs that can be used by speakers of different natural languages both within their communities and for joint management of lands and landscapes. Pictorial dictionaries of landscape terminology also will provide the tribes and cultures in question with material that may contribute to cultural preservation through use in the schools and other outlets.