Proficiency sits at both ends of the anthropological project: before the beginning, when we just want to be able to talk to someone, and after the end, as that orienting goal we sometimes call “the native’s point of view.”Īs Héctor and Alessandra have demonstrated, the basic urge for linguistic proficiency radiates consequences outward: it may concern not only speaking, but also listening not only language, but also other methodologies for articulating the world. It is simultaneously a pragmatic concern about the basic mechanics of communication and a source of profound questions about difference and what it means to know. (Others have noted the movie’s broad anthropological resonances more narrowly, the plot’s central conceit is effectively an adaptation of Dorothy Lee’s “Lineal and Non-lineal Codifications of Reality” with space aliens.) In its drama, Arrival demonstrates why proficiency is so loaded. Like other science fiction concerned with language and alterity, Arrival dramatizes this idea. And disciplinary tradition holds, in a kind of latent Whorfianism, that linguistic proficiency not only allows us to communicate with our interlocutors, but also, more consequentially, to try on their thoughts. As Héctor Beltrán and Alessandra Ciucci have noted in their contributions to this Correspondences session, anthropological interest in proficiency has long focused on how knowing a language enables access to the field. I offer Arrival’s linguistic fable as a contribution to this conversation about proficiency because it presents an extreme version of a bit of anthropological common sense. One film critic described its effect on the viewer as “less a sudden twist than sleek unwinding of everything you think you know.” (For the audience, it has already happened as well: a series of interposed flashbacks are revealed to be flash- forwards.) The “arrival” of the title turns out to refer not only to the descent of the alien fleet, but also to this breakthrough moment, which transforms Banks from an anxious, doubtful character into a serene, knowing one. In a moment, she sees her own future, which, for the heptapods, has already happened. We learn (this is the spoiler) that the heptapod language, written in circles, is timeless-that the heptapods experience time not linearly, but cyclically, and that they have come to Earth to share a message about a future they have seen but which quarrelsome, linear humans can’t appreciate.īanks, having achieved proficiency in heptapod, experiences what can only be described as an incredibly strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: learning the alien language not only gives her access to their ways of thinking, but it literally gives her the power to see through time as they do. She ends up back in the spaceship, but now she’s on the other side of the partition, floating in a blissed-out, dreamlike state, CGI hair waving ethereally in the mist, face to thorax with an enormous heptapod. Amid some geopolitical drama, Banks finally understands the heptapods-not only the message they’ve come to share with Earth, but also their language. Back at basecamp, aided by a passel of cryptanalysts, some computers, and a handsome, useless physicist played by Jeremy Renner, she decodes the circular alien script, bit by bit. The aliens respond with their own otherworldly orthography, and Banks begins to elicit an alien vocabulary. military to help communicate with the aliens and, following her failure to talk to them, she tries writing to them, holding up words on a portable whiteboard. It sounds like highly processed camel grunts (which is, in fact, what it is, along with a few other things). Louise Banks, a linguist played by Amy Adams, discovers this ability after realizing that she can’t parse the spoken alien language at all. This chapter discusses the themes which Arrival has brought to the mainstream, including Universal Grammar, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the importance of linguistic fieldwork.Conveniently, the aliens use those legs to write, squirting misty ink into blobby circles against the room’s partition. Her job is to find the answer to the question everyone is asking: why are they here? Language is a crucial piece of the answer. Louise Banks is recruited by the military to translate the language of the newly arrived alien heptapods. If aliens arrived, could we communicate with them? What are the tools linguists use to decipher unknown languages? How different can languages be from one another? Do these differences have bigger consequences for how we see the world? This chapter addresses these questions through the lens of the 2016 science-fiction film Arrival and the real-life work of language documentation (in particular, the Mayan language Ch’ol).
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