Language ecology is the study of languages in their settings, and in recent decades much of it has become a campaign to protect endangered languages, often likening them to endangered species. Sociolinguists such as John Edwards argue that this version of the field has become romantic: it treats cultures as if they ought never to change, ranks small traditional societies above modern ones, and presents one set of moral preferences as science. Its defenders reply that the loss is real and measurable, and Therapeutic Shamanism, which meets the same charge of romanticism, holds the hunter-gatherer past as both fact and myth.
What is language ecology? #
The idea of studying a language the way an ecologist studies a living thing in its habitat. The term was first used in 1967, and the linguist Einar Haugen took it up in the early 1970s, defining the ecology of language as “the study of interactions between any given language and its environment.”1 In its first form it was meant to look at every link between languages and the world around them, and to stop people thinking of a language as something standing on its own.2
Since then, as the sociolinguist John Edwards describes it, much of the field has narrowed to one concern: keeping linguistic diversity alive, treated as a good beyond question and defended wherever it falters. Writers such as Peter Mühlhäusler, author of Linguistic Ecology (1995), have compared the world’s languages to the world’s species, and some hold that the two kinds of diversity are not just alike but actually linked, so that losing languages and losing species are parts of one loss.2 See What is the ‘myth of language universals’?
What do the critics say? #
Edwards, in a short but pointed account, makes several objections. A truly ecological view, he holds, would take in every outcome from flourishing to extinction, yet modern language ecology pictures a gentle world of mostly “mutually beneficial links”, in Mühlhäusler’s words, when relations between big and small languages, like other ecologies, are often harsh. ‘Language loss’ is something of a misnomer, since people who shift from one language to another never end up with no language at all. Quoting the linguist Salikoko Mufwene, he finds it odd to mourn ancestral cultures “as if cultures were static systems”, and odd for an ecological school of thought to forget that living things change. The claim that linguistic and biological diversity are actually connected he calls dubious, and he adds that it is more difficult to save languages than to save species.3
His sharpest charge is romanticism. Just as eighteenth-century romanticism reacted against the Enlightenment, he writes, modern language ecology disparages scientific culture and the ‘privileging’ of its knowledge over ‘folk wisdom’, and beyond the reasonable wish that small cultures survive it sometimes claims that their ways are better. He quotes the linguist Tapani Salminen, who held that, “without romanticizing or idealizing” them, indigenous cultures are superior to mass culture because their members can still live in relative harmony with nature, and answers: “Despite the disclaimer, this is romanticism.” What gets presented as ‘language ecology’, he concludes, is a particular set of moral and aesthetic preferences, part of a resistance to big languages generally and to English specifically, put forward as though it were the only enlightened view. He is careful to add that none of this means the case for linguistic diversity has no basis.3
Others come at it from another side. The sociolinguists Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller held in Discourses of Endangerment (2007) that talk of endangered languages is bound up with the interests of nation states and of the movements that want states of their own, and often pictures language communities as uniform and unchanging; in their words, “Rather than assuming we must save languages, perhaps we should be asking instead who benefits and who loses.”4 The linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill, a supporter of endangered languages, warned in 2002 that the experts’ habits of speech, praising these languages in extravagant terms and describing them as belonging to all humanity, may be heard quite differently by the speakers themselves, and may undermine the very cause they serve.5
How do the defenders of language ecology reply? #
With evidence that the loss is real, and with the speakers’ own stake in it. On the link Edwards doubts, a study published in 2012 by Larry Gorenflo of Penn State University, the linguist Suzanne Romaine and colleagues found that the world’s thirty-five biodiversity hotspots, covering 2.3 per cent of the Earth’s land, hold 3,202 languages, about half of all those spoken, and that together with five great wilderness areas they hold some seventy per cent. “In many cases it appears that conditions that wipe out species wipe out languages,” Gorenflo said.6
Others point to what a language means to the people who speak it. A survey of research on Indigenous communities by D. H. Whalen of the Endangered Language Fund and colleagues gathered findings that language revival goes along with better health, whilst concluding carefully that speaking the language “in and of itself may not be solely responsible” for this, rather community validation of its own knowledge and community-led education.7 And the sociologist of language Joshua Fishman, as Edwards himself records, held that reversing language shift among peoples who still experience life and nature “in deeply poetic and collectively meaningful ways” is “a holy quest”.8
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Through the charge of romanticism, which Therapeutic Shamanism meets too, since it holds that hunter-gatherer peoples lived in a far better relationship with the Earth than we do. Its answer is to hold two kinds of truth side by side. As logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this, literal fact, it sticks to what anthropology knows: hunter-gatherers were “just people”, human beings with flaws like us, with no superpowers and no idyll, and yet whatever their other problems they lived in a vastly more harmonious relationship with the earth than we do now.9 Among the thousands of hunter-gatherer cultures studied there is no recorded case of one destroying the environment it lived in, though some probably did hunt certain species to extinction.10 As mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, stories of a time when we lived better are needed to guide us back.9 See Aren’t you romanticising hunter-gatherers? and Isn’t the Fall just noble-savage romanticism?
Nor does the teaching treat living traditional cultures as untouched. Virtually all the shamanic societies that exist today are agricultural, and even the few nomadic animist peoples left are mostly herders, so to some degree they too are shaped by domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and Taker thinking. That is no criticism of them: they still live in a much healthier relationship with the Earth than the cultures that abandoned animism, and the debt owed to them for keeping shamanic and animist knowledge alive is incalculable.11 That sits close to Mufwene’s point that cultures are not static, whilst giving the change a meaning of its own.
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see differently? #
In what it thinks has been lost. The language-ecology debate is mostly about saving particular languages, and whether doing so is a scientific matter or a moral preference. The loss at the centre of Therapeutic Shamanism is older and wider than any one language: the animist knowledge that everything is alive and conscious, which the West lost along with its shamans. Every tribe once had its own word for shamanism, and in England even that word has long been lost.12 Bringing that knowledge back is not a matter of preserving a language as it was, and it does not ask anyone to stop the world changing; it asks people to notice how the words of the dominant culture shape what they perceive, and to relearn a living relationship with the more-than-human world.13 See What is deprogramming? and Is Western shamanism cultural appropriation?
