Austronesian Culture History : the Window of Language

Blust, R. (1996). "Austronesian Culture History : the Window of Language". Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. 86 (5): 28–35. doi:0.2307/1006619 . ISSN 0065-9746.

Abstract: Lexical reconstruction and culture history: I am going to delineate some things about the way of life of a prehistoric people for which we have no historical documentation and, with regard to some particulars, little or no physical evidence. Under the circumstances it would hardly be unreasonable to ask me how I know what I claim, or at the very least why I believe that it is true. At a meeting of the Pacific Science Congress a decade ago, I heard a distinguished British social anthropologist who disapproved of what he called" conjectural history" declare in no uncertain terms that the only reliable guide to the prehistoric past is" scientific archaeology." As, the linguistic meat in an archaeological sandwich that you are being served with these papers, I must hasten to take exception to this statement. Collections of excavated artefacts are not science; rather, science is a system of theories and hypotheses that serves to explain the raw data of experience in terms of fundamental principles of generalization, parsimony, and predictability. Seen in this light the more durable parts of material culture that survive the punishment of time are only one type, albeit a focally important type, of raw data from which to reconstruct the human past. Indeed, because of the filtering effect of differential survival probabilities, exclusive reliance upon the archeological retrieval of prehistoric cultures may distort our reconstruction significantly, even for material culture. And, of course, with regard to such areas of nonmaterial culture as kinship and social organization, religion or folk taxonomy, archaeological evidence is either entirely lacking or can be used only for the most perilously tentative inferences. But archaeologists need not feel alone in their excursions into the dark shafts of prehistory. What some of us too often forget, and what I would like to remind you about, is that Man the untutored has been inadvertently recording the stuff of social and cultural history in his daily speech since long before the advent of writing. At least since the latter part of the nineteenth century...

Extra details:

DOI: 10.2307/1006619
MAG: 2498995416
CorpusID: 131839987
OpenAlex: W2498995416