Bound Feet And Pie In The Sky!

[Guest guest]

Bound Feet And Pie In The Sky!

- Written by Subhash Kak

In personal life and in society, some things that looked very important and meaningful once appear ridiculous in hindsight, providing amusement in novels and history. But if in personal life one has the excuse of the passions of youth for one's follies, in social practices, high-sounding ideology makes monkeys of men.

 

In this column, I speak of two ideas that had broad acceptance for a long time. Foot binding in China lasted over a thousand years, even though it left women hobbled and crippled for life. The “reconstruction†of the proto-Indo-European (PIE) language was to find the nearest descendents of the master race destined to rule the world; this idea provided rationale for the brutality and inequity of colonial rule in Asia and Africa.

 

In the 19th century, Arthur de Gobineau, along with other philologists, argued that the languages of Europe were closest to the PIE, giving the Europeans special strength of character and spirituality. From there, the special role ordained for the Anglo-Saxons in maintaining their colonies was not a big jump. British historians saw the British Empire as a historic fulfillment. The “white man's burden†was to civilize the world.

 

Gobineau's influential “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races†suggested that the decline of the contemporary period was a consequence of racial corruption. He classified the races into black, yellow and white. Only the white race, in his opinion, was capable of freedom and conduct based on honor. He complained that the white race was failing to stay pure and this was behind the decline in artistic and material conditions.

 

Trying to outdo the English and the French who had shut them out of the closed markets of their colonies, the Nazis in Germany declared that they were the master race, inhabiting a region not far from the homeland of the PIE. The intellectual underpinnings of the program to find PIE generated poisons that led to the major conflagrations of the past two centuries. If the Chinese bound the feet of women with silk bands, the Europeans bound their mind with the gobbledygook of PIE.

 

Foot binding

 

Feet were bound in China to make them into “golden lotuses†about three inches long. We hear of it first in texts over a thousand years ago in accounts of emperor Li Yu, who ordered his favorite concubine, Fragrant Girl, to bind her feet and dance on a bejeweled, golden lotus platform. Once it became the standard for feminine beauty in the imperial court, it was copied by the lower classes.

 

In this process, the feet of a three- or four-year-old were wrapped so as to bend the toes under, break the bones and force the back of the foot together. There were many different styles to foot binding. In its extreme form, the feet were bound so tightly that the woman hobbled about with difficulty, leaning on a wall or another person for support.

 

Although women were more or less confined to their homes (these were generally upper class women, since farmer women still had to work in the fields), it was believed that bound feet promoted health and fertility. Chinese men came to consider women with bound feet to be more desirable -- modest and wanton at the same time.

 

But it wasn't just housewives or ignorant men who were responsible for the continuation of this custom. The famed 12th century scholar Zhu Xi, whose works constitute the texts of neo-Confucianism that was to dominate Chinese thought for six centuries, was a strong advocate of foot binding.

 

Mothers made sure that the custom continued, because without it, a girl had only limited prospects of marriage. Foot binding conferred status on the girl's natal family and the family into which she was chosen by her prospective mother-in-law for marriage. Foot binding joined the memories of mothers and daughters in shared pain that was their fate for the greater good of society.

 

The custom was outlawed in 1911. My Chinese colleague who grew up in the 50s remembers that his grandmother had had her feet bound. Foot binding must not be seen as a unique aberration. Even now high heels and cosmetic surgery (such as breast enhancement) cause equally serious injury. Other customs that have been followed for centuries without questioning include male and female circumcision. In the West, piercing of body parts and self-mutilation have lately become popular in certain groups.

 

In the Paduang hill-tribe in Thailand, women wear brass rings (in a continuous coil that can weigh up to twenty kilograms) to elongate the neck, earning the name of “giraffe womenâ€. Paduang girls start wearing rings from the age of six, adding one or two more coil-turns yearly, until the age of sixteen.

 

Once fastened, the rings are to be worn for life since their removal could cause the collapse or fracture of the neck. In the past, ring removal was a punishment for adultery. Such a woman was condemned to spend the rest of her life holding her head with both hands or lying down.

 

Proto-Indo-European (PIE)

 

Foot binding was the consequence of a certain aesthetic sense, but it mutilated the feet. In a similar manner, the idea of the Proto-Indo-European language was born of another standard of beauty, and it has caused injury to the minds of those who embraced it. But whereas foot binding lasted just over a millennium, PIE's heyday has been a mere 150 years, from 1800 to about 1950.

 

I am not suggesting that the idea of language families is not sound. But the idea that one can construct an original language out of which historically attested languages sprang, although attractive, is not practical, given the paucity of evidence. Even more importantly, the certitude with which the reconstruction was presented had the most unfortunate consequences for racist and colonial impulses.

 

Science at the first level consists of classification of things as they exist; but at a deeper level, it deals with their evolution with time. At this latter level, philology provides no reliable clues. PIE is based on analogies and models from the hard sciences that do not apply to language. Its appeal to genetics in that languages evolved from single parents is plain wrong (see my Yavanika article linked at the end of the column). Scientific study of genetics (a field that arose after the naïve genetic notions of philology had become frozen) tells us that diversity arises out of the complex relationship between the genes of a large host population and not from a family of uniform characteristics.

 

The Biblical notion of an original language of the Garden of Eden was behind the search for the parent language. The assumption was that, just a few thousand years ago, there were very few languages spoken and out of these few emerged the multiplicity of the languages of the historical period.

 

In reality, the diversity of the languages around 4000 or 5000 BC, the period when the PIE speakers are supposed to have lived in their homeland, is likely to have been much greater than the subsequent period, just as was seen in America when the Europeans arrived there. The extinction of languages occurred due to the advent of technology in the Neolithic age and thereafter, and to increasing political integration.

 

Selective use of words of the supposed common vocabulary of the Indo-European languages is another problem with the method used to find the homeland of PIE. It has been suggested that, since there are common words for many blood-relatives, and not the same number for in-laws, therefore in the original society, the relationship with the in-laws was not close. Going by this method, the people in the homeland knew butter but not milk, snow and feet but not rain and hands.

 

The distinguished linguist Karl Uitti had this to say of the scientific pretensions of philology: “The biological and medical metaphors employed by historical grammarians are legion and have come to sound ludicrous. Gilliéron, for one, spoke of verbal pathology and therapeutics; others, we noted, saw relationships between languages in terms of family trees, and so on. More or less regular phonetic change over time (e.g., stressed Vulgar Latin -A-> French -e-, as in PATREM>père) was labeled sound law by the neogrammarians, who claimed that phonetic laws are exceptionless laws of nature. Race also entered the picture. An English-language grammar of Swahili published during the 1880s speaks of the correlation between negroid mouth configurations and the sounds of that language.â€

 

This is not all. A certain chronology was assigned to the oral texts (as in the case of Sanskrit), and then certain changes were postulated that agreed with the assumed model. These changes were now taken as the proof that the model was correct. This reasoning is circular, somewhat like a fisherman using a net of a certain cross-wire size and then arriving at the inference that the lake has no fish below that size.

 

In the PIE system, meanings are assigned to old words to fit in with the theory. For example, it is claimed that “birch†and “beech†were known and therefore the original homeland had a certain climate. But we do not know the original meaning of these terms. In fact, in Greek, cognate of “birch†means the oak! Likewise, we do not know whether ashva meant horse in the earliest Sanskrit hymns.

 

In a recent paper, Nicholas Kazanas has opened many questions regarding the assumptions underlying PIE. For example, he argues that the three-grade ablaut (=vowel gradation) in Sanskrit is more convincing than the five-grade one proposed for PIE. He also argues that the retroflex/cerebral consonants in Sanskrit may have been a part of other languages in the family as well.

 

The leaders of the academy voted against PIE years ago by withdrawing support for research in it and informed students are aware of the sordid history of the discipline. Comparative study of language is useful, but it is time to move on past the race-inspired notions of PIE founded on circular reasoning.

© Subhash Kak., all rights reserved.