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Article: Humanizing science. (cultural bias in linguistics)
- Article from:
- The Humanist
- Article date:
- March 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 American Humanist Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Part of my humanism says that, in order for science to be of value, it must have value to the people from whom our scientific information comes To use other human beings as objects of study and then hide the results from them--using such results only for the benefit of ourselves and our group--is, in my judgment, both anti humanistic and scientifically unethical It also leads to bad science, as some work in my own field of linguistics clearly shows.
I first went to Bolivia in the early 1960s to work with the Jaqi (pronounced "hah-kay") people who inhabit the high lands of the Andes mountains. Though Aymara ("eye-mah-dah") is the language spoken by the largest ...