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PAPUA - New Guinea — about 463,000 square kilometers of rugged tropical rainforest that stretches from tsunami-prone coastal communities to the steeply rising valleys of the interior — is home to more than 850 languages and 1,000 distinct traditional cultures: a richness of diversity that’s the result of more than 50,000 years of relatively undisturbed habitation.

I have a lovely book from there called Birds of my Kalam Country by an anthropologist, the late Ralph Bulmer, and Ian Saem Majnep, a Kalam native New Guinea Highlander from the remote fastnesses of the Kaironk Valley.

The book outlines the Kalam classification system — a “taxonomy” — for the birds that live in the Kaironk Valley. They’re an intimate part of the lives of the Kalam people, as food, yes, but they also turn up in dreams, wisdom traditions and ritual. And the classification system gathers in all of this so that it adds up to a succinct but graphic account of the birds’ habits and habitat, their forms and colours, their uses, their roles in ritual and their relationships with the Kalam people. The book includes some essential folk tales about birds and people.  It gives the birds meaning.

This Kalam way is very different from the Latin-using taxonomic system devised by the 18th century Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus that prevailed in the 1970s when this book was compiled, as well as from the new genes-based “cladistic” system that’s replacing the physiology-based Linnaean system.

But it’s only the Kalam system that would actually help you to survive in the Kaironk Valley.

Language is like that: a kind of wide-ranging taxonomic system with extras. It’s a way of dividing and grouping varieties of experience that enables us to communicate with each other.

Having a language means narrowing our eyes a bit; it’s a trade-off of total perceptual freedom for a bit of company.

So, in the conventions of English, we see objects or people doing stuff to each other: a “subject” acts on an “object”. That’s the basic, core English sentence: things and actions, nouns and verbs. It’s the basis of our ability to tell a story. And that’s the way we tend to go around looking at the world: cause and effect, objects in action.

We are less likely to see everything, for example, as itself an activity (a chair, for example, as several substances — each with its own story — coming together to be a chair for a while), or as patterns of relationship (a tree, for example, being the particular, dynamic interaction of soil, seed, wind, sun and air). We see THINGS: distinct categories of objects and creatures.

We see them act on each other, and react. But we miss a lot of life’s essential dynamism and uncertainty, the unstoppable flow. This makes it easier for “us” to set ourselves “goals” to “achieve” without feeling any great need to reflect, for example, on the way pursuit of the goal will immerse us in new relationships and transform our lives: what might “we” necessarily become by the time we get there. Will “that” goal (as a kind of object) please the person we will have become… or will we need to make a new “goal”? When do we get to be happy again?

Nor do we think very much about the mutabilities of whatever we have determined the “goal” to be. The changing world and society we live in means that pursuing a goal is very much like getting on a bus without knowing where it’s going; we might have seen pictures or been told it’s “good” there, but we have no way of knowing whether we’ll find it “better”, or even “good” for us. Still, our categories give us the courage to get us on the bus. After that, everything’s an adventure.

The trade-off English gives us is that we get to plan our actions in exchange for an understanding of the possibilities. Risk assessments don’t deliver; only life delivers. While we may say, “everything is connected” very few of us live that way, contentedly focused on maturing healthily within the contexts we inhabit, wherever that may lead us. Life is often more about ignoring connections, and our English language helps us to do that.

LANGUAGE is an amazing facility and the distinguishing badge of a culture. It gives us illusions of intimacy with a historical and collective consciousness, one that’s not uniquely our own. It makes us feel part of something greater than ourselves and, without it, we’d feel very much more lonely than we do.

From within his or her own language, a person of any culture can be misled into believing that he or she lives in THE “real” world and, with others, has a secure power over it. In fact, of course, it’s just conceptual scenery, helping to fill out and shape the imaginations of those who live in its midst. But by naming and articulating them, a language makes some ideas easier to hang onto than others —more “real” — and it seems to help steer a culture and its members in some directions more assuredly than in others.

And all of that will be different for someone whose world is embodied in and nurtured by some different language and some other culture.

And, as we grow up, all that we understand ourselves to be and all of our experience tends to become embedded in a culture and a language. Language is what makes it possible to share aspects of our own consciousness with others. And consciousness is the lens through which everything comes to us: our mother’s cautioning look, our baby’s gurgling grin… ugliness, beauty, interest, love, dreams, hope, ideas, inspirations and insights … even the police.

These filters vary from person to person but far more markedly between cultures. Too often, the worlds shaped and inhabited by other cultures do not interest us greatly and so they remain closed to us.

That’s a very great pity because reality is like ice-cream: it comes in more flavours that you can think of. And each flavour adds to our appreciation of ice-cream.

Cultural diversity has long been humanity’s richest and most stimulating treasury of thought and insight but, in the West’s rush to “develop” and “civilise” rather a lot of it has been discarded, deliberately extinguished, wasted: lost forever.

And — because exploring other cultures opens to us to a colours-filled kaleidoscopic view of the universe, a garden of delights, almost a second life — that’s an assault against us all, whether we realise it yet or not.