Changing Tires on the Fly

[marct]

Can I get an "Amen?"

I'll see if I can get my students to do that as well (evil grin).

Seriously that trait goes well beyond Canada, Marc. And it goes hand in glove with stunned disbelief or iconclastic denial when such naivete is exposed to reality. I recently tried to explain to a friend why I say that the capacity for genocide is the reciprocal of man's capacity for mercy. They are in my mind very much a Yin and Yang, which define humanity.

Oh, too true! I tend to call that "theological epistemologies" - very popular with the Marxists . I remember years ago, during my undergrad, reading a Gnostic book called Divine Pomander (part of the Corpus Hermeticum). Once you got past the symbolism, the content and ideas were absolutely fascinating - things like "all opposites are the same", etc. Nowadays, I just say that reality doesn't have zero's or infinities.

As I recall from my long distant undergraduate days as an anthro minor, there was a case study set I believe in a Latin American country on a small tribe that had set lying as desirable trait, one emulated and rewarded in the limited cultural setting in which it occurred. Yet I have heard so many times, educated people state catergorically that lying is a "universally" condemned trait. That to me is what distinguished between "educated" and "learned." Kind of like what some said regarding religion in Rwanda: the Church was strong but Christianity was not.

LOLOL. I think my favorite ethnographic example is from Papua New Guinea. There was a particular tribe of head hunters that had been studied for over 50 years and, unlike every other tribe of head hunters, there was no apparent rhymn or reason to their expeditions. The last couple to study them had been there several times and were supposed to go back, but only the wife could (something about supervision and teaching duties). Anyway, while the wife was back there, she ended up slipping on a mountain trail and falling over a 1000 feet to her death. Anyway, the husband went into a grief spin and just couldn't be brought out of it. For over a year, he couldn't look at any of his research material. Finally, he managed to get to the point where he had to clean out her office, and all he felt was an overpowering urge to kill the chair of his department. That's when the lightbulb went on. He checked through all of the field notes they had so painstakingly gathered and realized that every chief who had launched a head hunting expedition had had a close family member die in the recent past. He had, after over 50 years, cracked one of the major mysteries in Cultural Anthropology - headhunting, for the Ilongit, was a form of grief psychotherapy.

One of the strengths of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, as a species, is that we are infinately adaptable within the limits of our biology. Every culture abhors "murder", but "murder" is always defined as "unlawful killing". It's the same with every one of the "Deadly Sins". (Actually, I remember a friend of mine, Jerome Barkow, who did a really great presentation about that... )

To my mind, "educated" means that you have been "inculcated with tribal gnosis" - i.e. you have been brainwashed into perceptions based on your cultural matrix. "Learned" means that not only are you "educated", even if you may not have the formal accrediation, but that you are also able to produce "new" knowledge within your culture/symbol system. Personally, I prefer someone who is "Wise"; defined as stepping beyond the limits of your culture to look at the face of reality as best you can perceive it. I think Socrates said it best, when he said that "I am the wisest man alive, for I know that I know nothing."

Marc