Hi Phillip and fellow xmca'ers,
Now that you mention it, Phillip, I may as well add a few words to it...
(talking about movies... an off-beat topic here?) The title should be
"Eat, Drink, Man, Woman" (No, Phillip, we are not cannibals! :-) :-) )
The title has borrowed from an ancient saying of Confucius: "Drink, eat,
man, woman--humans' major desires."
I remember when I first read this in my Chinese intellectual thought class,
I was a bit surprised at Confucius's down-to-earth and mundane way of
talking about human nature, but my teacher said this reflects the
pragmatic side of his thinking, and that in his political and educational
thoughts, the basic needs of humans must first be taken care of before you
can talk about other "higher level" things, e.g., Confucius's another
famous saying is: "Humans can know honor only when they are free from
cold and hunger".
Well, then there's another saying in our culture (not attributed to
Confucius though) which goes like this: "When one is well-fed and
well-clothed, one thinks of excessive desires". So, our fellow-students
used to joke about our culture: full of famous sayings that contradict
one another... now that I think about it having read some of Engestrom's
writings... I think it may just be natural that no single culture is
homogeneous, and that a culture can be full of dissenting voices,
inner contradictions and tensions, just as so often we may find the
human life full of inner contradictions and potential tensions...
Just a thought,
Angel