paul asks, about translations:
>Two questions:
>
>1. What provides the basis for translation?
experience
> How is it even possible if
>there isn't something independent of the language to which the translation
>can be compared?
there are, of course,many experiences that cannot be translated. hence the
need for a term such as "ineffable"
> What do you call this "thing", this frame of reference?
>How is it accessed?
experienced is translated through cultural norms, social habits,
language, genre, discourse, science, art, bodily activity, re-activity,
but the "essential" thing is experience.
>
>2. Have you read Ishmael?? The voice of Mother Culture whispering its
>lies? There the objectivity comes quite simply as extinction. Human
>practice that fails to conform to the independent structures, the
>ecological
>parameters of the material world (e.g., the Anasazi, the lowland Maya, the
>20th century global civilization?) quite simply autodestructs--no gas in
>the
>tank, no drive-- that's pretty objective and doesn't admit of regionally
>applicable truths except in "make-believe".
"make-beleive?" i'm not sure that regionally difference in translations of
experience qualify as make-beleive - whatever the experience MEANS is
dependent upon the language that provides it with references, contexts,
and understandings - these are, are would suggest, partial, not subjective
in
an absolute the way objectivity is an absolute, but partially-contingent
on courses over which there are, in the end, no control.
thus the Holocaust can be denied as easily as the dissolving ozone can
be denied. it is not what we admit as objective, but what we deny as
possible
that is invariably our undoing.
>But then in make believe there
>is no real (objective) tea in the tiny cups anyway, is there? Or maybe
>we
>are just like the children who play "tea party": after we finish playing
>our
>parents (gods/goddesses) will call us into the kitchen and give us lunch.
>That'd be nice, I guess . . .
i think there are some intellectuals who are indeed having tea parties
in make-believe worlds, absolutely. in fact, i'd say a good part of
"civilized" world is more invested in their tea parties than in expanding
the parameters of
what are partial truths about the world.
diane
>
>
>Paul H. Dillon
**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
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