[Xmca-l] Re: Notes on Blindness

[Greg Thompson]

Annalisa,
Yes, you said it very well, much better than I did in my prior post which
was a bit intellectually garbled (and I missed the article that went along
with it, so thanks for pointing that out!).

But I do think that there is an interesting point to be made about the
importance of the reduction of the manifold of experience that is essential
to memory.

I once assembled a paper that argued that forgetting should be seen as a
tool of ethnography since when one reduces one's experience to what is
remembered, one has gotten to something that was somehow important.
Reviewers thought it was just an excuse for doing lazy ethnographic
research. Perhaps it was...

What ever happened to that paper?

I can't remember...
-greg



On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 3:00 PM, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:

> Greg!
>
> Yes the piece is really great and well produced!
>
> If you read the article that accompanies the video on the Times page, the
> writers indicate that over time as he adjusted to blindness, he came to
> revel in the other senses to the point that when he was helping with the
> movie, he'd forgotten that he'd gone through that painful time, and
> apparently wasn't happy to revisit the memories. I think that is the point
> of the last scene with the rain (inside), to show that he began to "see"
> differently, with sound. Maybe? At least, that is how I interpreted it.
>
> I also thought, as you, it was remarkable that he remembered photographs,
> maybe these map in memory differently? Like you say because of reduction of
> modality?
>
> What also seems significant is that if we don't use those organs of
> perceptions we lose memories of those perceptions. Which may mean that
> memory is something that must be reconstructed with the organ somehow, even
> if we aren't using the organ to perceive externally while retrieval of the
> memory? I'm not sure I explained that very well…
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Annalisa
>
>


-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson