Re: Quack! Quack! Quack! (2)

James Robert Martin (jmartin who-is-at extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 16:15:59 +1000 (EST)

Perhaps the trick is to see weather and climate as a cline, so we can
have 2 person cliamte, more person climate... etc. Or texts, registers,
codes (in Bernstein's sense of coding orientation),
languages if we put this into a linguistics kind of orientation to
communities.
It's the micro- vs macro- problem again... the bottom line for me is that
we can't talk about power without relating weather to climate, and if we
can't talk about power, it is very difficult to act politically on
anything.

On Thu, 18 Apr 1996, Robin Harwood wrote:

> Jim--I love the climate/weather analogy. The "climate" perspective
> seems to imply not only a longer period of time, but also seems to
> look for meaningful patterns over a larger geographical region as
> well. "Weather" occurs outside my front door, but "climate" is
> something that can be said to characterize the entire state of
> Connecticut; moreover, I can visit Virginia and "compare" the "climates"
> (i.e., the larger weather patterns) of the two states.
>
> This is interesting to me, because I have heard some people argue
> that it is meaningless to look for cultural patterns any larger
> than two people interacting at a given point in time. The climate/
> weather analogy, however, seems to suggest otherwise...
>
> Robin
>
>