diane,
>
> when nature becomes a force to dominate - ?, historically, is this the
> qualitative change you're referring to?
yes, that's exactly the change I'm referring to. A classic expression of
this hypothesis is the novel, "Ishmael", but the book I mentioned, "The
Idea of Wilderness", provides a more scholarly perspective. Basically it's
a deep ecology position which I don't support because I do believe that the
historical dimension has an ontological status different from nature. It is
perhaps a characteristic of agriculture as developed in the middle east and
europe that leads to this pattern: monocropping and the elimination of
"weeds" and "pests". There a pretty good case that Andean agriculture was
a much more subtle relationship with the environment. For one thing, the
mountainous environment led to a much more diverse pattern with the
simultaneous exploitation of multiple ecological zones. Single productive
units (extended families) exploited numerous, non-contiguous pieces of land
(almost like multiple gardens) distributed through these different
ecological zones ranging from lower semi-tropical areas producing a wide
variety of fruits to very high plateaus where only bitter potatoes (source
of the world's first freeze dry potato: chunu) would survive. Interestingly
enough, the highland andean peoples not only had a very advanced
civilization with no writing, they positively outlawed writing which had
developed at an earlier stage among coastal andean people (a form of glyph
writing)--like it was a crime to write, sort of the same way it's a crime to
depict human figures in an Islamic mosque. Interesting patterns. Brings to
mind the Star Trek (TNG) where Picard has to communicate with a person who
also uses a language that is purely metaphorical and in which the speaker is
only indirectly related to the agency implicit in the descriptive processes
of language use.
Thus, whether all of this was implicit, coded in the first tool, but just
very, very slow to mature is something I'm unsure about. As far as
civilization goes, remember that most all historians in the west have always
dated this from the development of agriculture in the fertile crescent (how
historically ironical that this is the same place that witnesses the
struggles over oil which might just bring the whole adventure to a close).
>
> being a bit of a muddler in these language games,
> i'm going to ask my next question on this - what do you see as a
> relationship between "will" and "agency?"
I haven't really thought about this--I was using "agency" in the context of
semantic theory as explained to me by a friend.
Paul H. Dillon
p.s., that Mr. Plow episode of the simpsons is a good one.
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