RE: [xmca] second nature

Must get to see "Ten Canoes", Phillip!! I hear it's a great movie.

And yes of course, actually, I go with Merlin Donald's idea that pre-human
hominids built a "second nature" and homo sapiens evolved biologically to
fill the ecological niche that they themselves were constructing. In fact,
it could be argued that the idea of a "first nature" independent of human
labour, is nothing more than metaphysics. Nevertheless, nature and culture
are conceptually distinct, even if they can never be extricated from one
another.

Andy
At 02:24 PM 12/10/2007 -0600, you wrote:
>
>Andy - i recently saw "Ten canoes" - a film from your parts of the
>world - yes? and it looked to me that the folks portrayed in the film -
>possibly thousands of years ago (?) - while part of the natural world,
>did not live in the natural world, but rather in their own tool-mediated
>culturally constructed world - when a dead body was painted, for example,
>yes, the paint was natural, of the earth and plants, the the reason for
>the paint wasn't about living in a natural world - the paint was a
>cultural artifact viewed through a semiotic lens - or, when bodies were
>painted in preparation for war -
>
>anyway - i wondered if in fact, since language and perhaps even before
>(witness baboon social relations and inherited dominance), if we folks
>have ever lived in anything but artifacts - regardless of the degree of
>sophistication of our technologies - and, as Foucault would assert,
>language is one of our technologies.
>
>merely meanderings out here in the Rocky Mountain West - (irony here)
>
>phillip
>
>________________________________
>
>From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Andy Blunden
>Sent: Fri 10/12/2007 6:51 AM
>To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>Subject: Re: [xmca] second nature
>
>
>
>Yes, yes, I understand that, Maria.
>My question is not about the person as such but about the world we live in,
>the environment, which is no longer a natural world but a world of
>artefacts. Obviously (especially for us) a closely related idea, but not
>the same.
>Andy
>
>
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  Andy Blunden : http://home.mira.net/~andy/ tel (H) +61 3 9380 9435,
mobile 0409 358 651

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Received on Fri Oct 12 17:23 PDT 2007