e.g., Scollon, 1981, Tempo, density and silence: Rhythms in ordinary talk.
Fairbanks: University of Alaska, Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies.
Barhhardt, C. 1982, Tuning-in: Athabaskan teachers and Athabaskan
students. In R. Barnhardt (Ed.), Cross-cultural issues in Alaskan education
(vol. 2). Fairbanks: Unviersity of Alaska, Centre for Cross-Cultural
Studies (ERIC Document No. ED 232 814)
Angel
-------------
Angel Lin
City University of Hong Kong
At 10:25 PM 2/24/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Very interesting stuff there, Diane. I in no way discount the ontogenetic
>experience as playing a key role in how feelings come to have meaning for
>us and how they become differentiated, mixed with meaning categories, etc.
>And I think you offer some stimulating speculations as well as pointers to
>relevant kinds of data.
>
>I would probably agree that rhythmicity plays a key role in some kinds of
>feelings, certainly our sense of duration, probably our sense of stability
>or predictability, usual and expectness, whether as boredom and banality or
>as comforting count-on-it-ness. I think the observation linking maternal
>and fetal heartbeats to the development of the hearing-balance sense, the
>sensitivity to pressure waves, etc. is very intriguing, though I wonder if
>there may not be other proto-senses in play fetally: afferent general
>sensations from the whole fetal body (which afferent nerve trunks develop
>first?), perhaps a kind of motion-sense. A womb is quite a bit like a
>sensory-deprivation tank! but there must still be some salient
>environmental changes that would impinge ...
>
>And as I think about rhythmicity in ontogeny, of course I then also think
>about it in phylogeny ... human phylogeny. We have brains that are very
>sensitive to rhythmic patterns, and so have our precursors for a long
>evolutionary time. This means that rhythmicity ramifies from obvious
>sensory inputs like the heartbeats to become a salient feature (or
>background; there is a figure-ground dialectic between rhythms and pulses)
>in many kinds of experiencing ...
>
>And phylogeny must be given its due here if only because ontogeny
>recapitulates it in species-specific development at the same time there is,
>gradually, more and more unique individuation in development also. So what
>about the truism that SMELL is the ur-sense? what's happening to those
>relevant parts of the brain in early development? what kind of chemical
>awareness might the fetus have? and beyond olfactory smelling, there is the
>whole range of sensitivities to enviromental chemicals, to internal
>chemical balances ... There's a lot of homeostatic control in the womb of
>course, but some things get through the placental barrier ... our culture
>doesn't make much (positive) of smell and chemosensitivity, but it ought to
>be there and have a good head start on the other senses in fetal
>development (a guess based on the theory) ...
>
>All the time scales are mixing again here.
>
>Music to the fetus ears, beyond heartbeat, to environmental rhythmic
>sounds? rhythms at least, even perhaps before pitch sensitivity?
>
>And the data ... chest-tapping, thumping ... gestural signs that may have
>more than just conventional values ... the materiality of gesture, with the
>body as the semiotic _medium_ means that again other time scales come into
>play beyond the here-and-now ... echoes of old motor habits, links of motor
>habits to feelings. There must be a literature in clinical psychotherapy on
>idiosyncratic gesture patterns as clues to psychodynamic states (i.e. to
>feeling patterns), the visible tip of the inner-bodily iceberg (and volcano).
>
>What else makes visible the flow of feelings in action? How are the
>_qualities_ of action performances not merely "operations" in the
>analytical sense (ala AT), but also (my terms) _topological signifiers_?
>voice tones and qualities, movement manners, pacing ... there is really a
>LOT to go on if one wants to find data by which to study these things even
>non-introspectively.
>
>JAY.
>
>---------------------------
>JAY L. LEMKE
>
>CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
>JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
>---------------------------
>
>