Deer people,
I had this message put away among the numerous drafts that get written but
never posted-- but feeling that the current discussion could use a turn in
the road bring out a broad new vista upon which to rest the eyes, I've
pulled it out of the drafts folder and now post it soon to be followed by
another.
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Having just returned from Seattle where I found to my great surprise that
Yrjo Engestrom had been a foreign exchange student up here in northern
California, behind the redwood curtain, I'm now going through the messages
and found the following from Phillip White:
" i'm reminded on Ana
Shane's comments from february 16 of this year where she wrote about the
conflict of moral answerability and taking agency out of the individual.
she wrote "if one cannot situate agency in an INDIVIDUAL, if one does not
VALUE an individual, then on one hand one cannot talk about individual
moral answerability, and on the other, destruction of individual cannot be
construed as a crime." (Ana's caps.) "
This brought to mind a conversation I was having last night about the
linguistic problem of relating the semantic core concept of AGENT to the
syntactic position of SUBJECT and how, although this is the most common case
in languages throughout the world, it turns out that there are some
languages in which the AGENT is not necessarily the SUBJECT. Of all the
various forms of culture bound perspectives, I think those that come to us
from the structure of our language are perhaps the most important, the
deepest (yes, I'm something of a Whorfian). This SUBJECT/AGENT bias seems
something that is deeply embedded in the structure of our language.
Interestingly, the languages in which this isn't the case are found among
Australian aborigines and perhaps some of the native american groups
associated with the first migratory movement out of Asia to the Western
hemisphere (approx. 20-30,000 bce). What makes this interesting to me being
that it occurred before the agricultural revolution whereas all of the
languages in which the SUBJECT/AGENCY is given are associated with cultures
emerging after or perhaps as those that were in contact, (eg, the lowland
south American tribes of the 20th century who were originally highlanders
(ag folks) escaping the Spaniards in the 16th-18th centuries. The same is
true of the australian groups who arrived to that sub-continental land mass
also before the ag revolution and apparently lived pretty much without
contact with other groups emerging aftere the ag revolution.
Connecting this with the proposals concerning the fundamental shift in
consciousness that occurred among homo sapiens toward the end of the
paleolithic period (ca 20,000 bce) coincident with the slow transition to
agriculture and pastoral adaptations (so clearly encoded in the Book of
Genesis, for example -- out of the Garden and living by the sweat of ones
brow) One can question from a deep historical fashion our tendency to
associate INDIVIDUAL and AGENCY as a consequence of the fundamental
transformation to the basic activity systems and the way in which the object
was given as part of the fundamental productive activities (the
transformation of the Paleolithic Mind, the Great Hunt and totemism to the
agricultural mind and implicit subject/object dichotomy--i.e., the object is
the product of labor and not something provide by an all abiding living
world that provides all without any direct human intervention in the
productive process.
Still needing to read Peter's comments on LBE2.
Paul H. Dillon
"It seems ridiculous to me to attempt to study society as a mere observer.
He who wishes only to observe will observe nothing, for as he is useless in
actual work and a nuisance in recreations, he is admitted to neither. We
observe the actions of others only to the extent to which we ourselves
act." - Jean Jacque Rousseau
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 01 2001 - 01:01:53 PDT