Re: [xmca] primitive language, primitive thought

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Mike,
I have been reflecting on your comment,

Its as if the authors writing in the 1920's were encaptulating the late
19th century armchair anthropologists. That this kind of thinking persists
to the present day as the everyday ideology of European Americans strikes
me as significant.

I have also been reflecting on how we approach trying to clarify the shared
ideals informing  multiple CHAT perspectives. You  mentioned that how we
understand the "both/and" of the various romantic and enlightenment  ideals
within our day to day practices  is one way of reflecting on this theme.

You earlier offered this FRAGMENT of text from the young Marx to focus our
discussion on  the "both/and" as an overcoming of the antimonies that
currently play out between spiritualism and materialism:

It is only in a social context that subjectivism and
objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity cease to
be antinomies, and thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution
of the THEORETICAL contradictions is possible ONLY through practical means,
only through the PRACTICAL energy of man.

Mike, this approach of offering FRAGMENTS of text that you show us or
present to us [as presents or gifts] to OPEN and to ponder and to
GENERATE further QUESTIONS  seems to present presents as a particular
method that may hold significance.
If this approach to writing can be seen as a particular KIND of writing
engendering a particular KIND of "reader" [who is IN mind -spiritual??] we
may have a particular practice developing before our eyes which engenders a
less assertive KIND of knowing [as certainty, predictability, and
repeatability] and brings forth a more dialogical, conversational method
that privleges acknowledgement within particularity, uniqueness,
idiosyncratic FRAGMENTS as an ideal practice.

I'm circling around this hermeneutical notion of "seeing through"
enlightenment OR romanticism as SYSTEMS and shifting focus to the FRAGMENTS
"read" in a "timely" or historical AWARENESS.
I will end with David's metaphor of rusty LINKS in the chain AS FRAGMENTS
and Ivan's suggestion that we not see these multiple links as  proceeding
FROM the past as LINEAR, but use a metaphor of MESH as FIGURE and the
FRAGMENTS weaving together through multiple rusty links.

I will end with how I opened, exploring the term *encapsulated* as a
container with flexible boundaries which expresses an ideology that seems
to be a subjective choice but actually expresses a WAY of life [and a
particular configuration of "both/and"

Larry








On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 9:01 PM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> It appears that the God of Serendipity has intervened in recent discussions
> of cultural difference,
> primitivism, etc.
>
> For reasons extraneous to this discussion, I have been reading *Mutiny on
> the Bounty*. The crew has made it to Tahiti and the young narrator who is
> there officially to write a dictionary for purposes of facilitating future
> trade, is put under the guardianship of one of the Tahitian nobility,
> Hitihiti. The narrator, eager learner that he is, makes the following
> observation concerning his host.
>
> "Hitihiti spoke the Tahitian language as only a chief could, for the lower
> order, as in other lands, possessed
> vocabularies of no more than a few hundred words. He was interested in my
> work and of infinite use to me, thought, as with all his countryman, mental
> effort fatigued him if sustained for more than an hour or two."
>
> Its as if the authors writing in the 1920's were encaptulating the late
> 19th century armchair anthropologists.
>
> That this kind of thinking persists to the present day as the everyday
> ideology of European Americans strikes me as significant.
>
> mike
>
> mike
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> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
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