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Saturday, May 16, 2009
EXTRA CREDIT: TED TALK ON CULTURAL WEB OF LIFE--THE ETHNOSPHERE
Watch this video and read about Wade Davis and write a 250-word comment relating it to what you learned from the video and from the class about cultural anthropology and how you think it relates to the real world in your life.
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2 comments:
At the end of his speech Davis returns to the original problem, what is causing these remote and culturally rich people to disappear? is it technology? is it change? It is neither says Davis, it is power. Power causes these cultures to become unnoticed and eventually they fade away. Ethnocide should be treated on the same level as genocide, maybe even taken more seriously. The only way to stop ethnocide is to accept the fact that we live in a multicultural, pluralistic world, and if we do not embrace diversity these rich cultures will not only not be present in our language, but these cultures wont be present at all.
I think that by "agreeing to be offended" and by seeing through the "lenses of someone else's grinding" we can become more accepting and open minded to these foreign rich cultures. I think that Anthropology is a great awareness subject especially for college students because we are the next generation of workers and future anthropologists than can change the world.
Sara Petrovsky
May 21, 2009
Ant 1001 TV24A/ Gaunt
3rd Year (Psychology)
Wade Davis discusses some of the main ideas that make anthropology what it is. Davis discusses the fact that there are so many rituals in each culture, each culture has its own song cadence. This culture specific cadence to one general song is what he calls the ethnosphere. The ethnosphere is what we are as human beings right now, and what we can become. The main thing that affects the ethnosphere is the biosphere. Cultures are always developing, accommodating, acculturating, and sometimes disappearing and the thing that disappears with culture is language. “Language is the house of being,” says Martin Heidegger, language is how a mind, a soul, a spirit is brought to life. There used to be more than six thousand spoken languages on earth claims Davis, now half of that six thousand is gone. How do some cultures preserve it? Most cultures because of ethnocentrism will marry only people that are from their culture and speak their own language, but the Amazon have a tradition to marry someone who does not speak the same language, in order to get different cultures to listen to each other and appreciate each other.
Some of the pictures that Davis used stuck in my mind, the Voodoo culture where the children dance and “become God” they hold burning coals in their hands. This is completely foreign to me. This type of mind body disconnection is such a crazy ritual, but to them the fact that I don’t burn my hands is weird.
The other interesting culture that Davis mentioned were the Acolytes (spelling?) who would take their children at the age of three and place them in dark stone caves until the children were eighteen. This is interesting because in philosophy there is an allegory of a cave which discusses a similar scenario. Plato’s cave is a cave where people are kept in a cave underground and are only shown two-dimensional reflections their whole lives. At a certain point they are brought to the surface of the earth and are greeted by the sun which blinds them, and this is called enlightenment. It is very interesting that this method of education is still being used since Platonic times.
The other tribe that I found fascinating was the tribe who made the “ayawaska” for their priest initiation. They are able to identify seventeen different types of plants that when mixed with other plants inhibit certain psychedelics. We think that a tribe this remote, this uneducated would have no scientific knowledge, but it turns out to be the complete opposite, they know more science than we do.
At the end of his speech Davis returns to the original problem, what is causing these remote and culturally rich people to disappear? is it technology? is it change? It is neither says Davis, it is power. Power causes these cultures to become unnoticed and eventually they fade away. Ethnocide should be treated on the same level as genocide, maybe even taken more seriously. The only way to stop ethnocide is to accept the fact that we live in a multicultural, pluralistic world, and if we do not embrace diversity these rich cultures will not only not be present in our language, but these cultures wont be present at all.
I think that by "agreeing to be offended" and by seeing through the "lenses of someone else's grinding" we can become more accepting and open minded to these foreign rich cultures. I think that Anthropology is a great awareness subject especially for college students because we are the next generation of workers and future anthropologists than can change the world.
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