The Ecology of Magic
22 Mar 2009 21:32:00 UTC
Topic 194240
(moderation:
I listened to David Abram on a CBC Program called Ideas and he impressed me greatly.. Basically he states the problems exhibited to the natural world by humanity are result on how science and technology shaped our dispassionate outlook on the natural world..
I am posting an interview I found online just to share :-)
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
The Ecology of Magic
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Even Plato was wary of this new and powerful technology of phonetic Alphabet at that time by his writing in the Phaedrus , in the course of that dialog, Socrates relates to the young Phaedrus a curious legend regarding the Egyptian king Thamus.
Plato gives us the legend of the Egyptian god Theuth, giver of marvelous inventions. Theuth invented geometry and astronomy, games and dice, but his greatest invention was writing. The king of the Egyptians, Thamus, admired many of the gifts of Theuth, but he did not approve of writing, and refused to teach the art to his subjects.
[']If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.' 1
:-)
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
A Carrier Indian quoted in
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A Carrier Indian quoted in Diamond Jenness, The Carrier Indians of the Bulkley River, Bureau of American Ethnology: Bulletin 133 (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution 1943), p. 540.
We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon, and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has been only a short time in this country and knows very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught long ago by the animals themselves. The white man writes everything down in a book so it will not forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their ways, and passed on this knowledge from one generation to another.
Hummm... Maybe we lost something..
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
According to Mrs. Anne
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According to Mrs. Anne Peaches, A senior Apache woman
The Land is always stalking people. the Land makes people live right. The Land looks after us. The Land looks after people..
The Apache have tales called 'agodzaahi (literally, "That which has happened")
It happened at 'whiteness spreads out descending to water"
Long ago a boy went out to hunt deer. He rode on horseback. Pretty soon he saw one [a deer] standing on the side of a canyon. Then he went closer and shot it. He killed it. Then the deer rolled all the way down to the bottom of the canyon.
The the boy went down there. It was a buck, fat and muscular. There he butchered it. The meat was heavy, so he had to carry it up in pieces. He had a hard time reaching the top of the canyon with each piece.
Now it was getting dark. One hindquarter was still lying at the bottom of the canyon. "I have enough meat already" he thought. So he left the hindquarter where it was lying. He left it there.
Then he packed his horse and started to ride home. Then the boy got dizzy and nearly fell off his horse. Then his nose twitched uncontrollably, like Deer's nose does. Then pain shot up behind his eyes. Then he became scared.
Now he went back to the canyon. It was dark when he got there. He walked down to where the hindquarter was lying - but it was gone. Then he returned to his horse. He rode fast to where he was living with relatives.
The boy was sick for a long time. The people prayed for him on four separate occasions. He got better slowly.
Some time after that, when the boy had grown to manhood, he always had bad luck in hunting. No deer would present themselves to him. He said to his children. "Look at me now. I failed to be careful when I was a boy and now I have a hard time getting meat for you to eat.
It happened at "whiteness spreads out descending to water"
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
According to the Dreamtime
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According to the Dreamtime beliefs common to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Their diverse cultures - Pintupi, Pitjantjatjara, Aranda, Katitj, Warumungu, Walbiri and a host of others - May well be the oldest human cultures of any still in existence, cultures that have evolved in some of the harshest of human environments for tens of thousands of years.
The astonishing endurance of the Aboriginal Peoples must be attributed, at least partially to their minimal involvement with technologies.
Dreamtime - the Fukurrpa or Alcheringa - that plays such a prominent part in the mythology of Aboriginal Australia.
It is a kind of time out of time- A time that exists below wakeful awareness - Where Totem Ancestors first emerged from their slumber beneath the ground and began to sing their way across the land in search of food, shelter and companionship.
Gabidji, Little Wallaby, came from the west to Ooldea Soak, He came across the large western sand-ridge, close to a black desert- oak tree. He was carrying a malu-meri or buda skin water bag, which was full. He crossed the ridge and came to Yuldi. There he put his buda at the base of a large sand dune to the south and urinated in a depression which became the present day Ooldea Soak. He stayed there for a while, and then went to another sand hill to the north, from there he look out to the east. That sand hill was named Bimbali. He returned and picked up his buda, and then he spilt a little water and that became a lake. However he was not sure whether to go further and finally decided to return to Oolea. He left his buda there and it was metamorphosed as the large southern sand hill. " That's why there is always water there." He camped for a while then decided to go east again.
Each ancestor thus leaves in his wake a meander trail of geographic sites, perceivable features in the land that are the result of particular events and encounters in that ancestor's journey.
The Australian continent is crisscrosses by thousands of such meandering "song lines" or "ways through".
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
We must stand apart from the
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We must stand apart from the conventions of history, even while using the record of the past, for the idea of history is itself a western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat. It formulates experience outside of nature and tends to reduce place to only a stage upon which the human drama is enacted. History conceives the past mainly in terms of biography and nations. It seeks causality in the conscious spiritual, ambitious character of men and memorializes them in writing.
Paul Shepard
I wonder if the Ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said? - Young Chief of the Cayuses tribe (upon signing over their lands to the US Government in 1855)
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
Acocording to anthropologist
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Acocording to anthropologist Ake Hultkranz:
Western time concepts include a beginning and an end; American Indians understand time as an eternally recurring cycle of events and years. Some Indian languages lack terms for the past and the future; everything is resting in the present.
American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in his extensive analysis of the Hopi language during the 1930's and early 1940's. Whorf found no analog in the Hopi language, to linear sequential uniformly flowing time that Western Civilization takes for granted. Indeed, Whorf found no reference to any independent temporal dimension of reality, and no terms or expressions that "refer to space in such a way as to exclude that element of extension or existence that we call time, and so by implication leave a residue that could be referred to as time. What we call time in other words could not be isolated from the Hopi experience of space:
"In this Hopi view [that which we call] time disappears and [that which we call] space is altered, so that it is no longer the homogenous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or of classical Newtonian mechanics".
What a clash of cultures...
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
RE: "In this Hopi view
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The original relativists! Heck. This is what Einstein, then Minkowski, later unearthed! :-) :-)
It is the conundrum of the meaning of time that stymies, or confuses, the interpretation of some products of quantum mechanics : action-at-distance, non-locality, entanglement ....
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
RE: The original
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They lived this way... It was not just a thought experiment...
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
Let's sit down here... on the
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Let's sit down here... on the open prairie, where we can't see a highway or a fence. Let's have no blankets to sit on, but feel the ground with our bodies, the earth, the yielding shrubs. Let's have the grass for a mattress, experiencing its sharpness and its softness. Let us become like stones, plants and trees. Let us be animals, think and feel like animals. Listen to the air. you can hear it, feel it, smell it. taste it. - Woniya wakan - the holy air- which renews all by its breath. Woniya - we sit together, don't touch but something is there; we feel it between us, as a presence. A good way to start thinking about nature, talk about it. Rather talk to it, talk to the rivers, to the lakes, to the winds as our relatives.
John Fire Lame Deer
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. - Aldo Leopold
RE: RE: The original
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Some good thoughtful nicely down-to-earth examples there. A good example of what can be lost when there is a clash of cultures. To be "cosmopolitan" is to be very rich of culture!
The comment about the Hopi Indians being agnostic of time sounds like the old fallacy from the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:
Pinker also debunks Whorf’s claims about time in the Hopi language. He points out that the anthropologist Malotki (1983) has found that the Hopi do have a concept of time very similar to ours – and in fact have units of time, and a sophisticated calendar. In addition, Whorf’s arguments on Hopi character are based on Hopi language, making his argument circular, and therefore useless.
Is the Hopi way of expressing their ideas of time really a different concept or just merely a different cultural view? Or just misunderstood in the English language due to there being no direct word by word translation?
Note also the fallacy of the "many words for snow" of Eskimos... We have just as many distinctions discernible in English, we just happen to use multiple shades of phrases if we were so interested to do so.
Similarly, to pick up on a philosophical detail from Terry Pratchett and his DiscWorld Dwarfs, do miners have an extended unique vocabulary for finely identifying geological strata?...
Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" makes for fascinating reading if you are interested in what we do with language and how.
Aside: In the brief history lead-in for that article, I rather like the comment: "Science came next, bringing the idea of causality – which required further debate." Beautifully droll! :-)
Keep searchin',
Martin
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