Honors III

Harvey

OVERALL SUMMARY OF COURSE

--we’ve been looking at “other” cultures--non-middle-class, mall-hopping cultures--more or less anthropologically; to study other cultures is to make you more self-conscious about your own, and thus more self-aware

--we walk around in a shell of customs, everything from how you are treated in a court of law if you transgress the law to how you relate to your body and other bodies

--and also material culture (style of clothes, architectural/domestic space)

--that cocoon of stuff makes us feel comfortable and gives us a sense of identity; more radically, perhaps you are those things, or the multiple narratives you tell yourself about yourself in relation to those customs and material cultural items

--you are just a vessel for Gap jean's style, Britney Spears wannabe or loathing, get-ahead/capitalist ideology desires, the clock-ticking-away-your-life-as-you-anticipate-the-future

--“Bat” and film-theory essays: what I call otherness puzzles—can we imagine being a radically different species? What are we imagining when we watch a film?

--next semester we will examine “otherness” not anthropologically, but in terms of psychology and atypical intensity of experiences (religious zeal, imprisonment/degradation, death)

--we will also track one culture from “green” culture experience to urban modernity

CULTURES/TEXTS STUDIED

--Rousseau: the social philosopher who inaugurated a nostalgia, for Westerners, for the “primitive” (Noble Savage) life

--“primitive” or “green” cultures (pygmies or Black Elk): immediacy of forest environment and magical powers within forest because not separated from environment via technology; less clock-time or career conscious; every day much like every other day, no written laws but social laws intensely known; no alienating gray-box world

--Sioux “Younger Brother” story: try to figure out the cultural rules that make sense of this story!  Vice-versa, what are the cultural rules that make sense of Halloween?

--highly ritualized or contemplative cultures (from Genji to Thousand Cranes): day-to-day world less filled with objects, but those objects are highly ritualized/reverentially regarded; pace is much, much slower than pace of U.S. today (what contemporary Japan is like is another story!)

--Zen: you are not the objects, plans, or narrative in your head: try contemplating experience directly without filtering it, try being engaged in life with a mix if spontaneity/control

--Austen, end of 18^th-century: dating and career, etc. (just as today), but etiquette very fine-tuned.

NAGEL BAT ESSAY SUMMARY

--says we can’t imagine being “like” a bat

--that quality is not reducible to behavior or anything physical

--consciousness is a closed world of subjective experience

--uniqueness of consciousness is in experience of “batness” not in being a particular bat

--ergo: we all share being “human” and can “understand” one another

IN SMALL GROUP: LET’S IMAGINE, NONETHELESS, WHAT IT IS TO BE A BAT

--how does a bat understand time?

--does a bat think “me”

--can a bat (can you?) feel pain without a “me” concept

--if you forgot pain, would it the pain have happened?

--what is the relationship of “me” to temporality?

HOW ABOUT A SLUG?

--does a slug feel pain, or is it merely a physiological response? 

--does a slug tell narratives to itself about itself?