Levi-Strauss argues that there is no real difference in terms of
complexity
between "primitive" and scientific thought; he found the primitive's
categories and structurings in botany, for example, to be as complex as
any
western textbook might offer. The difference he found was that the
primitive
botany was based upon use--what plants were good for.
I still think Levi-Strauss erred in being driven by the concerns of his
day,
possibly responding to developmentalists like Heinz Werner, and was out to
prove "primitives" were not "simple." But what he ended up describing as
the
primitive mind is the everyday mind of socialized people
everywhere--habits of
willful tenacity and authority.
I don't accept the notion of "man in a state of nature." What few
studies/examples of feral children and social isolates there are suggest,
unless rescued before puberty, they do not achieve normal human
development.
I don't know what "laws" there are governing the human mind, but whatever
they
are, they're largely social. To be socialized means to be locked into
belief
systems based upon tenacity and authority, initially those you are born
into.
These two social requisites of belief are perfectly capable of the most
radical kinds of error and monstrosity. They have historically supported
all
sorts of superstition, tyranny, genocide--you name it--along with the
heights
of human achievement. end Bailey quotation
Dear Bill,
You describe Levi-Strausss claim that primitive can often
match scientific knowledge in areas such as botany, though primitive is
not disinterested. And how sometime later you acknowledged how scientists
too
are filling needs, have uses for their systems. So far Im with you. One
might even state it differently: scientific naturalists can tend to be
focalized exclusively on a research question, whereas hunter-gatherers can
tend to view a particular question as an aspect of ecological mind. Jared
Diamond gives a great example of ornithological field work in New Guinea
where
his focus on identifying a particular rare bird limited him from seeing it
ecologically: his aboriginal guide had to show him how one version of the
bird
is found low in branches, the other in higher branches. Diamond was only
looking at the bird itself, isolate. The question I would pose is: who was
more scientific, the aboriginal or the focused Diamond?
But your idea that man in a state of nature is feral, if I
understand you, seems to me to be a basic misreading of the life of
hunter-
gathering through which we became human, as is your idea that the
primitive
mind is the everyday mind of socialized people everywhere. Im not a fan of
Levi-Strausss way of boiling people down to his structural conception of
mind. But the anthropological record reveals hunter-gatherer peoples
typically
to be highly sophisticated naturalists.
Consider Paul Shepards words, from his book, Nature and Madness: Beneath
the
veneer of civilization, in the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the
barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and
necessary for becoming fully human: birth in gentle surroundings, a rich
nonhuman environment, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the discipline of
natural history, play at being animals, the expressive arts of receiving
food
as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the cultivation of
metaphorical
significance of natural phenomena of all kinds, clan membership and small
group life, and the profound claims and liberation of ritual initiation
and
subsequent stages of adult mentorship. There is a secret person undamaged
in
each of us, aware of the validity of these conditions, sensitive to their
right moments in our lives. All of them are assimilated in perverted forms
in
modern society: our profound love of animals twisted into pets, zoos,
decorations, and entertainment; our search for poetic wholeness subverted
by
the model of the machine instead of the body; the moment of pubertal
idealism
shunted into nationalism or otherworldly religion instead of an
ecosophical
cosmology.
We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse. It awaits only an
authentic expression. The task is not to start by recapturing the theme of
a
reconciliation with the earth in all of its metaphysical subtlety, but
with
something much more direct and simple that will yield its own healing
metaphysics. Paul Shepard, from Nature and Madness
You also claim that, To be socialized means to be locked into belief
systems based upon tenacity and authority, initially those you are born
into... Yet this seems to me not a depiction of socialization, but of what
Dennis Wrong called the oversocialized conception of man. Healthy
socialization brings forth individuals capable of spontaneous
reasonableness
and autonomy, not simply molded to blank conformity, but possessed of an
internalized community with whom to dialogue in the process of thought.
And
socialization is truly a biosocial, biosemeiotic process, especially in
its
earliest stages where real brain development occurs with real social
interaction of mother and infant, involving real human, primate, and
mammalian
characteristics.
For hunter-gatherers socialization involves internalizing an inner
community peopled not only by human parental, peer, and authority figures,
but
by the living instinctual intelligence of the all-surrounding community of
life, found especially in its animal and plant creatures. Man in a state
of
nature, contra Hobbes, is man as but one member of the community of life,
who
realizes the value of omnivorously attending to and revering ecological
mind.
Man in a state of agriculturally-based civilization, contra Hobbes, is one
who
lives the shorter, nastier, more brutish life, even literally growing 4 to
6
inches shorter universally wherever civilization flourishes, encumbered in
megastructures of authority and inequality.
To hunter-gatherers, a people who regarded themselves and the universe
as dead machines to which life is reducible would be the feral children,
socialized into a matrix ultimately as suicidal as it is murderous. That
is
precisely the world brought about by modern science and its arrogant
dismissal
of the psycho-physical universe under the spell of materialism; by the
modern
scientific world-view, whose apparent disinterest disguises the crypto-
religious teleology it serves.
Scientific self-correction may be a matter of the long run. Hooray for it.
Someday it may correct its ghost in the machine delusion and renew the
psycho-
physical universe as irreducibe reality. The problem is that life is also
a
matter of once for all time. Cut its cord and its gone.
We are the earths feral children razoring away.
Gene
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