Introduction to Cultural Anthropology †Summary Essay

How does Language affect the meanings we assign to our experience? The Ideas of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf demonstrate that the vocabulary of a language may direct perception to certain features of the environment, and the grammar of a language may encourage certain ways of looking at the world. The selection of metaphors also has an impact on the meanings we assign to experience. By taking language from one experience and applying it to another, we carry the meaning of one experience to the other. Robbins then explores the ways in which symbolic action reinforces a particular view of the world. Ritual, for example, symbolically depicts a certain view of reality in such a way that it convinces us of the truth of that reality. Examples include the Cannibal Dance of the Kwakwaka’wakw, which shows the values of Kwakwaka’wakw society and provides members with a way to control their lives, and the rituals of contemporary English magic and witchcraft, which convince persons of this society that mental forces can influence the material world. Walter Benjamin’s Surrealism essay explains how these competing political aims manifest themselves at the level of aesthetic form: â€Å"Here due weight must be given to the insight that in the Traite du style, Aragon’s last book, required a distinction between metaphor and image, a happy insight into questions of style that needs extending. Extension: nowhere do these two — metaphor and image — collide so drastically and so irreconcilably as in politics. For to organize pessimism means nothing other than to expel moral metaphor from politics and to discover in political action a sphere reserved one hundred percent for images. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. For the moment, only the Surrealists have understood its present commands. They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds. † Benjamin’s analysis here provides the scattered fragments of a political-aesthetic diagnosis of surrealism which would differentiate this movement from conservative romantic traditions. While such traditions trade in â€Å"moral metaphor† and the â€Å"play of human features† — idealized human forms which are meant to serve as soothing allegories of the supposedly homogenous and unified social body — surrealists circulate what Benjamin elsewhere terms â€Å"dialectical images. † In his writings regarding the Cultural Industry, Adorno continues to emphasis the theories of the Frankfurt school and the concepts of Marx. The terms ‘mass deception’ and ‘social control’ seem to most accurately describe the ideas and theories that Adorno prescribe. He further suggests the notion that socially, we are conditioned to think rationally, reasonably and through a scientific approach, which when structured to appease the larger cultural industry, functions by disallowing the potential for human individuality, and re-emphasizing the myth that such individuality could even exist. According to the text we are conditioned to be obedient to the great social hierarchy, thus the opportunity for any social change is limited, is it not? The notion that culture is entertainment is also introduced, and that as individuals, we can only accept out work/roles knowing that pleasure will ultimately be rewarded. 2. Summarize what you consider to be the relationship between the assigned readings. How do the readings speak to each other? – All three authors I believe have a relationship with expressing metaphors in their texts. A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract. Throughout each reading society, cultural, language, politics, thinking, and social change is present in all three readings and in all three these words are represented with symbolic meaning and/or have a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action. Through these metaphors I believe is the way that these texts speak to one another. Each text you can find similar symbolic meaning and a word or phrase that is attached to an object or action. . Identify one or more passages that you feel are especially provocative, suggestive, dubious or illustrative of the author’s argument. – In the Richard Robbins text one passage especially was provocative to the author’s argument in symbolic action reinforces a particular view of the world and the reality we as human beings live in. â€Å"Ritual, for example, symbolically depicts a certain view of r eality in such a way that it convinces us of the truth of that reality†. In the Walter Benjamin Text one passage especially was provocative to the author’s argument in explaining how competing political aims manifest themselves at the level of aesthetic form. â€Å"Here due weight must be given to the insight that in the Traite du style, Aragon’s last book, required a distinction between metaphor and image, a happy insight into questions of style that needs extending. Extension: nowhere do these two — metaphor and image — collide so drastically and so irreconcilably as in politics. † In the Theodor Adorno text one passage especially was provocative to the author’s argument in the notion that socially, we are conditioned to think rationally, reasonably and through a scientific approach, which when structured to appease the larger cultural industry, functions by disallowing the potential for human individuality, and re-emphasizing the myth that such individuality could even exist. â€Å"The notion that culture is entertainment is also introduced, and that as individuals, we can only accept out work/roles knowing that pleasure will ultimately be rewarded. Thus, must not culture and society be forced to change, as it was also interpreted that pleasure without change becomes a sort of work, and then our understanding/defining of pleasure must be constantly changing in order for the mass society to maintain social obedience. 4. Briefly compare the texts you have read or some aspect of it/them, with a previous selection or selections read in this course. – I reread â€Å"A Berlin Chronicle† in Reflections and then read the whole of Berlin Childhood around 1900. I thought about how he had not been able to return, and how he had written Berlin Childhood around 1900 precisely as a way of dealing with the irrevocable loss of the world of his childhood and its security. Benjamin knew by 1932 that he would never be able to return to Berlin his home again. Benjamin immortalized the cities that had rejected him, writing about his memories of earlier and safer times. Benjamin is recalling a lost world. He selects a variety of places and spaces that contain or prompt memories of his childhood and the high bourgeois world that nourished his fantasies and predilections. By 1932 this world was gone, or at least inaccessible to Benjamin and other Jews like him. Reading this text I can compare it to Richard Robbins chapter 4 material when he writes â€Å"demonstrate that the vocabulary of a language may direct perception to certain features of the environment, and the grammar of a language may encourage certain ways of looking at the world. † Reading this helped me understand â€Å"A Berlin Chronicle† and how Walter Benjamin’s language and vocabulary were in direct result of the environment he was living in and how that encouraged his view on Berlin. Also, Comparing â€Å"A Berlin Chronicle† to Theodor Adorno’s The Culture Industry I found a passage that directly relates to Walter Benjamin and his time in Berlin. â€Å"He further suggests the notion that socially, we are conditioned to think rationally, reasonably and through a scientific approach, which when structured to appease the larger cultural industry, functions by disallowing the potential for human individuality, and re-emphasizing the myth that such individuality could even exist. According to the text we are conditioned to be obedient to the great social hierarchy, thus the opportunity for any social change is limited. † After reading this passage you can relate this to the larger cultural as the Nazis as they were the ones disallowing the potential for human individuality against the Jews, while reemphasizing the myth that such Jewish individuality could even exist. 5. Offer a brief critical assessment of the texts and its ideas: Do you find that it opens up new avenues of inquiry or reveals new knowledge? What question does it raise for you? How would you evaluate them overall? -Out of the three texts I found an interesting passage out of Walter Benjamin’s Surrealism text that opens up new avenues of inquiry and reveals new knowledge for the reader. â€Å"There is always, in such movements, a moment when the original tension of the secret society must either explode in a matter of fact, profane struggle for power and domination, or decay as a public demonstration and be transformed. Reading this passage and the author’s use of the word illumination throughout the essay, the reader could easily open a new avenue on a secret society named the Illuminati. The author even stats â€Å"And the most passionate investigation of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking, as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance. The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, and the ecstatic. And more profane. Not to mention that most terrible drug –ourselves- which we take in solitude. With so many references or should I say hidden references I can only ask if Walter Benjamin is referring to this secret society the Illuminati. Overall all three texts had their strong points but from day one when I began Walter Benjamin’s readings he has captured me in ways other authors haven’t. It could be that he writes essays while intoxicated or how it seems there is always secret meaning in his writings. If not secret then definitely meaning that could be explored even further and spend a whole class just decoding this topic.