SubscribeSeptember 3rd, 2009
More on Arthur Versluis’s book
I’ve been thinking about my mixed feelings with Verluis’ book. Around 3 AM today I found myself thinking about that book and about an essay I deeply admire by Cynthia Ozick called “Mrs. Virginia Woolf and Her Nurse“. When I caught myself thinking of them together, I searched for the connection I had subconsciously perceived, because apart from the fact that they are both in English, they are very different bits of work. What came to me was was the phrase “compassionate writing.” I now think that I didn’t respond whole-heartedly to Verluis’ book is because it isn’t what I think of as compassionate writing. So, in fact, it wasn’t a connection I was seeking between Ozick and Versluis but a difference.
When reading Verluis, I got the strongest sense that he was hiding something. Not data, of course. And no, I do not think he misrepresents his study. Rather, I think he is hiding himself, hiding something essential about his response to his subject, and by doing that he is unintentionally hiding his subject from me.
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September 2nd, 2009
Final bits from Atran and Medin
Final bits from Scott Atran’s and Douglas Medin’s The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature
Our data show that expertise cannot be separated from cultural milieu, even when people engage in more or less the same activities. The parallels between the Itza’ and the Menominee are striking, especially when one notes that both groups also have sustainable forestry practices. As with Itza’ and Lacandon, some Menominee men express the belief that if a person treats nature in a greedy or wasteful manner then spirits will punish them and offer tobacco as a prayer of thanks. Cultural paths (in the sense of reliable distributions of conceptual representations in a population of minds) appear to provide something of a framework theory for organizing experience. This is seen, for example, in the Itza’ Maya tendency to see reciprocal relations (animals helping plants as well as being helped by them) and in Menominee fishermen’s ecological orientation.
This is a great paragraph but give me a moment to speak some of the sub-text. The non-Itza’ and non-Menominee in the study (i.e. the “culturally dominant” folk) also cannot separate out their expertise from their cultural milieu. They also have their cultural paths and “reliable distributions of conceptual representations” that organize their experience (i.e. constrain what they perceive into belief categories). In this case it is the tendency not to see reciprocal relations, whether they be between plants and animals or between groups of humans .
Let me clear about that last statement, there is the abstract knowledge of interrelationships and reciprocal relations, but the cultural conceptual relations extant in the “dominant cultures” divert individuals from experiencing specific instances of those relations. What that does is impoverish conceptually – see next paragraph for explanation of “impoverish”…
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September 2nd, 2009
2 bits on folk taxonomy from Atran and Medin
“It entails the conceptual realization that, say, apple trees and robins belong to the same fundamental level of (folk)biological reality, or rank, and that this level of reality differs from the subordinate level that includes winesap apple trees and mountain robin as well as from the superordinate level that includes trees and birds….We hypothesize that there is a naturally selected set of cognitive processes targeted on the biological world, which we call a “biological module” of the mind. This biological module is responsible for generating folkbiological taxonomy under appropriate experience. The empirical specificity and scope of taxonomic categories, and the inductive use to which taxonomic structures are put, vary with people’s degree of exposure to the biological world and with their cultural background.” (65)
Both the classical taxonomic system used in the pursuit of scientific biology and the folktaxonomies used to assess the world by everyone else develop out of this same “module.” Folktaxonomies “are crucial to understanding folkbiology for two reasons: biological taxonomies seem to be culturally universal; and they are structured enough to impose constraints on possible theories, thereby rendering biological theories possible, including evolutionary theory (at least historically). Western biological theories emerged by decontextualizing nature: by tearing out water lilies form water so that they could be dried measured, printed and compared with other living forms detached from local ecology and most of the sense. For Itza’, folkbiological taxonomy appears to hearken to a somewhat different calling in human life and cognition, on that is more embedded in the local environment.” (28-29)
September 2nd, 2009
When you “know” things about how “they” are….
According to Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, the amount of knowledge a person or group possesses is not enough by its self to explain perceptions or behaviours. Rather, what seems fundamentally important is how that knowledge is mentally categorized. That is we all have a way of categorizing the knowledge we have of the world (including the people in it). These categories differ from group to group and channel what we perceive into preset beliefs about the world. It is, of course, possible to change, to some extent, those preset beliefs, but to do that you need to have a system that challenges the power of those channels to limit what you can understand about the world. Normally we call that challenge system reason.
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August 30th, 2009
Ecological thinking and folk taxonomies
What it means to have a folk taxonomy….
So lets play a game: Which is the odd man out?
BIRD : CROCODILE: TURTLE
If you’re like me, you put crocodile and turtle together.
But….
I’ve been reading The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, Here’s what they say about that.
If birds descended from dinosaurs, and if crocodiles but not turtles are also directly related to dinosaurs, then crocodiles and birds form a group that excludes turtles; or crocodiles, birds, and turtles form separated groups; or all form one group. In any event, the traditional separation of BIRD and REPTILE is no longer tenable.
So we all have a folk taxonomy. (We also all have a goal orientation for that taxonomy, but I won’t talk about that much until another post.)
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