CeJ jannuzi at gmail.com Sorry still not convinced that 20th century anthropology explains very much about the origins, development (both species and individual) of language etc. I advocate a wholesale rejection of 'differential' structuralism in order to tackle the issues.
You say for example aboriginal societies have huge stores of native flora and fauna--something that has been observed again and again, and something conservationists now value when they go in to 'environmental impact studies', etc. But how arbitrarily symbolic is the SYSTEM of classification here? It is largely determined by three living generations interacting with their environment in order to survive. It's practical knowledge got through hands-on experience and interaction with living members of their society, not dead ancestors. CJ ^^^^^^^^ CB: No. The body of knowledge is not rediscovered, anew, through hands on experience every three generations. That is positivism. They have science , too. Science is a body of knowledge socially shared across generations. The hands-on experience that humans get is "mediated" by language. Language is interaction with dead ancestors. With language, there is always a "third person" ,an ancestor, involved in the conversation. That's the point of the wheel example. It is a play on the words of the famous saying " Lets not reinvent the wheel". Once some genius invented the wheel, the reason it didn't have to be reinvented was because of culture and "stories" preserved across generations. Language helps an individual to remember how to make a wheel. The language is filled with symbols which are signs-symbols with an arbitrary relationship between the signifiers and the signified. The word for "tuber" in any of these languages has an arbitrary relationship to what it refers to. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
