Greetings Economists, On Feb 10, 2006, at 2:07 PM, Charles Brown wrote: Metaphor is sort of algebra...so.
Doyle, Hey CB that reminds me of an area I'm researching now. Ethnographic studies gives us some insights about how humans take their cultural tools and use them to shape their ways of understanding. So one area that awhile back gave me a lot of interesting things to think about is the NA people is western China who have a matrilineal society. This is pretty complicated in how when husbands and fathers are not part of a family that moms are the center of the household, and the shifts that encompasses in female social roles. The NA are a linguistic minority and like a lot of small language groups can continue their cultural heritage because of language barriers that protect their often tiny culture from the impact of a much larger culture, in this case the mammoth Han culture of China. But what I am about to study is a small culture in Ghana, that does not accept the rationalist point of view we are familiar with in the West. They see themselves directly connected to the world. The book is from UC press, called "Culture & the Sense Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community". Let's take your remark above, when a culture, a small culture has been isolated they can't have or don't have the resources we have. In the global culture all kinds of tools, like literacy give us a sense that 'knowing' is not so direct. But for this small culture they still retain what I think Marx was referring to about alienation, a sense of the directness of 'knowing'. CB writes, (cuneiform wedges used in trade/taxing in Mesopotamia)is pertinent here. Counting or arithmetic too; counting might be the first writing if writing starts in commodity exchange Doyle, You know what frustrates me? In the U.S. certain cultural technologies that bug Mike Perelman like IT being hijacked by the phone companies to fit their business plan, all the way back in history something comes along like writing, like cuneiform writing, which could be a 'peoples' tool but has to be shaped by ruling class needs. Well we can see in the U.S. that the phone companies are mounting a campaign to squeeze profit from every bit of text we type. That interferes with what the people would use the internet for like our little conversations here. Intrinsic to Marx is the communal redistribution of resources and property which underlies the proper development of Information Technology. thanks, Doyle Saylor
