Saturday, October 1, 2011
Using the Force
Between Laming-Emperaire’s two schools, I would wholeheartedly belong to the second. The knowledge of specific dates and locations belonging to artifacts is of little importance to our understanding of history and humanity without being able to decipher from them the details of our evolution, and the roles they played in its development; where they fit its lineage is not enough. The discovery of facts without the research and critical contemplation that would allow us to achieve a deeper understanding of how we as a species have reached the state that we find ourselves in today and our relationship to the world is like a collection of blank puzzle pieces that doesn’t depict any kind of picture even after the pieces are fit together. I think it is extremely important as a human to understand humans, and I believe such understanding is impossible to attain without using artifacts to connect the dots of a complex timeline stringing along multiple civilizations and without using mental expertise to envision the collective effect that each stage of human progress had upon all subsequent stages. Strategically pinpointing the very crucial staples of human capability to our best abilities allows us to better perceive the world we live in now with mental illustration. For example, there is extensive evidence of various societies sharing technological advancements without any correspondence of information between them; to examine what each culture used these inventions for, how they invented them and when the need surfaced for an object of its function brings us infinitely closer to grasping our invisible nature as humans. It is the job of those in this second group to recognize how crucial each small development of any civilization was, and is, to the overall direction of their culture, and to the potential of a mind-blowing amount of cultivated resources that was made available to us with the initiation of trade, interaction and communication. The building blocks of our world need glue to be held fast together, and I want to be a part of the group that crafts that glue.
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I agree with you. There is no single way to approach any anthropological question because the subject of study are humans and the human mind is one of the most varying and complexe things out there. Humans understanding other humans is time consuming in the same way that studying cave paintings is, as any stranger can be judged by their face value. Realising how holistically the mind works, it makes sense that anthropology should be approached as a holistic study.
ReplyDeleteNumbers are nothing without meaning. That meaning is a holistic determinant. As students we have all stared at the teacher as they state some fact or another, with a giant question mark on our foreheads going ok, and that means..... what. Its the "natural" next step, the step of things that transpire in the brain, we just train ourselves to start filling in that what part ourselves.
ReplyDelete"best abilities allows us to better perceive the world we live in now with mental illustration."- wow, makes you think.