ipernity: African Primates

Dinesh ^club

;. . . .The flowering of the human genius and “concrete logic” during the neolithic era, for Levi-Strauss, realities of history far more important than the brief adjunct of turmoil and political cannibalism of the past 3000 years.

Proceeding from the linguistic axiom that all elements in a complex system are related and that their sense can be derived only from the analysis of their interrelations, of the place which the unit can occupy in the set, Levi-Strauss waves a host of apparently disparate Amazonian and North American hunt- and creation-myths into a unified pattern. In the course of the argument, he seeks to demonstrate that successive variants of the myth cannot be discarded as irrelevant, that the sum of related tales is a living aggregate, a code of cultural reinterpretation in which single elements are regrouped but not lost (the analogy being that of mathematical topology which studies those relations that remain constant when configurations change). The result is a kind of more pattern which we learn to read as the physicist reads superimposed photographs of cloud-chamber particles. ~ Page 248 ~" Language and Silence"
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5 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . . Man is an animal organism who must naturally agrees on his world in order to incorporate the energy-power h needs from it. On the most elemental level this power resides in food, which is why primitives have always acknowledged food power as the basic one in the sacrificial meal. From the beginning, man, as a meat-eating hunter, incorporated the power of other animals. But he himself was a peculiarly weak animal, and so he had to develop a special sensitivity to source of power, and wide latitude of sources of power for his own incorporation. This is one way to understand the grater aggressiveness of man than of other animals: he as the only animal conscious of death and decay, and so he engaged in a heightened search for powers or self-perpetuation. Any study of the early evolution of warfare and the natural viciousness of it has to take this into account. Very early in the human evolution men agreed in order to incorporate two kinds of power, physical and symbolic. … Page 107 Excerpt: "Escape from Evil" Author : Earnest Becker

4 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

. . . .Its daily life was like that of extant nonhuman apes: most walking hours spent in small bands foraging individually for fruit and other vegetation, with various kinds of social interactions, mostly competitive, interspersed. Our hypothesis is that this creature -- and also probably astralopithecines for the ensuing 4 million years of the human lineage -- was individually intentional and instrumentally rational. It cognitively represented its physical and social experience categories and schematically, and it made all kinds of productive and hypothetical inferences and chains of inferences about its experience as well -- all with a modicum of cognitive self-monitoring. As so, the crucial point is that well before the emergence of uniquely human sociality, much less culture, language, and institutions, the foundations of human thinking were securely in place in human’s last common ancestors with other apes. ~ Page 30 ~ ~ “A Natural History of Human thinking” ~ Author - Michael Tomasello

3 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

3 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

3 years ago.

Dinesh ^club

3 years ago.

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