Archive for April 3, 2010
Man’s Absurdity Derives From ‘Culture’
0In the sixties, Anthropologist Jules Henry hit the nail on the head in ‘Culture Against Man’ (1963), saying that culture makes us live absurd lives.
Culture has us running around like electrons in a magnetic field. ‘Tensions’ that we can feel, shape our individual and collective behaviour. Racial tensions between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites’ (whether they began from intellectual notions of inherent white racial supremacy or whatever) induced blacks to use separate eating places, toilets, seating at the back of the bus and it induced outrage in whites if blacks did not show deference to their (self-declared) ‘superiors’, those of the white race.
‘Tensions’ within a culture shape more individual and collective behaviours than ‘race relations’. They can also trigger actions in the explosive manner that tensions in the earth trigger earthquakes. Powerful ‘tensions’ that we associate with symbolic meaning (the quasi-religious meaning of white and black skin, of a national flag, of a cow in India, or a pig in Israel etc.) suggest that homo sapiens should have been called ‘homo symbolicus’. But since our response to symbolic meaning keeps us living absurd lives, it has also been suggested that homo sapiens should have been called ‘homo absurdus’. (more…)
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