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Tag Archives: ethnography

Also in Media: “Tribal Logic in the Middle East” – Philos Project – By Andrew Harrod – March 7, 2017

08 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, Middle East

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ethnography, middle east geography, middle east history, tribalism

“This is actually the real map of the Middle East,” Kedar said, pointing to a slide showing a MENA geographic map without borders, a largely arid area in which vast deserts surround isolated water sources. “To live as a tribe is essential in this area. Otherwise you are weak; otherwise you cannot defend your source of water.” This means that families in the region banded together as clans millennia ago. Clan members could marry only fellow clan kin, lest familial connections create competing tribal claims for resources while the tribes developed codes of conduct (e.g. rules of retaliation) that predated and had more tribal loyalty than Islamic and state law.

Read the whole thing: Tribal Logic in the Middle East – Philos Project

FTAC – More Than 7,000 Ways of Addressing the World

12 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by commart in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

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anthropopsychology, ethnography, language, peace

In the arts, we may refer to a certain state in performance as contained and connected and that with God, nature, and the universe.  — put together some observations in psychology — Ecstasy: a Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (1961). I happen to think our Homo sapiens sapiens is as wild a species as any but with a large brain and a phenomenal mouth, and one has proven capable of great creativity and intuition and the other of aiding the invention of languages (of which there are more than 7,000 separable extant as I type in just one) and language culture, each of the thousands embracing and entertaining one form of divinity or another.

Mine (edited lightly).

* * *

In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to writing that was more poetic and expressive. I also wanted a more viable balance between my work with words and my work with wood, especially furniture for worship settings.

William J. Everett’s Blog | Reflections on Writing, Woodworking, and Ethics

Human life (actually for those bedding down on Siberian ledges to watch the sunset, bear life too) entails, whether we or the bears like it or not, an aesthetic and spiritual emotional and emotive experience.

That’s life.

The wonder is how many approaches have been adopted, created, discovered, embraced, invented, and modified in service to those experiences.

Betwixt and between, then and now, but then I turned a first graduate degree toward facets of the experience of leisure time — boredom, ecstasy,flow, motivation, peak experiences, self-concept, self-as-entertainer, etc. — and among the predicates were youth, mountains, and music.

Not much has changed about me, but my views have been broadened, and here in the blogland of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”, it may be worth taking a moment while fighting rages in Syria, Iran struggles to obtain The Bomb, and terror drips into everyday life somewhere in Iraq and Pakistan on a daily to weekly basis that our humanity is of just one species and that species, about 7.124 billion in number, communicates by way of more than 7,000 languages, each addressing the aesthetic and spiritual percepts of its speakers.

We should not be fighting.

We should be awed.

Briefest Introductory Reference

Abraham Maslow

Daniel Everett

Ethnologue

Joseph Campbell

Marghanita Laski

William James

# # #

Russia – A Look Back at Ham-Handed Power – An Excerpt from Hedrick Smith’s _The Russians_

01 Monday Jul 2013

Posted by commart in Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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culture, ethnography, Russia, Russian history, Soviet Era

In his singular work on the character of the Russian people during the Soviet Era, The Russians, journalist Hedrick Smith notes, “Probably the sharpest blow to the spirit of education reform and experimentation in recent years was the emasculation of Phys-Mat School No. 2 in Moscow in 1971-1972.”  Phys-Mat 2 had become an attractive and exemplary magnet school for minds both gifted and ambitious and, attracting accomplished lecturers and bright students both, it afforded uncommon freedoms to an elite qualified by intellectual ability (“Applications to the school soared to three or four times the number of places available,” wrote Smith).

In Smith’s words, here is what happened to “Phys-Mat School No. 2 in Moscow”:

As the logical extension of some of the educational reform theories, the intellectual climate at the school obviously troubled Communist Party conservatives.  The percentage of Jewish students was very high and so was the proportion of Jewish scholars on the faculty, according to my Moscow friends.  When in early 1971, one of the teachers, I. Kh. Sivashinsky, applied to emigrate to Israel, the authorities moved in on the school and began administrative harassments.  According to Igor, a tall, lanky recent graduate, the pretext for administrative inspections was that New Year’s Eve 1971 had been celebrated with a roulette game.  Another pretext, he said, was that a group of students had visited the Jewish synagogue in Moscow and would have gotten away without trouble for the school except that one boy wrote the school;’s initials on a fence near the synagogue.  Purges of the faculty and student body were carried out in spring 1971, and again a year later.  In one action the director and three assistants were fired; later, teachers of history and literature were forced out, an indication that the real reasons for the purge were ideological.  Several other teachers, I was told, resigned in protest to these firings. Marxist-Leninist indoctrination courses were stiffened and students who did poorly in those fields, no matter how talented in science, were called on the carpet, and outside lectures by university professors dwindled to nothing.  By fall, 1972, the previous flood of applicants had fallen off and in in Igor’s words, this once elite school had becomes “a spiritless, gray, sorry spectacle.”

Smith, Hedrick.  The Russians.  New York: Times Books, 1983.

In the left side column of this blog is an epigram by Milan Kundera: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Kundera’s remark suits, and as one reads The Russians, not only the atmosphere of the era returns with many of its continued challenges and quirks but also the shadow of the looming authoritarian fist, the familiar oafs of now other states in this era who may wish others not get too far out ahead of themselves or otherwise dull their glorious presence with something like the expression of their separate God-given talents, benevolent accomplishments, and earned compensation.

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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