"My Soul I Hold"

My soul I hold
in my hand, heavy as a plate,
a heaving rack of slate,
glabrous, matte-glossed,
and in my other a hammer
to lay the sweating rock to rest.


Between my hairy fingers
a cut of felt now lies limply,
drooping through the cracks
like pearled honey drops
leaking from a bear bottle;
tender memories poke the sore
for the emptiness they reveal
the elation gone, a trough
in its place, the cracks in between.


by Timidy Cole

Tonight

Mansur Al-Hallaj

I was researching the layers of the pericardial sac for our first anatomy exam, which is Thursday, and I ran across Mansur Al'Hallaj, a 9th-10th century Persian mystic/revolutionary, maybe not an unusual combination in its day, and his description of God through a beautiful anatomically-relevant analogy:

God is He "who flows between the pericardium and the heart, just as the tears flow from the eyelids."

Linguistic Relativity

John Lucy has identified three main strands of research into linguistic relativity. The first is what he calls the structure centered approach. This approach starts with observing a structural peculiarity in a language and goes on to examine its possible ramifications for thought and behavior. The first example of this kind of research is Whorfs observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is the research made by John A Lucy describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by speakers of English.

The second strand of research is the "domain centered" approach, in which a semantic domain is chosen and compared across linguistic and cultural groups for correlations between linguistic encoding and behavior. The main strand of domain centered research has been the research on color terminology, although this domain according to Lucy and admitted by color terminology researchers such as Paul Kay, is not optimal for studying linguistic relativity, because color perception, unlike other semantic domains, is known to be hard wired into the neural system and as such subject to more universal restrictions than other semantic domains. Since the tradition of research on color terminology is by far the largest area of research into linguistic relativity it is described below in its own section. Another semantic domain which has proven fruitful for studies of linguistic relativity is the domain of space. Spatial categories vary greatly between languages and recent research has shown that speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many quotidian tasks. Research carried out by Stephen C Levinson and other cognitive scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has reported three basic kinds of spatial categorization and while many languages use combinations of them some languages exhibit only one kind of spatial categorization and corresponding differences in behavior. For example the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations — the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions. A speaker of Guugu yimithirr will define a person as being "north of the house", while a speaker of English may say that he is "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house" depending on the speakers point of view. This difference makes Guugu yimithirr speakers better at performing some kinds of tasks, such as finding and describing locations in open terrain, whereas English speakers perform better in tasks regarding the positioning of objects relative to the speaker (For example telling someone to set the table putting forks to the right of the plate and knives to the left would be extremely difficult in Guugu yimithirr).

The third strand of research is the "behavior centered" approach which starts by observing different behavior between linguistic groups and then proceeds to search for possible causes for that behavior in the linguistic system. This kind of approach was used by Whorf when he attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers' use of the word empty to describe the barrels containing only explosive vapors. One study in this line of research has been conducted by Bloom who noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counter-factual questions posed to them in a questionnaire. After a study he concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in the Chinese language. Another line of study by Frode Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher occurrence of work related accidents than similar Swedish ones. He concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process where Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker. Other research of importance to the study of linguistic relativity has been Daniel Everetts studies of the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon. Everett observed several peculiarities in Pirahã culture that corresponded with linguistically rare features. The Pirahã for example have neither numbers nor color terms in the way those are normally defined, and correspondingly they don't count or classify colors in the way other cultures do. Furthermore when Everett tried to instruct them in basic mathematics they proved unresponsive. Everett did not draw the conclusion that it was the lack of numbers in their language that prevented them from grasping mathematics, but instead concluded that the Pirahã had a cultural ideology that made them extremely reluctant to adopt new cultural traits, and that this cultural ideology was also the reason that certain linguistic features that were otherwise believed to be universal did not exist in their language.Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary.

More on the Worfian hypothesis and Linguistic Relativity via Wikipedia

And check out the article at the Theory and History of Ontology for a more in-depth and contextualized history with tributaries and distributaries into other related disciplines.

Alternative takes on Obama-Crowley-Gates party

1. “The Sheriff at the Gates: A Farce in Three Acts’’

Act One

(A street in Cambridgeham. Most Exalted University Professor HENRY LOUIS GATES, freshly returned from the Land of the Asian Khan, is rattling the door of his keep. Enter a WENCH.)...

From The Boston Globe

----------------------------------------------------------------------

2. A Beer with Obama

The Oval Office. Late. President Obama sits across from Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Officer James Crowley, who share a couch. They sit amidst several empty beer bottles. No one’s wearing shoes...


Posted by John Kenney in The New Yorker

Bowman's "Irony without Irony"

When my oldest son was a Boy Scout in England 20 years ago, I once watched his troop play a game in which the boys formed a circle around a troop leader holding a soccer ball. The leader proceeded to throw the ball to the boys at random, saying as he did so either "head" or "catch." If he said "head," the boy was supposed to catch it; if he said "catch," the boy was supposed to head it. Anyone who slipped up and caught the ball when instructed to catch it or head the ball when instructed to head it, was out and had to leave the circle. Eventually, only one scout was left standing. That boy, as I have often had occasion to think since, must have been one of nature’s ironists. He and the others had certainly had an education in the central principle of all ironic — and, for that matter, non-ironic — discourse, namely that meaning depends on context. A boy who’d said that he would just love to play such a game could have meant either that he’d love to play it or that he’d absolutely hate it, and all but the most literal-minded would have been able to tell which it was on hearing the words spoken in their context.

The ability to read that context, to pick up the cues indicating irony or its absence, depends on a certain degree of social skill and experience in complex social interactions. Irony, that is, belongs to the world of face-to-face communication, even when we encounter it in a book or a movie. If we are able to recognize the irony in fictional contexts it is because we have previously experienced it, or something like it, in real ones. Maybe that’s why, as we have begun to spend more and more of our time interacting with each other remotely and electronically, rather than face-to-face, it seems that our irony-reading skills have tended to atrophy, or else to go haywire, producing, on the one hand, a leaden literalism or, on the other, the sort of paranoia which supposes that everything must mean something other than what it says.

Continue reading James Bowman's article "Irony without Irony."

"What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said." - Heidegger

Hinzen's "...On names and truth"

The contemporary debate on the nature of semantic content looks, at least from afar, like a battle between two armies. On the one hand, one finds the externalists, who claim that the content of what you have in your head depends on what’s out there in the world. For example, the content of my concept of WATER is determined by the substance in the world that instantiates it, while the content of my thoughts about ARTHRITIS is dependent on the social conventions of my community. Internalists, on the other hand, have ‘pushed the world into the mind’ (to borrow Ray Jackendoff ’s phrase) and hold that it is the compositional and/or inferential nature of conceptual representations that determine their content.

Curiously, the defenders of externalism seem to come largely from a philosophical background, while linguists often opt for the internalist mode of explanation. Wolfram Hinzen, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Durham, but works within the biolinguistics program, seems to be the ideal person to reanimate this sometimes gridlocked debate.

Hinzen’s latest book, An essay on names and truth, is part of an ambitious venture in which the author aims to invalidate the central intuitions behind externalism, while at the same time arguing for a type of internalism that has next to nothing in common with comparable theories on the market. Hinzen takes as a starting point two traditional strongholds for externalist theories of meaning : names, ‘ the very paradigm of a referential expression ’ (2), and truth, which few theorists would dare suggest have nothing to do with the external world. His central idea is that the judgements of truth we make are dependent on the syntax that underpins thought, and that names, like all other expressions, get their content from their syntactic form...

Fascinating review by Georg Kjøll of Wolfam Hinzen's latest book "An essay on names and truth." Find the article under Reviews here, at the Journal of Linguistics, and read on.

lost city of Cahokia

Pauketat's masterstroke may be his reanalysis of an obscure dig conducted in the '60s by Charles Bareis, who found an enormous 900-year-old Cahokian garbage pit, so deeply buried that its contents still stank atrociously.

Analyzing the strata of rotting gunk found therein, Pauketat concludes that there was probably an upside to Cahokia's appalling "mortuary rituals," which he suspects were officious public ceremonies to honor the ruling family or to install a new king. The garbage dump reveals the remains of enormous Cahokian festivals, involving as many as 3,900 slaughtered deer, 7,900 earthenware pots, and vast amounts of pumpkins, corn, porridge, nuts and berries. There was enough food to feed all of Cahokia at once, and enough potent native tobacco -- a million charred seeds at a time -- to give the whole city a near-hallucinogenic nicotine buzz.

There's no way to know for sure whether these multiple-day, citywide shindigs were simultaneous with the human-sacrifice rituals, but it's highly plausible, and they were certainly part of the same social system. (Pauketat also finds in the trash heap evidence of "spectacular pomp and pageantry.") At any rate, if you weren't personally being decapitated and thrown into a pit to honor some departed leader, life in Cahokia evidently came with some benefits that, like almost everything else about the city, were unprecedented in the Native American world.

Read on... "Sacrificial virgins of the MIssissippi" by Andrew O'Hehir

Thanks to A&L Daily

Smörgåsbord

Smörgåsbord is a Swedish word which refers to a type of Scandinavian meal served buffet-style with multiple dishes of various foods on a table. In Norway it is called koldtbord and in Denmark it is called kolde bord. Smörgåsbord became internationally known as Smorgasbord at the 1939 New York World's Fair when the Swedish Pavilion offered Smörgåsbord at the Swedish Pavilion’s "Three Crowns Restaurant". "Smörgåsbord" consists of smörgås ("open faced sandwich") and bord ("table"). The word open faced sandwich, "smörgås" in turn consists of the words "butter" and "goose", (smör and gås). Gås literally means goose, but also refers to the small pieces of butter that form and float to the surface of cream while it ischurned. These pieces reminded the old Swedish peasants of fat geese swimming to the surface [naturally]. The small butter pieces were just the right size to be placed and flattened out on bread. Smörgås came to mean buttered bread. In Sweden, the term buttered open-faced-sandwiches (bredda smörgåsar) has been used since at least the 16th century. In English and also in Scandinavian languages, the word smörgåsbord (or in English, more usually without diacritics as smorgasbord) refers loosely to any buffet with a variety of dishes — not necessarily with any connection to Swedish Christmas traditions. In an extended sense, the word is used to refer to any situation which invites patrons to select whatever they wish among several pleasant things, such as the smorgasbord of university courses, books in a bookstore, etc.

For a more in-depth discussion of the term smorgasbord, and an explanation of a Julbord that is just as engrossing, check out the rest of the Wiki here...

Some rapid kayaking

A trailer with some amazing footage from a new kayaking film called Dream Result. Thanks to The Adventure Life for this one.