Progress Of Indic Languages Vs English - 2

[Husky]

(Years later ^What?^ The Iliad etc in Indian languages? Fortunately/Mwahahahaha, I don't need that. 'Cause my sister used to narrate entire passages from both Epics to me (and from other ancient GR material) in the original. :win: (She'd translate afterwards of course, since I couldn't understand G or even L. But even if she hadn't followed her narrations up with her translation of what was just said, I'd have listened willingly: both G&L sound very pleasing to mine ears, and made more so when rendered by my sister's pleasant voice and her enthusiasm for the material.)





Anyway:

[color="#0000FF"]I was recently contemplating how Hindoos - and their current state - reminded me of the Tanooki from Pom Poko in so many ways[/color], while also admiring the latter for its many qualities and insights (several of which have seeped into my understanding in a subconscious way, rather than directly - attests to PP's brilliance).



Then I saw the following at the Rajeev2004 blog today, and it reminded me once more of PP, and its creators: why it is natural that the Japanese would have made it and made it the way they did. And the following also clarified suspicions I had in how the christo-conditioned western experience and understanding of PP would invariably be incomplete and that they would only be able to approach it as outsiders, since contrary to their perception of its "novelty"/uniqueness, PP's more than a "novel cultural" take on the situation it deals with: it's actually the product of innately-heathen minds (and hence explains the medium/POV chosen and the various ways this is presented and the aspects focused on). The heathenness of the minds behind it is obvious not just from the mere facts that the Tanooki is a special/sacred Shinto animal and that animals are considered a part of the religious world in Shinto, but even from the Japanese creators' ease of choice in the POV and the "self-evidential" way they go about presenting this, including the range of scenes included: it may have a wistful ending and the underlying situation may be more serious than its lighthearted protagonists enact it as, but there's some truly striking moments in there. Next to the heathen ones (like the hold of heathenism over the Japanese humans, which the heathen Tanooki try to turn to their advantage), there's the delightfully endearing take on romance and family life - including a sense of romance and family life in animals. (Actually, one of the scenes reminded me of a shloka in the SL.)







Anyway, the article on Rajeev2004. (It's because it's somewhat about language that I figured this would be the thread for it. Especially as there's no "Animals" thread on IF.)



rajeev2004.blogspot.com

Seeing Through Cultural Bias in Science [no, white western experience should not be the universal norm]

Not only in science but in every form of discourse. This is why English is a curse as well as a blessing. It is a mask of conquest. For instance just take the expression 'Holy Land'. Whose holy land is the west Asian desert? Not mine, for sure.



On Jun 10, 2012 4:07 AM, "sri wrote:

Seeing Through Cultural Bias in Science

Jul. 4, 2002

www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/seeing-through-cultural-bias-in-science

Most people now accept that fields like politics and journalism

reflect and perpetuate cultural bias. Yet we imagine science as free

of unexamined cultural assumptions. This is more or less true for some

fields - say, chemistry or physics. My own corner of science,

ethology, or the study of animal behavior, is certainly not pristine.



How we look at animals reflects how we view ourselves. The founder of

Japanese primatology, Kinji Imanishi, could attest to this. Imanishi

argued that nature is inherently harmonious rather than competitive,

with species forming an ecological whole. This rather un-Darwinian

perspective so upset a British paleontologist, the late Beverly

Halstead, that in 1984 he traveled to Kyoto to confront Imanishi.

Unconstrained by first-hand knowledge of Imanishi's works, which were

never translated, Halstead told him that his theory was "Japanese in

its unreality."



What compelled Halstead to be so rude? Why did he later write an

article criticizing not just Imanishi's views, but his country? Why

did " Nature, " one of the most prestigious journals in science,

publish it, in 1985, beneath the patronizing assertion that the

"popularity of Kinji Imanishi's writings in Japan gives an interesting

insight into Japanese society"? Could not the same be said of Darwin's

theory of unremitting competition, which grew out of a society giving

birth to free-market capitalism?



Even if Imanishi's ecological and evolutionary ideas were problematic,

he and his followers were right about quite a lot. In fact, well

before Halstead's contemptuous pilgrimage, Western ethologists began

adopting Eastern concepts and approaches--although without being aware

of their sources. To understand how this could occur is to appreciate

the role of different cultural assumptions about the relations between

humans and animals and how linguistic hegemony affects science.



Eastern philosophy has no counterpart to Plato's "great chain of

being," which places humans above all other animals. In most Eastern

belief systems, the human soul can reincarnate in many shapes and

forms. A man can become a fish and a fish can become God. There are no

grounds in Eastern thought for resisting the central idea of

evolutionary theory: that all animals are historically linked.



Unlike in the West, this acceptance of evolution was never tainted by

hubris or an aversion to acknowledging human-like characteristics in

animals. Japanese primate researchers assumed that each individual

animal had a distinct personality, and they did not hesitate to give

their subjects names. They plotted kinship relationships over multiple

generations, believing that primates must have a complex family life,

just like us.



They did all of this well before any Western scientist thought of it.

In 1958, when Imanishi and his students toured the US to report their

findings, they were ridiculed for humanizing their subjects and for

believing that they could distinguish between all those monkeys. The

Western view of apes regarded them as akin to Rousseau's "noble

savage" - autonomous individuals, devoid of social ties and

obligations, driven by instinct to swing haphazardly from one fruit

tree to the next.



But while Jane Goodall was describing female chimpanzees and their

dependent offspring as the only socially bonded units in the primate

world, a Japanese team, working only 130 kilometers away, eventually

proved that chimpanzees live in large communities with stable

memberships. We now know that chimpanzee society is male-bonded, and

there is ample evidence of territorial warfare between communities.

The initial discovery arose from the assumption that chimpanzees, so

close in evolution to humans, could not be as "individualistic" as

Western science supposed.



The same initial assumption led Imanishi in 1952 to suggest that

animals might have culture, which he reduced to its lowest common

denominator: the social rather than genetic transmission of behavior.

If individuals learn from one another, over time their behavior may

diverge from that of other groups, thus constituting a distinct

culture.



We now know that cultural learning among animals is widespread,

including birdsong, the use of tools by chimpanzees, and the hunting

techniques of whales. Yet only a few decades ago, some Western

professors forbade their students even to make reference to papers by

Japanese colleagues! How could a cultural outlook that the West

treated with such raw condescension - even in 1985 - simultaneously

shape Western science so profoundly?



The answer lies in language. A single language for scientific papers

and conferences is clearly desirable, and the language of

international science is English. Good scientific ideas formulated in

bad English either die or get repackaged. Like a Hollywood

interpretation of a French novel, their origins become erased. Eastern

thinking could creep into ethology unnoticed partly because it

filtered into the literature through awkward formulations and

translations that native English speakers found it easy to improve on.





The problem is not the English language per se [color="#800080"](not in this matter, though it is in others)[/color], but the attitude and

behavior of many native speakers. Naturally, you speak and write your

own language faster and more eloquently than any other, and this can

place scientists whose English is poor at a severe disadvantage.

Imanishi's influence is now pervasive - all primate scientists have

adopted the technique of following individuals over time, and animal

culture is the hottest topic in our field. But Imanishi's writings are

rarely, if ever, cited. We should not wonder at the difficulties that

other cultural and linguistic groups must experience in gaining a

voice and proper acknowledgment in science.

Posted by nizhal yoddha at 6/10/2012 01:36:00 AM 0 comments Links to this post

I think the modern west is very uncomfortable with animals. Recollect that Henry Beston - with his very poetically stated views on animals (reproduced in the vegetarianism thread I think), and on nature in general - was influenced in his views in no small measure by a native American community, the Navaho I think. But that was obvious, wasn't it? After all, his is not a naturally "western" view - i.e. it cannot be naturally-derived in someone who is a product of a christoconditioned society. There was clearly a heathen influence behind it, and the fingerprint was moreover clearly native American, and this straightforward supposition predictably proved to be true.