Eduardo Kohn (2013), in his ‘anthropology beyond the human’, describes the lives of the Runa people of Ávila, in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon, as inhabiting an ‘ecology of selves’ Continue reading The web of relations
Explanations and complications
Being organisms ourselves, we often find it ‘simple’ – that is, easy and ‘natural’ – to interact with other organic entities, especially if they are closely related to us. This kind of ‘simplicity’ is transparent and implicit. But when we try to explain how complex systems work by naming their parts and their functions, the symbols we use often turn out very complicated. Continue reading Explanations and complications
Lend us your ears!
I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises toward the world.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 87)
or the trees
The path is not the forest. Continue reading or the trees
Eh?
Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.
— Voltaire
Transmission and gospel
It is obvious enough that translation into another language can change the meaning of a text, despite the best efforts of the translator to be “faithful” to the original. But even the copying process which has brought most ancient scriptures to their readers in the original language can change the original text. Continue reading Transmission and gospel
Writing wrongs
In his ‘Afterword’ to the Nag Hammadi Library (Robinson 1988, 547), Richard Smith gives this account of Harold Bloom’s hermeneutic theory:
Bloom’s argument is that literary influence always proceeds by ‘a deliberately perverse misreading … an act of creative correction, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism whose purpose is to clear away the precursor so as to open a space for oneself.’
The lion code
Some sayings in the Gospel of Thomas appear ‘cryptic’ at first – that is, difficult to decode, which serves to remind us that the message is coded.
Jesus said, ‘Blessed is the lion that a person will eat and the lion will become human. And anathema is the person whom a lion will eat and the lion will become human.’
— Thomas 7 (5G)
The fountain of youth
Interpretations at any level are selective processes, and conscious selection is grounded in natural selection. Continue reading The fountain of youth
Shedding leaving reading returning
Walt Whitman, addressing ‘Workmen and Workwomen’, has this to say about sacred texts: Continue reading Shedding leaving reading returning