In the Country of the Mind Reading Response
By Mona Luo (04/13/14 21:52:31)
Throughout the assigned reading this week there seemed to be a prevailing theme of careful observation and respect for one’s surroundings. As the author surveys his surroundings, what we might consider a bleak and boring landscape suddenly comes to life. If you gaze across open tundra in a sweeping glance, it certainly does seem sparse in comparison to a bustling city. But any place can be rich with information if one knows where to look. I believe the same approach can be taken when observing animals. If one takes the time to really get to know an animal, without projecting preconceptions upon its behavior, the process of familiarization and discovering is much more fulfilling (and sometimes informative) than reading about the animal in a book. When I asked a friend to go to the zoo with me he declined because he said he had just went last year. This took me by surprise because I find the zoo to be a place where I could go every day and not get bored. To think that one can understand the nature of an animal through a brief visit to its enclosure sounds preposterous to me. The reading criticizes Western science for this tendency to summarize and generalize. I read a book by a scientist who had been studying ants for something in the neighborhood of 15 years. She said that even as someone who had been carefully observing these insects for years, she too had the tendency to jump to conclusions. In her particular case it was regarding ants on her kitchen counter top. One’s first instinct is to believe they are searching for food. However, most of the time, this is not really the case. People tend to believe that what they observe will corroborate their preconceived notions, and I believe that is a dangerous mindset to be in. If one were to be an Arctic with such a philosophy, it might even put one’s life in peril. This notion of observation and respect seem to go hand and hand. To summarize a place or an animal in a single statement dismisses the nuances and sophistication that make them unique.
There was a passage about the nature of the language of the Eskimos. Their language is dynamic in its viewpoints, and space and time are not clearly separate entities. Language is shaped by the environment and culture of people who speak it. English interpretations of certain terms can only be rough and ungainly approximations of phenomenon only fully comprehensible to those that have spent time in the right place with the right people. This raises the question of whether our language is fit to understand potential nuances in animal communication. Translating between human cultures is hard enough, so it isn’t hard to imagine that between species there would be a lot lost in translation. In some ways the structure of the language seem somewhat reminiscent of how the land is pictured in the mind of the Eskimos. This melding of time in space can perhaps explain the exaggerated size of prime fishing locations or emotionally charged landmarks. As the amount of time spent in an area increases the amount of memory and prominence in the mind increases as well, expanding the perceived space. It would be interesting to see how animals mapped their world. Would our roads and highways shrink in their mind, overshadowed by the more practically useful bushes and shrubbery they hid in?


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