Battening down the hatches for the possibly two typhoons on their way, I've gotten quite confused about what we are arguing about. Looking back, my problem is that wj's first comment seemed to take in the common conservative trope of cultural relativism = fuzzy liberal thinking of anything goes. nous pointed out that for undergraduates, you often have to pound into their heads the fact that _everyone_ carries a lot of prejudices and it is hard work separating oneself from them. Getting them over that hurdle is job 1, but some people take it (or possibly more accurately lampoon it) as all there is.
As Russell notes, humans have a long history of doing shitty stuff, so making anyone doing that the villain is probably going to preserve, and possibly enlarge blind spots. I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering what people in the future are going to make of the things that I do and think 'wtf were they thinking?'
16 hours ago
I'm not really sure how marriage is something you want to take as something that, I don't know, argues against cultural relativism? There are a lot of things to pick at, like the oscillation between legal terms and social naming (shacking up, friends with benefits), but the fact that you name it suggests that there is some public recognition of the fact.There is not a 'who is shacking up with whom' column in the NYTimes, but within that person's social sphere, there must be something that had to be named.
Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official and over half of the people do what is called a nashi-kon (no wedding marriage). So your definition seems a bit ethnocentric, at least where Japanese are concerned.
To understand 'marriage', you have to look at the totality of the culture, which seems to require some sort of cultural relativism in order to not fall into false comparisons.
1 day ago
But even if a particular culture doesn’t do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.
They have norms about how people partner or group up. Those generally flow to specific examples, like male/female couples, who comprise the majority, and those norms are kept those in place with social enforcement. But as soon as you say 'marriage', you kind of lose me in making some sort of universal argument.
I mean, you have the word kekkon（結婚）in Japan, which roughly corresponds to marriage and is what you say to explain to your friends. Marriage, right? But if you fill out a government document, it is kon'in (婚姻) which is more meaning affiliation, especially between two houses. In fact, in the Heian era, marriage was matrilocal, with the man _visiting_ the wife at her mother's house, which gives interesting thoughts what 'meeting the family' means. And if the husband didn't visit within 3 months, the couple was considered divorced. As Mr Spock might say, it is marriage, but not as we know it.
That system took 500 years to disappear, in part because it made more sense to move the wife to the samurai husband's (fortified) estate and primogeniture was necessary to prevent a family's lands from being divided, weakening military power. This is when Neo-confucianism got into it and eventually, it was codified that the eldest male of the family had total control over everyone in the household and a marriage could only take place if he approved it. But you still have traces of that matrilocal system, like muko-iri, 婿入り where the husband is adopted by the wife's family.
We can argue whether these sorts of differences are enough to undermine a term of marriage, but regardless, I'd avoid making claims about the universality of marriage until you specifically define what you mean.
1 day ago
Invite him over! I'm sure he's got a story to tell!
1 day ago
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought.
Across time? I'll forgo a deep dive, but the Asian words are all about creating family ties rather than any kind of intimacy or family unit implication, which may be why for Japanese, you have this strange combination of citizenship being represented as an individual passport and having/being listed on a koseki (family register) Just cause it gets translated as 'marriage' doesn't mean that it is.
1 day ago
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up. Well, I'm pretty sure gay people have partnered up through history. Every small southern town had their two spinsters who were living together while President James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor, roomed with a politician from Alabama for 10 years before he became president (and the roommate passed away before Buchanan became president). So why is that not 'marriage'?
But when a lot of people talk about marriage, they are thinking about wedding cake, or licenses, or getting drunk at receptions. But those are certainly not universal, but it is easy to have the lines blur between what is the core and what is peripheral. In addition, there are a lot of things associated with marriage that, if we acknowledge some set of universal human rights, we can't simply say oh, we have to accept that. Dowries? Father giving away the daughter? Understanding it requires understanding the social networks and all the other anthro sort of things, but it's just a conservative conceit that this means researchers _defend_ those practices. You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can't be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.
2 days ago
Cultural relativism is about understanding a culture (or subculture) in its own terms. Look at how its cultural norms work for the benefit of its members — how they impact others from outside the culture is irrelevant.
Hmmm, I think the first part is right, but the second part is problematic. Certainly, no culture, with the possible exception of the Sentinelese, is exists in a vacuum, so you are moving from cultural relativism to ethical relativism. It seems like the second statement could be used to justify anything. Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn't become a moral compass.
2 days ago
A few notes to add to nous summary (thanks).
I too was surprised at the recency of the trickster and it was interesting that Radin wrote about it in the late 50's given that he was a student of Boas, who is late 19th century/early 20th. Radin must have been in his 70's when he wrote the book mentioned. Something to think about when you hear bitching about the gerentocracy.
Boas came to the US from Germany with an ax to grind, which was that Primitive people weren't as primitive as people said, so I give him points for pushing back against the tide of Social Darwinism. A lot of the research was linguistics, trying to figure out why you had this patchwork of languages and cultures in the US. Brinton, mentioned by nous, was appointed professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at UPenn, becoming the first Anthro professor in the US. He liked the theory of psychic unity, which was that people were people, but then argued that what particular races did with those building blocks determined their evolutionary advance (boo!). This was opposed by Radin's teacher Boas, who argued for cultural relativism, with no culture being superior to another. (yay!) Though I wonder how they would deal with MAGA culture...
But you had both Brinton (under the guise of psychic unity) and Boas, (who argued that no culture was superior to another) pushing the trickster and linking it to Western mythic figures like Loki and Hermes. The whole idea is foundational to studying Native American culture and linguistics, cause you had all these field anthropologists collecting trickster tales which then gives you your data for study.
However, most linguists dealing with NA languages are not really chasing Jung, but are more obsessed with their particular language family and take a more romantic approach, thinking well, I'm sure there's something to that trickster stuff. I recall a presentation about something related to a Coyote tale, maybe from the Southwest by 2 people and just before the conference, one of the presenters had to have emergency eye surgery and the other presenter said, well, what do you expect, we are talking about Coyote and everyone kind of nodded, and probably thought yeah, that makes sense.
The whole site is pretty interesting and I got to looking at it when my wife asked me if it was kay-yot or kay-yot-tee.
2 days ago
Wonkie, you might be thinking of the book by Paul Radin, a student of Franz Boas. If anyone wants to check out his book on it, it is here
https://ignca.gov.in/Asi_data/4517.pdf
3 days ago
Everyone, that's really fun stuff, and nous, a really nice inversion. So would you say the story of Loki and Baldr, which seems like typical trickster shit, is like a retcon?
Quick tldr, Baldr is the cool handsome kid and is invulnerable to everything because his mom Frigg got everything to promise never to hurt him. Of course, she missed mistletoe (which has a particular resonance with Celtic mysticism and gets imported into Christmas, so that figures). So Loki gets a party game going where all the gods throw shit at Baldr and it just bounces off of him. As everyone's mom used to say, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. In this case, Baldr's twin brother, Hodur (which was the inspiration for George RR Martin's Hodor), who was blind, was left out, so Loki says come on, join in and gives him a twig of misletoe and guides his arm. And of course, it pierces Baldr's heart and kills him and the gods lose it. Baldr goes down to Hell and his mom follows and pleads for his release. Hel, ruler of the underworld, says ok, if you can get everything in creation to weep for Baldr. Spoiler, one giantess (who may be Loki in disguise) refuses to, so Baldr stays put and when the gods discover it was Loki shapeshifting, they bind him to a rock with a poisonous snake.
So the story has overtones of Sisyphus (another trickster) and with the whole bringing back Baldr, you have the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Though it does make Loki out to be a shit (he supposedly did it because he was jealous of Baldr)
When I was looking up Trickster gods, it noted that the trickster god role in Africa is often taken up by a spider, which had me wondering if the story of Arachne and Athena, which I thought was a creation of Ovid, might be related, but gemini says they aren't. Who you going to believe, an LLM or your pet theory?
Wj's observation that Monkey D Luffy is an homage to Dragonball is spot on. Eichiro Oda, who does One Piece (and is from where I live!) has often said how much he idolizes Toriyama and he actually redrew the entire volume 42, which was the last volume in the original series, as a tribute. If the Thai students are really manga heads, I'll bring this up and send them to the prefectural office to see this. https://kumamoto-guide.jp/en/spots/detail/368
And the question about Abrahamic religions, sure, let's go there. I've never really delved into Old Testament as myth, something actively discouraged by my sunday school bible training, but my primary memory of Jacob is going up the ladder and talking to God, which seems to open up the possibility of trickster. A Joseph Smith jr. for biblical times.
But my thinking is that because people think that the Bible is somehow historical fact (or ignore it because they don't want to get in fights) has them fail to see how people and situations are archetypes and that we are placed in those situations in the process of living our lives. For Abrahamic religions, you have people who take their texts as actual historic truth. While the thread passes through a lot of anti-Muslim rhetoric, you've got a place like the Ark Encounter, as well as Israelis right wingers arguing for Greater Israel. All of these seem like taking mythological tales and attributing them a historical truth. Of course, Socrates ran up against the same thing on his way to a hemlock chaser, so it's not like mythic thinking is a guard.
Anyway, this was probably too long, but keep the observations coming!
Battening down the hatches for the possibly two typhoons on their way, I've gotten quite confused about what we are arguing about. Looking back, my problem is that wj's first comment seemed to take in the common conservative trope of cultural relativism = fuzzy liberal thinking of anything goes. nous pointed out that for undergraduates, you often have to pound into their heads the fact that _everyone_ carries a lot of prejudices and it is hard work separating oneself from them. Getting them over that hurdle is job 1, but some people take it (or possibly more accurately lampoon it) as all there is.
As Russell notes, humans have a long history of doing shitty stuff, so making anyone doing that the villain is probably going to preserve, and possibly enlarge blind spots. I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering what people in the future are going to make of the things that I do and think 'wtf were they thinking?'
I'm not really sure how marriage is something you want to take as something that, I don't know, argues against cultural relativism? There are a lot of things to pick at, like the oscillation between legal terms and social naming (shacking up, friends with benefits), but the fact that you name it suggests that there is some public recognition of the fact.There is not a 'who is shacking up with whom' column in the NYTimes, but within that person's social sphere, there must be something that had to be named.
Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official and over half of the people do what is called a nashi-kon (no wedding marriage). So your definition seems a bit ethnocentric, at least where Japanese are concerned.
To understand 'marriage', you have to look at the totality of the culture, which seems to require some sort of cultural relativism in order to not fall into false comparisons.
But even if a particular culture doesn’t do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.
They have norms about how people partner or group up. Those generally flow to specific examples, like male/female couples, who comprise the majority, and those norms are kept those in place with social enforcement. But as soon as you say 'marriage', you kind of lose me in making some sort of universal argument.
I mean, you have the word kekkon（結婚）in Japan, which roughly corresponds to marriage and is what you say to explain to your friends. Marriage, right? But if you fill out a government document, it is kon'in (婚姻) which is more meaning affiliation, especially between two houses. In fact, in the Heian era, marriage was matrilocal, with the man _visiting_ the wife at her mother's house, which gives interesting thoughts what 'meeting the family' means. And if the husband didn't visit within 3 months, the couple was considered divorced. As Mr Spock might say, it is marriage, but not as we know it.
That system took 500 years to disappear, in part because it made more sense to move the wife to the samurai husband's (fortified) estate and primogeniture was necessary to prevent a family's lands from being divided, weakening military power. This is when Neo-confucianism got into it and eventually, it was codified that the eldest male of the family had total control over everyone in the household and a marriage could only take place if he approved it. But you still have traces of that matrilocal system, like muko-iri, 婿入り where the husband is adopted by the wife's family.
We can argue whether these sorts of differences are enough to undermine a term of marriage, but regardless, I'd avoid making claims about the universality of marriage until you specifically define what you mean.
Invite him over! I'm sure he's got a story to tell!
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
A very peculiar assumption, I would have thought.
Across time? I'll forgo a deep dive, but the Asian words are all about creating family ties rather than any kind of intimacy or family unit implication, which may be why for Japanese, you have this strange combination of citizenship being represented as an individual passport and having/being listed on a koseki (family register) Just cause it gets translated as 'marriage' doesn't mean that it is.
Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.
This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up. Well, I'm pretty sure gay people have partnered up through history. Every small southern town had their two spinsters who were living together while President James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor, roomed with a politician from Alabama for 10 years before he became president (and the roommate passed away before Buchanan became president). So why is that not 'marriage'?
But when a lot of people talk about marriage, they are thinking about wedding cake, or licenses, or getting drunk at receptions. But those are certainly not universal, but it is easy to have the lines blur between what is the core and what is peripheral. In addition, there are a lot of things associated with marriage that, if we acknowledge some set of universal human rights, we can't simply say oh, we have to accept that. Dowries? Father giving away the daughter? Understanding it requires understanding the social networks and all the other anthro sort of things, but it's just a conservative conceit that this means researchers _defend_ those practices. You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can't be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.
Cultural relativism is about understanding a culture (or subculture) in its own terms. Look at how its cultural norms work for the benefit of its members — how they impact others from outside the culture is irrelevant.
Hmmm, I think the first part is right, but the second part is problematic. Certainly, no culture, with the possible exception of the Sentinelese, is exists in a vacuum, so you are moving from cultural relativism to ethical relativism. It seems like the second statement could be used to justify anything. Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn't become a moral compass.
A few notes to add to nous summary (thanks).
I too was surprised at the recency of the trickster and it was interesting that Radin wrote about it in the late 50's given that he was a student of Boas, who is late 19th century/early 20th. Radin must have been in his 70's when he wrote the book mentioned. Something to think about when you hear bitching about the gerentocracy.
Boas came to the US from Germany with an ax to grind, which was that Primitive people weren't as primitive as people said, so I give him points for pushing back against the tide of Social Darwinism. A lot of the research was linguistics, trying to figure out why you had this patchwork of languages and cultures in the US. Brinton, mentioned by nous, was appointed professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at UPenn, becoming the first Anthro professor in the US. He liked the theory of psychic unity, which was that people were people, but then argued that what particular races did with those building blocks determined their evolutionary advance (boo!). This was opposed by Radin's teacher Boas, who argued for cultural relativism, with no culture being superior to another. (yay!) Though I wonder how they would deal with MAGA culture...
But you had both Brinton (under the guise of psychic unity) and Boas, (who argued that no culture was superior to another) pushing the trickster and linking it to Western mythic figures like Loki and Hermes. The whole idea is foundational to studying Native American culture and linguistics, cause you had all these field anthropologists collecting trickster tales which then gives you your data for study.
However, most linguists dealing with NA languages are not really chasing Jung, but are more obsessed with their particular language family and take a more romantic approach, thinking well, I'm sure there's something to that trickster stuff. I recall a presentation about something related to a Coyote tale, maybe from the Southwest by 2 people and just before the conference, one of the presenters had to have emergency eye surgery and the other presenter said, well, what do you expect, we are talking about Coyote and everyone kind of nodded, and probably thought yeah, that makes sense.
https://hofstra.github.io/coyote/sources/coyote-as-trickster/myths/opler-lipan-apache-coyote-eyes/
The whole site is pretty interesting and I got to looking at it when my wife asked me if it was kay-yot or kay-yot-tee.
Wonkie, you might be thinking of the book by Paul Radin, a student of Franz Boas. If anyone wants to check out his book on it, it is here
https://ignca.gov.in/Asi_data/4517.pdf
Everyone, that's really fun stuff, and nous, a really nice inversion. So would you say the story of Loki and Baldr, which seems like typical trickster shit, is like a retcon?
Quick tldr, Baldr is the cool handsome kid and is invulnerable to everything because his mom Frigg got everything to promise never to hurt him. Of course, she missed mistletoe (which has a particular resonance with Celtic mysticism and gets imported into Christmas, so that figures). So Loki gets a party game going where all the gods throw shit at Baldr and it just bounces off of him. As everyone's mom used to say, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt. In this case, Baldr's twin brother, Hodur (which was the inspiration for George RR Martin's Hodor), who was blind, was left out, so Loki says come on, join in and gives him a twig of misletoe and guides his arm. And of course, it pierces Baldr's heart and kills him and the gods lose it. Baldr goes down to Hell and his mom follows and pleads for his release. Hel, ruler of the underworld, says ok, if you can get everything in creation to weep for Baldr. Spoiler, one giantess (who may be Loki in disguise) refuses to, so Baldr stays put and when the gods discover it was Loki shapeshifting, they bind him to a rock with a poisonous snake.
So the story has overtones of Sisyphus (another trickster) and with the whole bringing back Baldr, you have the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Though it does make Loki out to be a shit (he supposedly did it because he was jealous of Baldr)
When I was looking up Trickster gods, it noted that the trickster god role in Africa is often taken up by a spider, which had me wondering if the story of Arachne and Athena, which I thought was a creation of Ovid, might be related, but gemini says they aren't. Who you going to believe, an LLM or your pet theory?
Wj's observation that Monkey D Luffy is an homage to Dragonball is spot on. Eichiro Oda, who does One Piece (and is from where I live!) has often said how much he idolizes Toriyama and he actually redrew the entire volume 42, which was the last volume in the original series, as a tribute. If the Thai students are really manga heads, I'll bring this up and send them to the prefectural office to see this.
https://kumamoto-guide.jp/en/spots/detail/368
And the question about Abrahamic religions, sure, let's go there. I've never really delved into Old Testament as myth, something actively discouraged by my sunday school bible training, but my primary memory of Jacob is going up the ladder and talking to God, which seems to open up the possibility of trickster. A Joseph Smith jr. for biblical times.
But my thinking is that because people think that the Bible is somehow historical fact (or ignore it because they don't want to get in fights) has them fail to see how people and situations are archetypes and that we are placed in those situations in the process of living our lives. For Abrahamic religions, you have people who take their texts as actual historic truth. While the thread passes through a lot of anti-Muslim rhetoric, you've got a place like the Ark Encounter, as well as Israelis right wingers arguing for Greater Israel. All of these seem like taking mythological tales and attributing them a historical truth. Of course, Socrates ran up against the same thing on his way to a hemlock chaser, so it's not like mythic thinking is a guard.
Anyway, this was probably too long, but keep the observations coming!