There are safe subjects to talk about in polite society—the weather, everyone’s health, sports—and then there are the subjects that are best left untouched. These include politics, religion, and money, to name a few. Why, then, is it, that when a person is transplanted into a new culture, the first things he or she notices are those little things that shouldn’t be discussed? Is it a lurid attraction to the forbidden? Perhaps he or she notices the things that are taken for granted as givens in his or her home culture. A person begins to understand the reality around him or her beginning on a level deeper than readily given definitions.
To live and learn in a culture, one of the biggest inhibitors cum liberators is language. Without language, every interaction comes by was of translation, gesticulation, or sheer guessing. What is lost in the mean, of course, is the depth and beauty (or brusqueness, as the situation may be) or the culture being experienced. In his fantastical travelogue Gulliver’s Travels, Swift’s narrator, Gulliver, notes the Lilliputians’ language. He notes commands and cries repeated, and in some cases he gives explanations learned later. (ch. 1) Swift also recalls his experiences with being a seaman and going into ports of call to interact with local peoples. “My hours of leisure I spent… when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language.” (ch. 1) The indication here is that Gulliver views the learning of language as a trifle of excitement and something to enjoy.
Often, language is used to classify or define a foreign group. For example, people who have been reared in Latin American countries are often lumped together by people raised in more Anglo-influenced America. The one group forms bounds and attempts to understand the other on the basis of language and an understood cultural norm of the Other. De Tocqueville similarly explains Native American society by an analysis of their languages. He notes that Native American language is broadly similar, made up of only a few actual languages and many dialects. (p. 354) He goes on to infer that this means that the people have not “undergone any great revolutions or been incorporated…into foreign nations.” (p. 354) De Tocqueville further uses the language to analyze the level of systematic complexity with which the people operate. He points out that words are carefully crafted and hold much meaning within them. As with de Tocqueville, most learners of new languages find that there are windows of understanding a people’s mental processes in the breakdown of linguistic construction.
Religion is a cornerstone of cultural identity. It could range from a pantheistic view of god in nature to an atheistic view of a mechanical cosmos, but people base their worlds of understandings beyond that which is definitely provable. As a result, religions build in ceremony and complexity, often with the inclusion of temples or shrines and moral codes, which inform the day-to-day actions of adherents. An interesting point of note is what happens when such things are forsaken or tainted. In Thucydides’s account of the plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, the common religion is abandoned. He notes, “No fear of god… had any restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same things whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately.” (p. 155) Thus we see that the Athenian religion of the day carried an understanding of “good and bad” people as well as a gone-awry system of divine punishment or reward based on actions. As a bit of self-fulfilled prophecy, it seems that the system of reward for good and punishment for bad was corrupted and thus taken advantage of by Athenians. In this desperate situation, where actions and consequences no longer held their sway, the people “became indifferent to every rule of religion or of law. All the funeral ceremonies which used to b e observed were now disorganized, and they buried the dead as best they could.” (p. 155) This manner of disarray befalls Athens, and with the old order of health and normalcy go the ceremonies that once defined civilized behavior for the people.
The points that create coherency in a society are not foreign; they are universal and common. Instead of being amazing and mystifying, they are the norm. The differences are the particulars: which language, which gods. It is likewise not a surprise that the same things that intrigue modern ethnographers and anthropologists would intrigue the writers of these pre-modern accounts. Such subjects intrigue guests at dinner parties and casual acquaintances, too. We just don’t always get to talk about them.
(I got a little carried away, because I exceeded the length and I was only on point 2. There were a good three more paragraphs in my little head. We were gonna talk about politics! And religion in GT.)
(I got a little carried away, because I exceeded the length and I was only on point 2. There were a good three more paragraphs in my little head. We were gonna talk about politics! And religion in GT.)
Here's to another rainy day in Conway. Gustav, get outta here!
T
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