Miers+first+blog+post




 * Miers

Doing your first wiki blog post is easy:**


 * **create a new page using the blog post template**
 * **give the page a unique title - "lastname xxxx"**
 * **add your personal page name at the top (see creating pages )**
 * **tag the page "blog"**
 * **link to or paste an image on the page**
 * **briefly ( 2 or 3 sentences) explain why that image interests you**

The image you post can be one you are thinking about using in your visual grammar installation.
 * You should have the post up by the start of class on Thursday, Feb 4. We will use the images in class to illustrate principles from //Reading Images//

If you have no idea what image to post, follow this simple 5 step** André Breton **surrealism algorithm:**


 * 1) Go to Google images.
 * 2) Close your eyes and meditate.
 * 3) Open your eyes and type the first word that comes to mind in the search window.
 * 4) Hit enter.
 * 5) Pick any image from the first search page.


 * When I tried this, I typed "fleece." Then I picked this image:



Now I not only have a blog post but a potential topic for an installation: representing animals as humans. There is even an important anthropology article on this topic:**

T//he Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute//, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 469-488
 * media type="custom" key="5261229" ||  || [|"Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism," Eduardo Viveiros de Castro]

This article deals with that aspect of Amerindian thought which has been called its 'perspectival quality (Arhem 1993): the conception, common to many peoples of the continent, according to which the world is inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view. This idea cannot be reduced to our current concept of relativism (Lima 1995; 1996), which at first it seems to call to mind. In fact, it is at right angles, so to speak, to the opposition between relativism and universalism. Such resistance by Amerindian perspectivism to the terms of our epistemological debates casts suspicion on the robustness and transportability of the ontological partitions which they presuppose. In particular, as many anthropologists have already concluded (albeit for other reasons), the classic distinction between Nature and Culture cannot be used to describe domains internal to non-Western cosmologies without first undergoing a rigorous ethnographic critique. ....


 * Perspectivism**

The initial stimulus for the present reflections were the numerous references in Amazonian ethnography to an indigenous theory according to which the way humans perceive animals and other subjectivities that inhabit the world - gods, spirits, the dead, inhabitants of other cosmic levels, meteorological phenomena, plants, occasionally even objects and artefacts - differs profoundly from the way in which these beings see humans and see themselves. Typically, in normal conditions, humans see humans as humans, animals as animals and spirits (if they see them) as spirits; however animals (predators) and spirits see humans as animals (as prey) to the same extent that animals (as prey) see humans as spirits or as animals (predators). By the same token, animals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages and they experience their own habits and characteristics in the form of culture - they see their food as human food (jaguars see blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish, etc.), they see their bodily attributes (fur, feathers, claws, beaks etc.) as body decorations or cultural instruments, they see their social system as organized in the same way as human institutions are (with chiefs, shamans, ceremonies, exogamous moieties, etc.). This 'to see as' refers literally to percepts and not analogically to concepts, although in some cases the emphasis is placed more on the categorical rather than on the sensory aspect of the phenomenon. ||~  ||