From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Apr 01 2003 - 01:19:08 MST
Damien writes
> [Lee wrote]
> > The most important aspect to me is whether we can distinguish
> > political ideologies---in their effects---from other systems
> > of belief. For example, most of your [Hal's] analysis might
> > equally well apply, it seems to me, to my convictions about
> > certain scientific or historical matters.
>
> One problem here is in discerning the limits of `political' as a framing
> adjective. Feminist critique, for all its excesses, has shown convincingly
> the ideological forces skewing, constraining, even largely *creating* the
> ways most men and women in the Western 1950s, say, understood what it is to
> be a male or a female human.
Why is this hypothesis necessary? The anthropologists and the
evolutionary psychologists have their own complementary ways
of recognizing and incorporating the fact that the world over
(from ancient China to Zimbabwe to the Andes) the concept of
the "feminine" seems to be based upon a large common denominator.
> This construction was largely invisible to those involved;
> it was *just how the world is*. If you were a black man or
> woman, you had further layers of ideological shaping
> simultaneously imposed *on* you and internalized *inside*
> you.
Yes, that's how it would definitely work, I think, for those
outer layers for which there has been insufficient evolutionary
time to evolve instincts.
> That's ideology: not what political opinions you happen to
> find fashionable, but the immense social constraining and
> enabling powers of discourse.
A meaning of the term that I shall try to appreciate.
More on your ARCHITECTURE OF BABEL perhaps later.
Lee
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