Wow did I find this very confusing as first. This chapter is shown through a myth of when Europeans and Hawaiians first came encountered with each other. The Hawaiians at first were a little bit worried and always stuck with their same traditions until they were no longer frightened of change and could actually learn from the Europeans.
Sahlins begins the chapter with community and language, I think he is looking at it as a whole and each part connects with each other and leads into new parts or new beginnings. You need all the parts that will fit together to have a community or language that will have full meaning. The problem with language as Sahlins says there is a “dilemma,” of speech and langue. This is because the speaker can use language in a different way than the listener would because everyone interprets things differently. To me from the myth of the Hawaiians this can sometimes work out to be a good thing as long as you can learn from the different interpretations.
The myth is the “Resolution and Discovery.” What I got from it is how culture and society is consonantly changing over time. If people always stayed the same, spoke the same language, stayed put in one society; never moved then nothing would change. But once people give other ones a chance like the Hawaiians and the Europeans then the past can become a stepping stone towards the future instead of the past and future always staying the same.
It is crazy to go back in time and remember how women were treated at one point. As Sahlins states “moreover, as men ate in communion with the gods, every meal itself a sacrifice, women could not dine with them, nor could their own food be cooked in the same oven’s as men’s.” Thankfully culture has changed over time. With this myth if the Europeans would never of sailed to the Hawaiians women could still be mistreated to this day, since the Europeans showed how men and women eat and sail together.
All and all what I got from this chapter is how community and language is not always going to be a “cultural reproduction.” This is because each decade new things are being produced not just within one culture but from others that add to the change. One has to be open to new ideas and change even how much we can be scared at first or hate it at first.
Sorry commenters if I was completely off I struggled a bit with this chapter please feel free to be completely open if I was wrong or on the right track.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
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2 comments:
I also found the writing to be a little confusing. The first point made on language puzzled me, but what I got from it was that each word needs another for anyone to understand it. “The value of the sign is fixed by relationships with co-existing signs.” I believe that what is being said here is a good interpretation of what I got out of the reading. All the words need to fit together, however, the problem is that words mean many different things, and listeners may interpret things differently, (metaphors).
The Hawaiians have an interesting past, the way they treated a man who was born from 2 siblings is completely different from how they would have been treated in today’s society. He was treated God-like instead of a hillbilly from the South. The Europeans, however, disrespected him. They believed that they were showing great respect by presenting him with gifts and not falling into the sacrifice position as would have been respectable. This shows that different cultures hold different beliefs.
Now, when it says that women could not eat with men, nor could they eat food made in the same oven, are they saying that men are closer to the gods? Or that they are like gods. That is something that could have been explained in the summary. However, the European men did encourage Hawaiian women to join in their dining and socialization.
Sahlins ends this article by stating that the relationship between commoner and chiefs, men and women and structure had been revised. The paragraph in the summary was good when saying that things change overtime because of different cultures mingling. Without the Europeans showing that women are more than slaves, they would still be treated as such. The summarizer did a good job considering the way this article was worded. I had a hard time trying to understand the first part and a harder time trying to keep my mind on the reading. It took a couple times of reading this article to simply make sense of what Sahlins was trying to say.
I don't like to beat a dead horse, but I too was confused with this reading. I couldn't really understand where Sahlins was going with his discussion of, as said before, the language and how the Hawaiian men were like gods and the women were pretty much nothing,etc, until the end. Here, is when Sahlins seems to sum up, which helped me a lot and he did quite well. I perceived it as, everything he was discussing [with the Hawaiians] changes when different societies, with different cultures, come together. As this changes, society becomes ever changing as they progress (as with the European men allowing Hawaiian women to eat with them) with new ideologies, values and beliefs, form. His writing, to say the least, was perplexing. However, the posts written seemed to somewhat clarify my interpretation of the "mythical realities".
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