Native American Teachings

http://nativeamericanencyclopedia.com/teachings-the-seven-grandfathers/

Linking Thinking

Links to Power

Throughout the study of history, shifts in power are related in some way to an advance in communication technology of some kind. Movements begin and paradigms fade as inventions take hold and change the way information is shared or managed. As society develops and organizes itself, power is held or released by groups and ideologies, often as a result of the technology used to process information. Beniger (1986) notes that “such technologies are more properly seen, however, not as causes but as consequences of societal change” (p. 7). This writing will explore instances of power shift that have taken place and their links to advances in communication modes and technology.

Ancient storytellers held power in their ability to relate history and define peoples with their poems. Virgil’s Aeneid serves as an historical and religious textbook for the Roman people of that time and afterward. In his description of the “indescribable” texture of Aeneas’ shield Virgil sets in stone the legend of Roman origins for all to see, “for there the Lord of fire had wrought the story of Italy” (Mandelbaum 2004 p. 208). The legitimacy of leadership is solidified as the poet describes “Augustus Caesar is leading the Italians to battle, together with the senate and the people, the household gods and the Great Gods; his bright brows pour out a twin flame and upon his head his father’s Julian star is glittering” (p. 209). The Roman system of government is couched in a process of ascendancy wherein Augustus’ power is given his father’s blessing.Here too, the Roman culture is held up above others. Gauls creep in darkness and Egyptians follow shamefully. Roman gods triumph over other gods as Virgil describes a scene in which Apollo “stretched his bow; and all of Egypt and of India, and all the Arabs and Sabaeans, turned their backs and fled before this terror” (Mandelbaum 2004 p. 210). The use of the poem to create a Roman identity seems plain, but it also serves to convey religious education. The Aeneid is a reference for those who wish to understand the hierarchy of the gods, the underworld and afterlife, and how Rome related itself with the rest of the known world. The author in his writing held immeasurable power. The history and culture he ascribes to Rome is glorious and unique, drawing on earlier histories and then elaborating on them. It is important, I feel, to note that Rome’s history could have been significantly different if Virgil had made other choices in his process. Much of what he describes comes before his writing, but much comes afterward. Most importantly a self-awareness on the part of the Roman people as being specially blessed in the world follows Virgil’s effort.

Ancient buildings speak volumes about the ideals and priorities of the people who built and inhabited them. Hugo (1831), in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, determines that “from the beginning of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusive, architecture was the great book of humanity” (p. 170). Temples which still stand tell us of the influence deities held over the people who built them. Palaces and castles, too, give us some indication of the power of their residents. This power which brought these edifices into being is described by the size and description of the buildings themselves. Often cathedrals are in the middle of a city or town and dominate the skyline. Their size and elaborate, innovative shapes stand out from other, lower buildings used for everyday tasks and shelter. The power considered by their creators is described by the buildings themselves, immense and consolidated. This power is set apart and different from others, and this is made clear when looking at the medieval skyline.Parables and master narratives play out on the walls of important buildings. Windows and carvings tell stories to those who gaze at them. Stained glass Bible scenes reinforce the power of the force that inspired the architect, and also of the patron who funded him. As architecture develops, however, we see dissent in the details of important structures. Hugo (1831) describes later periods in which liberties are “then taken by architects even in regard to the Church” (p. 173). He then exposes intricacies which contradict the message of the edifice; “capitals interwoven with monks and nuns in shameful attitudes,” and a “tipsy monk with the ears of an ass, and a glass in his hand, laughing in the face of an entire community” (p. 173). The dissent of the message reflects a shift of power from the Church to the craftsman. As Hugo iterates, architecture here “escapes from the priest and falls into the power of the artist” (p. 173) who builds it the way he sees fit.

This shift reflects societal changes that took place in the later Middle Ages. At a similar time, the invention of the printing press, and Guttenberg’s Bible, wrested access to “the word” from the control of the Catholic Church. Until this time, one group determined who could print the Christian Bible. Monks in scriptoria created parchment manuscripts through a painstakingly slow process. Access to holy words came through priests and other celebrants at the Church’s timing. Significantly this exposure to the divine was in Latin, a language reserved to church members and the educated, a small minority of the European population. Due to communication technology’s advancement religious power transferred from a chosen few to many.

Protestant religions developed with personal Bible reading as a center of their faith. No longer was a mass celebration the center of a religious life. In Protestant faiths, Bible reading was “the essential, imperative exercise of religious life, the one thing not to be omitted” (Eisenstein 1968 p. 38). “Reformers,” according to Eisenstein, “put in place of the Mass as the decisive high point of spiritual experience—instead of participation in the sacrament of the real presence on one’s knees in church, they put encounter with the Holy Spirit in the familiar language of men on the printed page of the sacred text” (1968 p. 38). This shift in the locus and practice of religious experience and was made possible by the availability of books. Significant in this quotation is the inclusion of the “familiar language of men.”

Vernacular languages of many kinds became formalized and standardized as a result of the printing press and the enormous creation of printed materials which became available at this time. Until large scale printing made Bibles readily available, the local clergy “was still the direct intermediary between his parishioners and the divine” (Anderson 1983 p.23). This huge shift in power from centralized control of religion to the individual became possible only with communication invention and the rise and legitimacy of vernacular languages. Latin, which had been the dominant tongue of the educated and powerful, became esoteric and increasingly less applicable to the exchanges of daily life. Political power, too, underwent change as a result of these developments.

Anderson (1983) states that while “manuscript knowledge was scarce and arcane lore, print knowledge lived by reproducibility and dissemination” (p. 37). The volume of book production increased ten fold from 1500 to 1600 C.E. leading to new forms of business, print-capitalism, and new ideas of self-determination among European peoples. The gravity of divine and dynastic leadership diminished. Community developed among individuals and people began to see themselves as citizens rather than subjects. New sentiments and feelings emerged as “the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought” (Anderson 1983, p. 11). A desire to be connected to or part of something larger than self drew many to the ideas of nationhood. Anderson speaks of the “secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning” (p. 11). As kings and popes lost control of the public imagination, new ideas, which meet the described needs for continuity, took hold in the form of nationalist ideas. These new nations would be linked by language and also through technology.

The telegraph was the first communication technology form to fully diverge from transportation technology. It therefore, “was a new and distinctively different force of production that demanded a new body of law, economic theory, political arrangements, management techniques, organizational structures, and scientific rationales with which to justify and make effective the development of a privately owned and controlled monopolistic corporation” (Carey 1989 p.205). Power has shifted again as a result of communication technology, but this time to a new entity, the corporation. This entity was not controlled by government or church officials, but worked separately and in its own interests. Although telegraph lines followed train line in the majority, it was a corporation’s decision to serve profitable areas and perhaps not others which may not yield a profit. This power to serve or not is still seen today with the vagaries of cellular phone service.

With the advent of electronic connections over long distances there comes a new understanding of time and language. Standardization of time zones developed as did uniformity of language between regions. This strengthened national ties and unified groups into larger groups. As a result, power shifts again as the telegraph brings into existence, “new structures of social relations, particularly by fostering a national commercial middle class” (Carey 1989 p. 204). This middle class seems to have been reliant on their employers to a greater extent than on their government or religious leaders. Business sped up as “through the telegraph and railroad the social relations among large numbers of anonymous buyers and sellers were coordinated” (p. 206). The strength of the corporation today attests to the shift in power from church and governments to business.

The telegraph signaled the initiation of recentralization of influence and power that had been dispersed throughout the Industrial Revolution (Beniger 1986). This movement of power “came to be reestablished by means of bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructures of transportation and telecommunications, and system-wide communication via the new mass media” (Beniger 1986, p. 7). Contemporary corporations are constantly monitoring market conditions, consumer patterns, sales and inventory figures and must therefore rely on a “continual comparison of current states to future goals” through information processing which is only possible with modern communication systems (p.8).

Here too, in government processes, a state’s ability to control is reliant upon its system of communication. Beniger (1986) writes that “a society’s ability to maintain control—at all levels from interpersonal to international relations—will be directly proportional to the development of its information technologies” (p. 8). If this hypothesis is true, the existence of strong central governments, as seen in contemporary England and France and more recently the United States, is made possible through communication invention.

Throughout human history those who control or change or adapt most rapidly to the modes communication gain influence and power. The peaks and valleys of power in the ancient and medieval world were flattened by the printing press only to reemerge with the advent of electronic communication. Power re-centralized, as demonstrated by Beniger, due to bureaucratic systems made possible by technological advances. As the information society (Castells 1996) advances, power may again level itself, unless our understanding of the world and its structures is too fixed by history and ideology to adapt again.

References

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread ofNationalism. New York: Verso.

Beniger, J. (1986). The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of theInformation Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Carey, J. (1989). Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York:Routledge.

Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of theNetwork Society, The Information Age: Economy,Society and Culture Vol. I. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Eisenstein, E. (1968). Some conjectures about the impact of printing on western societyand thought: A preliminary report. The Journal of Modern History, 40(1), 1-56.

Hugo, V. (2004). The Hunchback of Notre Dame. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics.

Virgil. (2004). The Aeneid, Allen Mandelbaum, trans. New York: Bantam Dell.

Worth thinking about...

Two Guys named Joe and Harry

http://communicationtheory.org/the-johari-window-model/

Primary Message Systems

According to Hall, (p. 37) Primary Message Systems of culture must meet three criteria:

A. They must be rooted in Biological Activity

B. They must be able to isolated and analyzed individually

C. At the same time, they must be reflected in the rest of culture and have the rest of culture reflected in them.

They are:

Interaction:
-a natural urge to want to interact with people
-highest form of interaction is speech and reinforced by tone of voice and gesture
-you define who you are by negative or positive interactions
-everything grows from interaction
-gender roles apply to it
-interacting is the basic of all the PMS because you are always interacting, just as you are always communicating with people

Association:
-biological needs, family unit which our initial association
-association also provides safety
- gender rules apply to association
-




Subsistence:
-beg. of time.. how to survive.. natural instincts
-food shelter water
-basic needs, taking what you need to get by
-Subsistence-->Temporality is referred to the circle of life. life continuously changes. full of rhythms and cycles. mother nature is a good example of subsistence. when the environment changes species change to adapt to their surroundings in order to live and survive to become the more dominant species.




Bisexuality:
-Gender roles, how we behave is determined by our sex at birth
-isolated male/female
-Subsistence - reproduction, survival of species.
-Interaction - younger kids playing with other children similar to themselves.
-Territory -  certain roles that women/men play the opposite gender usually does not.
-Association -  women's clubs, military, sports teams.




Territoriality:
-has to deal with the use, possession, and conflict over space.
-territory, by itself, is the space YOU, as a person, occupy.
-territory and sustinece, competing over resources in said territory
- territory and play: territory established based on game rules (e.g- safe area in tag)
- territory in defense- conflicts arise when space is occupied by animals or even nature (i.e cutting down trees)
-territory by association: more space indicated higher standing in a kingdom/workplace.





Temporality:
Isolation- Time cannot be recovered when lost.
Biology- Heart beat, Circadian rhythm, internal processes
Subsistence- Food, Breathing... you don't eat you body tells you, then you die.
Defense- Time as speed attacks or attacking when not ready
Interaction- Language and poetry




Learning:




Play:





Defense:







Exploitation (use of materials):