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From the Sleep-Deprived Student’s Point of View
Having read the segment to which I am currently responding at about midnight on one night and typing out this response at around midnight the next night after waking up from a six-hour nap beginning immediately after my return from school, I do not know nor am I overly concerned about my state of mind as it may have affected my perception or as it may be affecting my ability to verbalize my feelings on that already at least slightly questionable perception.
Geertz seems rather jolly. I like that in an ethnographer. Am I the only one who had never even heard the word “ethnograph” before I read this thing? Instead of making me think of ethnicity and such, it makes me think “ethyl”. That’s wood alcohol, isn’t it? The idea of wood alcohol is also kind of strange to me. Like drunk trees. I think Tolkien had some of those.
I actually like a lot of the stuff he’s saying-- figuring out a culture by discovering the symbols it uses to represent itself, what it sees as ideal, and what it sees as the worst. There’s no good word for “the worst” in English… Japanese has saitei, but depending on how you use it, it can have vulgar connotations. Yet I return to my theme as I simultaneously return from viewing what I’ve written so far in Print Preview to see how much of a page it fills up!
The Moroccan nisba system is particularly interesting to me, as it seems to define human beings by their differences from each other (going as far back as necessary to find non-mutual origins). It seems that, as Geertz said earlier concerning the uniquely Western idea of human beings as self-contained, the Moroccan view almost starts out by assuming people are more or less the same. The view here seems to be something along the lines of “I can’t understand you until I know exactly how you are different from me.” I kind of like that, because I’m so often plagued by the feeling that every individual is irreconcilably different from every other, and that’s why we as a nation, as a world, can never understand each other. That’s a place where I hope I can someday get proven wrong.
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