Sacred Place - Allie Hanscom

In the film of the aboriginals in Australia, we learned about how this group of oral people made a spiritual claim over the land by painting their hand prints in a cave. Since this culture does not have written documents to legally lay hold of the land that rightfully belongs to them, they create their signatures on the physical land, claiming it as theirs. I thought this was very interesting to compare to our written culture. In our culture, there is an extensive amount of legality and bureaucracy that's involved in owning a piece of land. The system of the hand print in the oral culture could be compared to a deed in our written culture. Although the hand print is not a legally binding document, the people are making more of a spiritual claim or authority over the land. In essence, they are claiming the territory as theirs and marking it as a sacred place.

I thought it was interesting how this system could also be compared to the situation of Mt. Rushmore in America. In class, Dr. Redick made the point that this national landmark could also be considered Americans' spiritual claim of the land. No one is allowed to climb Mt. Rushmore because it's a sacred place. I think it is important to recognize and respect the legitimacy of a culture's claim to land, even if it may look different from your culture's method. Learning about this particular oral culture's traditions, I have been exposed to my own cultural bias. I understand now that certain procedures such as claiming ownership of land is essential to a culture's existence and can be manifested in many different ways.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Campbell - Time and Primal Culture

One of the major themes that we've discussed in this class throughout the semester has been comparing and contrasting oral cultures with written cultures. There are many differences, including ritual practices, moral codes, and utilization of spaces. However, another major difference that we only briefly touched upon is the way in which primal and modern cultures differ in their dense of understanding time. In today's world, time is very linear. We consider there to be a beginning and an end, and have even become so technical as to mark the years, months, days, and even hours. We measure our lives in the passing of years and death is seen as a gateway to a new life or an eternal paradise. For primal cultures, however, life is entirely cyclical. When we die, our bodies serve as food for scavenging animals or as nutrients for the soil. Our energies are passed along to other members of the natural environment, so despite our deaths, we never stop contributing to the circle of life...
Read more

Campbell - Ossian Mythology and "Oral Texts"

Abram, David.  The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World . New York: Vintage Books, 1996. I really enjoyed Abram's historical summary of how oral language developed and transitioned into written word. He begins this account with the invention of the Hebrew alphabet, or "aleph-beth," which later served as a model for Greek linguistic advancement. However, as any geography lesson will tell you, the Greek nation was geographically broken and thus the cultural climate was highly sectarian (i.e. nation-states), so the concept of written language took awhile for people to accept. Additionally, the mystification of oral chants and stories could not be directly translated into written word, and many Greeks were rather disenchanted by this loss of oral magic. As Abram explains, "the sung stories, along with the numerous ceremonies to which they were linked, were in a sense the living encyclopedias of the culture - carrying and preserving ...
Read more

Hanscom - Lion's Gate Statue

        When we had class outside at Lion's Gate, we had a good discussion about the statue at the top of the hill. The statue commemorated a man who was responsible for making the space around it a place for the public to visit and enjoy. The statue was a very tall, geometric design of a man taming a horse with a bit in the horse's mouth on top. At the bottom of the sculpture, there are four sculptures of men holding different objects representing things we really value in American culture. One of the figures was holding a painter's palette with brushes to represent art, another figure was holding a compass with some paper to represent math/science, the third figure was holding an anvil to represent the trades that use this object for metalwork, and the fourth figure was holding a book by Homer to represent literature/storytelling. These four things represented the most important aspects of American culture at the time this sculpture was made.     ...
Read more