From: Lawrence DeBivort (debivort@umd5.umd.edu)
Date: Tue 04 Mar 2003 - 13:22:47 GMT
MOTEL OF THE MYSTERIES, David Macaulay. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1979, for
those who are not yet familiar with this gem of a classic on the
interpretation of artifacts for which user knowledge is no longer available.
Cheers,
Lawry
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
> Of Wade T. Smith
> Sent: Tue, March 04, 2003 7:14 AM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: memetics-digest V1 #1300
>
>
>
> On Monday, March 3, 2003, at 09:19 PM, memetics-digest wrote:
>
> > But if you were talking about an artifact such as a clay bowl or a
> > stone ax
> > head, for example, and you went out and gathered the same kind of clay
> > and
> > formed that clay in the same way and decorated it with the same
> > designs and
> > fired it at the same temperature, you would have learned a thing or two
> > about how the tribe accomplished the task themselves.
>
> Yup, for sure, and anthropologists do things like that, all the time.
>
> But they are not making one _anew_, in the cultural context that made
> that artifact _anew_. They are _merely_ replicating.
>
> - Wade
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
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> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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