From: John Wilkins (j.wilkins1@uq.edu.au)
Date: Wed 25 Jan 2006 - 01:32:16 GMT
On 25/01/2006, at 11:19 AM, Scott Chase wrote:
>> From: "Price, Ilfryn" <I.Price@shu.ac.uk>
>> Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk>
>> Subject: Sticky Memes
>> Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:47:02 -0000
>>
>>
> [snip]
>>
> Kate:
>>
>> > Also let's not forget the fact that a significant minority *do*
>> learn
>> > another language, convert to another religious viewpoint,
>> discard racist
>> > attitudes or bizarre Santa-related practices (she's off again).
>>
> If:
>>
>> Can you really discard 'Rudolf the red nosed reindeer' or
>> 'Santa' (as opposed to certain 'Santa-related practices' out of your
>> head. I would call them highly sticky and relatively trivial
>> (logical dangers of manipulation and association with over
>> consumption excluded)
>>
> I still remember Rudolf and Santa and the elves as they were a part
> of my childhood, especially given the heavy consumption of holiday
> television programming with all that Christmas lore (let me give a
> shout out to "Frosty the Snowman" representing the crystalline
> water anthropomorphs). At some point kids probably think "Mickey
> Mouse" and "Bugs Bunny" are real too, but eventually they realize
> otherwise.
>
> Can we discard colored eggs and chocolate bunny rabbits, neither
> having anything to do with Christian mythology, from the symbology
> of Easter? The Christians co-opted these pagan fertility symbols,
> so apprently they have some staying power. But what's really wrong
> with coloring eggs and hiding them on an annual basis, beyond the
> foul odor experienced due to forgetting one behind the couch for a
> couple months? One could do that and eschew the whole Christian
> aspect of Easter. Heck it's really about some long forgotten
> fertility goddess ain't it?
That's what was reported in some medieval chronicler, but in fact it
appears not to be. There were fertility rituals at about that time of
year, for sure, but that's because the northern spring began about
then and most agricultural societies were very aware of this. But the
calculation of Easter relies upon the Jewish calendar, and it is
solely based on that.
Arguably there are the "god-resurrected" myths that Fraser reports
but AFAIK this has tended to evaporate on hard inspection.
-- John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Biohumanities Project University of Queensland - Blog: evolvethought.blogspot.com "Darwin's theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science." Tractatus 4.1122 =============================================================== 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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