Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 18:55:12 +0000
Subject: extreme positions


Okay, Rahul, what's wrong with the Panda's thumb?  Or eating 19 hours a 
day?  There are many very strange looking things in the living world. 
Anyway, it's not like there is sure to be a known "explanation of 
everything", is there?

If you want see a lot of despicable pan-glossians, you ought to take a 
look at a lot of social/anthropology stuff - well it must serve the 
survival of the culture and the rule of the powerful, or it wouldn't be 
there.

One of them even claims that "reversal rituals" function to strengthen 
inequalities.  He ties together some societies in which there is a 
regular festival of cross-dressing and social sex-role reversal of 
domination for one day, with the US slaveowners who held events in which 
slaves dressed up for a day in their owner's clothing, and paraded 
around all cheerful to be looking like what they weren't.

This supposedly "released" the tension and anger of the downtrodden in 
all these societies, so as better to accept the shit they got the rest 
of the time.

I challenged [as usual] the crap that Dr. Parker was dishing out to us 
in that "psychological anthropology" class, saying it sounded more like 
a cruel joke.  If it served the status quo, perhaps it was by 
demonstration of the power of the owners, to give and take, to be "kind" 
but still to be totally in control.

Dr. Parker allowed as how there was little "evidence" for that 
"researcher's" views on the subject.  

Social "science" ???

BTW, do you still want that book on the ancient origin of macrame?  I 
found a second copy, used.

Lisa


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