ANT100Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Benjamin Lee Whorf, The Color Spectrum, Homo Sapiens
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Making things up is an act of signifying (using signs) It is an adaptive advantage of homo sapiens. Studied by philosophers, psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists. Anthropologists focus on small-group constructs and interactive practice. We do(cid:374)"t look so (cid:373)uch o(cid:374) (cid:373)i(cid:374)d as practice. No contradiction: reality is constructed, yet we can distinguish reality from irreality. In ordinary language: reality is what is real. In social science/humanities, jargon: reality is how we understand what is real. For the most part, reality seems pretty real and we are well advised to live in it. But a lot of the real is not our reality, we do not understand it. Each species sees the world in different ways. Human language orders the way we look at the world. Each language decisively influences the way its speakers think. No distinction in old chinese, old japanese, sioux, etc. The color spectrum is continuous; it"s language that divides it into units.
