ALL GROUPS: Looking ahead to the next week, submit one page listing 2 films that seem to illuminate the topic. This is typed, double spaced, no more than ONE page (less than 250 words)
for Monday 2/10
Claude Levi-Strauss on The Savage Mind The distinction we are looking for is the distinction between what could be called "magical" and "scientific" thought processes.
Example of text for a paper.
"Walkabout" 1971 Directed by Nicholas Roeg. The transformation of ways to think can be seen in the girl's eyes at the end of the movie: after having been left as a young girl in the Outback by her father, she was found by an aborigine. At the end of the movie she is back to civilization in a life that "makes sense" according to her native culture: indoors, behind glass, at work with all the gadgetry of a housewife. It is civilization that belongs in a museum, behind glass--not the native who is adept at living on earth and with the earth. The woman, now grown, has a successful husband and a house with all the amenities of modernization and the trappings of "love". But in the Outback she had been lost--and it was then that she was found. Nothing "made sense" in the Outback: she could not even speak with the person who found her! Not even a 'Hello.' With the help of her little brother--also abandoned by their father--they created between them one word: water. It was all they needed. Now that she is grown up and has all that her civilization recommends, we see in her eyes that she has inside her a world without language that provides food, shelter, companionship, and warmth. She lost the basics when, again, she was found.
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