Table of Contents

  1. A Life Story
  2. Context and Meaning
  3. A Poetics of Women's Autobiography
  4. Acts of Meaning
    - Knowledge Flow
     - The Self
     - Intelligence
     - Folk Psychology
  5. A Poetics of Women's Autobiography
  6. The Second Self
  7. Evocative Objects
  8. Questions
  9. Women's Lives
  10. Human Rights and Narrated Lives:
    the Ethics of Recognition-
    By Reception
  11. Interfaces
  12. Construction of the Self
  13. The History of Cartography
  14. The Present Moment
  15. Learning To Be Old
  16. The Women Who Came to Help

A Life Story

There are many ways of telling a story and recording it. Central to this story is a self. The self is a tool that can be manipulated from one culture to another. It depends on what you think the brain is capable of doing in this process.

There are many different ways we can communicate with each other other than writing. When we write a word or a sentence we can expand or shrink an idea.

WWhen telling a life story there is the art and science of gathering, remembering and recording. To achieve this there are many mnemonic devices and orientating tools that can be used for this purpose. These include dancing, singing, music, beads, prayer knots, memory boards, map making and art. Therapy and cartography have much in common.

Judith Koplewitz


Context and Meaning

Nothing exists alone. Everything exists in a context. While I am trying to write you I receive a call from a social worker at the local university hospital. My husband is to be discharged after surgery. She asks me if I will agree to the Visiting Nurse Service providing nursing care and physical therapy for my husband. She wonders whether he will need a commode? Will there be room for a commode near his room?

As I try to tease out the words which will explain context and meaning to you the TV in the other room blasts out its own message, " Muslims believe that women's breasts cause earthquakes . A group of women at a local college decide to test out this theory. They have exposed their own breasts to the sun , minus their blouses. The women call this a 'boob quake ' The reporter tells us that nothing has happened! Everything exists in a context. Nothing exists alone. It seems I do not need to explain much to you about context and meaning.


Poetics Of Women's Autobiography

It has been years since I have read the first writing of Sidonie Smith and admired it so much. Her work was just what I was looking for . Some one who could tell me what I myself was looking for, some direction, some making sense of the women's autobiographers world, what I myself was looking for about how to put our stories into a form. A Poetics of Women's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self- Representation.

Especially chapter 4 :Women's story and the engenderings of self- representation. "There have always been women who cross the lines between public and private utterance, unmasking their desire for the empowering selfinterpretation of autobiography as they unmasked in their life the desire for publicity. . . " p.45

"Here then are the phenomena this discussion would illuminate".

  1. The ways in which the autobiographers position as women inflects the autobiographer's position as woman characterize it -the fictions of memory, of the "I" of the imagined reader, of the story.
  2. The ways in which the autobiographer establishes the discursive authority to interpret herself publicly in a patriarchal culture and androcentric genre that have written stories of woman for her , thereby fictionalizing and effectively silencing her, and
  3. the relationship of that literary authority to her sexuality and its presence or absence as subject of her story. These three phenomena mark the text of her life. Yet since I understand the "self" of autobiography not to be an a priori essence, a spontaneous and therefore true presence but rather a cultural and linguistic "fiction constituted through historical ideologies of selfhood and the processes of our storytelling. I want also to acknowledge the contextual influence of historical phenomena by accounting for communal figures of self hood, those intertexts that shape the autobiographers self interpretations.

For example, the autobiographer has to rely on a trace of something from the past a memory , yet memory is ultimately a story about , and thus a discourse on, original experience. So that recovering the past is not a hypothesizing of fixed grounds and absolute grounds and absolute experience but rather , an interpretation of earlier experience that can never be divorced from the filtering of subsequent experience or articulated outside the structure of language and storytelling, as a result autobiography becomes both the process and the product of assigning , meaning to a series of experiences after they have take place, by means of emphasis, juxtaposition, commentary, omission" p.45.

The nature of the truth is best understood as the struggle of a historical rather than a fictional person to come to terms with her own past rather than the result that she renders in words the confrontation between the dramatic present and the narrative past between the psychological pressures of discourse and the narrative pressures of story. Whatever " truthfullness" so much in the correspondence between word and form but in the imbrication of various auto-biological intentions into form-memoir, apology, confession. p.46

The doubling of the "self" into a narrating "I" and a narrated "I" and, further, the fracturing of the process as rhetorical artifact and the authorial signature as mythography. p.47

As she examines her unique life and then attempts to constitute herself discursively as female subject, the autobiographer brings to the recollection of her past and to reflection on her identity interpretative figures (tropes, myths, metaphors, to suggest alternative phrasings). Those figures are always cast in language and are always motivated by culture expectations, habits, and systems of interpretation pressing on her at the scene of writing. p.47

Precisely because "every subject, every author, every self is the articulation of an intersubjectivity structured within and around the discourses available to it any moment in time. p.46

Through the concept of "dialogic imagination," Bakhtin displaces the essentialist ideology of individualism that makes of the "self" an atomized privacy, a unified and unique core isolable from society and " representable" in autobiography. Product of and conduit for a variety of discourses that structure ways of talking about "self" every autobiographer "is constituted as a hierarchy of languages, each language being a kind of ideology-brought-intospeech. Thus the very forms of language of cultural stories of selfhood are "populated-overpopulated-with the intentions of others" in the sense that they carry in them those cultural expectations and systems of interpretation through which a culture makes palpable its effort to understand and make durable its power to name the world, itself and others. p.48

The meaning culture assigns to sexual difference, that is, the ideology of gender, has always constituted a, if not the, fundamental ideological system for interpreting and understanding individual identity and social dynamics. The generic structures of literature and the languages of self- representation and examination constitutive of autobiography as one of them rest on and reinscribe the ideology of gender. But the ideology and the stories perpetuating it have, until fairly recently, been created from phallocentric discourses wriften, so to speak, by men who serve themselves, constructing women symbolically as the mirror before which they can see themselves reflected. In fact. "woman is not just an other in the sense of something beyond [man's] ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is. In order to sustain the idea of man as that which is not woman, the mirror must remain intact; the slick, artificial surface of specularity cannot crack. Primary among the ideological intentions inherent in forms and language, them is the desire of culture to name and to sustain the difference of man's and woman's subjectivity and, by implication, man's and woman's self- representational possibilities. Thus, woman has remained culturally silenced, denied authority, most critically the authority to name herself and her own desires. Woman has remained unrepresented and unpresentable. p.48-49

Since traditional autobiography has functioned as one of those forms and languages that sustain sexual difference, the woman who writes autobiography is doubly estranged when she enters the autobiographical contract. Precisely because she approaches her storytelling as one who speaks from the margins of autobiographical discourse, thus as one who is both of the prevailing culture and on the outskirts of it, she brings to her project a particularly troubled relationship to her reader. Since autobiography is a public expression, she speaks before and to "man." Attuned to the ways women have been dressed up for public exposure, attuned also to the price women pay for public selfdisclosure, the autobiographer reveals in her speaking posture and narrative structure her understanding of the possible readings she will receive from a public that has the power of her reputation in its hands. As Nancy K. Miller notes, "female autobiographers know that they are being read as women." They understand that a statement or a story will be received a different ideological interpretation if attributed to a man or to a woman. As a result, the autobiographer, at least until the twentieth century, approaches her "fictive" reader as if "he" were the representative of the dominant order, the arbiter, the "silent" partner in the autobiographical contract assumes certain privileges of power. "He" does so because, as Michel Foucault suggests, the site of confession of self-exposure dramatically reverses power's conventional dynamics: The one who remains silent and who listens exerts power over the one who speaks. p.49

Autobiography is itself one of the forms of selfhood constituting the idea of man and in turn promoting that idea. Choosing to write autobiography, therefore, she unmasks her transgressive desire for cultural and literary authority. But the story of man is not exactly her story; and so her relationship to the empowering figure of male selfhood is inevitably problematic. To complicate matters further, she must also engage the fictions of self hood that constitute the idea of woman and that specify the parameters of female subjectivity, including woman's problematic relationship to language, desire, power, and meaning. Since the ideology of gender makes of woman's life script a nonstory, a silent space, a gap in patriarchal culture, the ideal woman is self-effacing rather than self- promoting, and her "natural" story shapes itself not around the public, heroic life but around the fluid, circumstantial, contingent responsiveness to others that, according to patriarchal ideology, characterizes the life of woman but not autobiography. From the point of view, woman has no "autobiographical self" in the same sense that man does. From that point of view, she has no "public" story to tell. That situating of the autobiographer in two universes of discourse accounts for the poetic's of women's autobiography and grounds its difference. p.50

And if the autobiographer is a woman of color or a working-class woman, she faces even more complex imbroglios of male-female figures: Here ideologies of race and class, sometimes even of nationality, intersect and confound those of gender. As a result, she is doubly or triply the subject of other people's representations, turned again and again in stories that reflect ans promote certain forms of self hood identified with class, race, and nationality as well as with sex. In every case, moreover, she remains marginalized in that she finds herself resident on the margins of discourse, always removed from the center of power within the culture she inhabits. Man, whether a member of the dominant culture or of an oppressed subculture maintains the authority to name This" woman. In her doubled, perhaps tripled, marginally, then, the autobiographer negotiates sometimes four sets of stories, all nonetheless written about her rather that by her. Moreover, her nonpresence, her unrepresentability, presses even more imperiously yet elusively on her: and her position as speaker before an audience becomes even more precarious. p.51

Cultural ideologies contain paradoxes. While they threaten hegemony, they remain vulnerable to leakages, to fractures along fault lines. Patriarchal gender ideologies have not totally silenced women. While women have been relegated to "a negative position in culture," they have nonetheless resisted this "assignment," as Ann Rosalind Jones suggests, by beoming " subjects in discourse" rather that remaining "subject[s) of discourse. p.51

The autobiographer's confrontation with those "maternal" and "paternal" narratives structures the narrative and dramatic texture of her self- representation and shapes her relationship to language, image, and meaning. Manifest in women's autobiography, therefore, is a kind of double helix of the imagination that leads to a double-voiced structuring of content and rhetoric. The voices of man and woman, of Adam and Eve, vie with one another, displace one another, subvert one another in the constant play of uneasy appropriation or reconciliation and daring rejection. Those tensions play themselves out differently depending on the imaginative power, artistic talent, and breadth of experience of the individual autobiographer and on her degree of self-consciousness about her place in patriarchal culture. p.51

Tracing or discovering a pattern of progressive stages, the autobiographer suggests how she has become who she is: the childhood that moved her toward some vocation, her educational and intellectual experiences, her entrance into the public arena, her success and failures, her reflection on that achievement in later years. p.52

In other words, this autobiographer "raises herself," as Julia Kristeva argues, "to the symbolic stature of her father." Identifying with the father and his law, she opts for the scenario of public achievement that apparently structures traditional autobiography and grounds the authority to write about herself in the f it if her life to stories of the representative man. To the extent that she reinscribes the myth of origins embedded in the discourse of man, she justifies her claim to membership in the world of words, men, and public spaces, adapting and thereby reproducing the myth of paternal origins and the narratives it underwrites. As she pursues the same self- representation, she may experience the exhilarating investments, in both senses of the word, that attend the fulfillment of her desire for a public story. She assumes the adventurous posture of man. p.53

But as she appropriates the story and the speaking posture of the representative man, she silences that part of herself that indentifies her as a daughter of her mother. Repressing the mother in her, she turns away from the locus of all that is domesticated and dis empowered culturally and erases the trace of sexual difference and desire. Commenting on the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, Josette Feral suggests that woman "cannot assume this identification with the Father except by denying her difference as a woman, except by repressing the maternal within her." p.53

Moreover, read through cultural fictions of woman's natural subordination to man, the self-assertion, self-absorption, and self-exposure manifest in the paternal narrative of the "manly" woman become equated with the cultural story of woman's "natural" narcisism. Consequently, the risks of appearing as too much the "manly" woman, that "unnatural" hybrid who defies the ideology of sexual difference, are indeed great; for in "going public," the autobiographer compromises her reputation, founded as it is on public silence. However much she may desire to pursue the paternal narrative with its promise of power, therefore, she recognizes either consciously or unconsciously that for her, as for all colonized people, the act of empowerment is both infectious and threatening. Her narrative may bring notoriety; and with notoriety can come isolation and the loss of love and acceptance in the culture that would hold her in its fictions. p.54

In all the speaking postures examined thus far, the authority to speak as both "representative" man and "representative" woman derives from the erasure of female sexuality; for the male-identified fiction commands the repression of the mother, and the "good woman" fiction commands the suppression of female eroticism, though not, of course, self-effacing love and devotion. In fact, whether she leaves womanhood behind for the figure of androcentric selfhood of embraces the figure of the ideal woman, the autobiographer acknowledges, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly, an uneasiness with her own body and with the sexual desire associated with it. Moreover, woman's goodness is always marked by her narrative and dramatic orientation to sexual desire. Thus, as she writes, she both asserts her authority to engage in selfinterpretation and attempts to protect herself from the cultural fictions of female passion and contaminated sexual desire. p.55

Instead of interpreting herself unself-consciously through those narratives of both man and woman privileged by patriarchal discourse, she grapples with the ideology of gender that has pressed on her, sifting her experiences through the sieve of fictions naming woman and her sexual difference. She begins by seeking to understand her problematic relationship to the language and the narratives she has been taught to speak; for she must come to grips with the power of phaltogocentric discourse to erase the female subject by confining her to its fictions, thereby delimiting her access to words themselves. p.56

But the autobiographer may also pursue an alternative scenario of linguistic destiny, depending on her political and philosophical stance toward her place as woman in patriarchy. If she does so, something more begins to take place as the autobiographer explores her access to the language of self-representation. She begins to realize that woman remains " unrepresentable" because autobiography as a formal, public contract requires her unrepresentability, because it makes no space for female desire and "self"-hood. What Christiane Olivier says of language characterizes as well literary contracts: "Sexism in [may be] the result of man's fear of using the same words as women, his fear of finding himself in the same place as the mother". Generic androcentrism recapitulates that tendency in sexist language. Formal autobiography remains the place where man stakes out his claim to sexual difference and ordination. It marks his refusal to remain "in the same place as the mother." p.57

Thus, as Carolyn G. Burke notes in her discussion of French feminism's central interest in woman's relationship to the symbolic, "when a woman writes or speaks herself into existence, she is forced to speak in something like a foreign tongue, a language with which she may be personally uncomfortable." The discomfort derives from her cultural ventriloquism, a gesture of impersonation that requires the autobiographer to speak like a man: for, speaking like a man, she may be unable to recognize the lineaments of her experience in the language and fictions that surround and inform her text. Furthermore, she may encounter her own complicity in reproducing the very cultural stories that have engendered her as they have repressed the maternal trace. p.57

And so the autobiographer may choose to confront self-reflexively the process of her own autobiographical storytelling she has inherited from the patriarchs. To this task she brings "muted" ideologies generated and promoted by woman in response to the prevailing ideologies of the dominant group. "Functions of the dispossession of women, as well as of women's natural resources in the face of this dispossession," such alternative ideologies acknowledge the realities of her experience as both particular and universal woman as well as infuse with value the stories and the storytelling of woman. Instead of using the same "sentence" as man uses, she experiments with another sentence. p.57

For she tries to tell stories that have not been told before, ones that have remained unspoken within the ideological framework of the dominant discourse. In response she tries to discover a language appropriate to her own story. To this end, she may, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar propose, think back through her mother to discover "woman's command of language as against language's command of woman. p.57

For French as well as some Anglo-American theorist, that alternative tongue and alternative psychosexual development would embrace what Kristeva calls the pre-Oedipal rhythms of the semiotic. Harking back to a phase before the symbolic logic of binary opposition insists on male privilege and superiority, the language of feminine desire - the ecriture feminine of Helene Cixous, the womanspeak of Luce Irigaray, the jouissance of Kristeva - finds its voice in alliance with the mother and her milk, her body, her rhythmic and nonsensical language. Now the subject position from which woman speaks may be, like the voice of the mother, outside time, plural, fluid, bisexual, de-centered, nonlogocentric. p.58

The autobiographer also confronts another possibility for autobiographical practice. Coming to terms with the uses and abuses of a father's language that twists and turns her in the fictions of biologic essentialism or of a mother's writing that implicates her in another kind of essentialism, the autobiographer may struggle to liberate herself from the ideology of traditional autobiography and to liberate autobiography from the ideology of essentialist selfhood through which id has historically been constituted. p.58

She seeks instead to pursue her own desires, to shatter the portrait of herself she sees hanging in the textual frames of patriarchy, and to create the conscious and the unconscious of her sex by claiming the legitimacy and authority of another subjectivity. p.59

Because of its historical location as the first extant woman's autobiography written in English, because it offers an early manifestation of woman's sacred self-writing. I begin this set of readings with The Book of Margery Kempe, written in 1436. buring the fourteen and fifteenth centuries, as I noted in chapter two, female religious broke out of the cloister and wandered over the face of Europe. Unattached to male orders, unattached to husbands, these woman traversed the public spaces and assumed public voices, leaving behind them the marks of female religiosity. But their anomalous position and unconventional independence threatened social relations and tested the boundaries of heresy. Margery Kempe, a medieval mystic from a burgher family in England's southern coastal town of Lynn, left behind a most remarkable story of one such woman's life. Through her book Kempe sought to convince her reader and her church that her name belonged in the genealogy of great female mystics, perhaps even in the genealogy of saints. She looked back on powerful foremothers for a legitimate and authoritative life script; Maternal narratives thus helped her structure generally her self- representation. But she remained a strange figure, a mystic who had married and had borne fourteen children. As a result, the presentation of herself as a truly chaste woman became both urgent and difficult. Moreover, she was dependant on the mediation of men throughout her life of piety and her autobiographical project: They listened, and they judged. Kempe's narrative thus becomes for me a fascinating work, full of life and energy and travail as it captures the quality of medieval Christian life, the mobile atmosphere of pilgrimages, the pressures of orthodoxy, the smell of the burning stake against which the heretic was pressed in her heresy. But the real drama of her narrative is played out in her relationship to the stories of her mystic foremothers and to the male mediators on whom she depends in telling her story p. 60

All four of these autobiographers desired the power, authority, and voice of man. None of them accepted the silenced life demanded of most woman in their times. They had energy, intelligence, courage, and not a little " madness" about them. And the energy, intelligence, and courage come through their texts. But so do the confusion, the crampedness. the compromises, the ambivalences - that is, the damages to woman of seeking to appropriate the story of man in culture that would condemn her to its sentence. They are products of the margin who desire access to the father country. As such they offer fascinating and complex examples of the problematics of negotiation of maternal and paternal narratives. All four woman reveal how problematic becomes the autobiographer's engagements with the ideological voices of female difference and with the generic contract of autobiography that is forcefully androcentric. p.62

Sidonie Smith


Acts of Meaning

Bruner proposes the need for cultural psychology that concerns itself with meaning because meaning is not only personal but cultural. To illustrate this he discusses ideas from folk psychology which is a critical feature of cultural psychology.
The proper study of man is the study of folk psychology, Bruner claims, "Folk psychology needs explaining, not explaining away." It is an essential base not only of personal meaning but of cultural cohesion. It is a system by which people organize their experience in, knowledge about, and transactions of the social world. P.35

Jerome Bruner

Our stories are not stories of some objective Self, but are the very process by which we create Self. One must look deeply into folk psychology and narrative for the roots of our cognitive and cultural cohesion. The culture's way of valuing and knowing.

Folk psychology is a cultures account of what makes human beings tick. It includes a theory of mind, one's own and others, a theory of motivation and the rest. p.13

A culture must contain a set of norms, it must also contain a set of interpretive procedures for rendering departures from those norms meaningful in terms of established patterns of belief. p.47

Bruner chose the concept of Self to illustrate what he calls "cultural psychology". Self has a peculiarly tortured history. Some of the theoretical trouble it has generated can be attributed to the "essentialism" that has often marked the quest for it's elucidation, as if Self were a substance or an essence that preexisted our effort to describe it, as if all one had to do was to inspect it in order to discover its nature. p.99

The best way to study Self is to study autobiographical narratives. The Self as a narrator not only recounts but justifies. p.121

Bruner's analyses of literature led him to his insight about the importance of narratives for the creation of the Self. He believes in a multiplicity of narratives. The only way that one can fuse the different chronological selves of a life is through storytelling: all those selves become characters of the story. "Self is a perpetually rewritten story."

He believes that narratives are not an accident of nature but play a vital role in creating our understanding of community and ourselves.


 Knowledge Flow

"In the 1930"s a person's knowledge is not just in one's own head, but in the notes that one has out into accessible notebooks, in the books with underlines, passages on ones shelves, in the handbooks one has learned how to consult , in the information sources one has hitched up to the computer, in the friends you can call up to get a references or a "steer" and so on almost endlessly. All of these are parts of the knowledge flow which one has become a part". p.106 Bruner

Schools are themselves communities of learning or thinking in which there are procedures, models, feedback channels and the like that determine how , what,, how much and in what form a child '"learns"–what learning a child is doing is participating in a kind of cultural geography that sustains and shapes what she or he is doing and without which there would be no learning." p.106

Bruner, Acts of Meaning


 The Self

"That self was a substance that pre-existed our effort to describe it, as if all one had to do was to inspect it in order to discover it's nature." p.99

Introspection is at best early retrospection and subject to the same kinds of selectivity and construction as another kind of memory. p.99

Bruner, Acts of Meaning


 Intelligence

"... intelligence is what tests measure and so it was with the study of the self. "It is what ever is measured by tests of the self concept. So there has developed a thriving test industry built around a self narrowly defined self concepts, each with it's own test, and with a recent 2 volume handbook given over more to methodological complexities than to substantive issues." 1972-1989. p.101

Acts of Meaning


 Folk Psychology

Folk psychology is a cultures account of what makes human beings tick.  It includes a theory of mind, one’s own and others, a theory of motivation and the rest. p.13

Folk psychology, though it changes, does not get displaced by scientific paradigms.  For it deals with the nature, causes, and consequences of those intentional states - beliefs, desires, intentions, commitments - that most scientific psychology dismisses in its effort to explain human action from a point of view that is outside human subjectivity, formulated in Thomas Nagel’s deft phrase as a “view from nowhere.” p.14

For it is rooted in a language and a shared conceptual structure that are steeped in intentional states - in beliefs, desires and commitments.  And because it is a reflection of culture, it partakes in the culture’s way of valuing as well as its way of knowing. p.14           

There are procedures, negotiations for getting back on track, when these canonical relations are violated.  This is what makes interpretation and meaning central to cultural psychology.  p.19

Action in a situated setting and the interacting intentional states.   

Folk psychology is a system by which people organize their experience in, knowledge about, and transactions of the social world. p.35

Is it only when constituent beliefs in a folk psychology are violated that narratives are constructed. I mention it here to alert the reader to the canonical status of folk psychology: that it summaries not simply how things are but (often implicitly) how they should be.  When things “are as they should be,” the narratives of folk psychology are unnecessary. p.40

Folk psychology is about human agents doing things on the basis of their beliefs and desires, striving for goals, meeting obstacles which they best or which best them, all of this extended over time.  It is about Ilongot young men finding enough anger in themselves to take a head, and how they fare in that daunting effort; about young American women with conflicting and guilt-producing demands on their senses of identity finally resolving their dilemma (possibly with their doctors’ unwitting help) by turning into an ego and an alter, and about the struggle to get the two back into communication. p.43

The culture’s ways of valuing and knowing.


Their Stories Remain Private. . .

A Poetics Of Women’s Autobiography

Women who do not challenge those gender ideologies and the boundaries they place around women proper life script, textual inscription, and speaking voice do not write autobiography. Culturally silenced, they remain sentenced to death in the fictions of woman surrounding them. They may write autobiographically, choosing other languages of self writing- letters, diaries, journals, biography. Even so, their stories remain private, their storytelling culturally muted, albeit persistent. But as noted earlier, there have always been women who cross the line between private and public utterance, unmasking their desire for the empowering self interpretation of autobiography as they unmasked in their life the desire for publicity. Such women approach the autobiographical territory from their positions as speakers at the margins of discourse. In so doing, they find themselves implicated in a complex posture toward the engendering of autobiographical narrative. p.44

Nonetheless, for me, and I would hope for you, the effort is justified insofar as it attempts to situate a congerie of phenomena in relationship to one another as it locates then in their cultural and textual embeddedness. Here, then, are the phenomena this discussion would illuminate: (1) the ways in which the autobiographers position as women inflects the autobiographical project and the four marks of fictiveness that characterize it- the fictions of memory, of the “I”, of the imagined reader, of the story; (2) the ways in which the autobiographer establishes the discursive authority to interpret herself publicly in a patriarchal culture and androcentric genre that have written stories of women for her, thereby fictionalizing and authority to her sexuality her; and (3) the relationship of that literary authority to her sexuality and its presence or absence as subject of her story. These three phenomena mark the text of her life. Yet, since I understand the “self” of autobiography not to be an a priori essence, a spontaneous and therefore “true” presence, but rather than a cultural and linguistic “fiction” constituted through historical ideologies of selfhood and the process of our storytelling. I want also to acknowledge the contextual influence of historical phenomena by accounting for communal figures of selfhood, those intertexts that shape the autobiographer’s self interpretation. p.45

The autobiographer joins together facets of remembered experience- descriptive, impressionistic, dramatic, analytic- as she constructs a narrative that promises both to capture the specificites of personal experience and to cast her self-interpretation in a timeless, idealized mold for posterity. An effort of recovery and creation, an explanation into the possibility of recapturing and restating a past, autobiography simultaneously involves a realization that the adventure is informed continually by shifting considerations of the present moment. For example, the autobiographer has to rely on a trace of something from the past, a memory; yet memory is ultimately a story about, and thus a discourse on, original experience, so that recovering the past in not hypostasizing of fixed grounds and absolute origins but, rather, an interpretation of earlier experience that can never be divorced from the filtering of subsequent experience or articulated outside the structures of language and storytelling. As a result, autobiography becomes both the process and the product of assigning meaning to a series of experiences, after they have taken place, by means of emphasis, juxtaposition, commentary, omission. p.45

The fictions of the autobiographer are always mediated by a historical identity with specific intentions, if not pretension, of interpreting the meaning of her lived experience. p.46

The nature of the truth is best understood as the struggle of a historical rather than a fictional person to come to terms with her own past, with the result that she renders in words the confrontation between the dramatic present and the narrative past, between the psychological pressures of discourse and the narrative pressures of the story. Whatever “truthfulness”emerges resides, not so much in the correspondence between word and past, but in the imbrication of various autobiographical intentions into form- memoir, apology, confession. p.46 

The doubling of the “self” into a narrating “I” and a narrated “I” and, further, the fracturing of the narrated “I” into multiple speaking postures mark and the autobiographical process as rhetorical artifact and the authorial signature as mythography. p.47

As she examines her unique life and then attempts to constitute herself discursively as female subject, the autobiographer brings to the recollection of her past and to the reflection on her identity interpretive figures (tropes, myths, metaphors, to suggest alternative phrasing). Those figures are always cast in language and are always motivated by cultural expectations, habits, and systems of interpretation pressing on her at the scene of writing. p.47

Precisely because “every subject, every author, every self is the articulation of an intersubjectivity structured within and around the discourses available to it in any moment in time”, self interpretation emerges rhetorically from the autobiographer’s engagement with the fictive stories of selfhood. p.47

Through the concept of “dialogic imagination”, Bakhtin displaces the essentialist ideology of individualism that makes of the “self” an atomized privacy, a unified and unique core isolable from society and “representable” in autobiography. Product of and conduit for a variety of discourses that structure ways of talking about “self”, every autobiographer “is constituted as a hierarchy of languages, each language being a kind of ideology-brought-into speech. Thus the very forms of language of cultural stories of selfhood are “populated- overpopulated- with intentions of others” in the sense that they carry in them those cultural expectations and systems of interpretation through which a culture makes palpable its effort to understand and makes durable its power to name the world, itself and others. p.48

The meaning culture assigns to sexual differences, that is, the ideology of gender, has always constituted a, if not the, fundamental ideology system for interpreting and understanding individual identity and social dynamics. The generic structures of literature and the languages of self-representation and examination constitutive of autobiography as one of them rest on and reinscribe the ideology of gender. But that ideology and the stories perpetuating it have, until fairly recently, been created from phallocentric discourses written, so to speak, by men who serve themselves, constructing women symbolically as the mirror before which they can see themselves reflected. In fact, “woman is not just an other in sense of something beyond [man’s] ken, but an other intimately related to him as the image of what he is not, and therefore as an essential reminder of what he is”.  In order to sustain the idea that man is that which is not woman, the mirror must remain intact; the slick, artificial surface of specularity cannot crack. Primary among the ideology intentions inherent in forms and language, then, is the desire of culture to name and sustain the differences of man’s and woman’s subjectivity and, by implication, man’s and woman’s self-representational possibilities. Thus, woman has remained culturally silenced, denied authority, most critically the authority to name herself and her own desires. Woman has remained unrepresented and unrepresentable. p.48-49        

Since traditional autobiography has functioned as one of those forms and languages that sustain sexual difference, the woman who writes autobiography is doubly estranged when she enters the autobiographical contract. Precisely because she approaches her storytelling as one who speaks from the margins of autobiographical discourse, thus as one who is both of the prevailing culture and on the outskirts of it, she brings to her project a particularly troubled relationship to her reader. Since autobiography is a public expression, she speaks before and to “man.” Attuned to the ways women have been dressed up for public exposure attuned also the price women pay for public self-disclosure, the autobiographer reveals in her speaking posture and narrative structure her understanding of the possible readings she will receive from a public that has the power of her reputation in it’s hands. p.49

Autobiography is itself one of the forms of selfhood constituting the idea of man and in turn promoting that idea. Choosing to write autobiography, therefore, she unmasks her transgressive desire for cultural and literary authority. But the story of man is not exactly her story; and so her relationship to the empowering figure of male selfhood is inevitably problematic. To complicate matters further, she must also engage the fictions of selfhood that constitute the idea of women and that specify the parameters of female subjectivity, including women’s problematic relationship to language, desire, power, and meaning. Since the ideology of gender makes of women’s life script a nonstory, a silent space, a gap in patriarchal culture, the ideal woman is self-effacing rather than self-promoting and her “natural” story shapes itself not around the public, heroic life but around the fluid, circumstantial, contingent responsiveness to others that, according to patriarchal ideology, characterizes the life of woman but not autobiography. From that point of view, woman has no “autobiographical self” in the same sense that man does. From that point of view, she has no “public” story to tell. That situating of the autobiographer in two universes of discourse accounts for the poetics of women’s autobiography and grounds its difference. p.50

But she can speak with authority only insofar as she tells a story that her audience will read. p.52

Tracing or discovering a pattern of progressive stages, the autobiographer suggests how she has become who she is: the childhood that moved her towards some vocation, her educational and intellectual experiences, her entrance into the public arena, her successes and failures, her reflection on that achievement in later years. p.52

Moreover, read through cultural fictions of women’s natural subordination to man, the self -assertion, self- absorption and self-exposure manifest in the paternal narrative of the “manly” woman became equated with the cultural story of women’s “natural” narcisism. Consequently, the risks of appearing to much the “manly” woman, that “unnatural” hybrid who defies the ideology of sexual difference, are indeed great; for in “going public”, the autobiographer compromises her reputation, founded as it is on public silence. However much she may desire to pursue the paternal narrative with its promise of power, therefore, she recognizes either consciously or unconsciously that for her, as for all colonized people, the act of empowerment is both infectious and threatening. Her narrative may bring notoriety; and with notoriety can come isolation and the loss of love and acceptance in the culture that would hold in its fictions. p.54

Instead of interpreting herself unself-consciously through those narratives of both man and woman privileged by patriarchal discourse, she grapples with the ideology of gender that has passed on to her, sifting her experience through the sieve of fictions naming woman and her sexual difference. She begins by seeking to understand her problematic relationship to the language and the narratives she has been taught to speak; for she must come to grips with the power of phallogocentric discourse to erase the female subject by confining her to its fictions, thereby delimiting her access to words themselves. p.56

Thus, as Carolyn G. Burke notes in her in her discussion of French feminism’s central interest in womans relationship to the symbolic, “ when a woman writes or speaks herself into existence, she is forced to speak in something like a foreign tongue, a language with which she may be personally uncomfortable “. The discomfort derives from her cultural ventriloquism, a gesture of impersonation that requires the autobiographer to speak like a man; for, speaking like a man, she may be unable to recognize the lineaments of her experience in the language and fictions that surround and inform her text. Furthermore, she may encounter her own complicity in reproducing the very cultural stories that have engendered her as they have repressed the maternal trace. p.57

And so the autobiographer may choose to confront self-reflexively the process of her own autobiographical storytelling as opposed to the autobiographical storytelling she has inherited from patriarchs. To this task she brings “muted” ideologies generated and promoted by women in response to the prevailing ideologies of the dominant group. “Functions of the dispossession of women, as well as of women’s natural resources in the face of this dispossession”, such alternative ideologies acknowledge the realities of her experience as both particular and universal woman as well as infuse with value the stories and the storytelling of woman. Instead of using the same “sentence” as man uses, she experiments with another sentence. p.57

Foe she tries to tell stories that have not been told before, ones that have remained unspoken within the ideological framework of the dominant discourse. In response she tries to discover a language appropriate to her own story. To this end, she may, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar propose, think back through her mother to discover”women’s command of language as against language’s command of woman”. p.57

She seeks instead to pursue her own desires, to shatter the portrait of herself she sees hanging in the textual frames of patriarchy, and to create the conscious and the unconscious of her sex by claiming the legitimacy and authority of another subjectivity. p.59

All four of these autobiographers desired the power, authority , and the voice of a man. None of them accepted the silenced life demanded of most women in their times. They had energy, intelligence, courage, and not a little “madness” about them. And the energy, intelligence, and courage come through their texts. But so do confusion, the crampedness, the compromises, the ambivalence- that is, the damages to women of seeking to appropriate the story of man in a cultural that would condemn her to its sentence. They are products of the margin who desire access to the father country. As such they offer fascinating and complex examples of the problematic of negotiation of maternal and paternal narratives. All four women reveal how problematic becomes the autobiographer’s engagement with the ideological voices of female difference and with the generic contract of autobiography that is forcefully androcentric.

Sidonie Smith  


The Second Self

In The Second Self, Sherry Turkle looks at the computer not as a "tool," but as part of our social and psychological lives; she looks beyond how we use computer games and spreadsheets to explore how the computer affects our awareness of ourselves, of one another, and of our relationship with the world. "Technology," she writes, "catalyzes changes not only in what we do but in how we think." First published in 1984, The Second Self is still essential reading as a primer in the psychology of computation. This twentieth anniversary edition allows us to reconsider two decades of computer culture-to (re)experience what was and is most novel in our new media culture and to view our own contemporary relationship with technology with fresh eyes. Turkle frames this classic work with a new introduction, a new epilogue, and extensive notes added to the original text.

Turkle talks to children, college students, engineers, AI scientists,
hackers, and personal computer owners-people confronting machines that seem to think and at the same time suggest a new way for us to think-about human thought, emotion, memory, and understanding. Her interviews reveal that we experience computers as being on the border between inanimate and animate, as both an extension of the self and part of the external world. Their special place betwixt and between traditional categories is part of what makes them compelling and evocative. (In the introduction to this edition, Turkle quotes a PDA user as saying, "When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. I thought I had lost my mind.") Why we think of the workings of a machine in psychological terms-how this happens, and what it means for all of us-is the ever more timely subject of The Second Self.

Editorial Reviews

 "'No ideas but in things,' wrote the poet William Carlos Williams. Sherry Turkle's eloquent and inspiring book brings the poet's insight to life. She shows us the things-to-think-with that brought generations of scientists to their vocations. Just as a butterfly may spark a hurricane, as wires and sockets brought a ten-year-old Richard Feynman to physics, objects spark the curiosity of young scientists. In an age when science education is in crisis, this splendid book offers us new insight about bringing young people into science. By looking at objects we see, in Turkle's terms, the connection between 'science, technology, and love.'"

-Ray Kurzweil, Inventor, and author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

"In the knowledge economy of the 21st century, a solid grounding in science and math is essential for our graduates to successfully compete in the global marketplace. The essays in Falling for Science deftly portray the impact that interaction with everyday objects-a cardboard box, a stop sign, or a ring of keys-can have on the cultivation of a lifelong passion for scientific discovery, a passion that led many of the essayists into careers devoted to finding solutions to the world's most pressing problems."

-Lou Anna K. Simon, President, Michigan State University

"Turkle's thought-provoking collection represents an admirable invitation to further exploration of science and human sensibility, of the mysterious web of human choice and feeling."
- American Scientist

We live in the era of big science, with teams of hundreds of scientists poring over data on computer screens. In this sparkling collection, gifted students and world-class scientists remind us of the irreplaceable role of tangible objects, sensory impressions, and powerful experiences in the formation of the scientist."

- Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard
Graduate School of Education


The Second Self

The 2nd edition was written twenty plus years later. Sherry Turkle was trained as a humanist when she took her job at MIT in the late 1970's. There, she tells the reader she was surrounded by people who spoke about the mind in an unfamiliar language of bits and bytes, registers and computers. Her sixth grade daughter, Deborah, said to her, “when you program a computer, there is a little piece of your mind and now there is a little piece of your computers mind”

The Second Self documents a moment in history when people from all walks of life were first confronted with machines whose behavior and mode of operation invited psychological interpretation and that, at the same time incited them to think differently about human thought, memory and understanding. In consequence they came to see both their minds and computation machines as struggling unfamiliar or “uncanny”. Psychoanalysis shares with computation a subversive vocation: each in it’s own way defamilarizes the mind.
The author tells us that “computation has become more complex, but fundamental aspects of how people relate in the seductions of the interactive medium have remained constant”. In this sense, The Second Self remains a primer in the psychology of peoples relationships with computers. Computable objects poised between the world of the animate and inanimate are exprienced as both part of the self and of the eternal world.

More recently a woman spoke to her personal digital assistant and said “When my Palm crashed, it was like a death. It had my life on it, I thought I had lost my mind”. Pg 5

Beyond the PDA is the wearable computing of today. People who wear their computer call themselves “cyborgs”. The central processing unit and radio transmitters is in their pockets, and their eyeglasses serve as screens.  Turkle tells us that to refer to that projection by calling computers a second self was proactive.  Today, however, it does not go far enough, to be proactive ones tempted to speak not early of a second self, but of a new generation of self, itself. Pg. 5

Turkle frames this exciting reading with a new introduction, and a new epilogue and extensive notes added to the original works.

I have only read the beginning of the second self and scanned the remainder of her book.  I hope at some point to read much more of her writing.




Evocative Objects

Sherry Turkle has written a number of books, with which I am familiar with, and a
number of which I am not familiar with. Both Evocative Objects and The Second Self of particular interest to me. She has chosen to examine our connection to inanimate objects and a way of thinking about these objects and understanding the inseparability of thought and feeling in out relationship to things. We think with objects we love, we love the objects we think with.

In every case that she studied the object brings together intellect and emotion. In every case the author focuses is not on the objects instrumental power- how fast the train travels or how fast the computer calculates- but on the object as a companion in life experience-how the train connects to the emotional worlds, how the mental space between computer keyboard and screen creates a sense of exotic possibilities. p.5

Her collection begins with the theme of discussing and leaving and the opportunities of adulthood, the navigation of love and loss and finally the confrontation with transcendent issues such as spirituality and the divine-life is not lives in distant stages or the relationships with objects that accompanied its journey. Objects have life roles that are multiple and fluid. We live our lives in the middle of things. Material culture carries emotions and ideas of startling deserve. Pg 6 In the late 1970’s Sherry took a job at MIT and trained as a humanist.

I have gotten this great creative drive to write at my desk this week- a wonderful feeling- only to discover that the by product of this is activity is terrible swelling in both feet accompanied with pain. My doctor and I had a phone conference, she decided to put me on a stronger diuretic -Lasix, which used to stop the edema. All this activity took place after reading the chapter on older people being put on large doses of drugs. Learning to be Old”. Gender, Culture and Aging by Margaret Cruiksbank, 2003, to which I will refer to later. I found this reading very ironic.

While studying in Paris, Sherry Turkie came across the work of Claude Levi- Strauss and found the word briculage, a way of combining and recombining a closed set of materials with which to come up with new ideas. She realized that this word, briculage was already a childhood friend in the memory of her closet of her childhood friend- and the idea that objects as companions in life experience. Because of her research and writing only recently have objects begun to receive the attention they deserve in our own lives and only recently have objects had life roles that are multiple and fluid.           



In her own research each author was asked to choose an object and follow it associations. Where does it take you? What do you feel? What are you able to understand? Combining this with the title of her book, Evocative Objects-Things we think with.

She asked people to consider their activities posed more as questions rather than answers. Does this sound familiar?


Questions

In this writing we might consider the following areas posed more as questions for each of us rather than answers:

  1. What is the nature of women’s life stories? Is it fair to generalize about this?
  2. What do we mean when we talk about women’s self-concept about this?
  3. How is the self constucted?
  4. What is the second self that Sherry Turkle writes about?
  5. How do we assess a women's prior ways of ordering meaning, and/or knowledge?
  6. How does each women see? what is out there?
  7. Sherry Turkle came across the word bricolage; a way of combining and recombining a closed set of materials to come up with new ideas. Have you used this idea to come up with new ideas? What have these been?


 Women's Lives

Women's Voices, Women's Lives: Documents in Early American History
 by Carol Berkin, Leslie Horowitz

Prof. Carol Berkin
Department of History
mail: cberkin@nyc.rr.com
Phone: (646) 312-4335

We have been here and this is what we did

This book documents the lives of women through their own words, rather than through commentary by the men around them. p.3

We learn about women’s experiences through primary materials rather than descriptive or analytical secondary sources.

This book is divided into six thematic chapters:

sex and reproduction
marriage and family
women’s work
religion
politics and the legal system
and changing gender ideology

Their working premise for their work is that race, class and region crosscut with gender in every womens life.

The work establishes a context for which was divided under 2 broad rubrics-prescriptive and descriptive, and sets the perimeters and parameters for womens lives.

The reader will get a sampling of female life rather than a mosaic or composite, having the women speak for themselves.

Others, European men have articulated the ideologies, encoded the norms and regulations and enjoyed the privilege of commentary on the character, intellectual capacities and social place of others. p.4

Scholars have been able to reconstruct the circumstances of certain women’s lives and through qualitative data, ethnographic work. archeology, the examination of the material culture, through the analysis of language and the interrogation of prescriptive literature of lives we thought we lost. p.5

Through
court records and wills
letters
diaries
day books
poetry
petitions and
newspaper ads
women can be heard speaking directly to us.

The editors draw on
diaries
letters
essays
court documents
sermon
wills
plantation records
newspapers
fiction and
advice manuals
to reconstruct womens lives and roles during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because of their circumstances elite women leave us more correspondence, more diaries and public statements.

Enslaved and poor women and servants come to us of course filtered through their masters employers, benefactors, female social superiors as well as men.

Court records by poor women under duress and pain are not about the satisfactions of their lives.

They are all through the perceptions and biases of the amaneusis.

Prescriptive documents such as sermons and legal statutes provide indirect, unintended evidence of widespread behaviour and attitudes contrary to the norms they assert.

Readers must be gleaners of knowledge rather than reapers of knowledge. p.6

The biological was also social interpreted through the prisms of religion, law and custom.

Womens lives can be explained through:
Trials and court records
laws and statutes
material artifacts such as birthing stools and tombstones,
medical books,
midwives journals,
sermons,
obituaries,
oral histories,
folk legends
and myths.

Puberty and marriage coincided.
Children became wives of older men.

The social contexts in which women
grew to maturity
experienced sexual intimacy
participated in reproduction
nurtured their children
suffered illnesses
and went to their deaths

Can be examined through sources as disparate as
trail and court records,
diaries and letters, 
church baptismal and burial records,
laws and statutes.


Human Rights & Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition

Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith

The post cold war decade of the 1990s has been labeled the decade of human rights...it has also been described as the decade of life narratives, what commentators refer to as the time of the memoir.  Many of these life narratives tell of human rights violations.  Victims of abuse around the world have testified to their experience in an outpouring of oral and written narratives.  These stories demand that readers attend to histories, lives and experiences often different from their own. p.1

I remember today that I have delayed my medications and taking my 9am meds at 11am.  Shortly after taking these I notice my hands and arms shaking and I do not know if it the meds I have taken or if it is the meds I have just read about in a  book about changes which occur with aging and adverse drug reactions. (Learning To Be Old : Overmedicating Old Americans)

The two contemporary phenomena - human rights as the privilege mode of addressing human suffering and the rise in popularity of published life narratives - have commonly been understood to exist within separate domains of politics and literature, respectively.  Human Rights and Narrative Lives, in concert with more recent interdisciplinary studies, understands “the political” as inclusive of moral, aesthetics and ethical aspects of culture. p.2

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted in 1948 and all additional conventions and covenants have signaled a collective moral commitment to just societies in which all people live lives characterize by dignity, equality, bodily inviolability and freedom. p.2

They provide platforms and mechanisms for redress for those whose rights to life, liberty and security have been denied whether by slavery, torture, rape and other forms of physical abuse, genocide, terrorism, racial and gender discrimination, ethic cleansing, arbitrary detention, or denial of cultural integrity.  Human rights platforms and mechanisms make possible a legitimating process of telling and listening that demands accountability on the part of states and international organizations. p.3

A commitment to provide a public international space that empowers all human beings to speak” according to Joseph Slaughter.  Their testimony brings into play implicitly and explicitly a rights claim.  The teller bears  witness to his or her own experiences through acts of remembering elicited by rights activists and coded to rights instruments. p.3

Human Rights and Narrated Lives traces the transformations of stories in the field of human rights as they connect with human rights platforms, discourses, and campaigns.  These transformations occur within the contexts of story production, circulation, and reception.  The study also attends to the efficacies of storytelling for tellers and their audiences, specifically the affective, emotional, and cognitive dimensions that activate or fail to activate ethical imperatives in the social field where literature enfolds into politics.

By production all stories emerge in the midst of complex and uneven relationships of power, prompting certain questions about production: who tells the stories and who doesn’t?  To whom are the told and under what circumstances?  Why, when, how and where do narratives become intelligible as stories of human rights?  What historical, cultural and institutional conditions affect the shapes stories take?  What are the personal, social, political and ethical effects of stories and then venues of productions for both tellers and listeners? p.5

By circulation we signal the conditions enabling and constraining the movement of stories across time and location - that is, their reproduction in dispersed sites and their silencing in others.

By reception we signal the conditions enabling and constraining the ways in which stories are received and interpreted by multiple audiences in the immediate contexts of production as well as those distant from the originating event.  Questions can arise from this: In what venues - transitional, rational, local, personal - do stories find audiences?  What historical and cultural landscapes of collective memory do stories enter or unsettle?  What are the terms of judgement directed to the stories different forums of interpretation?  How are stories enlisted in other peoples causes?  How do contexts of reception direct and contain ethical call of stories and their appeals for redress? p.6

There are 5 sites for their case studies, around the world, the venues of story telling.
  • Truth, Reconciliation and The Traumatic Past of South Africa
  • Indigenous Human Rights in Austria - Who speaks of the stolen generation?
  • Related Narrating: grandmothers telling stories of forced sexual slavery during WWII.
  • Life sentences: narrated lives and prisoner rights in the US
  • Post-Tiananmen Narratives and the New China

By Reception
Human Rights And Narrated Lives

By reception we signal the conditions enabling and constraining the ways in which stories are received and interpreted by multiple audiences in the immediate contexts of production as well as those distant from the originating event. Questions can arise from this: In what venues - transitional, national, local, personal - do stories find audiences? p.6

What historical and cultural landscapes of collective memory do stories enter and unsettle? What are the terms of judgement directed to the stories different forums of interpretation? How are stories enlisted in other peoples causes? How do contexts of reception direct and contain the ethical call of stories and their appeals for readers? p.6

Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith

Interfaces
Women/Autobiography/Image/Performance

I will give the reader a brief introduction to women's "enacted life narratives" as the authors like to call "women's autobiographies". Hoping that each reader will pursue her own interests.

Smith and Watson write that they will offer an overview of and theorize women's self representation as a preformative act. That, is never transparent, that constitutes subjectivity in the interplay of memory, experience, identity, embodiment and agency. They also suggest proposing a grammar describing four modes of the visual/textual interface as relational, contextual, spatial and temporal.

Visual/Textual  }   Relational
Contextual
Spatial
Temporal

"Naming is the active tense of identity, the outward aspect of the self-representation process, acknowledging all the circumstances through which it must elbow its way". During the last century women have been naming themselves by making art and performance from their own bodies, experiential histories, memories, and personal landscapes in myriad textual and visual modes and in multiple media. p. 5

The modes of self-reference, according to the two authors now include visual, textual, voiced and material imprints of subjectivity, extending the possibilities for women to engage both "women" and "artist" as "a social and cultural formation in the process of construction." p.5

If you look beyond the conventions of painted self-portraiture that encode the likeness of the artist, we become aware of the proliferating sites of the autobiographical. In addition to the textual modes of autobiography, memoir, diaries, and journals, there are many visual modes– sculpture, quilts, painting, photography, collage, murals, installations, as well as films, artists,' books, song lyrics, performance art, and Web sites in cyberspace – that have not yet been recognized as autobiographical presentation in the following media and the artists associated with them {a list by no means exhaustive} p.5

As you might notice so many of these artists have already found a place in the "writing" of the 3 Astra, Clare, Nancy's stories already.

These self-referential displays at the visual/textual interface in hybrid or pastiche modes materialize self-inquiry and self-knowledge, not through a mirror for seeing and reproducing the artist's face and torso but as the artists' engagement with the history of seeing women's bodies. p.7

In effect, autobiographical telling is performative; it enacts the "self" that it claims has given rise to an "I". And that "I" is neither unified nor stable-it is fragmented, provisional, multiple, in process.

In earlier explorations of autobiographical narratives, we have defined five constitutive processes of autobiographical subjectivity; memory, experience, identity, embodiment, and agency. These five terms are foundational for an engagement with women's acts of self-representation in twentieth-century narratives. In brief, we understand them as follows. p.9

Memory- creates the meaning of the past. "Memories are records of how we have experienced events, not replicas of the events themselves". Memory, moreover, has a history: we learn how to remember, and the uses of remembering, all of which are specific to our cultural and historical locations and that history is material . We locate memory and specific objects of our experiential histories. p.9

Experience- "It is not individuals who have experience". Joan W. Scott claims, "but subjects who are constituted through experience". Autobiographical subjects do not predate their experience. In effect, autobiographical subjects know themselves as subjects of particular kinds of experience attached to social statuses and identities. p.10

Identity- Identities, therefore, are discursive, provisional, intersectional, and unfixed. p.10

Embodiment- Subjects narrating their lives, then, are multiply embodied. There is the body as a neurochemical system. There is the anatomical body. There is, as Elizabeth Grosz notes, the "imaginary anatomy", which "reflects social and familial beliefs about the body more than it does the body's organic nature ". And there is the sociopolitical body, a set of cultural attitudes and codes attached to the public meanings of bodies that underwrites relationships of power. p.10

Agency- that is, control over the self-representation they produce about themselves. We need to consider how narrators negotiate cultural strictures about telling certain kinds of stories, visualizing kinds of embodiment. "Agents change, and change their worlds, by virtue of the systemic operations of multiple ideologies" that "expose both the subject and the system to perpetual reconfiguration" p.10

Rather, autobiographical acts of narration, situated in the historical time and cultural place, deploy discourses of identity to organize acts of remembering that are directed to multiple addresses or readers. Therefore, it is possible for narrators to produce multiple, widely divergent stories from one experiential history, as many literary autobiographers writing "serial lives" have done. Autobiographical narratives, then, do not affirm a "true self" or a coherent and stable identity. They are preformative, situated addresses that invite their readers' collaboration in producing specific meanings for the "life". p.11

"Memory, moreover has a history: we learn how to remember, what to remember, and the uses of remembering, all of which are specific to our cultural and historical location. And that history is material. We locate memory and specific practices of remembering in our own bodies and in specific objects of our expertial histories". p.9

Construction of the self

Cushman
Interfaces
Constructing
Smith
Women/Autobiography
America
Watson   Image/Performance

Experience p.9

Fragmented
Provisional
Multiple
In process

The "I"

Discursive
Provisional
Intersectional
Unfixed

"Identity"


Construction of the Self

 The following section is posed as questions which reflect the period of the sixties.
  1. Who had parents who showed marked discrimination toward the "blacks" in their home?
  2. How were biases towards women's abilities interfered with the advancement in her professional careers?
  3. She was the first woman to receive a degree im women's studies.
  4. How did music affect the lives of each of the woman during the sixties?
  5. Which woman needed to change her body image in order to continue with the activity she loved the most?
  6. Who were the four men who were assassinated during the sixties?
  7. Who was the first woman to receive a scholarship at Harvard?
  8. Can you describe the conditions which Baby Boomers found on the return to college and how has it affected their studies?


Construction of the Self, Constructing America

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

Philip Cushman, 1995

The author believes that in order to understand American psychotherapy we must study the world into which it was borne and in which it currently resides, and that we must study how psychotherapy not only reflects but also constructs the social field, placing the entire enterprise of psychotherapy within history. Out of this history he shows us how different eras or time periods have created different "selves".

The author tell us that "when social artifacts or institutions are taken for granted it usually means that they have developed functions in the society that are so integral to the culture that they are indispensable, unacknowledged and finally invisible. So then, what a are psychotherapy's socio-political functions? What part does psychotherapy play in the complicated cultural landscape of the late 20th century America. How does psychotherapy add to or challenge the status quo by affecting current understandings of what it means to be human, influencing standards of normality and criminality, trends in educational and advertising theory, the content of popular culture , the conduct of election campaigns, concepts of health and illness, and the particulars of moral understandings, everyday language, fashion trends, and leisure activities?" p.1

In the past 500 years the west has created a world in which a person is understood to be a "container " of a mind and a "self" that needs to be therapied , rather than being a person with a divine soul that needs to be saved , or simply an element of the communal unit that must cooperate for the common good. How does psychotherapy fit in with this new configuration? One way of beginning with a critical inquiry is to situate psychotherapy in the history and the culture of its time and place. p.1


Carving Out the Clearing

The USE OF A METAPHOR

The author tell us, "People can exist only within a cultural framework that is carved out of the sensory bombardment of potential perceptions and possible ways of being. The carving out `is done through the use of cultural artifacts during the exercise of social practices, such as language. The bombardment of perceptions and possibilities is like a forest, and the carved out space is like a 'clearing' in the forest." p.20

The 'clearing' of a particular culture is created by the components of its conceptual systems and transmitted from one individual to the next and one generation to the next through their communal traditions of shared understanding and linguistic traditions." It is only within the clearings that things and people show up in certain shapes and with certain characteristics. p.21

 TRUTH

The author writes, "There is no single truth to be found when studying humans - and there are many truths , depending among other things, on the historical and cultural context of the observed and the cultural frame of reference. A research agenda is always framed by the shared understandings and limits of the researchers clearing." p.22

"Researchers do not 'see' or 'discover' the one, reified truth of a culture; they construct a truth through the process of collecting, studying, and analyzing. What researchers construct is always, in part, a product of their cultural frame of reference, and therefore the moral and political agenda they are trying to prove or justify." p.25-26

 THE SELF

"The self embodies what the culture believes is humankind's place in the cosmos- its limits, its talents, expectations, and the horizon of shared understandings. There is no universal, trans-historical self, only local selves;" and "there is no universal theory about the self, only local theories. " p.23

The self is configured to conform to the requirements of a particular time and place. p.25

A particular, local self will thus develop certain illnesses and likewise be welcoming and hopeful about a particular healer, i.e. the person or institution who "shows up" in the clearing as a gifted, powerful doctor . The local healer will be trained in the healing arts of the local community and the healing technology will fit with the local frame of reference.

TIME AND CULTURE

To his useful way of thinking, the author tells us that there are four signposts to interpret particular eras and cultures-according to historical and cultural judgments indigenous to each era or culture:

  1. the predominant configuration of the self of a particular cultural or historical "clearing."
  2. the illnesses with which that self is characteristically afflicted
  3. the institutions or officials most responsible for healing those illnesses
  4. the technologies that the particular institutions or practitioners have used in order to heal that self's characteristic illnesses. p.24-25

THE SELF

Another useful metaphor

Referring to the self as a cultural package, the author tells us, " Cultural packages like selves, illnesses, healers and technologies can tell us a good deal about a culture if we remember that they are local and not universal." p.25

He gives us a number of examples of non-Western configurations of the self, what Jean Smith has called in the 1970's , the "organs of experience." The Maori, an indigenous Polynesian group of New Zealand, believed that " no matter what ones status or station in life , one is only someone within a kinship group; the Maori believed that one would lose status of being human, once separate from kin. The Maori's first responsibility was to the group, not to themselves." p.27

Th Maoris experienced emotions - such as fear before a battle, grief and mourning, or personal confusion, insecurity and indecision-as intrusions from the outside , attacks upon various organs responsible for the specific emotion or mental state....the Maori believed that functions of the mind such as memory, cognition, volition, which the West locates in the brain, resided in the Maori intestines." p.27

They did not take responsibility for their feelings; feelings were thought to happen to them...the self then, possessed a much more fluid or porous personal boundary than does the Western self. Feelings were conceptualized as being "in" individuals, but not"of" them. p.27

 SOCIAL PRACTICES

The author continues with his metaphor, "Social practices not only inevitably reflect the cultural clearing of their time and place, but also unknowingly reproduce that landscape-the moral and political arrangements that frame and structure it." p.279

"Psychotherapy" he tells us, "has reflected and reproduced the frame works of its respective eras ." p.279 Intended or unintended , social practices have political consequences , intellectual discourse is inevitably involved in the exercise of power, and the self unavoidably, is morally constituted." p.279

The history of psychotherapy can be interpreted in such a way as to demonstrate that the field has always been, and will always be unavoidably- although unintentionally - a moral discourse with political consequences." p.281

"Psychotherapy is a social practice that is, a technology of the self. Presumably it helps people to live better. The self is a moral term. What it means to help people to live better always depends upon a people's understanding of what it means to be human- it depends on our definition of the self." p.282

If you remember, Clare had some complaints of her own about what we call, "the self."

If the therapist's idea of the self is very different rom the patients idea, the therapy will not last too long. Therapy is a dialogue and shared understandings of what is the proper way of being-what it is to be human. It is a negotiation that occurs over time.

The author tell us that by recognizing how socially caused suffering has been medicalized and politicized , therapists could better understand how the presentation of the discipline as a universal intra-psychic healing technology has political and moral consequences. For example, how the practice has supported self contained individualism, the configuration of the empty self and the smooth functioning of consumerism .

Our practices often disguise the exercise of power, the impact of economic forms of production, and the injustices caused by oppression owing to race, gender and class and the suppression of cooperative group action that might find political and structural solutions to societal problems.

The author gives a number of chapters over to explaining how various psychological theories of the past eras have contributed to many problems , and that by exercising power, while disguising power, therapy is itself a political act.

"I do not believe" the author confesses, " that I researched this book by " discovering" neutral facts, collecting them one by one and adding them up and then reaching an inescapable scientific conclusions. Instead we did not so much find data as construct them; we did not objectively search -we seek out what we think is important. We think that particular things exist because of the frame of reference from which we see and think....We value certain ideas and are committed to them because of the constellation of intersecting traditions that make up the framework of our lives." p.289

Therapists must historically situate the patient, their professional role, and their healing practices ; it also requires that their theories acknowledge the interdependent, and complex nature of human relating.

Early on in my writing Sid Smith challenged my use of the phrase "true self" and later I understood what she meant to show me. Cushman writes, " The true self means the approved form of the self , the approved way of being, not some objective scientific measure of universal selfhood. It might feel "true" because the cultural concept of proper being is sedimented in our bodies, and therefore when we act properly we "feel" as though we are proper." p.298

"Politics refers to the exiecise of power. but what embraces and frames each struggle , the bedrock of all political struggles , is the ongoing moral negotiation over what it means to be human: the self.' the shape of the self in a particular era indicates which goals individuals are supposed to strive toward, and how individuals are to comfort themselves striving, it indicates what is worthwhile, who is worthwhile and which institutions determine worthwhileness.

In other words the self emerges out of a moral dialog that sets the stage for all other political struggles. Once the self is set, the rest of the struggles begin to appear in the clearting: they materialize." p.332.

On the other hand ..."it is not possible to tease out and separate where culture ends and nature begins, where the moral starts and the psychological no longer exists, where the political takes center stage and the economic fades from sight." p.333

 THE SELF

The self is not a thing; it is a constant process.

"..it is impossible to step outside the entanglements of the social world and to see one pure, uncontaminated truth. the language we use, the issues that we deem worthy of examination, the happenings we identify as problems and solutions, the information we consider data, the procedures we believe to be scientifically proper- all are imbedded in a specific, entangled cultural terrain. Although we might claim to have" discovered" a scientific truth about being human, are results of a product of the cultural frame that had already been set a long time ago." p.334

We must continually ask ourselves, from where does this current configuration of self come from?

 THE OTHER

The process by which"the other: is constructed, defined, and used is the face of war in our time. The constructed content of the self and the determination of what is split off, disavowed and then relocated into the unconscious and on to the other goes a long way from legitimizing political decisions regarding the identity of the enemy, the content of major political issues, the distinction between male and female and black and white, the understandings or right and wrong, The addict, African- American, Asian, criminal, female, homeless, Jew, or Latino carries what is despised and disavowed; these distinctions, and the intellectual discourse that follows them , then justifies previous injustices and present or future governmental policies." p.338

Psychological complaints only show up in our world if we de politicize them and medicalize them. For example: "Im stressed out", or we attribute them to a dyadic relationship-the foreman is giving me an ulcer. p.344

.............................

Although Charles Taylor's book, Sources of the Self, The Making of Modern Identity, was written in 1989, before Cushmans book, it has only recently been frequently referred to, and whose ideas are the sources of modern selfhood, are not yet familiar to me. Philip Cushman in the end of his writings relies heavily on his background as a Jewish thinker and philosopher. I hope to be able to become familiar with Taylor's work, which is frequently referred to in other people's writings.



The History Of Cartography

Volume 2 Book 3: Cartography In The Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies

Introduction

How maps function in a society.
Cognitive system
Material culture
Social construction
The differing roles and meanings of maps in various cultures.
The background and predictions of individual resources.
The cartography of traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific cultures.
Using the world map-
Greek pinax
Roman forma
Chinese tu p.2
Definitions of cognitive cartography
cognitive cartography p.3
Performance cartography p.4
Material cartography p.5 & 6
Overlaps p.6

A brief description of a few artists and their definitions of how these have communicated, perceived and preserved information essential to the survival of cultures with such attributes. It might seem that the maps in this book provide an evocative picture of how indigenous people view and present their worlds.

They illuminate not only questions of material culture but the cognitive systems and social motivations that underpin them.

Seeing the description of the partial first chapter of the History of Cartography will give the reader the breadth of the 532 pages of the total work. The book also is richly filled with graphic descriptions and photographs of the work which is described. It is a book after a lifetime reading for the reader who loves such books. It is not the kind of book which can be read quickly and it is the kind of book which effects the appreciative reader.

So dear reader, read on.


The History of Cartography

The cartography in the traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies has been edited by David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis.

The maps in this work have provided an evocative picture of how indigenous peoples view and represent their worlds.

Maps tell us much more than merely how to get from here to there. As one of the oldest forms of human communication, they ultimately express the many ways we attempt to understand the world.

The first comprehensive history of maps and mapping worldwide from prehistory to the present, the six-volume History of Cartography is both an essential reference work and a conclusive demonstration of maps' value to society.

Each volume brings together an international team of specialists to describe the known corpus of maps for the period, review the critical literature, and highlight controversial areas for future research.

What emerges is a fascinating picture of maps not just as practical tools for administration, education, navigation, and welfare, but also as symbolic images used for political, and religious purposes and in artistic, literary, scientific, and social contexts.

According to the authors there are four categories for defining cartography.

Cognitive

Performance

Material

Overlaps and Inconsistences

They remind me somewhat of the work Interfaces; by Watson and Smith.


 HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHY

The cartography in the traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies has been edited by David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis.

The maps in this work have  provided an evocative picture of how indigenous peoples  view and represent their worlds.

Maps tell us much more than merely how to get from here to there.
As one of the oldest forms of human communication, they ultimately express the many ways we attempt to understand the world.

The first comprehensive history of maps and mapping worldwide from prehistory to the present, the six-volume History of Cartography is both an essential reference work and a conclusive demonstration of maps’ value to society.

Each volume brings together an international team of specialists to describe the known corpus of maps for the period, review the critical literature, and highlight controversial areas for future research.

What emerges is a fascinating picture of maps not just as practical tools for administration, education, navigation, and welfare, but also as symbolic images used for political, and religious purposes and in artistic, literary, scientific, and social contexts.

According to the authors there are four categories for defining cartography.
Cognitive
Performance
Material
Overlaps and Inconsistences
They remind me somewhat of the work Interfaces; by Watson and Smith.


HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHY

The History of Cartography
Volume 2, Book 3: Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies
Edited by David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis

Introduction

Maps are seen through many different eyes. As the historical study of maps has broadened and matured over the past two decades to extend beyond the idea of maps as ever-improving representations of the geographical world, at least three approaches have been developed and championed: the map as cognitive system, the map as material culture, and the map as social construction. p.1

All three are necessary to a full understanding of how maps function in society. The way these approaches have waxed and waned has depended not only on the background and predilections of individual researchers, but also on the differing roles and meanings of maps in the various cultures that have been studied.

The emphasis on these three approaches has shifted as the History of Cartography volumes have appeared. In this book, which deals with the cartography of traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific cultures, where very few truly indigenous artifacts have been found or preserved, we would expect the cognitive and social approaches to have necessarily greater emphasis than in previous books. This introduction is meant to lay the conceptual groundwork for the chapters that follow. After addressing definitional questions--what we mean by various key words, such as "cartography" and "traditional"--

We discuss the differences among what can be called cognitive, performance, and material cartography and explain the many instances where these categories overlap. The introduction then turns to a number of methodological problems and issues, including the problem of bias inherent in studying the maps in this book from a Western perspective, the possible omissions deriving from a diversity of approaches, the feasibility of cross-cultural comparisons, and the ways the study of maps can be made more central in ethno historical studies.

Definitions

In this section, maps were defined as "graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world."2 The definition, purposely broad, was intended to set general parameters for the entire six-volume series. But in this book the very terms "map" and 'cartography," with their strong Western overtones, need some elaboration. There is no cross-cultural, generally agreed definition of these terms, and none of the cultures described here apparently had a word for "map," let alone "cartography," before contact with the West.

If the purpose of our definition is pragmatic rather than semantic, however, using "map" as a general term can be helpful.

The search for "maps" in these cultures, particularly when accompanied by the idea that maps privilege the societies in which they are found, is profoundly Eurocentric.

But The History of Cartography was born of a belief that the endeavour to understand the world by depicting it in map form should be treated in a global way and across the span of human history.

By using the word "map" to cover so many different things, we are simply extending the logic of earlier volumes that called the Greek pinax, the Roman forma, the Chinese tu, and the medieval mappa mundi and carta da navigare "maps" and included them in a cartographic history.

COGNITIVE CARTOGRAPHY
(Thought, Images) PERFORMANCE CARTOGRAPHY
(Performance, Processes) MATERIAL CARTOGRAPHY
(Record, Objects)
Organized images such as spatial constructs Nonmaterial and ephemeral
Gesture
Ritual
Song
Poem
Dance
Speech

Material and ephemeral
Model
Sketch
In situ
Rock art
Displayed maps
Mobile comparable objects
Paintings
Drawings
Sketches
Models
Textiles
Ceramics
Recording of
performance maps

Cognitive Cartography
In volume 1 of this History Brian Harley wrote:
There has probably always been a mapping impulse in human consciousness, and the mapping experience--involving the cognitive mapping of space--undoubtedly existed long before the physical artifacts we now call maps.

For many centuries maps have been employed as literary metaphors and as tools in analogical thinking. There is thus also a wider history of how concepts and facts about space have been communicated, and the history of the map itself--the physical artifact--is but one small part of this general history of communication about space. p.7

A "general history of communication about space" would be based on the vast literature of spatial cognition and behaviour in psychology, philosophy, anthropology, geography, and now artificial intelligence. p8

Spatial constructs are keys to the physical, social, and humanistic understanding of the world.

Human activities relevant to cartography include reducing the complexity
and vastness of nature and space to a manageable representation; way finding or navigating from one point to another; spatial reckoning of generalized distances and directions (as in an awareness of the cardinal directions); visualizing the character of local places; articulating spatial power and control related to territoriality; and constructing spatial views of real and imagined worlds. The mental constructions of such spatial ideas are sometimes selectively described as "mental maps." This is an intuitively attractive term and has been the subject of many recent studies, but it can mean at least two quite different things.

On one hand, the term is used to mean an image of the environment held in the mind to aid way finding or spatial orientation. This may be an image one remembers from having seen a physical map, or it may be constructed from one's experience of reality (such as one's neighbourhood). This type of mental map is often used to give directions, to rehearse spatial behaviour in the mind, to aid memory, to structure and store knowledge, to imagine fantasy landscapes and worlds, or of course to make commonplace material maps.

We know, however, that most people do not visualize space in mental pictures when engaged in everyday way finding or giving directions.

Some writers have questioned the value of using terms such as "image," " pictures in the head," and "mental map" to describe complex mental processes. p.10

The other main use of the term "mental map" or "cognitive map" is to denote physical artifacts recording how people perceive places. This category includes maps researchers draw from data about subjects' place preferences, as in Gould and White's Mental Maps. p.11




Or in some cases subjects themselves may draw their cognitive or affective view of their environment. In both instances we are dealing with a physical object, not a mental image.

Nevertheless, for want of a better phrase, the term "mental cartography" is sometimes used in this book to refer to the maps that many of these groups apparently carry in their heads as mnemonic devices.

A good example concerns the Pacific Islanders. In only one island group in Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, have material artifacts traditionally been made for the purpose of remembering and teaching navigation skills in the Pacific Ocean. Clearly, inhabitants of other island groups have had a similar need to navigate the thousands of miles between the island groups, yet these needs are met not with graphic artifacts but with a "mental cartography."

 Performance Cartography

If mental constructs can be metaphorically called "maps," there are occasions in many societies when a performance also fulfills the function of a map. Referring again to table 1.1, a performance may take the form of a nonmaterial oral, visual, or kinesthetic social act, such as a gesture, ritual, chant, procession, dance, poem, story, or other means of expression or communication whose primary purpose is to define or explain spatial knowledge or practice.

Or the performance may include a more material, but still ephemeral, demonstration such as a drawing or model in the sand.

Not all our authors agree on whether oral-kinesthetic expressions qualify as maps. For example, for Australian Aborigines, Peter Sutton has used this distinction as a key reason to be cautious about identifying some icons as kinds of maps, in that they "arise principally as display or performance rather than as explanation or record." p.13

Similarly, for Mesoamerica, where many more map artifacts survive than from oral cultures, Barbara Mundy mentions the circumambulation ritual still carried out in hundreds of Mexican communities, only to point out that this performance is not a map but "an oral litany of boundary sites committed to memory." p.14

On the other hand, Eric Silverman points out in the chapter on Melanesian maps that the Iatmul of the middle Sepik River map the landscape orally through chains of paired, polysyllabic names that are chanted and sung on ritual occasions.

And Neil Whitehead relates how the dances of the Barasana in the Vaupés region of Colombia enact the interconnection between persons and the cosmos in which the path of celestial bodies is replicated through the annual cycle of ritual and dance in a long house representing the celestial vault. p.15

 Material Cartography

A spatial representation may also be a permanent or at least nonephemeral record created or placed in situ, as in rock art, maps posted as signs, or maps embodied in shrines or buildings. Or the representation may take the form of a mobile, portable, archivable record. This category of material cartography, which comprises most artifacts we normally think of as "maps," includes models, ceramics, drawings, paintings, textiles, descriptions or depictions of performances, and in situ records. p.16




Despite the frequent image of the history of cartography as an antiquarian field, the study of maps as physical artifacts--as material culture--has been astonishingly neglected, perhaps on the mistaken grounds that technical studies do not illuminate the wider social history of car tography.

This is unfortunate, since technology is rooted in society, cannot be separated from its influences, and often sheds light on broader social issues.

One of the fundamental purposes of this book is to present the material evidence of traditional cartography--to describe the map corpus in a way that approaches the maturity of other fields that address issues of material culture, such as art history, ethnography, and industrial history.

Wherever the evidence has permitted, we have attempted to reconstruct the fabric and format of maps and the methods of their creation. We hope that in some cases we have also been able to move beyond the bare statement of how maps were made. This approach of course is fully compatible with recent studies of material culture, which go beyond explaining process. p.17

 Overlaps and Inconsistencies

There are several instances where the categories of cognitive, performance, and material cartography overlap. This overlap is most obvious where map artifacts are used during a performance.

For example, Thomas Bassett describes how memory boards known as lukasa, covered with beads and cowrie shells, are used to teach initiates about the origins of Luba kingship in the Kabongo region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The lukasa is read or sung to remember the journeys of a king, the location of sacred lakes, trees, spirit capitals, and migration routes. The content changes according to the king being praised, the singer's knowledge of royal history, and the political circumstances of the performance. p.18

In this sense the performance is not the map but an interpretation of it.

Likewise, the Comanches of western Texas prepared for raids into northern Mexico between about 1830 and 1845 by assembling a bundle of sticks, each marked with notches to represent days. A map was drawn on the ground illustrating every landmark to be encountered on the journey for the day represented by the notched stick. p.19

The evidence for mapping as performance--dances, dreamings, sandpainting ceremonies--is less complete than for material maps and is subject to greater errors in interpretation. Although such performances were observed and recorded in some traditional societies in the recent past, we do not know what proportion of performance maps were too sacred to have been witnessed by outsiders. Earlier examples were doubtless unobserved or misreported.

Many of the societies examined in this book assigned preeminence to performance, privileging process over product, particularly where permanence of the artifact might be a disadvantage in societies where maps were designed to grasp the ever-changing rhythms of nature and territory.

Thus, in the Inuit context, Rundstrom describes his conversation with an Inuk elder: "[He] told me that he had drawn detailed maps of Hiquligjuaq from memory, but he smiled and said that long ago he had thrown them away. It was the act of making them that was important, the recapitulation of environmental features, not the material objects themselves." p.20

Likewise, in the case of the Nazca geoglyphs, Clarkson notes the extensive overlapping of the geoglyphs and says it "raises an interesting and in many ways important question of why certain areas of the pampa look like a chalkboard used for many different lessons but never erased between each lesson. Was the act of construction as or more important than the recognizability of individual geoglyphs?" p.21

Given the fluid nature of the categories of cognitive, performance, and material cartography, we have assiduously avoided drawing a hard line between "map" and "nonmap" in table 1.1.

The "mapness" of an artifact depends in great degree on the social or functional context in which it is operating. Our concern in this book is less with constructing inclusive and exclusive criteria for what might be considered maps and more with shedding light on how certain members of society represent and codify spatial knowledge.

Thus, in this introduction we have carefully avoided defining terms such as "protomap" used by some of our authors, letting the context of their use and the authors' individual definitions illuminate the meaning intended. p.22

Any definition that ignores either the function of maps or their role as social constructions fails to account for the fact that maps are far more than way finding devices; they have enhanced the prestige, power, and respect of those members of society who have controlled their making and use for religious and political ends.

Maps are frequently used to establish social position--to gain respect through a display of knowledge--certainly a motivation behind many shamanistic rituals among such widely different groups as the Khoisan in Namibia, the Chukchi in Siberia, the Tukano and Desana in the Amazon, the Inuit and Ojibwas in Canada, and the Barasana in Colombia.

The oral "map" lies at the center of the definitional controversy. Whether a list of places is arranged in topographical or artificial order is certainly significant in the study of mental processes. Jerome S. Bruner suggests an experiment designed to help us understand how an individual represents the world. Individuals would be asked to name the fifty states of the Union. If the order is "Alabama, Alaska, Arizona..." the supporting mental construct is inferred to be list like. If the order is "Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont..." the supporting representation is spatial and, we could say, moves toward a "maplike" representation. p.23

Whether the "Maine, New Hampshire" approach would be called a "map" by our authors is debatable.

Possible conflicts in definition are not new with this book. In the chapter on Egyptian cartography in volume 1 of the History of Cartography, for example, such lists of place-names are not mentioned. Yet Goody describes as "an elementary kind of map" taxation scenes on the southern and northern entrance walls of a Theban tomb listing the dues paid to the Vizier Rekhmire(in the reign of Thutmose III, ca. 1450 B.C.) by various towns lying to the south and north of Thebes, not in random order, but according to their topographical and cardinal positions. p.24

Similarly, no mention is found in the medieval chapters of volume 1 of the prevalent processional "beating of the bounds" ceremony to confirm parish boundaries in England, which could be thought of as a kind of "performance map." p.25

It is also important to realize that the significance of elements of graphic representation (ideas such as points, lines, and areas) varies considerably, not only from society to society but also between individuals within a group. For example, the concept of a line--whether signifying a boundary, a pathway, or some connection between two geographic elements in the landscape--is so basic to modern Western cartography that "we take it for granted, as given in reality.

We see it in visible nature, between material points, and we see it between metaphorical points such as days or acts." p.26

Among the people of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, however, there is no indication that lines are conceived as connecting point with point during a journey, and hence representing such a relationship as a line would make no sense. p.27

On the other hand, the Yoruba of West Africa regard the line as extremely important, even associating it with civilization. In Yoruba, the phrase " this country has become civilized" literally means "this earth has lines upon its face." The verb meaning to cicatrize scars on a face also has multiple associations with marking new boundaries and opening roads through a forest, in the general sense of imposing a human pattern on the disorder of nature. p.28

 Problems and Issues

In compiling this book, several problems and issues have arisen that are uniquely applicable to the maps we will be describing. These include the problem of studying these maps from a Western perspective, the problem of possible omissions deriving from a diversity of approaches, and the definitional problem of what constitutes a map. Issues arise about the feasibility of cross-cultural comparisons and the ways cartography and its history can be made more central in anthropology, ethno history, and even cultural geography.

 The Problem of Bias

Many writers on culture start out by saying that studying culture is a " risky endeavour," as if this somehow exonerates them from error. This disclaimer does not, however, prevent them from proceeding.29 Correctly interpreting the history of traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific cartography through modern Western eyes is, of course, impossible. The very fact that the editors have grouped such a diversity of forms of expression into one book--though we would not claim everything we illustrate is a map or is "traditional"--inevitably reveals a bias.

The artifactual evidence presented in this book has survived in diverse physical states--a spectrum ranging from forms largely independent of European influence to transcripts and copies of maps made for engraving and publication elsewhere. Contemporary annotations intended to assist understanding can only rarely be evaluated. Many artifacts are no longer extant and are known only via contemporary accounts. Inevitably, the descriptions were filtered by the circumstances in which they were recorded, and correcting for this is seldom possible. Very few truly indigenous map artifacts have passed from their native keepers into nonnative collections. Most of the material that was readily available to our authors was made during the historical encounters between Westerners and indigenous groups, where acculturation was inevitable. Hence the representativeness of these records of the total picture is difficult to judge.

A related issue is the preservation or archiving of material artifacts. Until recently, most traditional societies have preserved their culture through means other than collections of artifacts, so it is not yet clear whether the new laws passed by many governments allowing indigenous groups to reclaim their heritage and requiring museums to return artifacts will help or hinder their long-term preservation, if this indeed remains an issue.

In the meantime, as the credit lines for the illustrations in this book will attest, the vast majority of traditional artifacts are preserved in repositories founded in the European image of the museum, a relatively recent concept--in its well-developed form--dating from the Renaissance.

Those that are preserved have thus usually been chosen according to the values placed on them in the Western culture of connoisseurship and collecting. As they have changed hands in private collections, the artifacts have accrued an importance beyond their intrinsic aesthetic worth, to include provenance, a position cemented by their description in published exhibition or auction catalogs. As with the "great maps" of the West, a few traditional artifacts have also been repeatedly illustrated and described, and their importance has thus been canonized.

There are further difficulties with the historical record. Prehistoric rock art may have functioned as maps, but such an interpretation is necessarily speculative. Much surviving rock art was accretive over long periods; later content was frequently added, often by people possessing little or no knowledge of the earlier cultures that had a hand in creating the images.

Thus linking rock art to the culture in which it originated always involves assumptions. Furthermore, much rock art undoubtedly reflects esoteric, mystical, shamanistic knowledge, and the figurative representations of this knowledge bear multiple meanings. Another example of the difficulties of interpretation is the Walam Olum, a pictographic record described in the nineteenth century, but now lost, that some believe to be the ancient history of the Delawares (Lenni Lenape ).

The Walam Olum is told in the form of an epic migration story about their crossing of the Bering Strait and their journey south and eastward across North America to a homeland centered in the Delaware Valley, ending with a description of European ships arriving on the Delaware River about 1620.

Some scholars date the record to the late eighteenth or nineteenth century, interpreting it as a bona fide attempt to create a unifying narrative in the face of disruption and forced migration. p.30

More recently a strong case has been made that it is one of the oldest hoaxes of North America, analogous to Piltdown man in England.31 For the Delawares, the epic may well form part of a narrative received from their ancestors and valid as such. But in the face of such difficulties of interpretation, it is best to be extremely cautious about its value in corroborating or guiding archaeological or historical research. p.32

There is, however, a concomitant problem of traditional groups' writing their own history in the absence of a historical record. The problem of bias has not dissuaded modern descendants of indigenous groups from " rewriting" and "reinterpreting" their history. For example, a recent history of Waitaha tradition has been criticized by several scholars for suggesting a longevity of settlement mythology for which there is no evidence. p.33

Even if bias is likely to be present no matter who writes the history of cartography, we are presumably not so culture bound that any attempt is hopeless. We believe the problems are mitigated somewhat by choosing a worldwide team of anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, geographers, and historians with an intimate knowledge of the cultures and literatures they describe.

This volume of the History of Cartography is thus the first global attempt to describe and explain traditional cartography since Bruno Adler's pathbreaking study of 1910. p.34

 The Problem of Diversity of Approach

Although multiple authorship is necessary for a work of this kind in which no one scholar could be expected to have a worldwide ethnographical, historical, and geographical knowledge of the cultures treated, such a plan involves a rich diversity of approach. Not only do our authors represent several fields, but there are widely varying interpretations of what constitutes a map, as our discussion of mental mapping and performance cartography in this introduction has shown.

Furthermore, although we have attempted to cover the main cultures of the world, there have inevitably been omissions and inconsistencies owing to the extremely sparse literature on some topics and the lack of specialists familiar with artifacts that could be interpreted as maps.35 Other inconsistencies include the varying emphasis on "modern" maps drawn by indigenous groups for ethnographical study or for their own land claims.

Similarly, some authors discuss at length maps drawn for Europeans during colonial contact, whereas others mention them only sporadically. Perhaps the most serious lacuna is the absence of separate chapters on celestial and cosmo graphical cartography for many of the cultures discussed, particularly in North America, like those in the books devoted to Islamic and Asian traditional cartography (volume 2, books 1 and 2).

Differences in approach are therefore perhaps more marked in this book than in previous volumes, but when these essays are viewed together they provide a multiplicity of insights into precontact mapping and a richer texture than a more regimented encyclopaedic attempt could possibly have produced.

 The Issue of Cross-Cultural Comparisons

By grouping traditional cartographies in volume 2 of the History, we are making the assumption that some kind of comparison between the maps of different cultures is desirable and will eventually be feasible. If all maps require some knowledge of their cultural context before we can extract their meaning, comparing maps implies no less than comparing cultures.

Such a question has been occupying anthropologists and geographers since Franz Boas in 1896. George Peter Murdock describes the Cross-Cultural Survey started in 1937 at Yale, which was based on the conviction that all human cultures, despite their diversity, fundamentally have a great deal in common, and that these common aspects are susceptible to quantitative analysis. Such a program of study required a systematic cataloging and categorizing of cultural characteristics--a global database from which hypotheses could be constructed and conclusions drawn. p.36

The criticism of such an approach is that it could not account for the local nuances in culture or the widely different contexts in which cultural practices take place, despite the enormous amount of useful fieldwork accomplished and data collected.

Since maps made by the cultures in this book are usually constructed from local knowledge, semantic systems, and materials, it is difficult to write about them using a Western vocabulary that attempts to analyze them structurally in terms of building blocks of graphic elements of points, lines, and color. This approach neglects the reasons the works were created, reasons that are almost always local. p.37

Far more fruitful is a semiotic approach that bears these local contexts in mind. Thus Geertz writes:

If we are to have a semiotics of art (or for that matter, of any sign system not axiomatically self-contained), we are going to have to engage in a kind of natural history of signs and symbols, an ethnography of the vehicles of meaning. Such signs and symbols, such vehicles of meaning, play a role in the life of a society, or some part of a society, and it is that which in fact gives them their life....

This is not a plea for inductivism–we certainly have no need for a catalogue of instances--but for turning the analytic powers of semiotic theory, whether Peirce's, Saussure's, Lévi-Strauss's, or Goodman's, away from an investigation of signs in abstraction toward an investigation of them in their natural habitat--the common world in which men look, name, listen, and make. p.38

 Reversing the Marginalization of Maps

In the preface to volume 1, the editors pointed out that the history of cartography "occupies a no-man's-land among several paths of scholarship." 39 For the maps introduced in this book (both as material artifacts and as metaphors for encoding spatial understanding), it could more forcefully be said that their significance has not been adequately recognized by anthropologists, ethnographers, cultural historians, and cultural psychologists in discussions of the differences between European and non- European cultures.

In particular, maps, mapmaking, and map use within well-studied traditional societies have not received much attention from cultural anthropologists. Whether this reflects a low awareness of "map" among field anthropologists or the marginal position of spatial representation within the societies they have studied is not clear.

The general impression is that terrestrial maps were more significant in hunting societies than among collectors, pastoralists, or cultivators. This difference may have been a function of the extent of the territories covered, the repeated use of relatively easy natural routes, and the spatial nature of the search for prey. It is uncertain whether the global evidence now available is sufficiently representative to test such tentative hypotheses at a worldwide scale.

Much of what is known about maps and mapmaking in traditional societies is derived from the kinds of sources widely used by historians: museum, archival, and special collections, early printed books of travel, and official publications of many kinds. Somewhat surprisingly, therefore, historians, even ethno historians, have rarely used extant maps as evidence.

Historians of exploration and discovery have been particularly remiss in this respect. For better or worse, explorers often based strategic decisions on maps supplied by peoples whose territories they were passing through, sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

Whether these problems resulted from misinformation or misreading can be a fascinating question. Other than those with a special interest in maps made in traditional societies, even historians of cartography have seemingly been unaware of the significance of these maps. They have made surprisingly few attempts to analyze the processes involved, recognize diagnostic characteristics on the resulting maps, or consider the consequences either for contemporary map users or for the general history of cartography. With very few exceptions, archaeologists seem to have been blind to the possibility that maps made within traditional societies during the historical period might reveal sites, trails, even boundaries in ancestral prehistoric societies.

Why have maps been so clearly marginalized? Perhaps they are trivial, gross oversimplifications of the world that often stand in the way of our understanding of it. Alfred Korzybski's dictum, "A map is not the territory," has been echoed by many writers p..40

But all ways of knowing the landscape--speaking, writing, singing, painting--wear their own veils of representation. The medium tends to take on a life of its own beyond the message, so that it is not always possible to separate the representation from the represented. Indeed, Korzybski's dictum is now sometimes quoted only to overturn it. p.41

In a society where the map sometimes is the territory, and where we have created a "thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life," to quote Daniel Boorstin, it is surely all the more important to understand the medium that is being mistaken for reality. p.42

Another reason may account for the marginalization of maps in cultural studies. Anthropologists, historians, and psychologists interested in culture have not always appreciated the spatial manifestations of human behaviour. Many of the artifacts illustrated in this book have thus not been recognized as conveying spatial information.

Examples include the ceramics and textiles discussed in the chapter on Andean spatial representation, the symbolic codes in the shields of the Trobriand Islanders in Papua New Guinea, the lukasa memory boards of the Luba of the Kbango region of central Africa, or the toas of the Lake Eyre region of south-central Australia.

A case could surely be made--and we hope this book of the History of Cartography will make it--that an indigenous culture's maps afford evidence of its ways of cultural world making. The map is found at the interface of the secular and the spiritual, it deals with the spatial world views of societies (in the sense of both landscape and world order), and it often reflects a society's view of its history and its origins. The map is at the juncture of performance and artifact, of the visual and the aural, of the static and the dynamic.

It sheds light on such deeply ingrained and universal human needs as way finding and feeling "in place." Maps have acted as versatile and essential tools for visual thinking about the world at global, continental, national, and local scales. They have shaped scientific hypotheses, formed political and military strategies, formulated social policy, and reflected cultural ideas about the landscape, and they have been agents of social and political power.

They have also communicated, explained, and preserved information essential to the survival of cultures. With such attributes, it might seem that the maps in this book provide an evocative picture of how indigenous peoples view and represent their worlds. They illuminate not only questions of material culture but the cognitive systems and social motivations that underpin them.




The Present Moment

Daniel Stern was interested in studying the micro analytic interview as a way of getting closer to lived subjective experience at what he called the micro momentary level. p.xii

He was interested in experiences that lead to change. He questioned: How do experiences do that? What are such experiences made of? When do they take place? He was particularly interested in experiences that bring about change in psychotherapy and in personal relationships in everyday life.

His basic assumption was that change was based on lived experience. It was not enough to have an experience described. An event must be lived with feelings and actions, taking place in real time, in the real world, with real people in a moment of presentness. Presentness is the key. p.xiii

"What is shared in a moment of meeting is an emotional lived story. It's physically, emotionally and implicitly shared, not just explicated" he writes. p.xvi

The three main ideas he explores are interpubjectivity, implicit knowledge and consciousness. p.xvii

He calls the present moment, nowness. What is now? When is now? Does now exist and for how long? How is now structured? What does it do? How is it related to consciousness, to the past? How does it lead to meaning? Why does it occupy such a special place in psycho therapy? And related to these questions, how is now experienced when it is co created and shared with someone? Finally, what role does now play in change? How do we conceive of a present moment? p.4

He uses the phrase "vitality affects" and share feeling voyages.

The Present Moment does not whiz by becoming observable only after it is gone. p.4

There is another aspect of the subjective now that is both startling and obvious. Rather, it crosses the mental stage more slowly, taking several seconds to unfold.

And during this crossing, the present moment plays out a lived emotional drama. As the drama unfolds, it traces a temporal shape like a passing musical phrase. p.4

The Nature of the Present Moment

Daniel Stern spends considerable time talking about how he kept a record of the present moment, which I will not give a record of now for the reader. However, the "present movement" has been studied before by- James, Kafka, Fraisse, Merlot-Pontity, called by various names, special present, actual present, perceived present or psychological present.

The Temperal Architect of the Present Moment

The present moment lasts between one and ten seconds, with an average duration of around three to four seconds. But in themselves they do not make life meaningful. We are bombarded with almost constant sequence of smaller units. These sequences must get chunked into larger units more suited to adaption. Several words are chunked to make a single psychological aggregate, the phrase. A major task for the mind is to make sense of the almost uninterrupted flow of stimulation. The phrase is the smallest chunk that gives us the maximum meaning to get by in the world of language, we can find the same parameters, Stern tells us in music, poetry, dance, gesture, kinetics and discourse. Each discipline that deals with the flow of several events in time, has had to deal with the flow of social events in time has had to deal with this problem on it's own terms. Longer continuos present moments are sought in meditative states achieved through various techniques practiced in traditions such as various religious such as Buddhism or when one enters what has been called the "flow" of optimal experiences. Similarly, some of the moments that Virginia Woolf has called "moments of being" can't last much longer. p.42

As William James puts it, "like a birds life, the stream of consciousness, seems to be made up of an alternation of flights and perchings. The present moments are the perchings. The flights are the spaces between moments of consciousness that are part of the present moment; these flights are inaccessible". Consciousness is thus left to switch focus from one present moment to the next; and the sense of the self as experiences is never felt to be interrupted, even though the perchings are discontinuous . These present moments are the stuff of subjectivity during or ordinary mental states. p. 43

The ten second limit of present moments does not mean that there are not larger time units made up of several present moments chunked together. This is the case of music and elsewhere. The same grouping has to be solved for activities such as movement, ritual and dance. p.46

The authors glossary on page 241 is particularly useful with pages from 241 to 247. Page 75 to 112 covers the Intersubjective nature. And page 112 to 149 covers implicit knowing. Page 149-197 covers the past and present moment.

The author tells us 1) There must be a reason to create the story, or become aware of the story being lived. Something must happen to bring it to psychological life. The trigger can be novelty or the unexpected, a problem, a conflict, or some kind of trouble or upset that wants a resolution. Second, stories are structured around a plot. They contain a who, what, why, where and how that make all of the elements of story collide. They are the stuff of novels, myths, legal criminal cases and clinical life narratives. p.57

Vitality affects p.62

Vitality affects were first introduced to explain the mothers affection attachment to her infant, as an early form of inter-subjectivity. A smile seen on another face has a distinct temporal contour that takes time to form. It grows one might say crescades in perhaps a second or so, reaches a high point of fullness of display, which is held for a moment with small modulators and then decompresses over, say, a second, this discomposition can be rapid, like a shut down, or slow, like a fade out, or anywhere in between. The who performance flows together as one uninterrupted, several second stimulus package. p.63

The feeling quality of vitality affects is best captured by kinetic terms such as surging, fading away, fleeting explosive, tentative, effortful, accelerating, climaxing, bursting, drawn out, reaching, hesitating, leaning forward, leaning back, and so forth. p.64

From the moment of birth, we have contentious daily exposure to these experiences in the form of breathing, sucking, urinating and defecating, swallowing, having cramps and so on- already has its own temporal contour and vitality effect .p.64

There are many parts not done in my study of the Present Moment. This is because I have gotten side tracked in my studies of a work called "Highlights of the Science and Clinical Implications of the Meditation Conference". An Interview of Investigation of the Mind-2005 meeting of the Dalai Lama- prepared by the Mind and Life Institute. This DVD starts with the first line saying " We now have all the pieces in place". I wish I could say the same about my own work! But my own work must stop here, to be completed at another time and another place where you can learn more about mirror neurons, adaptive oscillators and tax therapy. (Internal timing mechanism.)


Learning to be Old

Margaret Cruiksbank

Sickness and Other Social Roles of the Old

One mark of the social construction of againg is overemphasis on bodily decline. The meaning of old age then becomes physical loss. When the old are reduced to deteriorating bodies (which change in infinitely varied ways), they can easily be marginalized. No one regards childhood or adolescence solely on physical condition. Seeing old age in this narrow way has many consequences, of which the most is the medicalization of aging.


The Sick Role

 Thirty years ago, the distinguished anthropologist Margaret Clark pointed out that the old in the US have only one important social function: getting sick. This viewpoint is even more persuasive today because of the increasingly large role that corporate health care plays in aging, both in shaping public policy and in limiting individual choice. In America, where usefulness is defined as productivity, many of the old do not appear to themselves or others as useful because their paid work role has ended. In a market economy, however, the old do produce something of great monetary value: illness. The business of the old is to be sick.

Families assume that an elderly parent needs more drugs than before simply because she is old, and this assumptions shared by nurses, doctors, and social workers.

Without her pain, how would she present herself? The woman's pain is a physical condition, but the meaning she gives it is culturally determined. In a society where sickness conferred no status she might experience pain, but its meaning would be slightly compared to it's very large meaning in modern America.

Learning to be old, then, means knowing that late-life illness has both cultural and biological origins. It means believing in one's capacity to recover completely from illness, accident, or disease in the face of skepticism or insensitivity from families and doctors. It means knowing that political and economic institutions are structured to offer some support for the sick old but very little for their health maintenance or improvement.


Overmedicating Old Americans

 People over sixty-five make up 12.4 percent of the population according to the 2000 census, but 34 percent of the prescription drugs (some estimates say 45 percent). The exorbitant cost of drugs finally caught the attention of editorial writers and politicians. Stories describe busloads of elders going to Canada and Mexico to buy cheaper medications, choosing between food and medicine, or taking lower doses than prescribed. Some woman reported that they could afford to fill their husbands prescriptions but not their own. Drug costs have been rising 15-20 percent each year, totaling $131.9 billion in 2000 and prompting predictions that total American health care costs would double 2010 (McQueen, A3). Older American paid twice as much for out-of-pocket health care expenses in 1999 as they had paid in 1987 (Knight and Avorn, 111). Some face an annual drug bill of several thousand dollars and man find the situation intolerable.

Overmedicating the old results from three interlocking problems:

  1. The multinational drug industry has the money and power to control markets and heavily influence the way Americans think about aging.
  2. As medicine and gerontology have increasingly become advocates of prescription-drugged aging, they have exaggerated the benefits of drugs, downplayed the risks, and left unexamined the assumption that multiple drug use promotes healthy aging.
  3. The opposing, countercultural view is not taken seriously by professionals or by mainstream media.

Changes with Age

 Changes in height and weight as we age influence our reactions to drugs. Because the metabolism slows down and organs tend to function less efficiently, drug can have a very powerful impact on aging bodies. Loss of lean body mass affects the way we retain and eliminate drugs. In women, the percentage of body fat goes up from about 36 percent to 48 percent and consequently, fat-soluble drugs like sedatives and anti-anxiety medications are more concentrated in fatty tissue (Drugs and Older Woman, 5). Blood vessels stiffen and decreased blood flow impedes the circulation of drugs and nutrients. Cerebral blood flow decreases by 25 percent. With less water in our bodies, drugs are more concentrated. Kidneys do not filter as well in the old, resulting in drug accumulation. Decreased liver function can affect the way some drugs are metabolized, leading to toxic levels (Cameron, p.10). The brains of older people are more sensitive to drug side effects than younger brains (Lamy, 1988, p.9).

Because the lining of our intestinal walls loses cells as we age, we cannot absorb what we take in as efficiently as before, and because our stomachs empty more slowly, drugs remain in them longer (Bonner and Harris, 90). Age changes in hormones mean that drugs have stronger impact on us. The elderly are more likely to develop drug-induced hypoglycemia (Lamyu, 1986, p.123). If poor diet causes protein deficiency, the impact of a drug may be intensified (Beizer, p.14).


Adverse Drug Reactions

 Each year 100,000 Americans or more die of adverse drug reactions, 1 million are severely injured, and 2 million are harmed while they are hospitalized, making ill effects from drugs one of the greatest dangers in modern society and one of the leading causes of death, according to Thomas J. Moore, an authority on prescription drugs (1998, 15). Approximately 17 percent of hospital admissions of people over seventy are caused by adverse reactions to drugs.

Of all the adverse consequences of drugs, the effect on cell division is probably the danger most underestimated, according to Thomas J. Moore. It may result in large numbers of bone marrow injuries (1998, p.108). When cell birth and death are disrupted, cancer, birth defects, and blood disorders may result (1998,p. 92). In a nationwide sample of more than 6,000 people, 23 percent received drugs that were inappropriate.


The Drug Industry

 Americans pay 38 percent more for drugs than Europeans (Trager, A13) and wholesale drug price differences between the US and countries such as Canada and Australia range from 25% to 68% higher (Researchers, 8A). Drug company propagandists do not mention either that industry research is heavily subsidized by taxpayers or that the "me to" drugs flooding the market are designed not to create new medical knowledge but to increase their profits. Patents on drugs are monopolies that let pharmaceuticals companies raise prices higher than free market levels (Sager and Socolar, p.29).


Belated Social and Cultural Issues

 American are well known for liking quick fixes, and taking a drug for a medical problem is certainly easier than changing diet, increasing exercise, or reducing stress. This cultural preference for a fast solution may predispose elders to expect doctors to prescribe drugs for them and to fell disregarded if they are given none.


 The Women Who Came to Help

 In the many months that I have been here my own condition has gotten worse. I am now in an electric wheelchair. This has required the use of 24 hour care-giver services. The women who have come here to help have had children of all ages, with many concerns of their own and vary in ages 20 to 60. One, an organic farmer, expecting her first child soon, another with a child with severe autism, another living with her daughter, a student nurse, another raising three children of her sister's whose husband is abusive. Another has two siblings, an older and a younger brother. She is sure the older one is smarter, he gets higher grades easily. She describes herself as the dumber one, "but I am helpful, outgoing, generous and talkative, but I don't like change". Today's was interested in reading this website, and many books in my library having to do with neuroplasticity. She borrowed the book "Change Your Mind, Change Your Life". Another has just purchased 2 Persian cats, one names Angelo and the other one Cleo. She cannot wait until she can get home and see her babies; and to see how bad they've been with one another.

All of these women felt they have been made for this work.