Culture & Perception

David · 22nd August 2018, 04:28 PM

My humblest apologies Ariel. You are indeed correct that the word "analyical" does appear once in this article. The reason i passed it over may seem odd, but it is actually because that particular passage is enlarged, highlighted and in quotations as if it was pulled from some other part of the article. You might think that would make it more obvious, however i made the wrongheaded assumption that this was an extracted passage from the main article and passed it by assuming it was also included within the article and that i would encounter and read it in context. So there is my "block". My bad. Thank you for pointing it out to me.

That said, i still do not see how this article is posing any of this in a good vs. bad modality. It seems as artifact of your own Western way of thinking that you feel that "analytical" modes of thinking are somehow superior to any other method of approaching a problem. Nor does it say anywhere that Asians are incapable of analytical thinking.
You are also still conflating these concepts of race and culture. What is being discussed here is not how people with a particular skin color or facial features process information. It is the cultures in which we are raised that are being discussed, not the actual ethnicity of the people within those cultures. In indonesia, for instance, you might find people who are ethnic Chinese who were raised within a Javanese cultural mindset. They may not be culturally Chinese at all. This is now the third time i have brought up this point so you will probably ignore it again, but if you take a moment to think about it you may realize that this is not a question of racism at all.
So bottom line here gentlemen... i do not intend to have a discussion here on racism. That is not the issue at hand and i will shut this discussion down if there is an insistence to continue along that tract. It seems completely ignorant to believe that different cultures do not process information and other stimulus in different ways and foolish to think one can understand the ways of foreign cultures without immersing oneself fully in the history, mannerisms and ways of those cultures and acknowledging those differences.

David · 22nd August 2018, 04:55 PM

Ariel, if you have not read "Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali" by Margret Wiener i would highly recommend you give it a go. One thing that becomes really clear throughout is that the Dutch colonists inability to understand the Balinese culture and modalities of thought was indeed disastrous. Though much has changed in our information age and you may wish to believe that in the 21st century the ways in which this culture processes information has been overcome by our own Western methods i believe you may find you are mistaken.

David · 22nd August 2018, 11:50 PM

And just to bring all things back to the keris, which is, i believe we can all agree, the context for what we discuss here, the point Alan is making about understanding the keris, and by extension the system of tangguh, is not only dependent upon understanding the Javanese culture and mindset, but also understanding it as it existed many centuries ago. While it is not doubt true that the world view of many Javanese has been affected and perhaps changed by the dominance of a more Western world view, the keris developed in pre-colonial Jawa and while the tangguh system certainly came along a bit later it was still at a time long before European influences had the chance to Westernize people in the area. I still believe that the general world view of the Javanese people is strongly influenced by the culture of their past at least as much as by the influx of Western thoughts and ideas in the 20th and 21st centuries.

22nd August 2018, 04:28 PM	#1
David Keris forum moderator Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Nova Scotia Posts: 7,250	My humblest apologies Ariel. You are indeed correct that the word "analyical" does appear once in this article. The reason i passed it over may seem odd, but it is actually because that particular passage is enlarged, highlighted and in quotations as if it was pulled from some other part of the article. You might think that would make it more obvious, however i made the wrongheaded assumption that this was an extracted passage from the main article and passed it by assuming it was also included within the article and that i would encounter and read it in context. So there is my "block". My bad. Thank you for pointing it out to me. That said, i still do not see how this article is posing any of this in a good vs. bad modality. It seems as artifact of your own Western way of thinking that you feel that "analytical" modes of thinking are somehow superior to any other method of approaching a problem. Nor does it say anywhere that Asians are incapable of analytical thinking. You are also still conflating these concepts of race and culture. What is being discussed here is not how people with a particular skin color or facial features process information. It is the cultures in which we are raised that are being discussed, not the actual ethnicity of the people within those cultures. In indonesia, for instance, you might find people who are ethnic Chinese who were raised within a Javanese cultural mindset. They may not be culturally Chinese at all. This is now the third time i have brought up this point so you will probably ignore it again, but if you take a moment to think about it you may realize that this is not a question of racism at all. So bottom line here gentlemen... i do not intend to have a discussion here on racism. That is not the issue at hand and i will shut this discussion down if there is an insistence to continue along that tract. It seems completely ignorant to believe that different cultures do not process information and other stimulus in different ways and foolish to think one can understand the ways of foreign cultures without immersing oneself fully in the history, mannerisms and ways of those cultures and acknowledging those differences.

22nd August 2018, 04:55 PM	#2
David Keris forum moderator Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Nova Scotia Posts: 7,250	Ariel, if you have not read "Visible and Invisible Realms: Power, Magic, and Colonial Conquest in Bali" by Margret Wiener i would highly recommend you give it a go. One thing that becomes really clear throughout is that the Dutch colonists inability to understand the Balinese culture and modalities of thought was indeed disastrous. Though much has changed in our information age and you may wish to believe that in the 21st century the ways in which this culture processes information has been overcome by our own Western methods i believe you may find you are mistaken.

22nd August 2018, 11:50 PM	#3
David Keris forum moderator Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Nova Scotia Posts: 7,250	And just to bring all things back to the keris, which is, i believe we can all agree, the context for what we discuss here, the point Alan is making about understanding the keris, and by extension the system of tangguh, is not only dependent upon understanding the Javanese culture and mindset, but also understanding it as it existed many centuries ago. While it is not doubt true that the world view of many Javanese has been affected and perhaps changed by the dominance of a more Western world view, the keris developed in pre-colonial Jawa and while the tangguh system certainly came along a bit later it was still at a time long before European influences had the chance to Westernize people in the area. I still believe that the general world view of the Javanese people is strongly influenced by the culture of their past at least as much as by the influx of Western thoughts and ideas in the 20th and 21st centuries.