Tuesday, July 14, 2009

The Biotope of Homo Sapien


Edward T. Hall

From The Hidden Dimension (Anchor Books, 1966)

Believing humans to be first and foremost a biological organism...
 
"... man has created a new dimension, the cultural dimension.  The relationship between man and the cultural dimension is one in which both man and his environment participate in molding each other.  Man is now in the position of actually creating the total world in which he lives, what the ethologists (scientists who study animal behavior and the relation of organisms to their environment) refer to as his biotope.  In creating this world he is actually determining what kind of an organism he will be."

What kind of biotope are we, as organisms, creating for ourselves? And what kinds of people are produced through our modifications to the natural world?  As we become increasingly dependent on the institutions we ourselves have created to inhabit and structure our lives, how free are we to act naturally?  Stay in the lane, cross with the signal, stay off my property; why do we honor these rules when we never asked for them in the first place? 











1 comment:

  1. So--how is this going? Did you find a way to narrow/focus the topic? Still working with freeways?

    ReplyDelete

 
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