Moreover, it is apparently impermissibly anachronistic or imperialistic or somehow wrong to use a potentially ambiguous word to describe someone that some people might use a different way, even if explain what you mean and don't mean by using that word. The only words you can use to describe people in these other cultures, whatever they are, are theirs. Which means, of course, that we have to talk about Alexander in ancient, uh, Macedonian? Greek? Persian? Because of course all modern English words, tied so tightly as they are into "our" culture, whatever that is, are hopeless misleading.
Ipso facto: there were no classes before capitalism, ranks, etates, maybe, etc. To say that serfs were a class is like` saying that a hunter gatherer was a capitalist.
Please explain to me, Miles, why these standard objections to the extreme Winch-Wittgenstein linguistic relativism you are advocating don't commit you to these reductios, or why they aren't reductios.
--- Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > Bristle away, Miles. People didn't think of
> themselves
> > as in "classes" or having "governments." Or, if
> > Foucault is right, as individual people. Why do we
> > have to take their own seld-description as the
> last
> > word? Gay is what we call people who prefer same
> > saexrelationships. Absolutely bothing wrong with
> > saying Alexander the Great was gay, as long as we
> make
> > the obvious caveats about the facts that he say
> thsi
> > differently than we do and it played it a dfferent
> > role in his societ(ies). (Which were what:
> Macedonian?
> > Greek? Hellene? Mediterranean? Persian? Afghan
> --oops!
> > Bactrian. Indian? Mesopotaniam? North Afriacn?
> > Egyptiab? Something he created from all the
> above?)
> > This is so obvious I can't believe I have to say
> it on
> > a list full of Marxists who basically live by
> > vcaharctertizing people in ways they would reject,
> not
> > understand, and even find highly objectionable.
> Who do
> > you think you are, Peter Winch?
>
> Calling Alexander the Great "gay" is precisely
> analogous to calling
> someone in a hunting and gathering society who wants
> to accumulate
> wealth a capitalist. From the perspective of people
> in a hunting and
> gathering society, there can be no such thing as a
> capitalist, because
> the social relations do not exist that make that
> social status real in
> that society (substantial economic surplus,
> technology, government
> infrastructure to protect property rights, etc.).
> --And just so with
> being "gay": without a specific constellation of
> socal relations, there
> cannot be "gay" people, regardless of the sexual
> behavior or desires of
> people in that society.
>
> --Simple example: many societies with same-sex
> sexual activity have no
> words that corresponds to our notion of the stable
> sexual categories
> "straight" and "gay" (e.g., the Sambia). Sure, they
> have words for
> various types of same-sex and opposite-sex sexual
> relations, but it is
> literally impossible to identify someone as a "gay"
> or "straight" person
> with an exclusive, stable sexual identity. In this
> social context, it
> is pointless for us to describe people in that
> society using our sexual
> categories.
>
> This thread reminds me of Marx, perhaps in a
> different sense than Justin
> suggests: just as people create religious
> institutions, and then
> prostate themselves before the deity they created,
> people create social
> categories and then assume that categories existed
> prior to the social
> activity that made the categories possible! Social
> relations are
> creative, in the literal sense: they can generate
> new ways of thinking,
> new patterns of behavior, new types of people. I
> have no compulsion to
> be a doctrinaire Marxist, but I don't think you can
> get much more
> Marxist than that!
>
> Miles
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