Jean Jacques Rousseau and his Noble Savage. The supposed “enlightened” thinking, of liberal democratic godfathers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant filled with racist delusions. At the opposing spectrum is a Martin Heidegger and the counter-enlightenment which was basically philosophic propaganda in a different key. One get the impression that these allegedly liberating and emancipatory movements, rather than being opposed are actually complicit in arriving at similar goals. The means may vary but in the goals, there is a locus of commonality concealed deeply in the nature characterized by an opacity of the teachings within the darkness of the phenomenon…
Les Ballets Africains. Attired as a bird, with tail flying and beak fastened atop their heads, hunters in Cameroon can hurl themselves with exultation into the dusty air. They are dancers. Dancing as naturally as they walk, and dancing from childhood; a body language as complex and inscrutable as any other, multiple meanings and nuances that have evolved since the dawn of time.
---Yes, exchange. The worth of music and dance and economic relationships are extremely revealing and extremely complicated to understand. One case was when an extended family from Kenga, which was sort of a sub village of Bagandou about 15 km away, came to be initiated or inducted into Mabo, the hunting dance that was current at the time. And in the camp where I was living were the masters of that particular dance. So the Kenga BaAka came to my home camp to be inducted or initiated into Mabo so that their hunting would be more effective. That is part of the connection between the dance and the hunting, is that it makes your hunt more efficacious. So the idea is you have to give up something in order to get inducted, because you're getting something very valuable, both culturally in terms of beauty, but also in terms of your economic well-being, your success in the hunt.---Read More:http://www.afropop.org/multi/interview/ID/185
For some time, the West has been introduced to these dancers, mostly gathered from villages in west Africa, dazzling broadway style shows that one would have to have had a hip replacement not to feel like moving. The dances of the coastal region differ from the more inland regions as the people differ, but there is something common to all African dance: its expression of life.
The dance in Africa is still ritual, still magic, and is the simple expression of freedom, but not an unbounded freedom, but one linked in a long chain to a sophisticated belief system, grounded in a tradition of sort, even if a paganistic expression of joy in life, there is an attachment to an oral tradition.
----Cameroonian dancers from the Mabeas tribe. Dance is an essential part of many celebrations such as weddings and coronations. groups. Ancestors may be remembered in oral literature (the Fulani), buried in elaborate tombs in the family courtyard (Catholic Ewondo), or reburied and provided offerings of prayer, food, and shelter (the Bamiléké). The Fulani, like other Muslims, believe in an afterlife of material rewards for those who obey Allah's laws. Read more: Culture of Cameroon - history, people, clothing, traditions, women, beliefs, food, customs, family http://www.everyculture.com/Bo-Co/Cameroon.html#ixzz1r54YKneU---
It is more basic, less fettered than the dance of races and nations for who dance has become the formal expression of ideas as art. It is the hunter celebrating his kill; it is a girl wooing her prospective mate; it is the spontaneous thanksgiving of a people to the god who has given rain. Of course, globalization and pop culture will makes a “Society of the Spectacle” making a commodity out of a contrived nostalgia and sentimentality, but there remains something there, indestructible that will remain, a still small voice….
---A third praises his opposition to nihilism, an odd compliment for a conservative, nationalist thinker whose antihumanistic apotheosis of ruler over ruled helped grease the path of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Next month Yale University Press will issue an English-language translation of Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy, by Emmanuel Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris at Nanterre. It's the latest, most comprehensive archival assault on the ostensibly magisterial thinker who informed Freiburg students in his infamous 1933 rectoral address of Nazism's "inner truth and greatness," declaring that "the Führer, and he alone, is the present and future of German reality, and its law."---Read More:http://chronicle.com/article/Heil-Heidegger-/48806/ image:http://thesecretlifeofobjects.wordpress.com/category/guinea/
ADDENDUM:
( see link at end) … Immanuel Kant: In the hot countries the human being matures in all aspects earlier, but does not, however, reach the perfection of those in the temperate zones. Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The
oes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples…The Moors and the other peoples between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn can run quite astonishingly. They as well as other savages have more strength than the other civilized Peoples, which stems from the free movement allowed them in their childhood. The Hottentots can perceive a ship with the naked eye at the same distance as a European can with a telescope. The women in the hottest parts of the world already produce children at the age of 9 or 10 and finish before they are 25 years old.
Don Ulloa remarks that in Cartagena in America and in the surrounding areas people become clever very early but they do not continue to grow in intelligence at the same rate. All inhabitants of the hottest zones are exceptionally lethargic. With some this laziness is somewhat mitigated by rule and force….
…Montesquieu is correct in his judgment that the weakheartedness that makes death so terrifying to the Indian or the Negro also makes him fear many things other than death that the European can withstand. The Negro slave from Guinea drowns himself if he is to be forced into slavery. The Indian women burn themselves. The Carib commits suicide at the slightest provocation. The Peruvian trembles in the face of an enemy, and when he is led to death, he is ambivalent, as though it means nothing. His awakened imagination, however, also makes him dare to do something, but the heat of the moment is soon past and timidity resumes its old place again…
The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world, above all the central part, has a more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world.Read More:http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/03/29/enlightenment-racism/
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Charles M. Six is willing to accept black cowardice and southern European superiority in exchange for northern European stupidity and possible cowardice. On the other hand, he describes the dissenting philosopher David Hume as follows:
In 1748… David Hume — ignoring or blatantly lying about history — demonstrated the ridiculous propaganda that was accepted by an unknowing public with the following quote: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all the other species of men, to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even say individual eminent in action or speculation.” Sadly this type of propaganda was accepted among white Europeans; they just didn’t know any better. Unfortunately the propaganda led whites to discriminate and commit violence against people with darker skin tones, especially blacks, because of lies like the one above. Read More:http://unamusementpark.com/2011/03/why-the-filthy-savage-does-not-deserve-your-sympathy/
Are the hipsters just bastard offspring of the Enlightenment:
Allen Ginsberg ( Howl):
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,…
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