rebeccacider's review against another edition

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2.0

Didn't end up finishing this! Many of the essays were very enjoyable and weave together linguistics, existentialism, theology, anthropology, and literary criticism. The book as a whole is something of a love letter to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the author has interesting things to say about the extent to which we can say meaningful things about the world, explain scientific behavior in a world of cultural relativity, and whether "scientific" solutions to problems actually make people happy.

However, some of his arguments feel as dated as the sixties and seventies "science will cure everything" belief that he is critiquing, and near the end he seems overly interested in trying to describe and solve human problems with a "normative" anthropology that will somehow be different from the prescriptive science he decries. I got bored and confused, and decided to return the book to the library.

bibliocyclist's review

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challenging reflective slow-paced

4.0

Is flesh grass?  “Is looking like sucking: the more lookers, the less there is to see?”  Can our consciousness of the corn dance escape the consciousness of our consciousness, and does this certify the experience or nullify it?  To decide, check out the linguistic and cultural exploration The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy.  Consider yourself adrift down your own Mississippi to the very delta of the mind, and know that “there is always that which lies around the bend.”  Examine what happens when utopias don’t work, recapture a present that is too often surrendered to the past or the future, and gaze upon a literary bonfire in which “words are potent agents and the sparks are bound to fly.”  Delve as deeply as you dare into the self, the other and society, and ask yourself if there is “any difference, no difference, or the greatest possible difference, between that which I privately apprehend and that which I apprehend and you validate by naming in such a way that I am justified in hoping that you ‘mean’ that very ineffable thing?”
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