Lecture reflection from week nine's lecture

In this reflection, I am writing while watching the video of the lecture, and find myself unable to write in as personable manner of expression as I usually can. It feels like my mode of expression is naturally happening within an understanding that the authority is with the lecturer, and so I am being less expressive and verbose.

The lecture mentions a modern stream of research into how well young people are sustaining accurate and meaningful communication through the internet. I believe myself that if the internet could convey the full extent of meaning in any human interaction, we would probably already not need a real live lecturer present to learn at university. However I have also read some of the research about internet group interactions, seeming to have no worse results for students, than face to face interactions. What I suspect is that the model of group interaction between students, is already too contrived a sample of human communication, to be an accurate way to compare and contrast the success of internet interactions with face to face close proximity interactions.

The lecture mentions power and how who is holding power and authority, has a definite influence in how communication is transacted. An American anthropologist called Robbie Davis-Floyd, wrote her PhD about the way that birth as a modern American rite of passage, has been establishing society as a technocracy, where all human communication is subservient to the machines that go beep. It is a definitely controversial outlook, however, it was very well received indeed at the midwives conference I attended here in Australia, (in 1998), where Robbie Davis-Floyd presented the major paper.

The lecture mentions names and how we identify with out names, and our internal sensibilities to fitting with our names. The lecturer asked the students a question, from research about names, about whether we would change our name ourselves. This is a matter I have personal experience of to reflect on. I changed my surname about seven years ago, partly as a expression of rebellion against my parents. I was already 34 years old, and so it was a decision I had already been reflecting on for a long time by the time I made it. It was a statement of dissatisfaction with my father over a long time period, and of uncertainty about what level of authority I wanted to let him have. It was also about lacking certainty in respect of having ambivalent feelings about the origins of my father’s surname, which I know the history of. It is the anglicised version of a French Huguenot surname. The Huguenots were French Calvinists, an early form of protestants. And the Marker surname from my father’s family, can be traced to those Huguenots whom were refugees from Germany, who had to leave Germany over their split from the Catholic Church. The Marker’s were the surveyors, and their work was heavily concerned with dispute resolution processes. I am listening to the lecture about how our surnames orient other people’s subconscious into what sort of social status we belong in. The surname Copas I chose to change into, is that of my mother’s mother’s mother’s father’s father, who was a convict. He was convicted for forgery, but there is a family dispute about that, with one part of the family saying he was convicted for stealing a mantle piece clock. However the mantle piece clock story pops up in a few different family contexts, and began around an actual mantle piece clock my mother’s mother had, which my mother and my mother’s brothers, had begun to dispute over the inheritance of, well before my Nana passed away. Henry Copas the convict, has his pardon on record in the NSW state archives, and it is for forgery. He was also a bricklayer and stone mason, and there is a portion of a building he made in the 1850’s which is still standing today, in a place called Merton on the Denman, in the Hunter valley. Merton was the only private village ever built here in Australia. The land is still private property now, but my mother’s older brother has visited the farm where the remaining buildings of the village are. I chose the surname Copas because I liked that story, and I also liked the other one from my great grandmother’s sister, known as Great Aunt Lucy, whom, along with my great grandmother, was still alive when I got born. Great Aunt Lucy was married with a baby, and her husband decided for them to emigrate to South Africa. Great Aunt Lucy travelled ahead of her husband, but when she arrived in Cape Town, there was a telegram waiting for her with news that her husband had died before leaving Australia. However, Great Aunt Lucy remarried not long after, and both herself and the man she married lived to over 100 years old. The man she married has a really good story also. He was an Englishman who went to South Africa prospecting for diamonds. Himself and a friend were working along a valley, and the valley took a fork. His friend took the right fork, and Great Aunt Lucy’s husband took the left fork. He met my Great Aunty Lucy, but it was Mr DeBeers, his friend who found diamonds in the dirt.


I am reflecting upon why I like telling these stories. I think it is about wanting to assert a specific orientation towards the names I have and am known by. This is something I was encouraged to learn how to do, as a way of attaining a higher degree of self knowledge. I’ve been encouraged to learn more of my family history by both the Gurdjieff oriented tradition, and also by those indigenous communities I share kinship orientation with. Traditional indigenous culture is very sensitive to how we name ourselves, and so I also looked up as much as I could about my Christian name, Rebekah. As it turned out, the story which Rebekah has in the Bible, is the same story as the one which I was already aligned into within Warlbiri kinship, as a nungarrayi. That is my Aboriginal “skin” name, in those languages which use the specific set of names which nungarrayi is one of. All nungarrayi’s (and Jungarrayis who are the males), have the same story, and it is just one of those co-incidences that life throws up, that it happens to be a story with the same essential story structure, as the story of Rebekah in the Old Testament of the Bible. My father gave me the name Rebecca, which is how he spelt it on my birth certificate. When I changed my surname, I also changed how I spell Rebekah, only because I had always wanted to have it spelt a fancier way. It was a last minute fancy on the day I paid for the name change certificate, to also change the spelling of Rebekah. As it turns out, there is also another spelling, which is the Hebrew way, in which it is spelt Rivaq. What I have been encouraged in, is learning as much of my family history as possible, so as I know what parts are worth letting my own life story exist in repeats of. The understanding of both traditional Aboriginal culture, and of the Gurdjieff teaching, is that we are all somewhat bound by our heritage, and cannot help but exist in repeats of the stories of our ancestry, but that also, we each have the opportunity to make our life be an improvement on the stories we then pass onto our children; and the best way to enable that improvement, is to model ourselves upon the very best stories which exist among all of our ancestors. The story I chose to use, is that of my mother’s mother’s father, who is actually a Norris, and I chose it because he caught the bubonic plague but survived. The Gurdjieff tradition is strong in teaching that our health in particular is very connected with how our ancestors lived their lives, and there is some modern research corroborating the assertion, in respect of diet. The research was on television one night, showing how the researchers really need the farming records that have been kept in villages where the population has been stable, and of the same or similar ancestry, for enough generations. What they have proven is that famines and excesses in food production in the environment of our ancestors, have effected the constitution of their descendants.

I think this is enough for this reflection, and will try to find some of that research in the internet to make this into an artefact through putting it into a weblog with a link to the research.

Here is a relevant url:
http://www.hypoglycemia.asn.au/articles/hypoglycemic_diet.html


The next thing I found searching was an article in the field of “behavioural ecology”, called “Variation in bushcricket nuptial gifts may be due to common ancestry as taxonomy and diet are almost perfectly confounded.” I decided to include that title because I find it slightly amusing, but have to then say also, that it is well within my own experiences of indigenous Australian culture, to know that it would be absurd to suppose any indigenous cultural traditions were not sensitive to many generations of ancestry when making marriage deals. But normally nobody lets on that much information to anthropologists because anthropologists have trouble believing it. However, the point is that the general picture, of who is a good marriage partner for whom, and what ought to be normal diet for whom, is held to be within one sustainable pattern within both indigenous Australian culture, and within the Gurdjieff tradition. That sort of corroborates my assertion about our ancestry defining contemporary health outcomes through the stories of what has happened to our ancestors, but I know it is barely enough evidence in the modern academic world to even make a hypothesis, however, within the traditions of Aboriginal Australia as I have learned in Kinship among Warlbiri, understanding that our ancestors stories influence our immediate health outcomes, is taken to be such obvious facts of life, that nobody could doubt that the bushcricket nuptial gift patterns are corroborating what I have asserted.

Now the lecture has continued, and in the film with the man giving a public lecture, I think I might be in disagreement with the set of social assumptions in which certain status is being defined by whether a man is clean shaven or not. The lecturer is staying that a man needs to be clean shaven to be seen as the good guy, and that having whiskers makes a man look like a potential villain. I think that is a cultural assumption which is stronger in America than here in Australia, and I am wondering if the research being referred to was research done in America. My own experience is of my father having had a beard for most of my life, and most of my mother’s brothers also having had beards, as well as most of the men I have had relationships with having had beards, and my seventeen year old son now already wanting to keep his whiskers. It is a matter of pride in not being ashamed to show that a face grows hair, as I learned to think of men’s beards. My children’s father is Irish, and he defines the phenomenon of shaving as “the vanity of the English”. I tend to trust men with facial hair uncut, far more readily than men who shave in fact. But I also tend to distrust men whom have much shorter hair on their head than their beard. Somehow the beard’s haircut needs to match the head’s haircut, and that is a strong way I tend to stereotype men as trustworthy or not, rather than by being clean shaven.

In respect of using body language to moderate spoken words, I have noticed in the past, that with my children, at times, how I communicate with them when we are all relaxed and involved in joking sort of behaviour, is in a way where I demonstrate what lying is, and how to catch lies out, by telling an obvious lie, and making the body language which demonstrates it is a lie, very obvious, then we all laugh at whoever could not pick up that it was a lie. It is a behaviour I began automatically, in imitation of how my mother raised me, and it was not until my oldest son was about ten years old, that I began to reflect on what I was doing and analyse it like this.

I don’t want to reflect any more on this lecture now, even though it is still playing, and I am still listening to it.