ワタスゲ の山 6 月 1 週
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○自由な題名
○地域社会
○私の描く未来の社会、紙
○There's a funny story(感) 英文のみのページ(翻訳用)
There's a funny story that anthropologists tell to demonstrate how many different ways the same things can be named and classified, depending on the culture doing the naming. A group of anthropologists were giving a sort of IQ test to a band of tribesmen. The purpose of the test (and there really is such a test) is to see how someone will group a collection of twenty different objects drawn from four classes: food, tools, cooking implements, and clothes. The test predicts that the more intelligent individual will, for example, group apples and oranges under "foods" and knives and forks under "cooking implements."
In this particular test, the tribesmen consistently chose the "less intelligent" classification, however, grouping knives with oranges rather than with forks. After each classification, they would chant together a phrase in their own language that in translation might run, "This is how a wise man would do this." The anthropologists administering the test finally became irritated and asked the tribesmen "how a damned fool would do it." They immediately regrouped the knives with the forks and the apples with the oranges.
The moral of the story has partly to do with the different ways that various cultures classify the same things and partly with a sense of cultural superiority that causes one culture -- ours -- to judge the intelligence of other cultures by its own standards. It happens to be the case that our western approach to classification is an abstract one; we tend to group things together as concepts rather than as things. A knife, for instance, is a very concrete object and so is a fork, but an "eating implement" is a conceptual abstraction, a generalization rather than a thing. Our understanding of the actual knife and fork, in other words, is shaped by a cultural code that groups things conceptually and abstractly, and we expect all other "intelligent" people to understand such things in the same way.
But can't we look at knives and forks differently? After all, you use a knife, not a fork, to cut an orange, and so there would seem to be a perfectly good -- and intelligent -- reason for grouping the knife with the orange rather than with the fork. This, in fact, is precisely what the tribesmen in the story did: they classified the objects placed before them according to their concrete relations to each other. A knife, in other words, is concretely related to an orange because it is used for the physical act of cutting. Within the terms of a cultural code made up of concrete rather than abstract ideas, it is perfectly reasonable, and only common sense, to group the knife with the orange.
Even the most trivial of classifications can be seen sometimes to conceal a particular point of view. Several years ago, for example, the U.S. government created something of a sensation when it decided to classify tomato ketchup as a "vegetable" in order to save money on school lunch programs. At the time, a feeble attempt was made to defend this reclassification of ketchup from "table sauce" to "vegetable" on the grounds that since ketchup is made from tomatoes (which means, of course, that it is really derived from "fruit," but that's another issue) it could be seen as belonging to one of the four major food groups (which, if you're old enough to remember, were once the seven major food groups: meat, fish, dairy products, grains, green vegetables, yellow vegetables, and fruit). This attempt to change a classification was quickly abandoned, however, in the face of protests from parents and sneers from administration critics.
In the ketchup case, we find the conflict of two political interests. One believes that it is not the role of government to aid nutritional programs, and one believes that it is. From the former perspective, there may be a need to reclassify ketchup, but the decision to do so is determined by political rather than natural reasons. Conversely, keeping ketchup in its place as a "sauce" can also be seen to be a political decision because there is nothing to prevent us from viewing it as "food." It does have some nutritional value. The question is simply where we draw the line, and where that line is drawn will be determined by our interests, not by some "natural" power outside those interests.
In fact, all the most basic distinctions represent some human interest. Is a one-minute pause in a school classroom a "moment of silence" or a constitutionally forbidden "prayer"? Is a fifteen-year-old killer an "adult" or a "juvenile"? Are nuclear arms "offensive weapons" or "peace-keepers"? In each of these controversies you will find two sides equally certain that their designation is the right one, that they alone have drawn the line strictly according to the "truth." It would be nice if the truth were that easy to come upon, but in each of these cases the line we draw is only ideologically true.
The interests served by a classification scheme can sometimes be harmlessly personal. I was once told the story of a certain retired Harvard professor who, somewhat against his own more idle inclinations, had been persuaded by his wife to take up the fashionable hobby of bird watching. Wishing to avoid the labor of having to distinguish among, and remember the names of, too many species, he radically simplified the usual scheme by employing only four basic names for the classes of birds he was able (or willing) to recognize. These four classes included "crows," "gulls and robins," "small brown birds," and "other." That simplified things. Crows, gulls, and robins are easy to spot. So are small brown birds. Anything more complicated -- say, a scarlet ibis can be effortlessly put into the class of "other." But even this harmless approach to classifying animals contains ideological implications. As long as we are only talking about recreational bird-watchers, there's no problem at all. But if the question of where to draw the line appears in the context of a controversy over environmental protection, it can be quite another matter.
In the mid-1970's, for instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority's plan to build a dam on the Little Tennessee River was halted when it was discovered that the dam would threaten the survival of several local species such as the snail darter. Proponents of the dam argued that the snail darter was not an endangered species since there were plenty of closely related darter species scattered throughout the region. Opponents of the dam argued conversely that the snail darter was an irreplaceable component of the biological diversity of the earth and was accordingly covered by the Endangered Species Act of 1973'. The differing political interests of each camp were reflected in the way each chose to classify the darter. The pro-dam forces took a more general approach -- once you've seen one darter you've seen them all -- while the anti-dam forces insisted on detail. The whole issue depended on where you chose to draw the line. The line was finally drawn, and the snail darter was saved.
One reason we disagree so often on where to draw the line is because there are so many different ways to categorize objects and images. Thus, we usually classify them in terms of how they affect and serve our individual or cultural interest. An individual horse, for example, can be classified in quite a number of ways that are not all necessarily biologically based. There's nothing to stop us from seeing a horse as a rather oversized, short-eared donkey -- after all, with a little help from a breeder, horses and donkeys can interbreed -- but that would decrease the value of horseflesh, which would hardly be in the interest of the horse-breeding industry.
But what about the horse's potential to end up on your dinner plate? We eat cattle, after all, and horses, like cattle, are grazing animals generally classed as fit for the table within the terms of our code of cooking. This is the way the French draw the line to include the horse in the class of meats suitable for eating, and if you were a horsemeat butcher with an interest in opening up the U.S. market with fillet de cheval, you'd want to get Americans to think this way too.
How we choose to classify things may seem to be a trivial matter, but its implications can be very serious. For when one powerful group of people classifies another less powerful group as either inferior, or, even worse, not quite human at all, the result can be deadly. We only need to look at what happened to the American Indians in the nineteenth century, or to the European Jews in the twentieth century to see what horrible disasters can result from classifying human beings into groups.

anthropologist 人類学者
ibis トキ科の鳥
Tennessee Valley Authority テネシー渓谷開発公社(TVA)
snail darter タニシを常食とするスズキ科の小魚
Endangered Species Act of 1973 1973年の絶滅の危機にある種の法
fillet de cheval [フランス語]馬のヒレ肉

★美とは、本来、自然の(感)
【一番目の長文は暗唱用の長文で、二番目の長文は課題の長文です。】
 【1】ケンタウロスは、人間の上半身に馬の胴と脚がついた生き物だ。人魚姫は、人間の上半身に魚の胴と尾がついている。インドのガネーシャは、人間の身体にゾウの顔がついている。これらの不思議な神話上の生物を作る技術を、現代のバイオテクノロジーは手に入れつつある。【2】科学の進歩は、科学の悪用の可能性と不可分の関係にある。その典型的な分野のひとつが、核物理学である。物質が持っている膨大な熱量の可能性を、人間はエネルギーとして利用することもできるし、兵器として利用することもできる。【3】同様のことが、バイオテクノロジーの未来についても言えるのではないか。
 バイオテクノロジーの今後の発展から予想される第一の問題は、できることとやっていいことは違うという区別の基準がまだはっきりしていないことである。【4】遺伝子の解析技術が発展すれば、各種の遺伝的な疾病の改善には役立つだろう。しかし、それは遺伝的素質による就職や結婚の差別を生み出すことにもつながる可能性がある。人類のこれまでの歴史は、無条件に病気を悪、健康を善としてきた。【5】しかし、不老不死が技術的に可能になりつつある時代に大切なのは、いかに生きるかという技術よりもいかによりよく生きるかという哲学である。自然界を見ればわかるように、生き物はみな成長し子孫を残し年老いて死んでいく。【6】永遠の生命を求めることは、大きく見れば自然の摂理に反することではないだろうか。自然の摂理と人間の倫理の統合がこれから求められてくる。
 問題点の第二は、科学の発達による恩恵が強力なものであればあるほど、あとでその弊害がわかったときに、手後れとなることも多いということである。【7】特に、生命に関することについては、人間の知識は肝心なことは何もわかっていないと言ってよい。生命を生み出す知識さえないのに、生命を部分的に操作する技術だけはあるという状態が最も危険なのだ。【8】この危険性を防ぐためには、多様性の確保を技術の発達以上に優先することだ。農業の品種改良で、F1雑種による成果が取り上げられることは多いが、それが地域固有種の絶滅に結びつくようなことがあってはならない。大きな恩恵は、大きな弊害と裏腹の関係にある。∵
 【9】バイオテクノロジーは大きな可能性を秘めている。それは、肉体の変容だけでなく、精神の変容に生かすことさえできるようになるだろう。大切なのは、その可能性を発展させるか、その危険性を抑止するかということではない。【0】どのような技術も、それを生かす社会の仕組みによって、人間を助ける乗り物にもなれば、人間を傷つける武器にもなる。ケンタウロスや人魚姫やガネーシャが人間と一緒に暮らすようになってもよい。しかし、大事なことは、すべての生物が自分の存在に自信と誇りと喜びを感じて生きていくための技術でなければならないということである。

(言葉の森長文作成委員会 Σ)∵
 【1】美とは、本来、自然の造化による創造物の性質を言いあらわす言葉である。自然はその創造するすべてのものに、美という性質のほかは与えない。もとよりそれは、美という性質を与えようと自然が望んだ結果与えられた性質ではなく、自性としてそうなった性質である。【2】たとえば、花はどんな種類の花でも同じ美という性質を持っている。そしてその美しさは、花が自然の造化によって生れたために、本質的にそなわっている性質なのである。それを私たちは美と呼ぶのだ。
 【3】美はだから、人間の存在以前から、滅亡のあとまで、自然が存在して造化を続ける限り、人間に関係なく持続し続ける性質であることを、確かに承知し直さなければならない。この美に惹かれ、あやかろうとして、人間は創作活動を営んだ。【4】東洋的な考えかたでは、自然美を手本とすることで人間の造型活動が行われ、西洋的な意図では、自然美を補いあるいは自然美を超越する造型美を得ようとして、造型活動が営まれてきた。【5】概括的な言い方ではあるけれども、その永い歴史において生み出されてきた造型作品の美しさとは、畢竟人間の能力が自然の造化の力に立ち向かって、どこまで肉迫(にくはく)し得たかの記録にほかならない。芸術美とか、個性美とか、言葉の綾はいくらでも織れる。【6】しかし人間の造型の美しさは、自然美の前では多くは低い次元の美であった。なぜ低い次元の美と言わざるを得ないのか。究極性、価値性において、それは相対性の範囲内にとどまりがちだからである。
 【7】自然の美の本質は、美醜の対立を超越したところにある。自然には醜いものがない。醜いものに対する美しいものがあるのではなくて、どんなものもそのままの性質において美しいのだ。この超越性の故に自然美は究極の美であり得る。【8】しかるに人間の造型美は、人間が持つところの意識や欲望や迷妄や懐疑、その他もろもろの執着心の規制を、どうしても受けざるを得ない。美しいものを作ろうとする意識、美しいものを作ることで自分の才能をひろく一般に認めさせようという欲望、【9】生きることについてのさまざまの迷妄、存在に関する懐疑、要するに仏教の言う煩悩は、ただ生み出すだけの自然の無心の美を、人間の創造に容易に許してくれな∵いのである。規制され限定された美、人間の個性の範囲の美、特殊な性質の美。【0】それらはいずれも醜()の対立概念としての美にとどまって、自然美の超越性にまで到達することが困難なのである。
 無論、それを可能にした時と場合もあった。人間が煩悩を脱した状態でものを作る場合、自然と同じような無心の行為をとり得た場合、そこには美醜の二元を越えた美が生れ得た。原始の美、宗教造型の美、民芸の美、そして個人の能力が煩悩を超克した美。それらは自然美と同じような性質をあらわしていることを、私たちは容易に知ることができる。
 けれども、近代に始まった美術は、当初から人間の能力に絶対的な信頼をおいて出発したものであり、才能と個性への賛美によって貫かれてきた。自我を基調とし、煩悩を素材とする方向を目指してきた。人間性の認識を目途とする近代の成行は、人間の作り出す美にしか関心を示さず、視界に入れなくなってしまった。美の基準は個性におかれ、醜()と対立する美という範囲内でしか考えられなくなり、自ら美の次元を低い段階に限定する状態となったのであった。

(水尾比呂志「美の終焉」より)