Blog number eight (oh my!)

Walsh Part IV:

When I read Devilization then my eyes skimmed the page and focused on “Christian,” I giggled.
Only because I had the feeling they condemned shamans. It’s silly and sad they got away with it as well. To assume they are demons? Come on.

Page 90, paragraph two struck me. It just points out how we think what they do is strange because it doesn’t fall into our societies norm. But the fact that we remain skeptical of their practices makes us strange to them. It makes sense and I definitely agree. It’s important to understand other cultures in their own context. Americans are ethnocentric. It’s pretty sad.

The talk of shamans in the psychological world makes me laugh because I have a minor in Psychology so I have an understanding of that type of perspective. It wasn’t really intentional, but anyway, I get how they think shamans are crazy and hysterical, schizophrenic and all the psychological jargon that goes along with it. I don’t agree with it either. I think it’s a bit ridiculous for us to judge another culture by our standards and what we think is “mentally healthy.” And how can they be tested psychologically when what they do is what they do. Not what we do. What my psychology teachers had pointed out to me in class was DSM-IV is biased towards men. There are plenty of legit criticisms on it. So technically, we aren’t even accurately diagnosing people right in the first place.


Hughes Chapter six:

Gee, I like this book because it’s filled with pictures to occupy my short attention span. Way to be entertaining. Thanks book. The creative personality profile on Pablo Picasso was neat to read. I liked the quote about him, “The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge himself of his sensations and visions.”Sensations and visions, meaning his paintings could have been pictures he saw in his head. Hm.

The picture of Renoir made me sad. His knuckles were bulbous looking and his fingers were bent and crippled. Looking at his hands hurt my hands. But, it made me sad that happened to his hands because he loved painting so much. That is like a musician losing his or her hearing. Life had gone on for Renoir; he strapped his paintbrushes to his hands so he could still paint. Awww.

“The concentrated effort of writing makes one completely forget for the time being that one has a body.” Sometimes I do feel all brain all the time. This semester I’ve gone into writing overdrive. There’s Kareithi boot camp, The Capital Times, this blog, my personal blog that is neglected, critiques for my photography class yadda yadda yadda. Having spent so much time in my head, I liked this bit about British Poet Stephen Spender on page 86.