English I. Listening Script ➁. PDF version. all-todai.com

Transcription

1 English I Listening Script ➁ PDF version all-todai.com January 26, 2004

2 CONTENTS 1 Why Do We Laugh? 1 Introduction Listening Practice On Jabberwocky 2 Introduction Listening Practice The Light of Common Day 4 Introduction Listening Practice Natural Selection 5 Introduction Listening Practice Agriculture s Mixed Blessing 6 Introduction Listening Practice Against Focused Attention 7 Introduction Listening Practice The Flesh of Language 8 Introduction Listening Practice The Fabrication of Race 10 Introduction Listening Practice Multiple Personality 11 Introduction Listening Practice The Pleasure of Music 13 Listening Practice The Imam and the Indian 15 Introduction Listening Practice Sarajevo: Survival Guide Introduction Listening Practice The Birth of Fractal Geometry 17 Introduction Listening Practice The Return of Depression Economics 19 Introduction Listening Practice Time in Medieval Europe 20 Introduction Listening Practice Arresting the Flux of Life 22 Introduction Listening Practice Our Myriad-Dressed Shakespeare 23 Introduction Listening Practice The Jurassic According to Hollywood 25 Introduction Listening Practice The New Age of Man 26 Introduction Listening Practice The Thrill of Fear 27 Introduction Listening Practice Copyright by Department of English, The University of Tokyo, Komaba. The original listening tape unofficially transcribed into text by Les Alyscamps. That text edited, proofread and converted into PDF by all-todai.com.

3 SESSION 1 WHY DO WE LAUGH? SESSION 1 Why Do We Laugh? THIS is a scene from an old American situation comedy, I Love Lucy. Here, in a Japanese style hotel in Tokyo, as Americans in the early sixties imagined it, Lucy and her friend Ethel find out that a famous movie star is staying in the next room, just on the other side of the paper wall. Hi. Hi. I m Lucy Ricardo. And I m Ethel Mertz. Umm... You re Bob Cummings! Yes, why, we know you anywhere. Forgive me... for not getting up! Oh, that s all right. Well, the movie star is only apologizing, and politely too. So why does everybody laugh? And here comes another joke. See if you can get the punch line. You know, we re, we re big fans of yours. Oh, that s nice. I could use a big fan right now. The Brady Bunch is another all-time favorite sitcom. The first episode features a wedding scene. The minister marries Mike and Carol, who both have three kids and a pet. Carol Anne, Michael Paul, will you join hands, please? Do you, Carol Anne, take this man to be your lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold, to honor and obey, to love and cherish, in sickness and in health, till death do you part? I do. Do you, Michael Paul, take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold, to honor and obey, to love and cherish, till death do you part? I do. I now pronounce you man and wife. They whom God has joined together. Let no man put asunder... Well, aren t you going to kiss the bride? You bet I am! Now we know that something disastrous is going to happen. Bow, wow!! I told you, boys. Put that dog back in the car! Well, put him back! Mike! Thank goodness you saved the cake! Oh, Mike! Let s think. Why does the bride laugh when her wedding ceremony has turned into a slapstick catastrophe and her new husband is covered all over with cream? Wouldn t many people in that situation take it seriously, and think their married life is cursed from the beginning? But everybody is laughing heartily. It looks as if they just can t stop. When you come to think of it, laughing is a very mysterious piece of human behavior. What do we laugh for? Are they using humor to turn bad luck into good? Why do we laugh? 1

4 SESSION 2 ON JABBERWOCKY YOU have to carry a weight for God knows how long. That s what life is all about. Not only do you have to be tough, you have to pay close attention to everything around you, because if you don t watch out, just when you think you re getting your work done, you re reminded life is not a roller coaster, it s just a drag. When you re young, you set out to accomplish something. You aim high. But you are bound to encounter troubles. They swarm around you, annoying you at the very moment when you absolutely need concentration. If you allow it, you can easily get caught in a net of troubles. Sometimes you wish you hadn t started. You regret that you were more ambitious than you were capable. But people are merciless. They cheer for you, and push you on. The worst thing that can happen does happen. This has a way of coming about at the worst moment. Sometimes, you just have to grab at anything within reach. But you can t stop time that way. Life must go on as demanding as ever. What you thought was a life line turns out to be a loose rope. Sure, people will offer help, but all too often, they only make things worse. It s as if it s the whole world is against you, as if you live in a hostile universe intent on destroying you. To survive, you must be strong, smart, and single-minded. You must be alert and attentive. But alas, it s impossible to be all that all the time. After all, you re just a pendulum swaying this way and that in a world prone to disasters. Maybe in the end, everything will come out fine. But whether a happy ending awaits you or not ultimately depends on luck. Even so, while you are in the middle of it, you must struggle, ready to meet misfortunes that are sure to hit you. SESSION 2 On Jabberwocky FOR more than a century, Lewis Carroll s Alice stories have been loved by millions of children and adults throughout the world. Alice s adventures are indeed fascinating. She enters a rabbit hole, and begins to fall down, down, down. She imagines herself falling toward the center of the earth. And then, she has a series of strange wondrous experiences. Things begin to turn peculiar as she moves through her wonderland. Her size, for one thing, is never stable. She becomes huge, and then smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until she almost drowns in a pool of her own tears. She encounters many memorable characters like the twin brothers, Tweedledee and Tweedledum; the Eggman, Humpty Dumpty, who sat on a wall and had a great fall; and the famous Cheshire Cat whose grin still remains even after his face has disappeared. Another source of pleasure is Carroll s language, which is full of playful puns and parodies. In one scene, Alice comes across what looks like an old poem. But actually, it s composed of meaningless words that almost sound as if they mean something. Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Picture yourself in a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. 2

5 SESSION 2 ON JABBERWOCKY Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, a girl with kaleidoscope eyes. Cellophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over your head... Carroll s word play has had many famous admirers including the rock n roll visionary, John Lennon. In the 1960s, when it was fashionable for musicians to sing about their psychedelic experiences, they often turned to Alice s adventures for inspiration. Carroll s thought-provoking episodes have also been a source of inspiration for various 20th century figures such as novelist James Joyce, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and ecologist Gregory Bateson. Lewis Carroll s real name was actually Charles Dodgson. He was a mathematician, but his private life, like his writing, appears to have been filled with riddles. LEWIS Carroll s stories are intellectually very stimulating. That s for sure. But in another sense they are, well, simply funny. The way Carroll bends and twists language is just irresistible. In one episode, Alice meets two strange-looking creatures: the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon. The Mock Turtle is a verbal joke in itself. In England, there is a dish called mock-turtle soup. It looks like green turtle soup, only it uses beef instead of turtle meat. So, it s an imitation of turtle soup. But Carroll invites us to imagine that there is such a creature as the (?) Mock Turtle. In Tenniel s drawing, the creature has a calf s head and calf s feet sticking out of a turtle shell. Not only is the Mock Turtle created out of word play, but it looks as if word play is all he does. Like some friends of yours, he is addicted to puns. A pun is what you get when you deliberately say something that can be interpreted in two ways. For example, when I really want ice cream, I scream for ice cream. The Mock Turtle says that he went to school in the sea, and was taught by an old turtle, but that they called the Turtle a Tortoise. Why did you call him Tortoise if he wasn t one, asks Alice. We called him tortoise, because he taught us, replies the Mock Turtle. Then he goes on to list the courses he took at school. First, reeling and writhing. Did you get it? It s amazing how much difference a little sound change can make, for reeling means being thrown off balance, and writhing means twisting your body as if you are in pain. It must have been a really weird class. In Carroll s day, Greek and Latin were important subjects at school, but the classics master in the Mock Turtle s school taught Grief and Laughing. We are left to wonder what that class was like. Maybe the children learned how to cry properly in one moment, and how to laugh heartily the next. And when Alice asks, How many hours a day did you do lessons? The Mock Turtle says, Ten hours the first day, nine the next, and so on. That s the reason they re called lessons, adds the Gryphon, because they lessen from day to day. Puns are sometimes thought to be a low form of humor. They are often considered tasteless. Many people seem to believe that puns lower the literary quality of children s books. But the fact is, children find puns fairly funny. Alice Liddell, too, must have been charmed by Carroll s non-stop word play. By the way, he sprinkled his fantastic stories with puns and nonsense words. After all, the Alice books are based on Carroll s actual performances, and the atmosphere of live performance is one thing that explains the books lasting popularity. 3

6 SESSION 3 THE LIGHT OF COMMON DAY SESSION 3 The Light of Common Day THE universe shines with light. Each star emits enormous amounts of energy in the form of electromagnetic waves. What we see as starlight is only a small band of the whole spectrum. This is perhaps the most familiar constellation: Orion. The bluish star at the lower right corner is called Rigel. The diameter of this supergiant is estimated to be 50 times that of the Sun. It s 900 light years from the earth, which means that the light we see now actually left the star 900 years ago. But Rigel is one of our Sun s closest neighbors. Most stars are much farther away. And beyond the reaches of our galaxy, there are other galaxies which are millions, and sometimes billions of light years away from us. The light from the farthest galaxies began its journey through space even before our own planet was formed. What does it mean for light to be there without being seen by any creatures? We see light because we have eyes. And as far as we know, there wouldn t be eyes if life hadn t happened on this planet. And of course, life wouldn t have happened without the energy supplied by the Sun, which is light. We see the world the way we do because evolution has given us eyes that only see what are visible rays to us. The world would certainly look very different if evolution had taken a different course and we had eyes that see infrared rays, for instance. This fascinating relationship between the seer and the seen is among the topics that we are going to read about for next week. SUPPOSE you are riding a bicycle at 20 km/h. A train comes from behind at the speed of 60 km/h. Now, how fast would the train appear to you when it passes you by? This is simple. 60 minus 20 is 40 km/h. If you pedal really hard and reach the speed of the train, the train will appear to you as not moving at all. Now imagine that you were chasing light. Of course, light travels much too fast for chasing, but just imagine you were moving fast enough. Would light then become any slower? What if you reached the speed of light? How would light then appear? Not moving at all? When Einstein was 16 years old, he had a strange dream. He was on a paper airplane chasing light. In his dream, light appeared to slow down as he flew faster. But when he woke up, he told himself, That couldn t be true! This was just an instinct, but later experiments proved that he was right: The speed of light is absolute. It remains constant, no matter how fast you move toward it, or away from it. How could this be so? In 1905, some ten years after his strange dream, Einstein completed a theory that explained it. Special relativity is what it came to be called. It was a really bold theory. It demands us to change our notion of time and space completely. You ve probably heard that time runs slower as you move faster, or that the distance of ten meters to one person can be one meter to another. You may have decided that it s too weird, that it takes a special kind of brain to understand it. But the fact is, it s not. At least some aspects of special relativity can be understood by anyone with basic mathematics. 4

7 SESSION 4 NATURAL SELECTION SESSION 4 Natural Selection THIS is a crab s claw. Let s compare it with one of its legs. They re made of the same parts. The difference is just in the size and proportion of the parts. The similarity between claw and leg makes it natural to think that one developed out of the other, or that both appeared from the same root. But how? One way to settle this question is to think of some supernatural intelligent being, like the Christian God, who designed a crab using the same blueprint for both claw and leg. Another way is to imagine that crabs somehow made their front legs more and more claw-like through generation after generation of use and effort. Charles Darwin s view is different from both of these. Let s review his theory of natural selection. Suppose a million crabs are born each year. Some will be bigger, some smaller. Some will have thicker shells, some thinner. This is just a matter of accidental variation. It is not the result of intelligent choice or individual effort. In the same way, some will have slightly claw-like front legs. Suppose that claw-like front legs are an advantage. Perhaps they make it easier to capture food. Then crabs with claw-like front legs will tend to live longer than crabs with normal front legs, and have a better chance of producing offspring. Now, these offspring will also have variations. Some of them may have front legs which are more claw-like than their parents. These will be the ones that will survive and produce more offspring, and so on, until finally crabs with very claw-like front legs will be the majority. Eventually, all crabs will have claws. But this is all very mechanistic. Survival seems to depend not on intelligence or effort, but on accidental variation on mere chance. Look at nature at work. Every organ of every creature seems so full of purpose that it s very tempting to imagine some kind of intelligent order working secretly in nature. Is it simply wrong to look at nature that way, or is there any scientific case to be made for a force of intelligence in nature? THE eye is so important to us that we can hardly imagine any highly developed organism not needing eyesight to survive. Of course, there are eyeless creatures like bats, but they live in an environment where there is no use for the eye, and they have a very sophisticated sonar system to make up for the lost eyesight. But what about ants? Ants move about in daylight, but they can t see well. Their eyes have become much weaker. In other words, they have evolved into a simpler creature. And the strategy has worked so well that for millions of years ants have remained one of the most prosperous organisms on earth. Look at these hard workers. They cut leaves neatly, carry them home in orderly procession, lay them out with care. And... look at this: they are planting fungus! That s right. They re raising a crop. Agriculture is what s going on here. When we hear the word evolution, we usually think of something becoming more complex and sophisticated. But in natural history, evolution may occur in the direction of organisms becoming simpler and more compact. There are human engineers who are learning from the insect s way of life. One such engineer has built interesting ant-robots. And ant-robot operates by a very simple set of commands. It picks 5

8 SESSION 5 AGRICULTURE S MIXED BLESSING up a block when it comes in front of one, and lays it down when it hits another block. But the result is marvelous. If we put several of them on a messy floor, they really work like ants to create order. In this age of computer technology, perhaps we are re-discovering the old wisdom. That s simpler can sometimes be a lot better. SESSION 5 Agriculture s Mixed Blessing OUR ancestors made a series of discoveries on their way to civilization, like inventing language or discovering tools and weapons, learning to use fire. The beginning of hunting was also a big jump. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans depended on hunting and gathering for survival. But this is not how we imagine civilized people. At best, we think, these hunter-gatherers lived at an intermediate stage, halfway between savagery and civilization. The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, many believe, was a crucial step to civilization. But why are we so sure that this shift was really progress? How do we know we are better off now than we were as hunter-gatherers? That s the question Jared Diamond raises in his book, The (Rise and Fall of the) Third Chimpanzee. Maybe you re wondering why the question is worth bothering about. The answer seems pretty obvious. With the arrival of agriculture, we became able to grow food, and store food, instead of depending on blind luck as our ancestors did. Unlike us, they had to start anew each day to secure food. Besides, once the agricultural revolution occurred about 10,000 years ago, it gradually spread over almost all the world until there were very few remaining groups of hunter-gatherers. Isn t that a clear sign of agriculture s superiority? OK, so much for the progressivists view. Read your assignment and get the other side of the argument. IMAGINE. You are a visitor from another planet. The earth people show you these photos, and explain that they are advertisements for cigarettes. You have a hard time understanding what advertisements are. And it s still harder to figure out what cigarettes are for. Eventually, though, you get the idea more or less. Still, these particular ads don t really make sense to you. They would, if they were ads for cowboy hats or for horses. But why do they serve as advertisements for cigarettes? And why do the Earth s people smoke anyway when they know biologically it does them nothing but harm? This doesn t seem to be a biologists concern, but Jared Diamond, the author of our reading material today, invites us to relate this puzzle to another puzzling behavior of a different animal. As you see, the gazelle is jumping in a funny way even though there s a lion nearby. It s as if the gazelle was deliberately inviting trouble. This mysterious jumping is known as stotting among animal experts. Smoking and stotting: there s a common element here. You deliberately do something that is biologically harmful, something that can only be risky in terms of survival. Some of you might say smoking is an addiction. Everyone knows that once you start smoking, it s very hard to quit. But that doesn t explain all: why starts smoking at all? Addiction doesn t explain that, and of course, it doesn t explain stotting, either. 6

9 SESSION 6 AGAINST FOCUSED ATTENTION Professor Diamond explains stotting this way. The gazelle wants to tell the lion that it s useless for the lion to chase him. He needs to tell the lion that he is too quick. Of course, this can be done by running away as fast as possible, but it would be better if it could be done in a quicker, short-hand way. Stotting is exactly this. The message is, I am so fast that I can outrun you even after I give you a head start like this! But just to make the message believable, the gazelle must put himself in some real danger. Just winking at the lion won t do any good, for the (?) lion may simply ignore it. Stotting becomes a believable advertisement for speed precisely because there is real risk involved in it. According to Diamond, smoking can be explained in the same way. It is a human male s way to send a message to females: I am so strong that I can survive even if I smoke this terrible thing! It s a male s self-advertisement for manliness. That s why photos of a man riding a horse in the wilderness serve as ads for cigarettes. Through these images, smoking is associated with manliness. But what about female smokers? Are they trying to advertise their feminine quality by smoking? Or, are they trying to show off their masculine quality? Unfortunately, Professor Diamond doesn t say anything about this question. You, have to work out the solution for yourself. SESSION 6 Against Focused Attention GLEAMING eye, raised chin, fast breathing; men are magnificent when they are fighting. They are beautiful, because they are determined to do their very best. Their attention is focused on what is immediately in front of them. They are intent on knocking down any obstacle that may stand in their way. Life is a race, a continuing series of combats for survival. To be a winner, you must always look straight ahead to your goal. If you allow yourself to relax, even for a moment, your opponents will take advantage of you, and that will cost you dearly. You have to think of the right thing to do at each moment, and do it right. Be precise and prompt. You need a tremendous amount of concentration. Never relax. Never let anything weaken your determination. Don t listen to those who say life is for giving, or love is the thing. They are only tempting you to live an easier, idler life. Is life for giving? That s rubbish. Do lions give? No. For the king of beasts, the world is there for taking. The greatest satisfaction lies in devoting yourself to the one great purpose, whether that be championship, conquest, material wealth, political power, or social status. But, you must be strong. Only those who have perfected the severest self-discipline can hope for the glory that awaits them after the long and painful struggle. So, keep your eyes intensely focused on the one thing that ultimately matters. Like diamonds, you will shine most beautifully when you are most hard. Don t ever listen to the voices of temptation. Never loosen up. Never, ever!... and what will you achieve?... Well, such a discourse is probably familiar to you. But what we are going to read next is Against Focused Attention. What do we lose when we are concentrated? What would we gain from unfocusing our attention? 7

10 SESSION 7 THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE THE topic of today s session is attention. We learn at an early age how important it is to pay attention to what is around us. All animals, at least higher organisms, have to be watchful in order to survive in dangerous environments. But there are different sorts of attention. When you are walking in the dark, your attention is distributed almost equally all around you. But when you are, say, solving a mathematical problem, your attention becomes focused on a rather narrow area. Suppose you are to solve this equation. Some of you may be able to arrive at the value of x instantly, but most of us need to carry out one step at a time. First, you concentrate on the integer 58. You move it to the right side of the equation. And to do this subtraction correctly, you again divide it into parts and attend to one thing at a time. First, you take 8 from 17, which is 9. Then, you do 11 minus 5. And the outcome is 69. And so on, until you get to the value of x. To intellectual animals like us, this concentrated one-thing-at-a-time approach is often rewarding. We spend a lot of time in our waking hours focusing our attention on one little thing after another. But there is an interesting phenomenon. As we become more skilled, we gradually learn to unfocus our attention. So, we can take a broader view. A skilled mathematician would be able to solve a simple equation all at once without breaking it up into parts. A skillful guitar player; is he consciously thinking about where each of his fingers is going to be? No. He s just doing what comes to him naturally. A beginner would have to attend to the position of his fingers, but that s not how you play the instrument gracefully. Graceful performances require something other than focused attention. It is not enough to know what to do at each separate moment. As long as you are consciously thinking about your speed or the angle of the blade, you remain a clumsy skater. A skillful skater is someone who has learned to broaden her attention to the whole performance. And this is also true of verbal communication. When you are listening to somebody speak English at a natural speed, there s simply not enough time for you to attend to one word at a time. You must respond to the overall patterns of English as you must be doing right now. SESSION 7 The Flesh of Language WHAT is language? Many people will argue that the capacity for language is unique to human beings, or that language is precisely the very thing which makes us human. But others will say that animals must also be using some kind of language to communicate among themselves. It s a question of where to draw the line. Where, within all of communication, can we mark the dividing line between language and non-language? Is sign language really language? Is body language really language? How about the crying of Tarzan, or the expressions on Jane s face, or cheetah s face? Helen Keller didn t know any words, but yes, she was still able to communicate something, if only in a very beastly manner. But then, the miracle. The moment she learns that everything has a name, she becomes a new being. The savage girl is now becoming a civilized young lady. In this story, there is the world of language and reason on the one hand, and dark, wordless chaos on the other. The climax comes when the girl finally struggles out of the beastly state into the human 8

11 SESSION 7 THE FLESH OF LANGUAGE world of reason. The Miracle Worker is indeed a dramatic statement about what language is and what humanity is. But in this movie made in the 1970s, the emphasis is not on the difference, but the similarity between the human and the beast s mind. Kong s intelligence is emphatically shown by its expressive eyes. We don t care if it doesn t speak vocally. We think we get the message from its eyes, face, and its whole body. Of course, this is only a movie. But in fact, many linguists today have crossed the boundary between verbal and bodily communication, and are looking at communication as a whole. Are we alone in our ability to speak, or has the world around us always been speaking? NON-verbal communication is direct and very powerful. You can tell a man that you are in love with him by simply being in love with him. In the same way, it s easy to tell non-verbally that you hate him. But what if you wanted to tell him that you used to love him, or that tomorrow you might regain affection toward him? Would you be able to do that without using words? For a long time, we have believed that only human language is capable of conveying ideas and feelings about past or future events, but we are gradually learning that we may have been rather anthropocentric. This is Kanzi, the bonobo. And this is his younger sister Panbanisha. They were both brought up in the Language Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia. They understand what people say to them, and can express themselves through a keyboard. The keyboard is made up of 256 keys with different symbols. These symbols are abstract signs. They don t look like the things they stand for. Now the question is, can humans and bonobos communicate about what will be happening tomorrow? Let s watch the video. Were you, were you good while we were gone? Were you good? You were good! You were, you were really good? Well, can I see your mirror? Where s your mirror? Where s your mirror? Reluctantly, Panbanisha goes and gets the broken mirror. Is that your mirror? Well, Panbanisha, your mirror is broken. Panbanisha, that s not good. You broke two mirrors one mirror today and one mirror yesterday. I, I wanted to go get blueberries. I wanted to go get good eggs. But you were bad. Well, I guess we re just gonna have to go without you that s so sad, we re just gonna have to go without Panbanisha. Well, but it is too late. It s too late to be good. You should have been good earlier. You were bad. Panbanisha is miserable. She is so sad that Sue won t take her to the woods. But tomorrow is a new day. Tomorrow is a new day! Tomorrow, you can be good! You can be good! See how delighted Panbanisha is at what Sue promises for tomorrow. Her face and her voice strongly suggest that Panbanisha is able to communicate not only about now but about an imagined time when she will be so good that she won t break the mirror, and so, will go to the woods with Sue to get blueberries and eggs. I don t guess it s broken. It looks like you were good! We re gonna get eggs! Yes, we can do that! We can go get eggs! 9

12 SESSION 8 THE FABRICATION OF RACE Panbanisha has clearly remembered yesterday s promise that if she were good today, she could go to the woods to get some eggs. And anything else? Just, just eggs? And blueberries. SESSION 8 The Fabrication of Race TAKE a good look at this woman. Her face was created by computer from a mix of several races. According to Time Magazine, this is the face of the future in America (?). Can you tell what race or ethnicity she is? Look carefully at the color of her skin, eyes, and hair. Look at the shape of her nose. Do you think she is white? Or is (?) she black? Asian? Take a look at another set of photographs. You see a baby and his parents. Can you identify the race or ethnicity of these three people? Look at the father. Is he white? Is he black? In fact, he identifies himself as a Jew, whose father is a white Jew and whose mother a black Baptist. His wife, according to the article in Time, is a white Lutheran from rural Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. In this case, what is the baby? Is he black? Is he white? Is he a Jew? How useful is racial and ethnic categorization? Many people simply take it for granted that white or black or Asian people exist, but what makes people white, black, or Asian? This is becoming an ever more difficult question to answer in the United States because of the increase in so-called interracial marriages. Over 65 % of Japanese-Americans, for example, marry partners who have no Japanese heritage. With Native Americans, the figure for out marriage is more than 70 %. Gradually, Americans are becoming more and more aware that race and ethnicity are very problematic concepts. In your next reading, Matthew Jacobson argues that our familiar categories of race and ethnicity are not based on obvious natural differences between people, but are the products of particular ways of looking at people. This is why, Jacobson says, that race and ethnicity are socially constructed. According to Jacobson, race is just one relatively arbitrary method of dividing people into different groups. Read the next chapter and decide. Do you agree with Jacobson? IN 1936, the Hollywood movie studio, Universal Pictures, made a new version of the famous musical, Showboat. The hugely popular story had first appeared in 1926 as a novel, and was later turned into an equally popular musical drama. Showboat tells a story that covers half a century from the late 1870s until the 1920s. The story is about a group of people all associated with the travelling theater, a showboat, that moved up and down the Mississippi River, stopping at riverside towns to give performances. In the dramatic scene, that we are going to watch now, the singer, Julie, is revealed to be of mixed race. Her father was white, and her mother black. Her husband is white. This kind of marriage was illegal in some American states for a long time. The travelling showboat has brought Julie and her husband Steve into danger by crossing the state line into Mississippi where so-called mixed marriages were against the law. Steve learns that the local sheriff, Mike Vallon, is coming to arrest them. He takes desperate action. 10

13 SESSION 9 MULTIPLE PERSONALITY Steve, what are you doing with that knife! I m not going to hurt, you fool! Leave me be! I know what I m doing. It won t hurt much, darling... Steve... Hello, Windy. Captain Hawks, do you acknowledge to be owner of the showboat? Why? Of course I do. What do you want? Well, Captain, I have an unpleasant duty. I understand that you have a miscegenation case on board. How s that? Case of a negro woman married to a white man, a criminal offence in this state. No... no such thing on board this boat. The name of the white man is Steve Baker. The name of the negress, name of the negress is Julie Dozier. Which one s them? I m Steve Baker. This is my wife. Julie Dozier, my information says you were born in Mississippi. Your pop was white, your mammy black. That s right? Yes, that s right. You two( d) better get your things and come along with me. You wouldn t call a man a white man that had negro blood in him, would you? No, I wouldn t. Not in Mississippi. One drop of negro blood makes you a negro in these parts. Well, I got more n a (?) drop of negro blood in me, and that s a fact. In this scene from Showboat, the drama turns on the fact that even one drop of negro blood makes a person legally black in Mississippi at this time. Of course, in this case, the one drop has come from Julie s hand. Steve s desperate plan does not work. Steve and Julie lose their jobs on the showboat and have to leave. In this next scene, from another film version of the story, we see Steve and Julie leaving the showboat. The song, Old Man River, is sung by the famous singer, Paul Robeson. There s an old man called the Mississippi. That s an/the old man that I don t want to be. What does he care if the world s got troubles? What does he care if the land s not free? SESSION 9 Multiple Personality THIS is Rachel, a twenty-three-year-old woman. Doesn t look so different from any other young woman. You can see she s someone else now, Arianna, the seven-year-old child. Arianna is left-handed whereas Rachel is right-handed. Her writing is full of the kind of mistakes any sevenyear-old child would make. I wish I could have my own body little as it s supposed to be, a body that s seven years old just like me. And a soccer ball! 11

14 SESSION 9 MULTIPLE PERSONALITY People were telling me you know these things were happening to me that, that I was acting like a little kid, and I was just sitting there, saying, No, I wasn t. I was just having conversation with you. And I forgot in the space of time in between and that made me feel crazy. That just that felt horrible. Arianna and Rachel are not the only persons who are sharing this body. There are more than a dozen characters who appear by turns. In some cases in multiple personality, more than a hundred persons can compete with one another. This is Haley, acting these days as a kind of manager of all the personalities in Rachel. I m not sure that adults in the system know what kids are doing, and I need some help about what s going on. Is, is there any possibility that anyone on the inside wants to respond right now? Hi, Arianna. Hi. I can, I can help it. The problem is that she doesn t want to listen very good. I know it may seem like she s not listening to you or she doesn t hear it, but keep letting her know. Thanks, Arianna. You re welcome. Is... Can I talk to Rachel? Is Rachel... around...? Yeah, hold on and talk to Haley while I go get her. Ok. She s gone to get her. Ok. I wanted to see if Rachel heard what you said... Only fifteen years ago, cases of multiple personality were so rare that most doctors thought there wasn t any such a thing. Now cases are being found everywhere, and almost all the patients are female. I m so... really overwhelmed by being co-conscious with, with these people. What causes multiple personality? Why are so many cases appearing all of a sudden? Why are the victims always female? Does the phenomenon tell us anything about today s society in general? And, can we be really sure that there is such a thing as multiple personality? So, many questions remain unanswered. (British) philosopher Ian Hacking gives you a good starting point to think about them. MULTIPLE Personality. Advocates say it s real. Sceptics say it s no more than fiction made up by therapists and mass media. Which should we believe? Let s get some historical perspective. Multiple personality is not a new phenomenon in the U. S. Dozens of cases were reported around the turn of the century. A Boston doctor, Morton Prince, for example, reports the case of one Sally (?) Beauchamp, who seems to have had four different personalities. Dr. Prince was a well-respective man at that time and people took him seriously. But later, psychologists were suspicious. They pointed out that, when Miss Beauchamp came to him, the doctor was already known for his interest in multiple personality. They also pointed out that the young woman seemed to have been a little in love with the doctor: maybe she produced syndromes of multiple personality, they argued, just to please the doctor. After his death, Dr. Prince wasn t taken very seriously except in books dealing with crystal gazing, telepathy, and other dubious subjects. In one such book, the doctor appears side by side with Mr. Hyde under a section called Monsters Within as if he himself were a monster. 12

15 SESSION 10 THE PLEASURE OF MUSIC But advocates today have the numbers on their side. It s not mere dozens, they claim, it s tens of thousands that have been diagnosed as multiples today, and according to them, Dr. Prince missed one crucial thing: the cause of multiple personality. Everyone knows now that most multiples were victims of child abuse. Monsters were not within. They were outside. In the eye of the advocates, therefore, the astonishing increase of multiple patients is a sign of progress. We finally know the painful truth that we have been hiding from ourselves. For the sceptics, though, the number doesn t count. Patients come to therapists wanting to get better. And one way to get better is to locate the cause of their emotional problem. They need a scenario that leads to their present problem. And that s exactly what their therapists can give them. So they follow the therapists suggestions, eventually, discover numerous characters within themselves, and remember painful childhood experiences. Once the idea catches on, this can easily become a mass delusion. So, in the sceptics eye, the present vogue is Prince-and-Beauchamp all over again, magnified nationwide. Not everything can be true about reports of multiple personality. Not everything can be made up. Perhaps the best way is to maintain healthy scepticism, avoiding generalization, trying to see each case for what it is. So, you realize there can be no clear-cut answer to the question: Is it real? SESSION 10 The Pleasure of Music THIS is what American pop music was like in the early 1950s. These songs were designed to be as innocent and inoffensive as possible. They reflected the tastes of middle-class people who were enjoying the fruits of postwar prosperity and progress. But now, a new social class was forming: teen-agers with more leisure time and money to spend than ever before. Bored with the current hit parade, young people began tuning into radio stations that played a more exciting kind of music, black rhythm & blues. There were a few DJs who played rhythm & blues records for white teen-agers. These DJs were as important as any musicians as pioneers of rock n roll music. Some white performers began to blend elements of rhythm & blues into their own music. The biggest hit of the year 1955 was Rock around the Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets. The enormous success of this song brought rock n roll music to national attention. For teen-agers, this was the kind of music that spoke their language. That was crazy music. That thing s crazy, Jack. That music sends me, man. It sends me. You gotta stick to that music all the way. In Memphis, a nineteen-year-old truck driver named Elvis Presley recorded his first song, That s Alright. His performances weren t like anything people had ever seen or heard. Sweet, wild and irresistible all at once. The white man with a Negro feel soon rose to national stardom as the king of rock n roll. It was like an explosion as if everything that had been despised as vulgar and indecent suddenly burst out and began to hop to the 8-beat rhythm of youthful excitement. Everywhere, teen-agers went rock n roll crazy. Of course, not everybody was happy. Voices of fear and opposition began to be heard all across the country. Why, I believe that is because I know how it feels when you sing it. I know what it does to you. I know the evil feeling that you feel when you sing it. 13

16 SESSION 10 THE PLEASURE OF MUSIC The obscenity and vulgarity of the rock n roll music is obviously a means by which the whiteman... his children to be driven to the level of Negro. Gradually, the craze began to cool off. Little Richard quit performing to become a preacher. Elvis Presley went to Germany to serve in the military. Buddy Holly was killed in a plane clash. The decade ended just as it had begun with clean-cut respectable white performers offering polite entertainment. The so-called teen idols, like Fabian, pretended to sing rock n roll, but the spirit was no longer there. By 1959, the power of rock n roll seemed to have died out. But actually, it was only taking a short rest. A few years later, it erupted for the second time with the emergence of four fabulous young men from Liverpool, England. 14

17 SESSION 12 THE IMAM AND THE INDIAN SESSION 12 The Imam and the Indian MECCA is a city of about 6 hundred thousand people. But once a year, the city is flooded with millions of pilgrims arriving from a hundred different countries. These travelers have long dreamed of coming to Mecca, the sacred birthplace of Muhammad. At the center of the court of the great mosque is the Kaaba, a cubic stone structure covered with black cloth. The pilgrims work counterclockwise around the Kaaba seven and a half times, saying various prayers at the right moments. Wherever they are, when the time comes, Muslims will kneel down to give prayers. And this should always be done facing toward the Kaaba. Muslims believe that people are born clean and innocent, but they can t help getting stained as they grow up. Therefore the Koran says they should go to Mecca at least once in a lifetime to cleanse themselves of all their sins. Now an Imam appears and says the words that praise Allah. The people who have gathered here from every corner of the world are united as brothers (and sisters) sharing the same faith in the one and only god. An Imam is the person who leads prayers in the mosque, but not necessarily in a great mosque like this. In a small Islamic town, an Imam can be a regular shopkeeper. All the same, he is respected. He knows the teachings of the Koran by heart. So people will turn to him for advice. Whenever they face problems in life. This woman is in trouble. She had a quarrel with her husband and during the heated exchange her husband said the word Divorce three times. According to the Koran, if a man says divorce three times, his wife must simply leave the house; or if he doesn t really mean it, he is guilty of an irresponsible act; and, according to the Koran, must give free meals to ten poor people. An Imam is supposed to solve such problems in the way that will best benefit their community. In this case, he tells the woman that her husband must buy ten meals for the poor. Since the lives of Muslims are guided by rather strict rules, an Imam has a lot of advice to give. Understandably, he tends to hold conservative worldviews and in today s changing environments this could sometimes cause friction. In the story we are going to read next, a graduate student who originally came from India enters the village in a Nile delta and has an interesting exchange with the local Imam. WHAT is your image of Manhattan, New York? Skyscrapers? Broadway musicals? Fancy shops? Energetic business people hustling and bustling across the streets? Images may differ, but it seems safe to say that most people think of the city as the capital of western culture. In our image, the city is populated by people whose families come from European countries, if not from the African continent. We know that there are many Jewish people in New York, but surely the great majority of New Yorkers whether white or black are Christians, aren t they? Well done, take a look at these people. As of the year 2000, 80% of New York taxi drivers are (said to be) Muslims. There has been a rapid increase of immigrants coming from the Islamic countries, especially after the Persian Gulf War. And, they are known to be pious. When it comes to their religion, they never compromise, no matter what, no matter where. And great many of them are now moving into various parts of the United States. In September 1999, Madison Avenue was filled with Muslims from all over the country, cele- 15

18 SESSION 13 SARAJEVO: SURVIVAL GUIDE 1993 brating their strong bond based on their Islamic faith. Not all of them are Arabs and Asians. We see Caucasians and African Americans. The Muslim populations of the United States are estimated to be over 8 million. This means that there are more Muslims than Jews. And the surprising thing is that a lot of Americans with no Islamic background are being converted. Are we right or wrong? We re right! Are we weak or strong? We re strong! How many gods? One God! How many gods? One God! And we call him... Allah! And we call him... Allah! This Caucasian Woman, too, has decided to adopt the strict Islamic rules. No alcohol, no pig meat, she fasts, she kneels down and performs five salutes a day. And the same thing seems to be happening in other countries, too. Today, close to 20% of the world population are believers in Allah. That comes up to 1,300,000,000 people. This is surprising, at least to me. I thought that strict religious rules were irrelevant for life in the 21st century. I thought that the people of the world were gradually outgrowing the need for a supernatural existence to guide them and protect them. Have I been wrong? SESSION 13 Sarajevo: Survival Guide 1993 THE Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo, in The athletes from the host country were all Yugoslavians, so were the audience. No distinction was necessary between Serbians, Croatians, and Muslims. Who would have thought at that time that in less than ten years they d be killing each other? The city of Sarajevo went under siege in 1992 and for four years the city suffered countless bombs, gunfire, attacks by tanks. It was a nightmare beyond imagining. You may think that this would be the least likely place where humor and laughter would prevail. But no, look at this. It s called Sarajevo: Survival Guide. Just like any other tourist guide, it has sections on eating, shopping, and so on. This is published during the siege by Sarajevo artists who call themselves FAMA. It was translated into various languages and it became a minor best seller in Japan back in Readers praised the great sense of humor that managed to survive under the worst imaginable circumstances. Yet, Suada Kapic, the leader of FAMA, claims that humar was no more than a necessary part of their practical struggle to survive. Look at this bycicle-turned-electric-generator, for example. It was used by people when there was no electricity supply for reading at night. Some people might be amused, but for Sarajevo citizens it was just something that help them stay sane. And then one month later I discovered that it would be very useful if I made... mades, make some, let s say, Michelin s tourist guide book. (I tried) all four years to discover something very positive and very useful for other people. I think that I succeeded in that. That s my personal... victory. 16

19 SESSION 14 THE BIRTH OF FRACTAL GEOMETRY are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear, and never come back. I can tell you of the one such scene of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there THESE will be time. It s all happening too fast now, and I cannot keep up. I don t expect you to understand. You have seen none of this. And even if you tried, you could not imagine it. These are the last things. A house is there one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked down yesterday is no longer there today. This is the beginning of In the Country of Last Things, a novel by an American author, Paul Auster. It is written in the form of a long letter, written by a young woman, Anna Blume. Anna, is in an unnamed country that has closed itself to the outside world. She describes a world crumbling to pieces, where people are living in constant terror and hunger, where things are disappearing one after another. When the novel was first published in 1987, most of the readers thought that the book described a nightmarish future, a world that might become reality if we didn t watch out. Today, we know better. After the siege of Sarajevo, Auster s world seems too real to be just a possible future. It almost reads like an imaginative representation of what it was like to live in Sarajevo during the siege. And Sarajevo citizens felt exactly the same way. Artists in Sarejevo read In the Countly of Last Things, and saw an image of their reality. Like Anna in Auster s country, they were trapped in a city where escape was nearly impossible. Like Anna and her friends, they were living in constant terror, and as in Anna s country, things were quickly disappearing around them. Theirs was also the country of last things. They were moved, and they wrote a play based on Auster s novel. The play was performed first in Sarajevo, and eventually in Paris. Should we praise Paul Auster for capturing a terrible reality through his imagination? Or, should we deplore the fact that an imagined nightmare was so quickly overtaken by reality? It s hard to say. One thing that s certain is that the play did help people survive the terror that they were experiencing every day. And perhaps we can say the same thing about the Sarajevo: Survival Guide, a part of which we read. The Guide didn t play any part in actually putting the siege to an end, but it did help them to live through it all. Just like Anna Blume s letter, we can say that the Survival Guide was also a letter from a country of last things: a dark, but finally hopeful, letter. SESSION 14 The Birth of Fractal Geometry HOW long is the coastline of Britain? To answer it is impossible. For the more closely you look at it, the longer it appears to be. Every small bay has inlets, and every inlet has subinlets. If you look through a magnifying glass, the shape of each grain of sand will appear as complex as a coastline. We can simulate the problem in this way. First, draw a segment of, say, 10 centimeters. Divide it into four equal parts, and rotate the two central segments by 60 degrees. Then, connect the two open ends. The total length of this zigzag pattern is 15 centimeters, because it consists of six segments each with the length of 2.5 centimeters. Now, repeat the same procedure on each of the six segments. You can repeat this procedure as many times as you like, at least in your mind, creating ever more minute zigzags. Now, imagine 17