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    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Culture
    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Culture
    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Culture
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Culture

    By Martin Goldsworthy

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    About this ebook

    This book contains 38 separate articles which are about culture. By culture I mean everything about human behaviour which is arbitrary. Language is one aspect of culture and there is a set of articles about this and its curiosities. The second set are generally speculative and often indicate some potential for useful change.
    Experience, especially in places other than your home town, can trigger many types of responses, and almost certainly some learning. I was optimistic enough to go and live and work in a wide variety of places in different continents. From such places your perspective is automatically reorientated. These collected articles are one result.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMartin Goldsworthy
    Release dateNov 16, 2018
    ISBN9780463216217
    Reorientations: Collected Articles On Culture
    Author

    Martin Goldsworthy

    Martin Goldsworthy lives with his Peruvian partner in Lima. He comes from a large family and has two daughters of his own, both of whom live in Europe.He completed his university studies in Cambridge and in London, and has lived and worked in the UK, Malaysia, Germany and Perú. Currently he works part-time as a consultant.

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      Book preview

      Reorientations - Martin Goldsworthy

      Reorientations - Collected Articles On Culture

      By Martin Goldsworthy

      Copyright 2018 Martin Goldsworthy

      Smashwords Edition

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Contents

      1 Introduction

      2 Wordplay

      2.1 Meaning In Places

      2.2 Name Games

      2.3 Naming People

      2.4 Naming

      2.5 Gender Neutered?

      2.6 Discriminating Words

      2.7 Routes To Misunderstandings

      2.8 Languages Come And Go

      2.9 Number Confusion

      3 Conjectures

      3.1 Culture Is Arbitrary

      3.2 What Is Art For?

      3.3 Awful Or Awesome

      3.4 Dumbing Down Literature

      3.5 In These Days Of Dark Energy

      3.6 Belief And Religion

      3.7 Did They Get What They Wanted?

      3.8 Cosmetic Limits

      3.9 Pursuit Of The Undrinkable

      3.10 Advertising Limits

      3.11Unthinking Food

      3.12 Giving Beans A Better Name

      3.13 Local Medicine

      3.14 Plain Reading

      3.15 At The Appointed Hour

      3.16 Addressing Insufficiency

      3.17 Before The iBabel

      3.18 Doomed To Be History?

      3.19 Planning Versus Improvisation

      3.20 Cementing Families

      3.21 Erosion Of Value

      3.22 Demographic Transitions

      3.23 Biological Activity

      3.24 Face It

      3.25 Sustainable Habits

      3.26 Is Tourism Sustainable?

      3.27 Contact In Sports

      3.28 Sustainable Sport

      3.29 Are We Dim?

      About The Author

      1 Introduction

      This book contains articles which are loosely about Culture. By this I mean everything about human behaviour which is arbitrary. For example, in order to stay alive there is no choice about whether you consume food, but there certainly is choice about what you eat, and about how you eat it. The aspects of eating which are subject to choice make up part of the local culture, wherever you happen to be.

      A large part of human local culture is language and one of the common effects of living elsewhere is to increase your exposure to other languages. I find them interesting and sometimes illuminating, and I have a propensity to explore the material thus made available. The set entitled Wordplay contains articles of this type.

      To the larger set of articles I have given the title Conjectures. These are generally speculative and often indicate some potential for useful change in society.

      Experience, especially in places other than your home town, can trigger many types of responses, and almost certainly some learning. There is a joke about types of education, and one of the types it considers is the experience gained when you don’t read the small print. I didn’t, and I was optimistic enough to go and live and work in a wide variety of places in different continents. From such places your perspective is automatically reorientated. It remains to be seen whether you, the reader, will judge that this experience resulted in me learning something useful.

      The majority of the articles in this book and its two companions (Reorientations - Collected Articles On Life, and Reorientations - Collected Articles On Society) were originally posts to a weekly blog which I began when I stopped working full-time. I had time available to develop more fully and then present some of my ideas. For many years I had kept a file with notes and clippings. As I worked with those, I found that I had more ideas, based on where I am living now, on events and on my current activities. These new ideas also resulted in posts to my blog and in articles in these books.

      One of my teachers described a piece of my work as wide but not deep. The comment must have stung, as I still remember it, many decades later. The articles presented here certainly cover a range of topics, but I think that they now also have a useful depth.

      Apart from the organization described above, each article can be considered as separate. You can just dip in wherever you find an interesting title.

      2 Wordplay

      2.1 Meaning In Places

      Aren’t names great? They are not only for current communication. If you choose to look at them a bit more closely all sorts of things pop out.

      Sometimes they indicate some geography. A London Road is almost certainly going to show you the general direction that city lies in. They can also encapsulate some history. My family lived near Liverpool, in Port Sunlight. This was a model village built from about 1888 onwards for the workers in Lever Brother’s new soap factory. Sunlight Soap was the main brand. Our house was in Bolton Road, but it didn’t lead to Bolton. Rather it indicated where William Lever had come from. He was born and brought up there.

      In some special cases you can find a bit of both. The name of the river in Seville is a bit of a mouthful for Anglophones – the Guadalquivir. The history here is that this part of Spain was occupied by Muslims (the Moors) for over 500 hundred years, until 1248. They spoke Arabic and so used that language to describe the river’s key geographical attribute. In Arabic it comes out more or less as oued al kibir – river the big. Changing the o for a G, e for an a, and the v for a b, it is easy to see that the Spaniards use essentially the Arabic name.

      Cultural history is contained in the name Batu Pahat, where I lived in Malaysia. Nearby are rocky hillsides overlooking the Straits of Malacca, and these are perfect for a Chinese burial site. The name means chiselled stone, as required to excavate the tombs. There has been Chinese settlement in the area (Malacca was a base) from about 600 years ago, when the Ming dynasty’s Admiral Zheng He was leading maritime expeditions into the Indian Ocean, and perhaps beyond.

      More local names near Batu Pahat linked strongly with the project I was working on, which was part of a scheme designed to reduce flooding. Parit Besar (big drain) indicated the long recognition of the scale of the problem and Parit Rajah (king’s drain) that this had already been appreciated at the highest levels of government.

      Water in those drainage channels was dark, coloured by the organic compounds in the seepage from the peaty soils. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ayer Hitam (black water) is another nearby place-name. That one took my mind back to another project site, in Ireland, where the river was called the Blackwater, for similar reasons. When I was in working there I

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