Time to flood this community with educational memes! We have to meet the people where they are, and memes are the true art form of the people.
One of my all time favorite formats.
Is knowledge really inseperable from the conditions that produced it, though?
I mean that’s one of the chief contentions of Marxism. There is no out of context, everything is historicized and dependent on material conditions, even “knowledge.”
But that doesn’t condemn the knowledge to some sort of moral corruption. We can utilize that knowledge, if we understand the material context. The contention of the meme seems to be that we can glean nothing and learn nothing from it.
I would encourage you to read the paper and book in that last frame to see this in more detail (links are here), but they talk about how you totally can use anthropological knowledge, but it’s useless and reproduces colonialism if you don’t combine that knowledge, critique or none, with material changes for the communities they’re about. Decolonization isn’t just a metaphor for academic purposes, and if the communities that have been “anthropologicized” aren’t given autonomy, land, and some form of reparations, all that “decolonization” is for nothing. It’s basically a riff on Marx’s famous declaration “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it,” but applied to a colonial context.
So what’s the context of 1+1=2 and how does it exclusively empower the ruling class?
1+1=2 includes a lot of assumptions, that a binary operation in a ring produces this algebra (we could easily define “+” to mean “s+r+2” in our regular parlance, and thatd met all the requirements for it to be an algebra along with regular mutliplication). It includes definitions of what “1” and “2” are along with this rather mysterious thing called “=” is. If you read through principia mathematica, they dont get to “1+1=2” until well into the book, and even then it ultimately failed. Classical Greek mathematicians would have no idea what “1+1=2” is supposed to mean, but would show you how to add 2 measures instead. Mathematics is a wondefully mysterious subject that isnt encaspulated in equations, even the simplest equations belie some shaky ground we all take for granted. For instance, looking into something as simple as the interval between (0, 1) tells us something about the supremum of the set and we must introduce a new axiom of completeness to deal with it.
The fact that your base idea of knowledge without context is a simple equation shows how your education has led you to be automaton-like or calculator-like, you have been reduced to instead of a fully formed free thinking, creative, curious human into a creature that can recite simple mathematical observations without deeper reflection.
Old stories of archaeological digs can be depressing as fuck. There’s a ton of medieval era middle eastern artifacts and architecture just lost because some 19th century British mustache wanted to get to the ancient Egyptian and Greek stuff underneath.
The reason why we have so few mummies from Egypt is because 17th century European nobles used to eat them as medicine.
Mexico has a good policy. They know that there are hundred of undiscovered pyramids and Mayan structures underground in the Yucatan. But once they are uncovered, they cost money to maintain and protect. Stuff might have to go into museums, or else it will be looted. There can be weather damage. There isn’t enough tourism to justify opening more sites for visitors. So the policy is archeological digs are only allowed if they are very likely to increase either tourism revenue, or help better understand the history of the Mayans and the mystery of their collapse. I think thats pretty cool.
Yeah, most of what happens now is focused on village life and infrastructure, which is pretty awesome. The mayans had well maintained roads.
