Humanities thread

Well, the thing you linked was not a thesis, as far as I know. It's a website to share pictures, video and some other cultural stuff. I went to those kind of websites for research purposes in my internship at a cultural TV channel. Pulptastic, like some of those websites, engages in click-bait just like in any other place.

If there's anything I've learned, is that hollowness and shallowness can exist even in the highest artistic and literati worlds. There are clickbait-y titles in thesis, and there are non-clickbait-y titles.

Do you understand what I mean when I say "thesis"?

A Cruel Angel

If it's the same as Wikipedia's definition:

Then yes.

It's more basic than that. Wikipedia is using the strict, formal textbooky definition, and while it's certainly correct, I'd caution against taking it as a hard and fast rule.

"Thesis" is just a fancy way of saying "hey, look at this thing! I'm talking about this thing!" It's a description of the objective or function, in this case, saying "hey, this art is important cuz it makes you think about stuff you should care about!"

That's not necessarily a bad thing, but we should be mindful of relatively superfluous and surface-level calls to action. I'm not fundamentally opposed to sentimentality, but in its commercial form, it typically belies false, insincere or poorly weighed intentions.

Kind of like a car commercial that tells you you need to buy Sedan X because it's really safe for your kids. The thesis or theme, as a visual cue in the commercial, is a kid sitting in the backseat while uplifting music plays in the background. Don't forget about the dad smiling approvingly after he narrowly dodges a pothole or some other sinister entity.

I don't even mind art that appeals to our lizard brain responses (which is admittedly a moot point because everything we consume is a lizard brain response on some level), but it can cause controversy and create mixed messages. For example, there's a photographer (can't remember his name) who did a lot of civil rights activism in the 60s, and he uses a minimalist style to take a picture of a black man lying face down on the ground, apparently dead during a protest. It's a very plain, simple picture that doesn't seem to say much at first, but the lizard brain response he's going for is "holy shit, that black guy was killed by police." It's a seemingly thin piece of art that makes a powerful statement, all wrapped up in a simple thesis, that thesis being "this is what racial injustice looks like." I think he was one of the same people who spent time in Vietnam and China taking pictures of Buddhist monks who engulfed themselves in flames.

There's also a Chinese photographer, a very controversial man whose name I once again cannot remember (dammit). And no, its not Ai Wei Wei. He takes a picture of himself dropping a 3000 year old vase, taking a picture of it in the process. I don't agree with his methods, but his point is that art is both creative and destructive, or that one piece of art is destroyed in the process of creating new art, much like life itself. There's a much better way to get that point across, but whatever. That's his thing.

edited 26th May '15 4:11:39 PM by Aprilla

The short version: a thesis is the presentation of an idea, theory or point of view. PowerPoint, pen and pencil, a labelled folder of collected snippets and a scrawled note: valid ways of presenting something. Even if not generally accepted ways to get published.

A picture can be a thesis. Take Dulle Griet: Brueghel has a lot to say about War Is Hell (and people are really short sighted) in that one. As well as a few other things.

edited 27th May '15 4:49:19 AM by Euodiachloris

That Flemish art...so freaking trippy.

Must be some good drugs up there.

edited 27th May '15 8:05:09 AM by Aszur

Check out Hieronymus Bosch then. His drug of choice was religion.

Oh I know of Medieval Charlie Sheen, dont fret.

How often do cultural boundaries follow, or align with, geological boundaries?

Very often.

I cannot agree more with BestOf above me.

For more examples however find out a bit more about places like Polynesian islands or New Guinea.

For example: The Moriori people came from the exact same people that the Maori came. However the difference in resources of the Chatham islands where they settled (The dependence on hunter-gathering over agricultural exploits given the hostility of the land to the crops the polynesians were familiar with) contrasted with the much more agriculturaly exploitable islands where the Maori settled.

With more food available, the Maori had a greater population density. The moriori, seeing no need to expand and no way to sustain a huge population boost, simply kept to their island and developed into a pacific culture where they did not wage wars. The Maori had been rife with conflict due to the large amount of population. with mroe food and more food production, they could sustain non-agricultural positions such as priests, chiefs, soldiers, artisans...while the Moriori just had enough to sustain themselves. Much less a war.

The Maori were told of the Moriori by British settlers and promptly hijacked a ship, guns, and went on to attempt genocide on the Moriori people.

When I wrote that extremely terse post of mine I immediately thought of a couple of examples I would provide if asked; and the tribes of Papua New Guinea were the very first thing I would have mentioned. It's interesting - and telling - that you obviously thought of the same example.

To be honest I blatantly stole the example and idea from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is a magnificent read about this specific subject.

But it is, indeed, very telling that the geographical differences are so noteworthy there!

I'm more interested in New Guinea than Polynesia, though. From what I've heard there are mountains in New Guinea where you can find two tribes - one of each side of the mountain - that speak entirely unrelated languages. I think I've heard anecdotes of anthropologists or explorers having contacted both such tribes - relatively close to each other, yet with an obstacle between them - and discovering that neither tribe is aware of the other. If that's true it's remarkable; yet it is entirely conceivable, as these are very small tribes living in a tiny area and never really exploring their surroundings after they're settled. If they have no written language - and thus no permanent tradition or history - it's easy to see how even if they did at some point know about their neighbours such knowledge could be lost in the course of just a couple of generations.

Most languages can be divided into a relatively small number of language families, and these very small languages that don't appear to conform to any such classification are extremely interesting simply because it would be so easy to assume such things can't exist. If you're interested in this phenomenon you can look up "language isolates".

If you have read that book, the author puts it in a funny way. He went to the Islands to study birds. But he found so many languages he had to start studying the languages just to know what the hell was the name of that bird in the different islands to know its behavioral pattern.

Why did the Maori try to kill them? You said their land wasn't particularily fertile so what use was the genocide to the Maori?

From what I've gathered the Taranaki Maori were looking for someplace to conquer due to being displaced, and the Chatham Islands fit the bill due to the Moriori's laws against war preventing them from fighting back, and their close proximity to the North Island since the other options were Samoa or the Norfolk Islands.

People are happy to go to war if you built around them a warlike culture, too. Just point the average redneck to a darn mexicommie nazi and he will yeehaw and shoot them with a smile.

Washington Post - Teaching Literature in Common Core

From Patrick Welsh:

edited 29th Jun '15 7:04:15 PM by Aprilla

Huffington Post Art and Culture - 15 Artists to Watch in 2015

Some of them look intriguing. I am glad that there is a move at least by a few to get away from the splash style and actually get back to some form of bending realism.

NPR - Jesus In A Lowrider: El Rito's Santero Carves Saints In Modern Clothing

Those are some pretty nice looking statues.

Design Boom - Tatsuya Tanaka Crafts Intricate Miniature Calendar of Everyday Scenes

Huffington Post - Blue Note President Don Was on the Future of Jazz

The Guardian - I read only non-white authors for 12 months. What I learned surprised me