The articulation of ritual, juridical and scientific scenes I’ve been working on the last few posts open up a new approach for a discourse on media. I’ve been working with the ritual/myth binary, grounded in imperative exchange with the center, for quite a while: ritual enacts an originally sacrificial exchange with the being at the center and myth accounts for when the promises extracted from the center are not fulfilled. A tribe hunts deer, so their deity is the deer-god—in killing the “token” deer, the group brings the kill to the ritual center, returns some of it to the deer-god (the “type” deer) and, more generally, treats the meal with honor and respect, as the gift that it is. The deer-god, in return, agrees to donate some of its flock, or people, to the tribe. Sometimes the deer are hard to come by—how could that be? Here’s where myth enters, building very precisely on top of and out of ritual—the two, in fact, are articulated in prayer, recited during the ritual—some failure to fulfill the terms on the part of the members of group is the most likely explanation, and this leads to all kinds of inter-personal dynamic (who is guilty? who let us down?) and introspection (was it me? was my will crooked even if my actions were straight? Etc.).
Media as Infrastructural Translation
Media as Infrastructural Translation
Media as Infrastructural Translation
The articulation of ritual, juridical and scientific scenes I’ve been working on the last few posts open up a new approach for a discourse on media. I’ve been working with the ritual/myth binary, grounded in imperative exchange with the center, for quite a while: ritual enacts an originally sacrificial exchange with the being at the center and myth accounts for when the promises extracted from the center are not fulfilled. A tribe hunts deer, so their deity is the deer-god—in killing the “token” deer, the group brings the kill to the ritual center, returns some of it to the deer-god (the “type” deer) and, more generally, treats the meal with honor and respect, as the gift that it is. The deer-god, in return, agrees to donate some of its flock, or people, to the tribe. Sometimes the deer are hard to come by—how could that be? Here’s where myth enters, building very precisely on top of and out of ritual—the two, in fact, are articulated in prayer, recited during the ritual—some failure to fulfill the terms on the part of the members of group is the most likely explanation, and this leads to all kinds of inter-personal dynamic (who is guilty? who let us down?) and introspection (was it me? was my will crooked even if my actions were straight? Etc.).