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In the Image of God He Created Man
Memes
Memetics and the Age of Information
In recent years, a new word has entered our vocabulary, one which shapes how we look at this phenomenon we call culture. The word is meme. It is a product of the information age. This new but controversial field of study is called memetics. Culture, which is in a state of continual change, is attributed to the notion that "ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas."
Memes and Kinship Terminology
For emecists Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, and others, memes are real. They exist as “units of culture” which pass from one mind to another and from one culture to another. According to psychologist Ira Hyman, “memes are ideas that infect minds. They develop by spreading from one person to another, like a transmittable disease."
Discovering a "Natural-Born Dualism"
When anthropologist Edmund Leach asked: "How is it and why is it that men, who are a part of Nature, manage to see themselves as 'other than' Nature even though, in order to subsist, they must constantly maintain 'relations with' Nature?” he was, in effect, declaring his need for an INTERPRETATIVE SYSTEM, a system which could explain why people actually see themselves as “other than Nature." His evolutionary interpretative system provided no answers.
Dualism Began in the Garden
When developmental psychologist Paul Bloom wrote: "Children are natural-born dualists," and "we [scientists] should tell people the truth bout what we have found, without exaggeration or sugar coating," his statement was considered to be heretical by psychologists and anthropologists who "cannot conceive the mind apart from the concrete material --the brain --of whose function the mind is an effect."
Acquiring a Mother-in-Law from Hell
In non-literate societies there exists no written contracts. All contracts are verbal. For example, before a Chácobo bachelor marries, he must make a contract, not with his potential wife, but with his potential "in-laws." When the verbal contract is sealed and concluded, they call each other "raisi." The contract replaces the concept of son-in-law and in-laws with a status position they call “raisi.” SOCIAL EXISTENCE for the Chácobo demanded a restructuring of the nuclear family, a new meaning for marriage, and acquiring a mother-in-law from hell.
The Controversial Meme: "I Have."
Because concepts like own, have, and possess did not exist in the lexicon of the Mikasuki people, no Mikasuki could say, "I have money in the bank," or, "I own a house," or, "I own a car." It was semantically impossible. Its absence implied that the concept of have was a meme, a new way of looking at reality.
Linguist John Lyons explains the phenomena this way, writing: ...
Truth Suppression Leads to Meme Creations
Whenever a society begins to separate the constituents of knowledge, that is, to detached from forms or concepts common to all their inherent meanings and then replaces these inherent meanings with meanings which "belong to the people," it has DIVERGED from the TRUTH.
This rejection of the Truth embedded in inherent meaning results in the creation of misrepresentation of that which is constant. We deem to call these misrepresentations of the Ideal memes.
