Piraha Amazonian Tribe

Here is the New Yorker article on linguistics we were discussing in class today for those of you that were interested. It really is an amazing article. Hope the link works...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto

Discipline and Punish

In reading the first chapter of Foulcault's Discipline and Punish from 1975, I couldn't help but think of Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, which she published nearly thirty years later in 2003. Sontag's book deals primarily with our fascination with images and representations of war and cruelty, certainly not attempting to describe the evolution of the penal system or our ability to discipline individuals. However, what brought Sontag's book to mind while reading Foulcault was his arguement that we no longer want to see torture and punishment; that we have pushed it first into the dark and then transformed it into the court trial. What Sontag shows us is that we are still fascinated and drawn to the sight of the "wrong" being tortured. The difference between the middle ages and now, of course, is that our desire to witness cruelty toward others has become voyeuristic and closeted. It no longer occurs in the town square where we all openly cheer it, but rather on cell phone videos, or emerging photos, or youtube clips, and we all gravitate to the images in fascination while often simultaneously condemning it. Look, as Sontag does, to the events at Abu Ghraib, or the widely circulated video of Saddam Hussein's execution. Foulcault is correct in his description of the transformation and development of Western discipline and punishment. However, it would be incorrect to say that the medieval mentality toward torture and public punishment has been entirely dissolved from modern ideology, however much we may wish to deny it.