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I've run across this word several times. But it seemed particularly important when I heard it discussed on On the Media on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday this past Monday. MacArthur Fellow Louis Hyde describes it as our collective being or self, our public self, how we contain community in our "inside self." It is in contrast to individual and individuality. I think it may describe how we primarily view ourselves—as members of a community whose furtherance is our responsibilty and goal or as individuals, primarily responsible to ourselves.

Raised as we are in what must be one of history's most individualistic societies, we may have difficulty really understanding dividuality.

The definitions are definitely peculiar.

1. Separate, distinct.
2. Divisible, divided.
3. Shared, held in common (with others).

1 and 2 seem quite the opposite of 3. Alternatively, I found:

1. Divided, shared, or participated in, in common with others.

That's not a whole lot more clear. P2P, unavailable on Jan. 16 as they are opposing the SOPA legislation, writes: "a physically embodied human subject that is endlessly divisible and reducible to data representations via the modern technologies ..." Going from bad to worse!

However, this website does help, if a wee bit abstruse when you read down its page:

…persons – single actors – are not thought in South Asia to be “individual,” that is, indivisible, bounded units, as they are in much of Western social and psychological theory as well as in common sense. Instead, it appears that persons are generally thought by South Asians to be “dividual” or divisible. To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They must also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances – essences, residues, or other active influences – that may then reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated.” McKim Marriott Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism

The word may be difficult but I'm pretty sure that it in some sense (maybe just as what I want it to mean) underlies all of what Martin Luther King had to say in the wonderful hour that Amy Goodman and Democracy Now presented on Monday. If you have an hour, I strongly recommend that you listen to this broadcast instead of reading it. You can also download it at iTunes as a video broadcast. It is extraordinarily and so sadly still relevant in 2012.

P.S. You'll be glad to know there is an Atlanta band named DiViDUAL.

I can't resist this one, which a friend sent today. It's a photo taken outside of a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the U.S. It's a little early but we seem to be in the holiday season. If it's a mystery to you, you need to know that many, many Jewish families (including mine when I was a child) traditionally go to Chinese restaurants on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. I guess because all other restaurants are closed at those days.

 

 

Contest week here -- but no prize for this one. The answers are below. I'm currently reading an old book and came upon the following:

Pompeo was saying, "There was  a man who'd saved the country from ruin and showed the way to reform. When he came to power, we were surprised that his acts were in opposition to his words. We asked ouselves, 'Can he have betrayed us?' A few weeks ago someone came through here and revealed the truth to us. 'He's a prisoner of the bank,' he said. Nothing else! But what did he mean? Is he really in chains in the cellar of the bank? Or was that just a manner of speaking?"...

I couldn't say for sure whether the man you're talking about is really chained up in a bank," said Don Paolo. "Some people think he is. But it's not a question of just one man. But what you can be sure of as long as you keep your eyes open is that the whole country is the prisoner of the financiers."...

I'm also conviced that we'll have to prepare a second revolution," said Don Paolo. "We'll have to free our country from the bank's clutches. It'll be long, hard and tricky; but it's worth it."

Okay, written in either the 1930s or 1955. Italy. By Ignazio Silone in Bread and Wine. By no means would I ever compare Obama to Il Duce but when I read this passage, it did seem timely. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." (The more things change, the more they stay the same.) 

From Wikipedia:

Bread and Wine is an anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist novel written by Ignazio Silone. It was finished while the author was in exile from Benito Mussolini's Italy. It was first published in 1936 in a German language edition in Switzerland as Brot und Wein, and in an English translation in London later the same year. An Italian version, Pane e vino, did not appear until 1937.

After the war, Silone completely revised the text, publishing a significantly different version in Italy (in 1955), reversing the title: Vino e pane (‘Wine and Bread’). This is also available in English translation.

As someone who rarely goes back to reread books from an earlier time, I'm reading this book because at a memorial service for my husband's cousin Ted (English professor and book owner), there was a table of Ted's books with a request that we each take some. It's a lovely idea! Ted marked up this book in different colors and with different codes and it's driving me a little crazy because I have no idea what he understood and thought. I just know he read a lot more deeply than I do. Thanks, Ted. We miss you. 

I recently read a book by Liza Bakewell titled Madre: Perilous Journeys with a Spanish Noun. It is an odd book and I think I give it an 83% recommendation. The author, a writer and anthropologist, has spent a lot of time in Mexico. She was shocked by Mexican expressions that included the word madre and obsessed about it for years. I'm pretty sure she's still obsessing. 

We've all been told that mothers are revered in Latino culture. So "how can 'me vale madre' mean worthless and '¡qué padre!' mean marvelous?" And there are a lot of such expressions that I'm not comfortable writing here. In the course of Bakewell's meanderings, she uncovers a lot of distressing gender-related cultural stuff. (I couldn't think of a better word.)

She also traces the historical development of language and of the infant's "ma" sound that presumably morphed into "mamá" and "mama". She has a wonderful list of other languages' versions of "mama". It includes Swahili, Hopi, Cree, Quechua, Basque,  and many others. "Mama is for use inside the house. The Spanish madre, English mother, German mutter, Czech matinka, Slovak maminka, Polish matka, Albanian matrice are for use outside the house—more formal, more detached from its origins that way." 

The book is far from linear and quite autobiographical. I think it is my left-brainedness that led to the 83% rating. I would have liked to find a great concluding paragraph to quote. I didn't. Bakewell's an anthropologist and she writes as she observes. Nonlinearly. 

I've also just finished Henry Louis Gates book, Black in Latin America. I'll write more about it in another blog. It's fascinating as well. Yet somehow the autobiographical elements seemed awkward. As it did some in Bakewell's book. It's not that I don't like autobiographic information; it can personalize a reading and that should be a good thing. So, just now, I'm not clear why that component in the two books struck me as awkward. I welcome your thoughts about this.

I am a long-time Apple user—since the Apple II. I was one of the co-founders of the Apple Users Group a century ago on the UNC campus. I've stuck with Apple through many computers, iPods, iPhones, and now, even an iPad. I have, of course, been concerned over the years about their packaging, their recycling policies, their anti-union stance and treatment of Apple Store employees, and, most of all, their labor policies in China. It is Labor Day after all as I write this.

However, when Steve Jobs announced his retirement from the CEO position at Apple, I read a great number of the articles written about him. It struck me what a major role he has had in my life. And it brought back a funny memory from our trip to Oaxaca in June.

One of the places that we visited was called The Hub. It is a wonderful community center for non-profits, entrepreneurs, artists, computer users, teachers, and others in the middle of the city. Its motto is un lugar para quien trabaja por la transformación social para un mundo radicalmente mejor (a place for those who work for social transformation towards a radically better world).

I noticed a hard-to-read quote on the wall in the front of the Hub that I stopped to read. You won't be able to read it from the photo on the left, but it is a Spanish translation of the following quote from Jobs. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me … Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful… that’s what matters to me.” It is nice to have distinct aspects of your world intersect. It makes the world seem a little smaller.

You can read an interesting selection of Jobs' quotes in a Wall Street Journal blog entry by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries.