Edmund Snow Carpenter

In 1969, Edmund Snow Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil travelled extensively in Papua New Guinea researching the effects of media on that emerging nation. He spoke of the creation of an entirely new environment, of ancient rituals being scrapped after they had been filmed, and of people recognizing each other not by their faces but by the Polaroid pictures in their headdresses. Aside from any important moral questions, what were the possibilities of data contamination? How does the presence of the camera affect behavior and how does this vary in different cultures? These were the questions he sought answers to.

Edmund Carpenter : “Some cultures believe that to have your picture taken is to have your soul stolen by the camera. Well, that’s true.” He believes that we live in a sensory environment totally different from that of pre-literate man, simply because we have learned to read. He says that in “shifting from speech to writing, man gave up an ear for an eye, and transferred his interest from spiritual to spatial, from reverential to referential.”

His travels took him all over the world and in 1972 he wrote a book about his experiences. For the past two days (which explains why I haven’t done much blogging) I have been immersing myself in reading the text and looking at the photographs in an online version of Edmund Carpenter’s “Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!” : Translated to hypermedia and edited by Michael Wesch. The following quotes are a few of the interesting tidbits from that site, and though the quoted bits ‘look’ like a lot, these are just a fragment of what’s to be found there. I highly recommend taking some time to read through the whole thing, it’s… really ’something.’

“I knew a Californian who read his poetry aloud at parties until his friends learned to silence him. But when he played recordings of these same poems, everyone listened.” …

“Newsmen long ago discovered that news could be used as a hook from which to hang prejudices. They rarely reviewed current events or films or books; they merely ornamented opinions with them. For them, reality was an irrelevancy, something best avoided; what mattered was opinions about reality.

TV news favors this format. It offers clich� drama costumed as news. The commentator occupies the screen most of the time, though his visual appearance is totally irrelevant: Irrelevant to the news, but not irrelevant to the drama of the news hour, which is something utterly different, its own reality, with the commentator as star.” …

“The connection between symbol & thing comes from the fact that the symbol - the word or picture - helps give the “thing” its identity, clarity, definition. It helps convert given reality into experienced reality, and is therefore an indispensable part of all experience.

It’s not easy to experience the unfamiliar, the unnamed. We say, ‘If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it,’ but the phrase really should be, ‘If I hadn’t believed it with all my heart, I wouldn’t have seen it.’” …

“No sense exists in total isolation. Run water into the bath while switching the light on & off - the sound appears louder in darkness & its location is easier to determine. Teach a soldier to strip & reassemble his rifle, then ask him to do it blindfolded & you will find he almost always does it faster without sight. Taste & smell seem stronger in the dark, which may be why good restaurants are candlelit. Darkness certainly makes love-making more interesting.” …

“Dr. Jean Itard’s famous account of a ‘wild’ boy found in the forests of Aveyran in southern France, in 1799, tells how, when a door was suddenly slammed, the boy didn’t move. For a time it was thought he must be deaf, until one day he was observed listening to the sound of a mouse in the leaves.

A child, sleeping in a pram, may ignore the roar of a diesel truck, but respond to its mother’s whisper.

We respond only to what we recognize, to what holds meaning for us.” …

“Synchronizing the senses means one sense dominates all others. Under literacy, that sense is sight. Other senses are muted or used with the bias of the eye. Sight has a natural bias toward detachment, creating the detached observer, whereas sound has an opposite bias: it surrounds, involves - one steps into it.

Literate peoples experience sound as if it were visible: they listen to music. Nonliterates merge with music. Far from being detached, they become involved participants, immersing themselves totally in it.” …

“In the novel In the Region of the Ice, a nun who teaches literature, Sister Irene, speaks of a brilliant, mad student. ‘I’m very grateful to have him in class. It’s just that … he thinks ideas are real.’ Sister Carlotta, who loved literature also, had been forced to teach grade-school arithmetic for the last four years. That might have been why she said, a little sharply, ‘You don’t think ideas are real?’ Sister Irene acquiesced with a smile, but of course she did not think so: only reality is real.’

Under literacy, particularly print, all experience was subject to a single code. Inner experiences were expected to conform to outer perceptions. Any failure of correspondence was regarded as hallucination. The individual who failed in this was thought to be living in a world of self-deception.” …

“To the young today, however, the dream experience is its own reality, a separate reality: it doesn’t need to be validated by translation into the historical world of sensory experience. It validates itself.

Similarly, they regard media as self-contained environments, having little correspondence with other realities or environments. TV is its own reality, radio its reality, film still another reality.

Each creates its own space, its own time. The clock on the “Today” Show has no hour hand.

When TV fans seek correspondence between TV & reality, reality often surrenders to TV.” …

“TV deprives its viewers of speech. Those who live within it retreat from language. When Jean Piaget asked Swiss children, ‘What do you think with?’ most replied, ‘The mouth.’ Children in the most diverse cultures make this association. It may, until recently, have been a universally held concept. But today, in the United States, there are reports of children who associate thinking with television.” …

“Reading is hard work. It makes enormous demands upon the neurological system. It employs one sense only, and that sense in a most peculiar way.

Some years ago, it was alleged - first in a medical volume, later in a psychiatric journal - that Africans needed more sleep when taught to read, and that clothes aided them in reading by conserving body heat & energy. Convincing evidence wasn’t offered then & hasn’t been offered since, but I’ve gradually come to wonder, on the basis of scattered observations, if that theory may not have considerable merit. I’m not prepared to dismiss out of hand the observation that it’s easier for a naked man to watch TV than it is for him to read.

When food was rationed in France during World War II, the largest portions went to those engaged in arduous physical labor & those whose work involved reading & writing.

We think of exhaustion in terms of toil & sweat, but reading, by employing one sense only sight - and employing it in a highly restricted way, destroys the harmonic orchestration of all the senses. Reading can be more exhausting than physical labor.” …

“Media are really environments, with all the effects geographers & biologists associate with environments. We live inside our media. We are their content. TV images come at us so fast, in such profusion, they engulf us, tattoo us. We’re immersed. It’s like skin diving. We’re surrounded & whatever surrounds, involves. TV doesn’t just wash over us & then ‘go out of mind.’ It goes into mind, deep into mind. The subconscious is a world in which we store everything, not something, and TV extends the subconscious.” …

“Once students were empty buckets waiting to be filled. Now these buckets are overflowing with information acquired outside the classroom. In a world of media crop-dusting, the classroom has become a fallout shelter. It’s now a place of detention, not attention.

Unlike print, TV doesn’t transport bits of classified information. Instead it transports the viewer. It takes his spirit on a trip, an instant trip. On live shows, it takes his spirit to real events in progress.

But here a contradiction occurs: though TV may make the viewer’s spirit an actual witness to the spectacle of life, he cannot live with this. If he sees a criminal making ready to murder a sleeping woman & can’t interfere, can’t warn her, he suffers & is afflicted because his being is phantasmal.

So he participates solely as dreamer, in no way responsible for events that occur. All TV becomes dream. This is the inner trip, the inward quest, the search for meaning beyond the world of daily appearances. It’s the prophet ‘blinded so that sight is yielded for insight.’” …

“Edmund Carpenter defies labels as much as his books defy categories. Anthropologist, filmmaker, teacher, writer - he has lived in many cultures and worked in many media. His anthropological studies, which he began at the age of thirteen, have taken him to the Canadian Arctic, Siberia, Southeast Asia, Borneo and New Guinea.” - from the back cover of the first edition of Oh, What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me!. - Virtual Snow : Edmund Snow Carpenter on the Web