(no subject)

When I visit next week, a sister is getting a hardback first edition (pre-loved by an under-two I suspect, from the carefully drawn picture in the front) of an Enid Blyton book. I think she might sell it, but that's not relevant.

What *is* relevant is that this is the book that caused a close friend to discover that she had a deprived childhood. Apparently many, many Blyton titles and characters didn't make it to the American South. She had known about Little Black Sambo, but she discovered Golliwog for the first time when we investigated Blyton books online together. It's fascinating and sad that what can have minimal significance for a kid in one culture can be really hurtful to a kid in another. A golliwog was just a dolll in my childhood, and so Blyton wrote about a doll - just like AA Milne. OK, maybe not just like AA Milne, but I *did* know kids who coveted golliwogs in the 60s.

This highlighted for me a disussion that my virus prevented me continuing with, a few days ago. US definitions of white and white culture are quite different to Australian ones. If we want to find our own racism we have to look at the groups who are/were excluded here (since types of racism are as time specific as they are geographically specific), not the ones that are/were excluded there. In the 60s here the worst-hit groups (in my experience) were indigenous Australians, Jewish Australians, some Asian Australians (this was before the big wave - so mainly Chinese Australians whose families had been Australian for a century) and 'wogs' (mainly Australians from the Mediterranean and Central Europe). Skin-colour wasn't the key unifying factor in discrimination. Golliwog was just a doll.

Science and magic and fiction

Someone sent me to a discussion on jaylake's blog (and yes, Jenny and Kylie and Kaaron, I know I'm ill and supposed to be in bed, but my bedroom proved unsalubrious at 3 degrees, so I'm warming it up before I collapse in a heap). The discussion is an old one about the relationship between magic and science (or technology in this particular instance) and yes, I put in my 2c because I am supposed to be teaching my "Magic in the Middle Ages" in October and I have been wondering if I need to revisit my lesson plans. My 2c must have been disconcerting to Mr Lake who knows me not from a bar of soap (he may be able to work out which is me if I were next to a bar of soap, but that's a different matter).

If I'm thinking magic vs science in a novel or in teaching a workshop are a couple of things that need establishing before magic can even begin to be compared to technology.

1) What cosmology is at play? Things that seem technological to us seem magical to someone if they defy the cosmological logic, and vice-versa - lots of Medieval "magic" is nothing of the sort - it's science resting on a Ptolemaic world view.

2) Who is defining something as magic? There is a vast difference in understanding between a high level theorist and a person-on-street (well, mostly).

3) What religious rituals are linked to magic? Do they work with science, against science or have no interaction whatsoever? Many magic systems assume some kind of religion at play (not all though - lots of fictional systems give no thought to these things.) The assumption by many moderns that magic is non-existent assumes a religion which is ineffective in a cause-effect kind of way. This is fine with the cosmology of many modern scientists, but didn't work with people like Newton. You can't take deity out of explanations of a universe where deity is the major causative factor. This changes a bunch of views of things - 'magic' and 'science' have to be explained in relation to 'miracle' and 'judgement', for instance.

This ick virus has made me witter a heap, and I'm sorry, both for this post and for the Enid Blyton one. I suspect my thoughts are a bit more wayward than normal.