Ideas from Notebook, IV

Ravana, Demon King of Lanka

After visiting the Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology today with Sakina, I had a pretty full notebook. I also watched a TED talk this morning from Paul Stamets on “6 Ways Mushrooms can Save the World”, which failed to mention the ways in which they are currently… well, more on that later. Without further ado:

The culture of planned obsolescence; materialism and ideologies of consumption; frogs as fertility and sexuality symbols; Bes, Egyptian god of fertility, the lion-dwarf with his nine companion monkeys; ancient viral plagues; ideas of immortality; Ta Moko Maori scarification tattooing; Easter Island (Rapa Nui); Igbo (Africa) perceptions of society vs. nature, parallel modernity; storytelling and creation myths; Kumulipo; kou wood; ideoglyphs, heiroglyphs, structures of language and thought; Yuri Knorosov; Fremont Culture, Avonlea Complex; figurals such as katsina, statuettes, masks, totems; “Land Otter Man”; perspectives of war; Haida; realism vs. abstraction – cultural imperatives in artistic representation; Ravana the demon-king of Lanka; Tamil Tigers; locality of gods; monolatry; Tyrian purple, which inspired the Greek name of the Phoenicians; “Sea Peoples”; cartography; Planet Earth; “Biographica Literaria”; Egon Schiele; Serpinksi’s Triangle.