{"id":239,"date":"2013-10-09T18:21:12","date_gmt":"2013-10-09T09:21:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/?p=239"},"modified":"2013-10-13T09:27:46","modified_gmt":"2013-10-13T00:27:46","slug":"fish-is-funny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/09\/fish-is-funny\/","title":{"rendered":"Fish is funny"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even when nobody involved has bad intentions, learning about foreign cultures from a distance can be problematic.\u00a0 For example, if you want to know about the land of Boogleboopy–and you can’t go and emerge yourself in the Boogleboopite culture–you’ll have to rely on reports from others. In fact, most of the world’s people\u00a0don’t<\/em> go abroad, so their knowlege of other cultures has\u00a0<\/em>to come from what is reported to them.<\/p>\n

What can go wrong? A lot. The informant may think he’s gotten a bead on the foreign culture when really he hasn’t.\u00a0 When he’s in Booglyboopy, he’s served popiba berries with every meal. He goes back to his homeland and tells his buddy, “Boogleboopites eat popiba berries with every meal.” Actually Boogleboopites only eat popiba berries on special occasions (weddings, the birth of a child . . . and when a visitor arrives from abroad). Or he might say something that is absolutely true, but say it in a way that makes his buddy back home misconstrue the information. “I was invited over for dinner by seven different Boogleboopite families–and every time they had an enormous bowl of popiba berries on the table. Man, do they love their popiba berries!” The informant doesn’t say <\/em>popiba berries are a daily staple, but his homeland buddy may mistakingly infer that they are.<\/p>\n

The informant, of course, cannot paint one hundred percent of the picture, no matter how accurately he tries to report, so much of what Boogleboopites are really like will have to be left up to his buddy’s imagination–and with no experience of any<\/em> foreign culture, that is, with his own culture having to serve as the default when information about the remote place is lacking,\u00a0he might\u00a0come to some mistaken conclusions.<\/p>\n

At least he might every now and then. . . . And\u00a0it’s possible he\u00a0might a great deal of the time.<\/p>\n

One of the best illustrations (literally, illustrations)<\/em>\u00a0of this principle is a children’s picture book, written and\u00a0illustrated by Leo Lionni, Fish is Fish <\/em>(1970)–a wonderful book.<\/p>\n

In a pond, a fish and tadpole become friends. But then the tadpole becomes a frog. He leaves the pond. He goes “about the world–hopping here and there”–and sees “extraordinary things.” He comes back to the pond. He tells the fish of all he’s seen. Birds, cows, people.<\/p>\n

“Cows,” said the frog. “Cows! They have four legs, horns, eat grass, and carry pink bags of milk.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What the frog says is one hundred percent correct, but the fish is\u00a0\u00a0incapable of imagining anything he’s not explicitly told. The frog has assumed, wrongly, that his buddy will be able to infer all the physical attributes of a cow\u00a0from a description of only three.\u00a0 And so the fish imagines a\u00a0creature just like himself, a FISH (that is, a long, svelte creature with fins) . . . only his long, skinny, finned fish\u00a0has four legs, horns, and pink bags of milk, and\u00a0it eats grass.<\/p>\n

\"131009_cowfish\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To the fish’s miraculous credit,\u00a0 he does not, when told that cows “carry pink bags of milk,”\u00a0imagine\u00a0his cow carrying them with her hooves! I surely would have. If I could have imagined her hooves!<\/p>\n

I wonder if\u00a0the fish assumed that girl cows\u00a0and boy cows both <\/em>carry milk.\u00a0I wonder if he thought\u00a0that strapping pink bags to your belly\u00a0and stuffing them with milk was a bit daft.\u00a0Wouldn’t he have thought you should\u00a0keep\u00a0stuff like that in a cooler place, like, say, the bottom of a pond?<\/p>\n

I love this book–and highly recommend\u00a0it to\u00a0all the children and<\/em> adults out there, and especially for all the cross-cultural-understanding educators and students out there.<\/p>\n

When you read, of course, its very important to realize that neither the frog nor the fish has bad intentions. And it’s also important to realize that neither the frog (the informant) nor the fish (the stay-at-home buddy)\u00a0is aware\u00a0that the frog’s images of birds and cows and people\u00a0are at all off the mark.\u00a0 The fish thinks he’s got it. The frog thinks he’s given it to him.<\/p>\n

Near the end of the story, the fish decides to see the amazing world for himself. Alas, a mere few seconds of flopping about on the grass\u00a0at the edge of\u00a0his pond convince him that he was not meant to be a world traveler. He’s left to conclude that his world–the pond–is “surely the most beautiful of all worlds.”<\/p>\n

Of course he does! And no doubt, for him<\/em>, it is the most beautiful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even when nobody involved has bad intentions, learning about foreign cultures from a distance can be problematic.\u00a0 For example, if you want to know about the land of Boogleboopy–and you can’t go and emerge yourself in the Boogleboopite culture–you’ll have to rely on reports from others. In fact, most of the world’s people\u00a0don’t go abroad, … Continue reading Fish is funny<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260,"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239\/revisions\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/persimmon-dreams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}