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06466_Field_TCUM T31.txt
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1996-04-10
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Orient. The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between
written and oral kinds of perception and organization of
existence is upon us. Since understanding stops action, as
Nietzsche observed, we can moderate the fierceness of this
conflict by understanding the media that extend us and raise
these wars within and without us.
Detribalization by literacy and its traumatic effects on
tribal man is the theme of a book by the psychiatrist J. C.
Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease (World
Health Organization, Geneva, 1953). Much of his material
appeared in an article in Psychiatry magazine, November,
1959: “The Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word.” Again,
it is electric speed that has revealed the lines of force operating
from Western technology in the remotest areas of bush,
savanna, and desert. One example is the Bedouin with his