Guambia's perception of time

Hi guys,


As I was going through the readings for tomorrow I realized an experience I had with one of the indigenous groups in my country.
When I read "The medium is the message" from McLuhan and his debate about the separation between the medium and the content and how it ignores the nature of the medium I remembered a community located in the southwest of Colombia. Their name is "guambianos" and originally came from the Guambía nation. 

In one of my anthropology classes, we were talking about the notion of time, one of my indigenous classmates started to talk about how they think history is a walking snail, he didn't say history is like a walking snail, it is just a walking snail. This has been with me since that time, and now that I can relate it with what McLuhan and Ong said, it has more sense to me. Oral cultures like the people from Guambía express language as a mode of action and as a sound that has actual power inside their communities.

This also relates with a perception of time, a spiral perception that somehow contradicts the linear concept of time which is often connected with a western way of thinking. 

On this website my professor explains more in detail the process, I don't know if you can translate it with the Google tool.
 
Julianna

(This image show the "Snail Stone" or srurrapu)

Comments

  1. Sophie JohnstonOctober 8, 2021 at 2:09 PM

    Hey Juliana,

    Thank you so much for sharing this! I thought this was a really interesting and unique personal connection and a great example to the topics discussed in the readings and in class. Unfortunately the link didn't seem to work for me. However, this would definitely be something that I would be interested in reading more about as the idea that history is just a walking snail does confuse me a little and I think had the link worked I would be able to read more and gain a greater understanding as to what your classmate meant. Regardless, I think this is a great example of an oral culture and how the image of a snail in itself creates its own sound in my head. This example also demonstrates the power this sound has in creating a greater understanding of what history is as well as the concept of time and that it takes place over a long period of time, similar to that of a walking snail.

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  2. Anthony SorrentinoDecember 8, 2021 at 3:15 PM

    Hi Juliana,

    Similar to Sophie, the link unfortunately didn't work for me either. However, I think this a really strong connection between the McLuhan's idea that the Median is the message intertwined with Ong's ideology around oral cultures. Ong explains that Oral cultures and their learning tactics revolve around achieving close, emphatic, communal identification with the known. Associating the idea that "History is just like a walking snail" is interesting because it associates an image with idea. Even though it is an image there are sounds that associated with it. For instance, the silence of a snail moving slowly comes to mind and how history takes a long time to develop. It's an interesting twist on McLuhan's median the message.

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