Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery - Softcover

Newcomb, Steven

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555916422 ISBN 13: 9781555916428

Verlag: Fulcrum Publishing, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

Pagans in the Promised Land provides a unique, well-researched challenge to U.S. federal Indian law and policy. It attacks the presumption that American Indian nations are legitimately subject to the plenary power of the United States.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape) is the indigenous law research coordinator at the Sycuan education department of the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation in San Diego County, California. He is cofounder and codirector of the Indigenous Law Institute, a fellow with the American Indian Policy and Media Initiative at Buffalo State College in New York.

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Pagans in the Promised Land

Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery

By Steven T. Newcomb

Fulcrum Publishing

Copyright © 2008 Steven T. Newcomb
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55591-642-8

CHAPTER 1

A Primer on Cognitive Theory

This book is a tentative effort to apply what has been termed "cognitive legal studies" to federal Indian law. This chapter introduces the reader to a number of important conceptual tools that will be utilized throughout the rest of the chapters. The information presented in this chapter can be quite challenging because it involves an entirely new way of thinking about thinking. However, the insight to be gained from this information is critically important for those who seek to better understand how human beings reason, and for those who are serious about decolonization. Because cognitive science and cognitive theory involve a great deal of complexity and subtlety, this effort to apply some of the tools and methods of cognitive theory to federal Indian law should be understood as merely suggestive and tentative rather than definitive. A key point is that federal Indian law can be studied as an ongoing process of mental or conceptual activity and socialized human behavior. In part, it can therefore be analyzed and studied in terms of conceptual metaphors, image-schemas, and other cognitive operations, such as radial categories and idealized cognitive models (ICMs).

Cognitive science studies the mind by investigating conceptual systems, or systems of thought. This is accomplished in part through empirical research in such areas as psychology, linguistics, cultural anthropology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Some cognitive scientists study what is known as the "cognitive unconscious," where, they say, most of our mental activity takes place. Two prominent thinkers in the area of cognitive theory, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, use the term cognitive to refer to "any mental operations and structures that are involved in language, meaning, perception, conceptual systems, and reason." Based on some thirty years of work, their findings show that "our conceptual systems and our reason arise from our bodies." Cognitive scientists study the way that people think and speak by also investigating the role that our physical bodies play in cognition, including the complex neural activities of our brains.

Steven Winter describes mind as "an embodied process formed in interaction with the physical and social world." One of the most surprising claims made on the basis of cognitive theory is that "all thought is irreducibly imaginative." "Meaning," says Winter, "arises in the imaginative interactions of the human organism with its world, and these embodied experiences provide both the grounding and the structure for human thought and rationality." Thus the human imagination is said to be the central means by which we interact with and adapt to the social and physical world. Furthermore, our dynamic imagination, says Winter, operates in a "regular, orderly and systematic fashion."

However, as Lakoff and Johnson have pointed out, "Our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious." Cognitive science and cognitive theory are efforts to empirically examine human phenomena, such as language, in order to better understand the inner workings and structure of human conceptual systems.

Based on the above, because the conceptual system of federal Indian law is a product of the human imagination, it is also irreducibly imaginative. Because the ideas that constitute federal Indian law are the result of imaginative processes, those ideas operate systematically in a regular, dynamic, and highly adaptive manner. Furthermore, the deep cognitive structure of the conceptual system of federal Indian law is not immediately evident, even to those who regularly study and practice this area of law. Cognitive science and cognitive theory provide a number of valuable tools for gaining much-needed insight into federal Indian law; one of these tools is conceptual metaphor.

Conceptual Metaphors

Metaphor is a matter of thought, not just language. Metaphorical thinking involves imaginatively thinking of and experiencing one thing in terms of another. Since we as humans automatically and unreflectively think and reason (imaginatively conceptualize) about all kinds of things in terms of the functions, structures, and activities of our physical bodies, it necessarily follows that human conceptual systems are largely metaphorical in nature. Because federal Indian law is a conceptual system composed of countless abstract ideas, it too is largely metaphorical in nature. Thus a study of the role that conceptual metaphors and other cognitive operations have played and continue to play in federal Indian law may provide us with a much deeper understanding of this extremely difficult and problematic field of law than has been previously possible.

The term metaphor is derived from the Greek meta pherein and means `to carry over,' thereby "suggesting that the meanings and ideas associated with one thing are carried over to another." A more technical way of describing metaphor is to say that it involves complex neural brain functions that facilitate thinking of or understanding one conceptual domain in terms of ideas and inferences drawn from another conceptual domain. Two common examples of conceptual metaphor include understanding and experiencing the domain of argument in terms of the domain of war (argument is war) or thinking of and experiencing the domain of love in terms of the domain of a journey (love is a journey). In the first example, some entailments of war are mapped onto our understanding of argument. In the second example, the entailments of a journey are mapped onto our understanding of love. This gives rise to such expressions as "Our relationship isn't going anywhere" and "We're driving in the fast lane on the freeway of love."

An understanding of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in terms of the location of the Indies, as Europeans referred to Eastern Asia during the so-called Age of Discovery, eventually resulted in the Europeans mentally projecting the concepts indios, Indians, or American Indians onto the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere. Thus the misnomer Indian can be thought of as the primary metaphor in federal Indian law. The tools of cognitive theory provide us with an effective means of examining the way that federal lawmakers, jurists, and policy makers have unconsciously and imaginatively applied certain categories, concepts, metaphors, and other thought processes to American Indian peoples, some of which, through time, have come to be objectified and reified as "the law."

Image-Schemas

In addition to identifying conceptual metaphors and the central role they play in human thought, scholars of cognitive science have also identified a mental phenomenon called image-schemas, which are part of the structure and operation of the human imagination. Image-schemas play a highly significant role in the conceptual system of federal Indian law. Such schemas are mentally modeled after the structure, functions, activities, and spatial orientation of the human body and its interactions with the social and physical world.

Image-schemas are grounded in the bodily experiences of our everyday actions. For example, when we get up in the morning, we walk upright. We typically walk...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Fulcrum Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1555916422
• ISBN 13: 9781555916428
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland