Here's another perspective on the theme of the talking stick as a symbol;
it's a quote from Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance",
at the point where he describes Phaedrus' "Church of Reason" lecture:
It began with a refrence to a newspaper article about a country church
building with an electric beer sign hanging right over the front entrance.
The building had been sold and was being used as a bar. ... The article
said a number of people had complained to the church officials about it.
It had been a Catholic church, and the priest who had been delegated to
respond to the criticism had sounded quite irritated about the whole
thing. To him it had revealed an incredible ignorance of what a church
really was. Did they think that bricks and boards and glass constituted a
church? Or the shape of the roof? Here, posing as piety, was an example
of the very materialism the church opposed. The building in question was
not holy ground. It had been desanctified. That was the end of it. The
beer sign resided over a bar, not a church, and those who couldn't tell
the difference were simply revealing something about themselves.
Backing off from the priest's (or Pirsig's) impatient tone, there's still
a point worth thinking about here: the physical object is not the symbol,
it's merely the "carrier" of the symbolism as long as people give it that
significance. A stick used in a corporate setting, and given the name
"talking stick", is not necessarily a profanation of a native American
symbol -- it's simply a different culture adapting a form to invest with
their own content. If no disrespect is intended, none should be taken.
(This might be a good "ladder of inference" example: they're using a form
like mine for a different purpose -> they're using my symbol to mean
something different -> they're profaning my symbol.)
--Don Dwiggins I know you believe you understand SEI Information Technology what you think I said, d.l.dwiggins@computer.org but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard was not what I meant. -- S.I. Hiyakawa
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>