Lecture: THE HIDDEN BURDEN OF THE “PERSONAL OBJECT”: A LINGUISTIC DIGRESSION”
Language shapes the way we think and act as much as much as we shape language. And language ends up using us as much as we use it. Language is a powerful mechanism through which we construct and express, but also through which we perpetuate worldviews. And so culture is expressed in language, but culture is also formed through language. And then there is of course the question of using a foreign, common language, such as English, to express worldviews that are perhaps not consonant with it.
While we discuss the role, the power and the value of jewellery and of art in general, how attentive are we to the seemingly simple everyday words we use In our discourse? How critical are we of the terms that we employ? Of the worldviews that lie behind them and who constructed them? And of how language so easily makes us willing accomplices in perpetuating them? And willing victims in accepting them?