Fordham University

Marshall McLuhan 1968 - Lecture by Ted Carpenter - Language as Ritual - Fordham University Tapes #6

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Title: Language And Culture As Ritual Date: 31 January 1968 Location: Fordham University, Seminar center Speakers: Ted Carpenter Description: Two years before defending his thesis on Iroquoian prehistoric archaeology in 1950, he began teaching at the University of Toronto where he teamed up with Marshall McLuhan, a fellow iconoclast. He did fieldwork among the Aivilingmiut at Southampton Island in 1950, returning to this Iglulik subgroup again in the famine winter of 1951–52, and in 1955. An early public anthropologist, he also produced and hosted a weekly CBC radio show that turned into a television program. With McLuhan, he obtained a major Ford Foundation grant for an interdisciplinary media research project (1953–55) and co-taught a course on how print, radio and television transform human relations and perceptions. Together hatching their core ideas about the role of mass communication in culture change, they co-edited the interdisciplinary periodicalExplorations and published a selection of its articles in Explorations in Communication(1960). In 1959, Carpenter published his book Eskimo, left Toronto and became founding chair of an experimental interdisciplinary program of anthropology and art at California State University-Northridge. Collaborating with colleagues, he made several films, including Georgia Sea Island Singers (1964), documenting Gullah songs and dances from St Simon Island. Having remained in close contact with McLuhan with whom he collaborated onUnderstanding Media (1964), Carpenter rejoined his old friend at Fordham University (1967–68). Next, after a year as Carnegie Chair at UC Santa Cruz, he took a research professorship at the University of Papua & New Guinea, advising the Australian government on introducing mass media in recently-contacted indigenous communities. After returning to the US, he published They Became What They Beheld (1970), followed by Eskimo Realities (1973) and his most famous book, Oh, What a Blow that Phantom Gave Me! (1976) During the 1967-1968 academic year, McLuhan, the Albert Schweitzer Chair in Humanities, oversaw an alternative curriculum of lectures, film showings and independent study assignments for students. Within two months of his appointment in 1967 he is hospitalised and underwent the longest brain surgery the world has known until that date (2 1/2hours and removal of benign brain tumou. McLuhan’s appointment came about through communications professor John Culkin, S.J., a longtime colleague of McLuhan’s and himself a media expert. John Culkin (b. 1928), who was a Jesuit priest until 1969, first met McLuhan at a seminar Brandeis University in 1963, while he was working on his doctorate at Harvard, where one of his project was to write a clear explication of McLuhan’s ideas. (He found this difficult until he was directed to McLuhan’s fourteen-chapter Report on Project in Understanding New Media (1960): see page 255-6). In 1965 Culkin was appointed Director of the Centre for Communication at Fordham University and was instrumental in arranging for McLuhan’s appointment to the Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at Fortham in 1967-8. Culkin later founded in New York City the Centre for Understanding Media, and a graduate-school program in media studies at the New School for Social Research, both of which are explicitly based on McLuhan’s work. He is acclaimed to have invented the field of Media Literacy. Founded in 1841, Fordham is the Jesuit University of New York, offering exceptional education distinguished by the Jesuit tradition to more than 15,100 students in its four undergraduate colleges and its six graduate and professional schools. More information: http://beyondmcluhan.blogspot.nl https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com http://www.mcluhanonmaui.com https://ionandbob.blogspot.nl