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Littlestone wrote: tiompan wrote: Doesn't the Avebury avenue supposed male -female , ying -yang or whatever binary says more about us than the actual setting ?
Particularly seeing as doesn't apply i.e. it is far from consistent , in that the shape of the stones is not limited to diamonds and pillars and what would be described "female " stones are found opposed to other "female " stones etc. And if applied to the stone circle we would get a very unbalanced picture .
Actually it’s Yin-yang, not ying-yang. ‘Ying’ in Chinese means, among other things, eagle, jade or victorious. The two Chinese characters used to write Yin-yang are ‘Yin’, the ‘shady side’ and ‘Yang’ the ‘bright side’ (of a mountain for example). As such, the concept of Yin-yang may be seen as symbolising the opposites that comprise the whole. The ‘whole’ is the salient bit, not the ’binary’ opposites bit. ‘Binary’ is the ‘in’ word for a lot of things these days but, in the case of Yin-yang, the word ‘dualism’ (in its religious and philosophical sense) is probably a better word to employ.
As for the Avebury Avenue and the Avebury Henge, perhaps there were just not enough diamond- and pillar-shaped stones lying around (and as far as I’m aware none of the stones at Avebury have been dressed to make them look male or female). That would not stop the architects of the Avenue and the Henge from bestowing 'non-pillar' or 'non-diamond' stones with male or female attributes if they so wished. At Avebury they may have done that by decorating the more ‘neutral’ stones in a certain way, or they may have seen gender-related characteristics on the surface of the stone. Some of the stones may even have represented children, and might not have been seen as warranting stones that were perceived as having more clearly defined gender characteristics.
The original Chinese wouldn't have used capital letters . And writing in mid sentence in english wouldn't need one either , you can use them if you wish .
Binary is hardly a “in” word these days , when used in reference to binary oppositions like male and female , it stems from a least Saussure and is central to structuralism .
The post I was responding to mentioned “the yin-yang of dark-light, female-male “ (note the perfectly acceptable lack of capital ) , the ying /yang was never going to get special mention of being a dualism in the context of the reply .
It doesn't matter if there were not enough stones to fit any binary opposition , the problem is that even with the very limited number of pairs in the Avenue they don't fit into any type of binary opposition , male -female or otherwise .
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