Questões Militares de Inglês

   South Asian women have draped themselves in colorful silks and cottons for eons. The ways they’re made and worn are dazzling and diverse.

   The word “sari” means “strip of cloth” in Sanskrit. But for the Indian women – and a few men – who have been wrapping themselves in silk, cotton, or linen for millennia, these swaths of fabric are more than just simple garments. They’re symbols of national pride, ambassadors for traditional (and cutting-edge) design and craftsmanship, and a prime example of the rich differences in India’s 29 states.

   “The sari both as symbol and reality has filled the imagination of the subcontinent, with its appeal and its ability to conceal and reveal the personality of the person wearing it,” says Delhi-based textile historian Rta Kapur Chishti, author of Saris of India: Tradition and Beyond and co-founder of Taanbaan, a fabric company devoted to reviving and preserving traditional Indian spinning and weaving methods.

   The first mention of saris (alternately spelled sarees) is in the Rig Veda, a Hindu book of hymns dating to 3,000 B.C.; draped garments show up on Indian sculptures from the first through sixth centuries, too. What Delhi-based textile historian Rta Kapur Chishti calls the “magical unstitched garment” is ideally suited to India’s blazingly hot climate and the modest-dress customs of both Hindu and Muslim communities. Saris also remain traditional for women in other South Asian countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. 

(Available in: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/photography/the-story-of-the-sari-in-india/.)

Meritocracy has become a leading social ideal. Politicians across the ideological spectrum continually return to the theme that the rewards of life—money, power, jobs, university admission—should be distributed according to skill and effort. The most common metaphor is the ‘even playing field’ upon which players can rise to the position that fits their merit. Conceptually and morally, meritocracy is presented as the opposite of systems such as hereditary aristocracy, in which one’s social position is determined by the lottery of birth. Under meritocracy, wealth and advantage are merit’s rightful compensation, not the fortuitous windfall of external events. And most people don’t just think the world should be run meritocratically, they think it is meritocratic. However, although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

Perhaps more disturbing, simply holding meritocracy as a value seems to promote discriminatory behaviour. The management scholar Emilio Castilla at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the sociologist Stephen Benard at Indiana University studied attempts to implement meritocratic practices, such as performance-based compensation in private companies. They found that, in companies that explicitly held meritocracy as a core value, managers assigned greater rewards to male employees over female employees with identical performance evaluations. This preference disappeared where meritocracy was not explicitly adopted as a value.

This is surprising because impartiality is the core of meritocracy’s moral appeal. The ‘even playing field’ is intended to avoid unfair inequalities based on gender, race and the like. Yet  Castilla and Benard found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. They suggest that this ‘paradox of meritocracy’ occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral sincerity. Satisfied that they are just, they become less inclined to examine their own behaviour for signs of prejudice.

As with any ideology, part of its draw is that it justifies the status quo, explaining why people belong where they happen to be in the social order. It is a well-established psychological principle that people prefer to believe that the world is just.

Fonte: https://bigthink.com/. Publicado em 23/03/2019. Acesso em 20/08/2021. Adaptado.

In a new survey of North American Indian languages, Marianne Mithun gives an admirably clear statement of what is lost as each language ceases to be used. “Speakers of these languages and their descendants are acutely aware of what it can mean to lose a language,” she begins – and this is perfectly true, although these speakers must have taken the decision themselves not to teach the language to their children. It happens all too often – people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.

When a language disappears [Mithun continues] the most intimate aspects of culture can disappear as well: fundamental ways of organizing experience into concepts, of relating ideas to each other, of interacting to people. The more conscious genres of verbal art are usually lost as well: traditional ritual, oratory, myth, legends, and even humor. Speakers commonly remark that when they speak a different language, they say different things and even think different thoughts. These are very interesting assertions. They slip by in a book on anthropological linguistics, where in a book on linguistic theory they would be highly contentious. Is it true that “fundamental ways of organizing experience into concepts [and] of relating ideas to each other” are specific to individual languages and are therefore likely to be lost when a language ceases to be used? Is it true that when speakers speak a different language, they “say different things and even think different thoughts”? Again, the extent to which thought depends on language is very controversial. These questions must be now faced, because only when we have reached an opinion on them will we be able to accept or reject Marianne Mithun’s conclusion: “The loss of a language represents a definitive separation of a people from its heritage. It also represents an irreparable loss for us all, the loss of opportunities to glimpse alternative ways of making sense of the human experience.”

Fonte: Dalby, Andrew. Language in danger. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 252; 285. Adaptado.