My point exactly :P

Strictly speaking, Europe, Asia and Africa are one big landmass, and so do the three Americas. The lines between them are arbitrary.

There is nothing objective about drawing lines along the Urals between Europe and Asia, or deciding whether Africa ends this side of that side of the Sinai Peninsula. There is nothing obvious to differentiate the Near East from the Middle East, and nowadays many countries formerly in the Near East are lumped in the Middle East in popular culture. The boundary between North America and Central America is similarly vague. Drawing an arbitrary line between islands to locate some in Asia and some in Oceania is equally artificial. And so on.

(Not to talk about how so many denominations, like Near/Middle East, the Orient or the West are plainly eurocentric, even if they come from Antiquity)

All words and all definitions are social constructs. They’re real as words and definitions, but they’re not real as the things they refer to. An illustration of this is the painting, “This is not a pipe.” (It’s not a pipe; it’s a painting.)

The quote below is from Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” I’m nerding out here, but it’s a great essay that I really think everyone should read.

“Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.”

In other words, humans make up words and attach them to categories that exist not in the world, but in the minds of humans.

Comprehending the difficulty of meaning does not automatically mean that meaning doesn’t exist. It just recognizes (correctly) that meaning has to be earned more than received.

The race and class undertones were certainly uncomfortable, but of course an ad for a security product is supposed to trigger feelings of visceral discomfort. That’s what makes you want the product in the first place.

I’d be interested to hear Lisa elaborate on this part, though:

“the idea that Nigeria…is corrupt is a powerful and ubiquitous social construction”

Before that surreal discussion about continents in the thread below, there was a very sensible point about the fact that a wide range of experts perceive Nigeria to be among the world’s most politically corrupt countries based on actual evidence. And in its company do happen to be the majority of African nations.

I think a lot of explanations for *why* so much of Africa is awash in corruption are racist, historically illiterate, or outright wrong. But I don’t think we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. We don’t have to deny the fact of widespread corruption in Nigeria to refute notions like Nigerian people themselves are inherently untrustworthy, or that African society is monolithic.

Otherwise, I have to ask…what do you do with the facts when they support a social construct you dislike?

The notion of Africa has not always been like it is today, the colonial map of Africa was quite different (many African countries are litteraly invented by European colonizers), and today you have a division between Northern Africa and sub-Sahara Africa based mainly (if not solely) on culture and social differences. It’s also an ongoing discussion if Egypt belong to Africa, Middle East or both.

A landmass is just there. A continent is a social response to geography as well as to culture, history and social organization.

More importanly, when a continent is mentioned, most people do not immediatly think of rivers, mountains or forests – they think of the people living there.

The pair of shoes that the woman bought! So it turns out to be a legitimate business (legitimate in the sense that the characters in the commercial weren’t plucking her information out of cyberspace, but fulfilling the transaction she began). So we’re set up to look at Nigeria as this shady place, but in the end they’re just doing business. She has whatever service this ad is selling, so she knew she could trust these guys, even though the idea of Nigeria might seem scary or untrustworthy to her.

This is problematic in another way, of course, this notion of friendly globalization that shows a middle-class white woman buying shoes from the small businessmen of Nigeria; we don’t see images of how the shoes were made in the first place, for instance.