Mirror on the Wall
If you just checked yourself out in the mirror, you've actually done a lot more than just indulge yourself. You've just created culture![1]
“Your interaction with the mirror, which is part of this surrounding landscape,” archaeologist Kurt Anschuetz argues, “totally structured your day!” He believes landscapes have a guiding influence on us, contributing towards the structure, organization, and tempo of cultural change.
But let me clarify: If looking into the mirror made you think: “Hey, beautiful!”[2], you're probably floating on air and just about ready to seize the day, aren't you? Your interaction with your reflection has shifted the way you carry yourself. And since bodies serve as focal points through which we register sensory inputs, the way we occupy them influences how we structure and organize meaning-making projects.
Here's another, perhaps more relatable example: If checking yourself in the mirror made you realize that you've been walking around with a splatter of dried egg yolk on your shoulder—even though you didn't have eggs for breakfast today—or if you noticed you look slightly more like your mother now than you did only a year ago, you're clearly having a bad day! You may leave this hall feeling a little less confident and a lot less secure.
"And the landscape you inhabit reflects that," goes geographer Denis Cosgrove, “ [a l]andscape is a social and cultural product, a way of seeing projected onto the land.” “I disagree,” Tim Ingold, an anthropologist, responds. “We don't project images onto fixed landscapes, not even images evoked in a mirror. Landscapes aren't prepared in advance; landscapes are created! They take on their forms through a process of incorporation, not of inscription! An act as insignificant as staring into a mirror generates those very forms that become solidified in a landscape." See, you've been very productive.
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[1] Culture: from latin colere; to inhabit, care for, till, worship. Yes, that includes your body.
[2] I commend your confidence.
Works Cited
Anschuetz, Kurt. F., Richard H. Wilshuesen, and Cherie L. Scheick. "An Archaeology of Landscapes: Perspectives and Directions." Journal of Archaeological Research 9.2 (2001): 157-211.
Cosgrove, Denis. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. London: Croom Helm, 1984.
Ingold, Tim "The Temporality of Landscape." World Archaeology 25.2 (1993): 152-174.