Clifford Geertz's If This Is A Man

From a biological point of view, humans are not plants, fungi, protists, or monera; humans are animals. Believing ourselves to be the pinnacle of creation, the smartest and most capable of all that populate this planet, we face a conundrum that we fall in the same classification with earthworms, flounder, bulldogs, and orangutans. Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist, explained this by asserting “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (Clifford 5). Those “webs of significance” are culture. So when we strike down the sticky mess of threads that includes our languages, religions, social structures, and arts, among others, we also strike down the man within. Primo Levi tells the story of a man whose culture was forcibly taken from him. His narrative, If This is a Man, recounts his experiences as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. There, the Nazis took from him his basic necessities, his ability to communicate, his sense of purpose in his life, and his honor. The dehumanization Levi describes begins even before his …show more content…
It is a torturous job that drains the men of all their energy. They learn how to manipulate the limits of their pain thresholds to take complete advantage of whatever is left in their reserves of energy. The men often bite their lips to do so, but at other times the Kapos, or supervisors, take matters into their own hands and find other ways to cause pain including beating the men. This behavior is analogous to the torture that cart-drivers instigate with horses. For humans to manipulate themselves is one concern, but for others to instigate their manipulation is a far more serious matter especially when their methods pattern ones used on animals. If anger is stirred up when cosmetic products are tested on animals, shouldn 't we be far more vexed when worse injustices are burdening