domingo, 27 de septiembre de 2015

THE SALT OF THE EARTH: MAN, SOCIETY, CULTURE AND NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. Julio E. Correa M.D. jecorrea@retina.ar


INTRODUCTION
Personal and group narratives that develop and grow within family and small group systems follow the literary matrix of communication skills that give enormous sustain for mourning work, thus transforming the past personal and family narratives into new ones. Trans-cultural group stories may follow similar narrative paths for detaching from enmeshment to past bonds and establish new ones aiming to transform guilt and punishment in the cultural myths and recreate them. Such transformations reside on the understanding about the loss events by opening emotional comprehension to them. Natural group mythopoiesis that stems from the family model of storytelling to the group therefore has an important function in shaping the group narrative construction of bereavement.
Based on films analysis made over films chosen for their excellence and their connection with the environment, we further proposed that the personal and group processes that are elicited by the narrative of bereavement and its recreation that is based on the dynamics of understanding and sharing among the interpersonal narratives held in the person and in the group members, run together to integrating the lessons of the environment. As it can be assessed in any correction of behaviour, information is not enough for inducing change if it is not accompanied by sufficient reflection and emotional comprehension of the facts involving the subjects, environmental change follows a same track for achieving acquisition of real practical knowledge and the skills necessary for establishing the measures that are essential for it and not for just a cosmetic variation. I guess this is the case for the delay if not the inexperience to achieve it in almost every topic risking earth’s life since it was urgently denounced to be corrected during late XXth century: Starvation, crowding, violence, poverty, extensive disease and death in the majority of the world populations, disappearance of native languages and cultures, massive extinction of plant and animal species, loss of water supplies, deterioration of the atmosphere indexes, and climate change due to the greenhouse effect.
All 2014 films showed their protagonists in the midst of environmental sceneries that trapped them in a most cruel unavoidable way that was reinforced by their helpless rigid cultures awarding the surviving heroes but condemning the most to mortal punishment as mice trapped in a cheese box [Félix et Meira, 1994], not so hard as that one trapping thousands of employees who run down (if they could) the staircases of the recently blown up Twin Towers.  The possible change in behaviours under such conditions is like accepting imprisonment in boxes [Sils María, 2014], in very high pressure settings under extreme competitive work [Birdman, 2014], authoritarian rigid social and cultural patterns [Leopardi, ilgiovanefabuloso, 1994; Félix et Meira, 1994] if not governed by political-religious power systems [Leviathan, 1994] or ruled by both ancient andcontemporary myths adjusting to established socio-cultural needs that subdue persons to their precise fulfillment [In the woods, 1994]. Only the poet Leopardi contested to the social environment pressure for endorsing a common modern social self, brandishing his personal self skills in relation to the natural environment [Leopardi, il giovane fabuloso, 1994].
In all the 2014 studied films what seems at stake are the survival of the personal self and the group self that struggle with the social self which is strongly imposed by culture; except for Leviathan and Leopardi, il giovane fabuloso, bereavement is denied, while in the latter two mourning work that is not shared with the group conduces to isolation and big unavoidable suffering. It was then decided to study a 2014 film made by an artist that centered from a personal viewpoint in the visual narrative of the social and natural environment. This would provide us arguments to discuss the relevance of the personal self in its involvement with social and cultural matters that are shared by the different social and cultural selves of our contemporary “post-modern” life.
“The salt of the Earth” [La sal de la tierra] was premiered in Buenos Aires on August 20th, 2015, at the 6thInternational Festival of Environmental Cinema (20-26 August, 2015). It was recommended to me by Josefina Ichaso (General Coordinator) when I attended the festival the initial day [Thursday, August 20, 2015] and asked for assessment at the Festival table (6 GREEN FILM FEST, Ecosistema, 15 edición especial, 2015). Therefore I had seen it ten days before the blog ART & ENVIRONMENT published in its last edition the hypotheses summarizing the analyzed 2014 films released during 2015 together with the study of “Félix et Meira” [Sunday, August 30, 2015]; not having any clue about it and learning about both its artist and his photographic narrative method at the moment it was seen for the first time.

FILM DATA
The Salt of the Earth is a 2014 biographical-documentary film that shows environmental catastrophe at the human and social levels, as determined by political crime in the world global economy prioritizing business that left aside all the pre-2000 programs for controlling hunger, poverty and disease in most of the underdeveloped regions of the world. It was awarded with the Special Prize in the "Un Certain Regard" section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, the 2014 Audience Award at the San Sebastián International Film Festival and the 2015 Audience Award at the Tromsø International Film Festival, and won the César Award for Best Documentary Film at the 40th César Awards.  It is a French-Brazilian film directed  by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado (2014),Release date: 27 March 2015 [Wikipedia] .

TEXT
The film starts with the question:  A film over the life of a photographer?  Then it’s explained the meaning of the word from Greek –Photo: light, Graphein: write, draw–, therefore photography would mean to write and re-write with light and shadows. The first photo is from Serra Pelada (Brazil), which thrilled the photographer for its resemblance to the construction of pyramids, the tower of Babel, the mines of King Salomon, without any sign of noise of machines but only the rumor made by 50.000 persons melting their voice with the manipulation works. As the gold diggers perch and climb by small narrow ladders to the big ones taking them out to the surface, nobody fears falling down and drag others with them –the photographer himself used them several times by day together to men climbing them 50-60 times a day, which is followed by running down the inclined plane after they have reached the summit risking to fall if they stop–: It was an organization of madness made by slaves of greed, by a population joining together academics with farm workers or city workers. They all searched for an opportunity of finding a gold reef and share the choice of a sac that could contain the mineral or not; at that moment they put at risk their independence, as there lays slavery: all men that touch gold don’t ever return
Wim Wenders tells that he viewed that photo in an art gallery that made him guess it belonged to a great photographer and adventurer; he also tells that he discovered a portrait of a blind Tuareg Woman that shocked him and that he had hanged over his escritoire since then. Wenders further states that the photographer’s name is Sebastiao Salgado, somebody who loves human beings, the persons that are the salt of earth. Different photographers in a same place would shot very different photos because they come from very different places, each one with his own glance, each one in connection with his own history.
My own way I learned it was in this place where I had long walks with my father and where we come together for sightseeing. Behind each of the mountains there is a history, something to see. Here I had daydreamt a lot; I wished to go far than those mountains, I wanted to know.

A JOURNEY WITH SEBASTIAO SALGADO
They are shown in sequence the following scenes:
1) Views at western Papua range, Indonesia (2011), showing the camera to the people of Yali, seminude, with sticks resembling the erect penis at the pubis, dancing in rounds;
2) A speech from Sebastiao’s father at his farm in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil, surrounded by tropical forest, river and a railroad that was run by trains transporting minerals. He tells about his son’sdelight for travelling alike that one of his own father. He tells he never knew where his son was…doing political activity. He also tells that he studied economy;
3) The photographer tells that the sharing with other members of the photographic team (Wim Wenders) brings permanent camera shoots/ counter-shoot;
4) Conjoint photography with Sebastiao’s son in a remote island at the western Siberia sea;
5) A biographical note about the parting of Sebastiao from his parents’ house to Vitória (Brazil), with the aim of attending studies; his relationship with Léila whom he married at the time he obtained a bourse for studies at the University of Sao Paulo, sharing with her left political movements against the very hard Brazilian military dictatorship, from whichthey finally escaped, leaving to Paris in August 1969. Then, while he continued his studies in Economy Léila, studying Architecture, bought a camera that was very useful for Sebastiao; afterwards they moved to London where he started to travel to Africa for studying development projects of the World Bank. Sebastiao took with him the camera and shoot many photos that in time led him to start a project on photography, leaving the career of Economy and buying a photographic equipment, with whom he made portraits, weddings, sports and nudes; at times of a big drought in Niger (1973) he shoot women queuing for asking food; was born first Sebastiao’s son, Juliano (1974). Lélia introduced the work to magazines, newspapers and agencies until they found courage to design their first photographic project: “Otras Américas”: Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia… the Andes range. Latin America was at the time in social unrest, emerging in parallel to the Liberation Theology. In that time he met in Ecuador a young priest named Gabicho who carried to the peasants the word of God and organized them into cooperatives introducing solidarity. Sebastiao enjoyed both the views and communities.
The Saraguro Indians at southern Ecuador were big believers as well that big alcohol consumers; more than half the community during the weekend stayed completely drunk. Lupe was very friend of mine –at that time I had a blonde and very long hair, also a big beard very red and blonde-. One day we walked by the mountains, he got closer to me and said –“Look, Sebastiao, I know well that they had sent you from heaven, cause according to the legend of Saraguros, the gods to the very image of Christ were to return to the Earth to look on us, to observe us and decide who would merit the heaven”. Then, while we marched through the mountains he took advantage to tell me about his life: he seriously believed I was there for watching on them and then tell in the superior about their behavior. Time runs very slowly, with other way of thinking, other speed. In Oaxaca, Mexico he got in touch with a group of peasants called Mixtecs who lived in a feudal way, music being the most important activity for the community, all the members of the community who knew how to play an instrument hadn’t need to work: they worked as musicians. They made me sleep several days in a very cold room to evaluate if I resisted, if I wanted to truly stay. As I finally resisted they took me to a house and I got much more close to the community. We made friends, I was in harmony with them. Other Indian tribe are the Tarahumaras at the North of Mexico who are great runners, they walk running, they don’t march they fly! Several times they approached to my camera and made me feel a technician of sound: they told things as if they were being recorded. The strength of a portrait says if we understand a bit about the life of the person from whom is taken a photograph, the eyes say much, the expression of the face. When you make a portrait there is not only you who takes the photograph, the person offers the photo. For me they were so important. The basis wasthe same: it was my continent, we werevery close.
Otras Américas lasted eight years to Sebastiao. Each time he returned home to see his family and edit his photographs with Lélia, Sebastiao seemed a big adventurer to his son, a superhero more than a photographer. “Finally I joined to my father in one of his missions: to Wrangle, a deserted island in the Arctic Ocean”. Sebastiao waited to start working. Sebastiao wanted to take photos to the last large gathering of walruses but a polar bear makes all the flock to plunge into the ocean and so the team has to wait the former animal to find a position or action that would satisfy the esthetics frame for the photo. Both bear and photographer rested until the arctic sunset, when they finally crawled in the stone beach up to reach the herd of walruses, shooting photos giving sight of their diverse forms in action. When Sebastiao is drinking iced stream water taken with his own hands, Juliano asked him to tell about 1979, when his second son, Rodrigo, was born having Down syndrome. The sorrows and fears of the family for it disappeared when later Rodrigo developed his own language and the family learnt to decode his emotional language and to communicate with no words with him. At the time the Brazilian tyranny was over the family moved to Brazil after ten and a half years abroad. When reunited with their very aged parents, Sebastiao also wanted to see Brazil in depth and so then he travelled for six months through the north eastern Brazil he didn't knew before. There he reached a group of persons going to the funeral, and joined them.
The children that die before they are baptized, are buried with the eyes open in the belief they had to find their way to heaven from the intermediate “limbo” risking to undergo an eternal stroll if it is not found. The coffins could be hired at the church, the same one used several times. At the market they were offered for hiring together with shoes, fruits, vegetables, ice creams, everything… This is a region of the world where life and death are very close to each other. Also at the same time the family group prayed, they found time to practice political work. In Brazil there is a big movement of peasants with no lands, the most of them come from the north eastern territories. They are people of great moral and physical strength although they are frail due to bad nutrition; the region in fact is very arid, making the people to part and don`t return. They give up, they abandon their lands.
The Salgado family farm in Minas Gerais also suffered the consequences of draught, losing the pasture and cattle which extended to theloss in income. At that time seeded plants didn’t grow, birds lowered. Juliano’s grandfather says he had no idea in which way to end with abrasion. -I was happy raising my children: seven female and a male, “Tiao”, feeding and dressing them well-. These lands from my grandfather had always been burnt and dry, the place had nothing to do with the paradise my father recalled from his childhood. The sufferings he had seen, changed him, his role of photographer acquired a new sense. During the 1984-1986 years he voyaged to Sahel, Ethiopia, Africa and worked together with Doctors without Borders, making a report over hunger.
There was a camp of refugees, the biggest in the history of humanity until that moment: I felt crazy of showing there was a big part of humanity that lived under extreme anguish and miserable conditions, at most due to a problem of sharing that wasn’t only a question of natural catastrophe. This was a Coptic region, very Christian in northern Africa, of a big humbleness, unable to get ahead of others, even to a dying child. They preferred to wait. In such a state of skin and bones it’s impossible to endure much. In those camps hunger finished with many lives. It’s the cause of the body malaise, but the other diseases are the ones killing: quick dehydration by cholera, losing up to 12 liters of liquid a day because of diarrhea and dying in two-three days. Faces so young and so much aged by suffering. The forehead is from a young person but the eyes are aged, empty. During the night occur many deaths, caused by cold. Dying here is like a continuation of life. People gets habituated to die. The husband washes her wife before burying her. Dressed in mountain clothes, with goat furs on him. Agreeing with the Coptic beliefs, the body has to be cleansed for the encounter with God: it has to be washed, all washed even if water is scarce. Each person that dies is piece of the world dying. The father prepares his son for burial to saying his last good-by to him.  Normally is the family the one who prepares the dead. To know that the government retains the food for not letting it arrive to the people means a brutal political dishonesty. When in 1984 the guerrilla understood that the government plundered the region, they began to send the people to Sudan, to the region of Tigray, but two speedy combat helicopters Mi24 fired the people with submachine guns. Many pregnant women walked with the hope of finding water and food at the Promised Land. I had to stay there at least two months. When I arrived to Sudan I had a lot of work at the arrival of such people. They brought in arms their exhausted children, perhaps dead. After all that marching, when meeting doctors children were dead. It was necessary to disassemble the camp of the Doctors without Borders because the water was primordial and it was necessary to move as quickly as possible. They piled up them in United Nations trucks for taking them to another camp into a beauty fertile land, at the shores of the Blue Nile. We made 300-400 kilometers in those trucks: in there two friends departed as if they were telling stories below a tree. When getting closer to the Nile, it was possible to find water but here the people died because there was no food. At the border of misery they forgot or they couldn’t bring food. Although they said they have food, when arriving there it was nothing. In 1985 I went to Mali where they have had a large drought: the people’s skin was alike the tree bark, like trees marked by wind and sand, by sand storms. They were only women and children; men had marched to Libya for work or else migrated to the Ivory Coast in the search of work, with the promise of coming back and bring food to their families. Very few returned. Here they were all safe because Doctors without Borders made a big job, bringing assistance to the region. Luc, a Belgian M.D. measured and weighed the child. After 15-20 days children were healthier, unrecognizable, although they were marked for life because of the lacks that they had suffered during their growth.It’s worthwhile to look the posture and determination of a lonely boy of 8-9 years old facing the desert, as dressed in the remains of a shirt and without any trousers, accompanied by his dog while taking a small guitar in his other hand. It’s somebody who knows where he goes, in the search of other groups, of people of appurtenance.
Sebastiao was fond of the people of the Sahel region. He returned there over and over again. His photographs, the book and the exposition organized by Léila, called the attention of the world over droughts and lives of millions of people, demanding questions without answer over the cause of such situation. Then Sebastiao dedicated to an issue that kept his attention for other six years, making numerous journeys to almost thirty countries: The hand of man [Workers], the third volume of photos he conceived together to Léila.
I wished to make a kind of homage to all the men and women that had constructed our world: the archeology of the Industrial Age.
Sebastiao and Leila researched and planned in detail “WORKERS”. Afterwards Sebastiao, driven by the sympathy with the human condition, returned to travel to the four corners of the world: he photographed steel workers at the USSR, he lived with ship saboteurs at Bangladesh, sailed with fishermen from Galicia and Sicily, showed the mechanic production of cars in Calcutta, he observed agriculture in Ruanda. Each chapter of “The hand of man” plunged him into the particular places of handwork. In 1991, at the end of the 1st Gulf War, the Iraqi soldiers retreated and Saddam Hussein burnt thousands of oil wells that called thousands of world firemen, making Sebastiao to felt attracted for such explosive profession.
When I saw the first images on television I knew I had to do that coverage. It was like working in an enormous theater. Around 500 wells burning. A huge scene that was set in the size of the planet. Nobody controlled us, we could go where we wished. There were fumes, thick smoke oil. So much cumulative smoke was so thick that didn't let the sun to pass over. There were days that it was night the 24 hours. After the fire was turned off the land was so hot that it was needed to throw lots of water to cool it; if not temperature was so high that made the oil to restart burning. Yet still there was an explosion that sounded like a cannon. The noise was so much deafening that was like working near the turbine of a plane. At the present time I'm a bit deaf. My deafness started then. The Canadian firemen came from Calgary in a pretty red truck, they had a rule in washing the truck after ending the fire, every night; and in the next morning the truck returned to be covered by oil: a hellish work! I delayed my departure at least two-three times up to the day I had to part. It broke my heart to leave that huge spectacle. I got around there almost to the end when we passed in front of a big wall together with a Journalist from the New York Times. It was land of no body, the war had destroyed everything… We broke the door, when we got in we found a kind of paradise that had turned into a hell, a kind of garden of the Royal family of Kuwait, keeping horses, thoroughbreds, that had become completely fool . Such animals are the first to escape a catastrophe if they are free to escape, that they weren’t. We found birds there because that was an oasis, everything was well irrigated. Such birds couldn't fly because their feathers were glued. The Kuwaitis had escaped when the catastrophe started, leaving animals locked, together with the Bedouins to whom they not considered human beings.
Sebastiao turned then an artist whose photographs were published at the best magazines. The exposition made a “tour de monde” and the book was published in many languages. But Sebastiao and Léila didn’t stop there, they immediately began a new phase of their photography: they observed that another major issue of our times was the displacement of entire populations caused by wars, hunger and the role of globalization. At the time that Europe closed it frontiers Sebastiao tried to shed light on the lives of marginalized, accompanied by Léila who again started to research and plan, turning into the impulse of a new chapter which they entitled “Exodus” (1993-1999). It waked world conscience about the life of refugees from India, Vietnam, Philippines, Latin America, Palestine, Iraq and many other places. Sebastiao returned to the continent that had trapped his imagination long time before: to Africa.
I was making a project on the movement of populations when the plane of the President of Ruanda was dejected, a big movement migrated to Tanzania (Tanzania 1994) due to the harsh repression against the Tutsis in Ruanda. People escaped to Burundi, Congo, Uganda, everywhere; the routes where full of people, resting aside, carrying all their belongings in bicycles, taking with them what they could… We followed the road in the opposite direction and arrived to the border. There was no security nor nothing. When I arrived to Ruanda it was terrifying, the number of dead that were found in those roads, whether killed by a grenade or killed with machete, I understood the dimension of such genocide catastrophe… They were 150 km up to arrive to the outskirts of Kingali and 150 km of dead. I returned because I was making a book about the refugees, about the exodus. I got into those camps and began to see the number of persons that abandoned Ruanda: hell installed within paradise. It was something appalling to envisage how so a beautiful meadow was formed into a megacity. In a few days they were almost one million persons there. In the midst of such big anguish it impressed me a mother looking to his child on her lap and the confidence of the child expressed to her. In Yugoslavia, Europe (1994-1995) it was shocking to find the same violence and brutality as that one in the far away countries: in a bus coming from Krajina, when crossing Croatia, a person was killed through a hole in the window, killed by Croatians that assassinated many persons abandoning such place, from where all the Serbian population was expulsed: from one moment to the other entire families were thrown out of their houses and had to look for somewhere to go. They had their neighbors in front shooting against them. What dislikes the most is to see at what extreme hate is contagious. In central Bosnia, a refugee camp near Tuzla gathered families escaping from Zepa, where the Serbs had assassinated thousands of youths, so we were there at the moment when those families arrived and installed in a state of great anguish. They were only women, aged men and children. The young men were retained or assassinated. It is weird to see this happening in Europe, at the end of the XXth century; for their cars it can be seen that these are people with a life level and with intellectual standards of Europeans, a European infrastructure, and that they had lose everything. Hundreds of km crowded of people and cars. Humans are a most feral, terrible animal, whether in Europe or in Africa, whether in Latin America. Our violence is extreme. Our history is a history of wars. It’s a never ending story, a history of repression, a crazy history. The situation in Ruanda continued evolving: the Hutu army that had the power was dejected and so retired to Congo, to the region of Goma (Congo 1994). First were the Tutsis who escaped from the barbarism of Hutus, then they were these who escaped from the occupation of the Tutsi. Everyone has escaped. In several days of July 1994 the region of Goma received more than two million persons. There installed catastrophe: illnesses as cholera started to propagate and people began to die like flies: there was 12.000 to 15.000 people dead per day. I shot photos of heaps of dead. I saw approaching a father with his child in arms and throw it there, leaving after with his pal talking as if nothing. It gave no rest to bury the people; they brought tractors from the French army that collected dozens that were thrown to the earth and afterwards covered with it. Everyone would have to see these images to understand the terrible aspect of our species. Orphan children were found in the road, children with morbid eyes would die, surviving those other with vivid ones. When I left that I was ill, very ill, my body was ill, not because of an infectious disease, but was my soul that was ill. I went back to Rwanda one year after the catastrophe, waiting for the return of Hutus who were at Congo and didn’t have where to go, as the United Nations started to oblige them to return (Rwanda, 1995). It gave the impression that the whole planet was covered with refugee tents. After working there the Tutsi authorities proposed me to visit several places, sceneries of repression. People had sheltered in a church thinking they were able to save themselves at such place: all were assassinated. Or in a school where it’s possible to watch the written blackboard when the death toll happened. It was horrible. A fraction of the two million people of the population that left Rwanda returned, but the other part feared possible repression: a group of 250.000 left the city of Goma and entered into the forest of Congo, they got lost, everyone knew that there were 250.000 lost persons, without giving a clue where they were. Six months later they had begun to appear in Kisangani, at central Congo. They had spent six months within the forest. The UN High Commissioner took me to this place. I spent three days with such people that continued to arrive, columns and columns of people arriving. From the 250.000 persons that departed, they returned 40.000, 210.000 missing. Besides, life continued: hairdressers, those collecting foreign exchange working with a computer in the middle of nowhere, in a forest isolated of everything (Congo 1997). A moment arrived that the Kisangani guerrilla that was pro-Tutsi began to fire that people, to send them back so they had to walk other six months to return to Ruanda. They started to kill some… There I found people that couldn’t stand it anymore; they had started to rave, they had lost their mind, they had turned mad. In reality from such expulsed people it was not heard nothing else. I am sure they all had got assassinated. This was my last journey, such grim adventure in Rwanda. I left there not believing in nothing more. I didn’t believe in the salvation of the human species. We wouldn’t survive to such a thing. We didn’t merit to live more. No one would merit living. How many times I threw the camera to the floor for crying for what I was watching.
Sebastiao leaned out at the heart of darkness and questioned his work as social photographer and witness of the human condition. What was left to do after Rwanda? [WW]
At that time the health of my grandfather got worst and my parents had to go back to Brazil for taking charge of the farm. It was just barren land. They didn’t know what to do with it. The birds, alligators and woods had disappeared. Nothing remained from the marvelous forest that inhabited the memories of Sebastiao’s childhood [JS].
Then Léila had a magnificent idea: Why we don't plant here the forest that it was here before? That forest covering these hills was the Atlantic bush: the Atlantic tropical forest. Nobody had ever attempted to replant it, moreover to the extension of 600 ha. Her hint came probably from her desire of maintaining alive the family spirit. During the next ten years what occurred in these lands was a miracle that converted since that moment into the “Terra Institute” [WW].
I recall that during the first plantation I dreamt during nights that everything died, because the earth was horrible. It was in bad state, so degraded that I asked to myself: Would these plants take root? The Atlantic bush has over four hundred different species; we didn’t have such all but we finished planting a hundred or a hundred fifty species… It’s true that in the first plantation we lose 60%, in the second one 40%... They weren’t books teaching how to replant the Atlantic bush! [Léila]
I’m happy to come to see all the trees together. When one looks at this wooded area it brings an idea of the effort that supposes to plant all these trees. When I was a child there existed a little water fall, at all times of the year. I came together with my sisters and we made a picnic under the water fall. There was much jungle yet. Afterwards, when the trees were chopped, water disappeared. Nowadays our jungle is very young and needs much water, but in 10-15 years, when everything gets stable I’m sure that that beautiful spring of water will reappear. There are seen many small paths, hundreds of small paths by where the cows go along crushing the earth were nothing grows again. Such land with short grass now lays beside the other ecosystem with ten million trees planted, completely recovered. Here it’s shown the cicada that sings until it dies, this one will remain buried here, over the tree cortex. We look at a tree and we only think in its verticality, on its beauty, although everything depends on it: water, oxygen, the home of little insects: ants, cicada. It’s nice to touch a tree that you have helped to plant, well implanted and solid, that will live for 400-500 years.
During the first days we said: “We’re going to plant a forest”: it didn’t grow from a little plant but from a million. And not only here but in the surroundings, an idea that can evolve and grow. Our method can replicate in almost everywhere. Of course, the species are not the same but the way of acting is the same in all the tropical forests. [Léila]
The earth was the medicine for the hopelessness of Sebastiao. The joy of looking the trees, the resurgent buds made Sebastiao to reborn his photographer vocation, although Léila and he knew they could not return anymore to what they did before [WW].
We arrived to the conclusion of beginning a new photographic project over the environment. The first idea was to denounce the destruction of the woods or the ocean pollution, whatsoever. But afterwards, little by little we started to think in a different project. Let us make a homage to the planet, and surprisingly we discovered that almost half of the planet stayed as the first day of Genesis (Genesis 2004-2013). Many friends gave us advice for not to enter in that field as I am a human social photographer and that from then on I would turn to be another one of the photographers of views and animals. It’s nothing wrong with it; I will learn to photograph such things too. And so I began the first story. I’d liked to go to Galápagos, I needed to understand what Darwin had understood: the same species in very different ecosystems that had evolved in very different ways. Looking in detail the foot of iguana I couldn’t avoid thinking on the hand of a Middle Age warrior with its metallic flakes for protection. Looking at the structure of such hand I realize iguana is also my cousin; that we come from the same cell, that we were in front an old being, in front of an authority, with all its shrinks, with all its wisdom. Certainly, when Darwin came here this turtle was already an adult, perhaps she saw Darwin. Who knows? I remember once I was very weary because I had walked over lava fields for a long time, so I lay on the beach and I felt that something was touching my leg: I looked and it was a sea wolf, whereas I had other one installed at the other side. At the end they were three sea lions. They didn’t considered man as a predator, a menace: it was my first interview to nature, the first time I photographed other animals. Over eight years I had time to see and understood the most important: that I am so much nature as a turtle, as a tree, as a stone. The glance of a chimpanzee remains extraordinary, very deep; he came next to me so I shoot a photo, he put the finger within his mouth and he was looking to himself for first time in a mirror. I was in front of him and he put and took away the finger, and started to understand that it was himself. He was already recognizing his image. I felt completely identified. It was a family like ours, with a grandfather, a father, their children. They respected among them and you have to respect their manners. You have to seat in a particular way, you have to respect their territory and since that moment they receive you. I also made friend of a whale, whales in Argentina. An adult measures 35 m. and weighs 40 tons, more or less. She was approaching, she came to the ship. I could touch her… and it was incredible.  What so sensitive skin! While I was making caresses to her I could appreciate that her tail was trembling at 35 m. from it. A phenomenal sensitivity! We had a little boat of no more than seven m.She knew that if she would strike us strongly she could sink us… But she never touched the boat, never! At times she moved away and lashed the sea with the tail. Here I have photos from Nenets: their house, 18 members and 6.000 reindeers that lived in constant migration; close to 8 P.M. they catch fire and they make the only hot meal for the day. After dinner they have social circle and blow out the fire. While the fire is on temperature is nice:  15-20 degrees, two hours later it’s minus 30 degrees. They are real Siberian cowboys; they always keep their ties around their neck, made of reindeer skin; they wear boots of silver fox fur. They sleep with the boots on, the boots endure lifetime. Obi is a very special Siberian river that when you cross it over you’re in the Arctic Polar Circle. There’s no horizon line, there’s nothing. We’re within a white plate of the universe size.
Genesis made Sebastiao to return to travel around the world for almost a decade. He was going to show us nature, animals, places and people that lived like in the start of time. A much more optimistic vision of the planet that the one he had seen injured and destroyed. Genesis was going to be his masterpiece, a letter of love addressed to the planet.[WW]
We had representations of the Zoé in XVIth century Jesuit writings that came from the Amazon River reporting about people wearing some kind of tube in the inferior lip. Such Indians had never been seen; up to the end of 1980 when we were in touch with them again, it was thought they were a fable or an invention from Jesuits. These Indians live in paradise: the only place I’ve seen in my life were women have 3-5 spouses as them as well [State of Pará, Brazil, Zoé tribe, 2009]. The female has a hunter male, a fisher male, an agriculture worker male, a male that is close to the house and helps her to do everything; women have enormous power, they have considerable dominion over activity of men. A matter that I have found very interesting of these people is that they had whole consciousness of their image so when I was going to shoot a photo the person knew that I was going to represent its image. Initially they seemed somehow interested but later they lose interest. It wasn’t their world. On the other side, they were very much interested in my knife; my friend Ypó made me swore that I was going to present him my knife, but the responsible of the FNI had made me promise that I would not give them any object in order to protect the purity of these Indians. He said to me: “Look, we make a deal, the day you leave you throw the knife through the airplane window. I will follow the plane trajectory and I will find such knife”.
A new frame shows Sebastiao staring at the plants that had 40-50 years.
The ferns are marvelous plants that grow in the shadow of the centre of the jungle, in the higher parts, that recalls me my mother's hair. She was a very pretty woman. These were her plants. When she died my father looked after them until he died. Afterwards we brought them here. Now is raining. How pretty! This earth is very important to us. We are closing a circle with this earth, and in such circle we spent our life: the life of my parents and sisters passed together to a large part of my own life, and today we adjoin again our lives to all of this: my life and Léila’s life once again. It continues to be our history. It took part of my children story and now it’s of my old age. And so the day that I will die we will leave here the forest that existed before I was born, therefore a cycle will be completed. It’s my life history.

The man that’s the author of the photographs that tell us a thousand stories of the life of this planet shares in the present a big projectwith us, a dream: the destruction of nature isn’t irreversible. There is more than one thousand springs of water returning anew to the soil of “Terra Institute”. There are 2,5 and half million trees planted. Feral animals had also come back including jaguars. The land is no more Salgado's possession, now it’s a national park that belongs to all. This is a demonstration that it is possible to reinstall original forests in the abused maltreated land elsewhere.

Summary
The initial narrative sequences of THE SALT OF THE EARTH start describe several scenes of a dangerous exposition of men to slavery for gold in the mines, followed by blindness of a woman from a desert land.  Then starts a series of conversations of the photographer S. Salgado with his father “I had long walks with my father and where we come together for sightseeing. Behind each of the mountains there is a history, something to see. Here I had daydreamt a lot; I wished to go far than those mountains, I wanted to know”; conversations with nude Indonesian Indians; his own story as told by his father; conversations amongst photographers and with his own son.
After such an introduction Salgado starts describing his photographic and personal plights: 1) queuing of African women asking for food; 2) community work with Latin American Indians. Afterwards it further returns to conversations amongst photographers and together with his son: When Sebastiao is drinking iced stream water taken with his own hands, Juliano asks him to tell about 1979, when his second son, Rodrigo, was born having Down syndrome; such personal story ends by telling about his later return to his land (Brazil) when he needed to reunite with his very aged parents and wanted to know Brazil in depth. Then he tells Brazilian stories about children burial rites …”This is a region of the world where life and death are very close to each other”, northeastern migration…“They give up, they abandon their lands” and drought in his own father’s farm…“the place had nothing to do with the paradise my father recalled from his childhood”.
These latter three issues give entrance to the subsequent main narrative stories that Salgado had described with neat image detail giving credit of his own commitment with death perception and the mourning process: 1) HUNGER AND DEATH RYTUALS, during the 1984-1986 years he voyaged to Sahel, Ethiopia, Africa and worked together with Doctors without Borders, making a report over hunger. Such camp of refugees was the biggest in the history of humanity until that moment: I felt crazy of showing there was a big part of humanity that lived under extreme anguish and miserable conditions, at most due to a problem of sharing that wasn’t only a question of natural catastrophe. In such a state of skin and bones it’s impossible to endure much. People get’s habituated to die. Agreeing with the Coptic beliefs, the body has to be cleansed for the encounter with God: it has to be washed, all washed even if water is scarce. Each person that dies is piece of the world dying. The father prepares his son for burial to saying his last good-by to him. 2) SEARCH FOR FOOD AND WATER People arrived to Sudan with their exhausted children in arms, perhaps dead; as it was no water they were moved 300-400 kilometers to the Nile, but there the people died because there was no food. Sebastiao was fond of the people of the Sahel region. He returned there over and over again. His photographs, the book and the exposition organized by Léila, called the attention of the world over droughts and lives of millions of people, demanding questions without answer over the cause of such situation. 3) The hand of man [Workers] and DEATH covered the hellish work due to thousands of oil wells burning and bursting at the end of the 1st Gulf War along  depictions of hell remembering Hieronymus Bosch images with horses locked and birds with glued feathers, a time when the photographer’s deafness started; 4) Exodus” (1993-1999) and DEATH describes a big movement that migrated to Tanzania due to the harsh repression against the Tutsis in Ruanda…”They were 150 km up to arrive to the outskirts of Kingali and 150 km of dead. Hell installed within paradise. It was something appalling to envisage how so a beautiful meadow was formed into a megacity. In a few days they were almost one million persons there. Later were the Hutus, the ones who escaped from the occupation of the Tutsi. Everyone has escaped. In several days of July 1994 the region of Goma received more than two million persons. When I left that I was ill, very ill, my body was ill, not because of an infectious disease, but was my soul that was ill. There I found people that couldn’t stand it anymore; they had started to rave, they had lost their mind, they had turned mad. In reality from such expulsed people it was not heard nothing else. I am sure they all had got assassinated. This was my last journey, such grim adventure in Rwanda. I left there not believing in nothing more. I didn’t believe in the salvation of the human species. We wouldn’t survive to such a thing. We didn't merit to live more. No one would merit living. How many times I threw the camera to the floor for crying for what I was watching. 5) MIGRATION IN EUROPE: In Yugoslavia, Europe (1994-1995) it was shocking to find the same violence and brutality as that one in the far away countries: what dislikes the most is to see at what extreme hate is contagious. In central Bosnia, a refugee camp near Tuzla gathered families escaping from Zepa, where the Serbs had assassinated thousands of youths, so we were there at the moment when those families arrived and installed in a state of great anguish. Humans are a most feral, terrible animal, whether in Europe or in Africa, whether in Latin America. Our violence is extreme. Our history is a history of wars. It’s a never ending story, a history of repression, a crazy history. 6) WITNESS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION Sebastiao leaned out at the heart of darkness and questioned his work as social photographer and witness of the human condition. The earth was the medicine for the hopelessness of Sebastiao. The joy of looking the trees, the resurgent buds made Sebastiao to reborn his passion for photography. Although Léila and he knew they could not return anymore to travelling, they arrived to the conclusion of beginning a new photographic project over the environment. 7) Genesis made Sebastiao to return to travel around the world for almost a decade. He was going to show us nature, animals, places and people that lived like in the start of time. A much more optimistic vision of the planet that the one he had seen injured and destroyed. Genesis was going to be his masterpiece, a letter of love addressed to the planet.

DISCUSSION
This film shows the discovery of a photographer of different endangering aspects of contemporary societies and cultures that grow and develop aside the world’s advances of science and technology remaining submitted to non human life conditions under totalitarian rule, war and selfish practices of the societies governed by empowered groups of nations and enterprisesoverlooking human needs and centered in commercial, economical, technical and military ruling. His approach is neither anthropological nor sociological, he understands the cultural and sociological phenomena that are described by him in his portraits in the realm of his artistic and human sensitivity, accessible to his own personal and family life. Numerous bereavement situations due to hunger, work enforcement, loss of home and land, disease and massive death, due to tribal wars and escape as refugees to other lands, are described by him connected with his own situation exposing the citizens of his country to tyranny, migration and death,as well his own bereavement experiences needing to leave his country, undergoing the expectancy of a Down syndrome new child,the drought at his father’s farm and at last the recovery of its forest as fruit of the recreational task by which he regained the original family life environment. All his narrative is backed by his wife from whom he got the camera and designed all the photographic projects, to which later joined his son Juliano and the renowned film director Wim Wenders, narrators and directors of the movie telling this story.Hence, it might be said that his egocentric self is the main protagonist in the narrative, directly concerned with his own person and family group as well backed by the latter and by an additional film narrator. Description is not guided by anthropological objective observation but is more like that one of another human being that is embarked in a same human quest for survival. In conclusion, it might be asserted that his interpersonal reconstructive efforts with the socio-cultural groups with whom he interacts as artist and human being don’t submit to repeat the dominant social and cultural systems’ narratives modelling societies and cultures, but instead express his own version of reality that describes in all possible forms the nature of bereavementunder the most un-human circumstances. At the end of the film his disappointment about the world situation undergoing the most unbelievable crime against humanity, attempts to find reparation by focusing in his own natural family environment of Brazil, repairing the barren forest by the discovery of bringing back the forest from the older times of his childhood. Then he launches together with his wife to a new project where he can get marveled from the geographical sights of the world, together to catch images of plants and wild animals in connection with him along to rediscover a lost paradise of naked Amazonian Indians in stretch contact with the jungle and nature. Through his whole life Sebatiao Salgado underwent disease, death and recovery with final acceptance of the injury and possible repair. Orphan children were found in the road, children with morbid eyes would die, surviving those other with vivid ones. When I left that I was ill, very ill, my body was ill, not because of an infectious disease, but was my soul that was ill // I left Rwanda not believing in nothing more. I didn’t believe in the salvation of the human species. We wouldn’t survive to such a thing. We didn’t merit to live more // The ferns are marvelous plants that grow in the shadow of the centre of the jungle, in the higher parts, that recalls me my mother's hair. She was a very pretty woman. These were her plants. When she died my father looked after them until he died. Afterwards we brought them here. Now is raining. How pretty! This earth is very important to us. We are closing a circle with this earth, and in such circle we spent our life: the life of my parents and sisters passed together to a large part of my own life, and today we adjoin again our lives to all of this: my life and Léila’s life once again. It continues to be our history. It took part of my children story and now it’s of my old age. And so the day that I will die we will leave here the forest that existed before I was born, therefore a cycle will be completed. It’s my life history.
Salgado’s photographic and oral narratives (the latter as comments to the former in the film) account to a personal narrative that adjusts to multiple collective self levels: to a family self (Adler, 1966; Bowen, 1997), to a cultural self*and to a social self**, the latter two varying through diverse cultures, regions and historic times (Taylor, 1989; Gergen, 1991); as well to the spiritual self in touch with wholeness (Tugendhat, 1997).
In the family level Salgado follows a route of differentiation from his parents that moved to his nuclear family with his wife and children (Bowen, 1991). The differentiation process of the self might be defined as the ability to separate the individual's own intellectual and emotional functioning from that one of the family. By the accounts of his life by his father, son, wife and himself it might be asserted that both types of functioning didn’t diverge following separated outcomes but integrated in an only trend towards artistic accomplishment and intellectual commitment with the poor of the earth, a task that he initiated along with his wife during his youth backing a political position that he shared with those of his land to whom he honors, while he followed a similar search for other lands when desert and tyranny abducted his territory “…At the same time the family group prayed, they found time to practice political work. In Brazil there is a big movement of peasants with no lands, the most of them come from the north eastern territories. They are people of great moral and physical strength although they are frail due to bad nutrition; the region in fact is very arid, making the people to part and don`t return. They give up, they abandon their lands”.
A further step escalates through the matters he devoted to register as photographer of the most endangered regions of the world where he insistently had worked through very long periods. Within a peer fashion –man to man- contact with the fellows he portrayed, he established a esthetic glance integrated to a social testimony of the human utmost suffering at the same time that giving credit of each single trace of their firmness under such extreme situations This was a Coptic region, very Christian in northern Africa, of a big humbleness, unable to get ahead of others, even to a dying child. They preferred to wait// It’s worthwhile to look the posture and determination of a lonely boy of 8-9 years old facing the desert, as dressed in the remains of a shirt and without any trousers, accompanied by his dog while taking a small guitar in his other hand// In the midst of such big anguish it impressed me a mother looking to his child on her lap and the confidence of the child expressed to her.
His extreme sensitivity for the human condition paralleled the communication aims that had a central role in his family life, bringing together his wife and eldest son in the quests for developing photographic narratives of the wounded social environment and for developing innovative work with the natural environment. Such communication aim extends to every member of the family [”When Sebastiao is drinking iced stream water taken with his own hands, Juliano asks him to tell about 1979, when his second son, Rodrigo, was born having Down syndrome. The sorrows and fears of the family for it disappeared when later Rodrigo developed his own language and the family learnt to decode his emotional language and to communicate with no words with him”], as well it shines through his association with Wim Wenders filming and making adjusted sound comments on the photographer’s vocation: in his drama film “Paris, Texas” (1984), Wenders carefully exposed about the conditions that seem necessary to foster communication between distant brothers separated by time and isolation. In the initial segment it is described the narrative space that is required for willing to listen and expend waiting time in order to find the relational conditions of confidence that are necessary to generate a valid narrative that would finally result in the exposure and listening to each other. Under this sight the photo of the blind woman over the director’s desk would be equivalent to meeting at a “crossroads” with the photographer, the time lag for waiting a chance of encounter that is necessary to develop deep communication amongst two loners.
Simultaneous to the enhancement of the communication skills it grows creative resources in the family group that apply to the relations between members and with the social groups, in this case with the family and land of origin, the renaissance of the degraded natural environment. Nobody had ever attempted to replant the Atlantic tropical forest. Such hint came from Léila, the photographer’s wife, probably from her desire of maintaining alive the family spirit. During the next ten years what occurred in those lands was a miracle that converted since that moment into the “Terra Institute”// There is more than one thousand springs of water returning anew to the soil of “Terra Institute”. There are 2,5 and half million trees planted. Feral animals had also come back including jaguars.// It’s my life and Léila’s life once again. It continues to be our history. It took part of my children story and now it’s of my old age. And so the day that I will die we will leave here the forest that existed before I was born, therefore a cycle will be completed. It’s my life history.
Salgado’s life story also enmeshes with the hunger, thirst, endless wandering in the desert and forest, despair, loss of habitat, malnutrition, terminal illness and massacre of thousands of defenseless people. Through his camera and comments he describes the sorrows and pains of different moments of the mourning process …”Such grim adventure in Rwanda. I left there not believing in nothing more. I didn’t believe in the salvation of the human species. We wouldn’t survive to such a thing. We didn’t merit to live more. No one would merit living. How many times I threw the camera to the floor for crying for what I was watching.
The psychic unity depicted by Salgado agrees with the doctrine ot the psychic unity of mankind that has found increasing empirical substantiation as anthropological research has proceeded (…) it asserts that there are no essential differences in the fundamental nature of the thought process among the various living races of man. Culture and social systems have distinct integration mechanisms, the former a kind of meaningful integration whereas the latter a causal functional integration regulated by biodfeedback forces similar to those regulating organisms. Both would coexist among them and with a third element, the pattern of motivational integration with the individual which we usually call personality structure (Geertz, 1973). In connection with this, Luhmann (1984) distinguishes three fundamental types of self-referent systems: living systems, personal or psychic systems and social systems, each expressing an own type of autopoietic operation as well the way they construct their own space of operation and organization of its complexity: vital operations in the living systems; consciousness the mode of operation of the personal/ psychic systems; communication the characteristic trace of the social systems. Popper and Eccles (1977) suscribe on the existance of an individual self, each one endowed with feelings, hopes and awes, sorrows and joys, fears and dreams, that are known by the own person.
Discussion about the personal and social diverging conceptions of the self seems tautological when the argument is held from a context of analysis that is primarily personal or primarily social: hence whatsoever conclusion it will bias definitions by describing all phenomena with the epistemology of a unique field, erasing the other one. In respect to nowadays social outlook of the self, its criteria of existence seems to depend on the social contextualization (Lyons, 1978) or on socio-cultural historian viewpoints from diverse epochs -romantic, modern or post-modern- (Gergen, 1991), amongst which the Self would migrate alike human migrations over different regions through the ages. In the present postmodern age, social saturation would lead to an impairment of the notion on the existence of a true recognizable Self. Such a social groundswell would also extend on how is understood nowadays science made of ideological and political ebb and flow forces (Gergen, 1991). As long that the social systems acquire hierarchical authoritarian rule over its components, increased by instrumental weapons that range from arm force, torture and most recently communication machines that can emit constant messages, manipulate personal and interpersonal communication and operate over the individuals through espionage systems ad hoc, it would be likely to suppress autonomy and self-reference from the personal systems and therefore bias the notion of a true personal self. Rather than the psychic unity of mankind such distorted philosophical viewpoint would endorse the global unity of mankind, justifying the denial of facts that lead to human abuse and planet destruction at the same time that promoting political and commercial slogans that pretend the opposite. Under such vision centered in the denial of death and in the twisting effects of images, icons and signs validating transmission but not necessarily so the contents –as an outstanding musical monument dedicated to praise the environmental worries that might assure eternal post burial life to a rock singer-, human and environmental care efforts are misled. Our contemporary “post-modern” cultural denial of death and bereavement grows in parallel to the establishment of social delusions assuring everlasting technical communication that in turn puts at stake the development of firm personal and group selves that are necessary to defend the own human and natural environment priorities. This article discusses the relevance of the personal self on its involvement with social and cultural matters that are shared by the different social and cultural selves.
The Salt of the Earth directed by Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado tells about the personal artistic and social commitment of photographer Sebastiao Salgado and his family that centered from a personal and family group viewpoints, in the visual narratives of the human and natural environments subjected to destruction as well as in giving impressive esthetic testimony about their survival signs resisting definitive loss.
The next Blog publication will go back to February 2015 when it was released in Buenos Aires a 2014 film about the outstanding involvement of a renowned cinema critic in a painstaking survival spirit praising life and cinema learning about human life, along his peers and family relatives sharing with him his struggle for real communication at both life and terminal disease. Although such entry will not consider environment as a key issue, it surely ends these 2014 film series analysis made since March 2015, as the alpha and omega of relevant art communication concerning the cultural environment. Such documentary is about Roger Ebert’s life and death and is called Life Itself, made by his friend Steve James.  
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Notes
* Amongst the cultural self lay Personal and National identities being made of a mosaic of group and socio-cultural identities that integrate ambiguous national and universal appurtenances (Ernest Tugendhat as quoted by Comuzzi, 2010). This feature as well as the need to understand diverse meaning at diverse cultures and languages might be posed hallmarks of Canadian culture that would benefit from conversation and reflective sharing in order to achieve comprehension for the possible resolution of conflicting issues in the intercultural communication interactions as well to fulfil trans-cultural objectives promoting knowledge and comprehension of the Canadian culture in relation to other cultures.
** The notion of the social self considers a social contextual emphasis that imposes the start of the self at a certain moment of the socio-cultural history –Gergen, 1991-. Under this view it might be said that the social self is quite vulnerable to the influence of commercial and political power, both enhanced by propaganda. In the political publicity indorsing rigid social self stories there are enhanced and permanently transmitted leader stereotypes and government prototype measures of the “good” and the “nationalistic models” that confront the “bad” that characterize the opposition and the subjection to other cultures. Death and loss are repudiated as based in the denial of the truth or validity of something that contradicts the leader omnipotence and its nationalistic political empowerment. In the dictatorial or post-dictatorial Peronist regime governing Argentina through different cycles since the half of last century, Eva Perón and Cristina Fernández Kirchner embodied mythical figures of the “good” and of the “nationalistic models” that respectively are to survive death as a mummified corpse showed within a crystal coffin lid or as a huge very expensive building designed for honoring the everlasting life of the dead couple. The dead leader becomes the representative of the social self competing with other cultural representations, i.e. the latter Argentine president moved the statue of Cristophoro Columbus –represented on his feet in a very calm position- that was endowed by the Italian community at times of Argentina’s first 100 years anniversary, changing it from its original emplacement next to the Government palace and replaced it for a Latin American native woman holding a weapon in an offensive attitude. Cristina Kirchner had said people would have to fear god and also a little bit to her [09/07/2012]. The empowerment of a social self model is devised to rule nations and social groups with unlimited fearful power. Amongst Eva Peron’s mythology flourished terror tales [“The burned child”] that would correspond to terror and idealization defensive mechanisms recursively feeding opposite bad and good aspects of its political figure (Langer, 1957). The omnipotence of a Social self had been represented by religious figures in the past as a Big Brother would be in the internet future. In part such enhancement of the social self might relate to the loss of a vigorous folk tradition that has weaken the moral ties between individuals (Geertz,  1973). This is narrated in Argentina through the poem “Santos Vega” from Raphael Obligado. Popper & Eccles (1977) on their side refer to the start of the self referring to the acquisition of language and writing at the beginning of civilization, if not since the Neardental men (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) >100.000 BC. “Before language was written there is prove about oral repetition of stories by singers thal paved the way for their future writing, Gilgamesh being the epical story to be known after long existence in Sumer since 2000 BC; the development of the storytellig habit links to the development of imagination, fantasy and invention.// Along the discovery of language and weapons, the use of fire, emerged the discovery of the consciousness of the self and other selves, and the knowledge of death. Burial rituals goes back to the man of Neardenthal making possible to assess that these men were conscient of death along the beliefs of after death life as corpses were buried with presents, flowers and signs of caring”.

REFERENCES
Adler, A, “Individual Psychology” in Harriman, P.L., Encyclopedia of Psychology.Systematic Psychology – Philosophical Psychology – Phenomenology- Gestalt Psychology – Individual Psychology: Adlerian School, Philosophical Library, New York, 1966.
Bowen, M., De la familia al individuo. La diferenciación del sí mismo en el sistema familiar, Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1991.
Comuzzi I.,  Identidad y democracia: punto de encuentro para la integración de los latinoamericanos en Canadá. CD con las Ponencias de la Jornada Internacional “Nación, Diversidad. Pluralismo. Entre el crisol de Razas y el Multiculturalismo. Miradas cruzadas Argentina-Canadá”, llevado a cabo en la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas de la UBA el 15-16 XI 2010.
Geertz, C. The interpretation of cultures, Basic Books, Harper-Collins Publishers, 1973. 
Gergen, K. J., The saturated self. Dilemmas of identity of contemporary life, Basic Books, Harper-Collins Publishers, 1991.
Langer, M. Fantasías eternas del inconsciente a la luz del psicoanálisis, Buenos Aires: Nova, 1957.
Luhmann, N.,  System und function, SuhrkampVerlag, Frankfort del Main, 1984.
Lyons, J.O., The invention of the self, Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. 
Popper, K.R & Eccles, J.C., The self and its brain, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 1977.
Taylor, Ch., Sources of the Self, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1989.
Tugendhat, E., Egozentrizität und Mystik, Verlag C.H., Beck oHG, Munchen, 1997.


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