The meaning of ‘frozen their cultures inside ours’
The meaning of ‘frozen their cultures inside ours’
The passage below is from Fathoms: The World in the Whale Hardcover by Rebecca Giggs.
One upshot of this perpetual revision of humpback songs is that the dreamy recordings of whales from the 1970s, including those aboard the Voyager probes, no longer accurately represent the sounds of whales in nature. Whatever those compositions conveyed, whatever the meaning of those exact groupings of pitches, most were never heard again in the wild. Perhaps they never will be. As whales have sometimes captured human cultures in their bodies — arrowheads buried in their flesh, plastic products in their stomachs — we have frozen their cultures inside ours.
In this passage the last phrase ‘frozen their cultures inside ours’ doesn’t make any sense to me.
It seems like a figure of speech, hinting human environmental damage done to whales puts them into disaster. But we eventually cannot be excused from it.
However I cannot get any meaning of this phrase to that effect.
Actually I’m ok with ‘have frozen whales’ cultures’. Yes, we have done something terrible to them. And the author expressed it with that phrase. OK.
But adding ‘inside ours’, I cannot make any exact meaning of the whole phrase but a bunch of wild-guessing or speculation.
Can you help me out?
Top answer
From that sentence alone it seems ambiguous whether "ours" means "our bodies" or "our cultures", but from the overall sense I'm guessing that the latter is meant. Thus, the author is saying that we have incorporated whales' cultures within our own cultures, one example of which is presumably the previously mentioned use of the recordings of whales' songs. The specific word "frozen" is used to suggest the capturing and preserving of something at one moment in time, the idea being that once something is "frozen" it is static and can no longer change.
- From that sentence alone it seems ambiguous whether "ours" means "our bodies" or "our cultures", but from the overall sense I'm guessing that the latter is meant.
- Thus, the author is saying that we have incorporated whales' cultures within our own cultures, one example of which is presumably the previously mentioned use of the recordings of whales' songs.
- The specific word "frozen" is used to suggest the capturing and preserving of something at one moment in time, the idea being that once something is "frozen" it is static and can no longer change.
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From that sentence alone it seems ambiguous whether "ours" means "our bodies" or "our cultures", but from the overall sense I'm guessing that the latter is meant. Thus, the author is saying that we have incorporated whales' cultures within our own cultures, one example of which is presumably the previously mentioned use of the recordings of whales' songs. The specific word "frozen" is used to
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