Wizard Wear/Wizarding culture

[Amy]

No: HPFGUIDX 9163

Steve wrote:

> This does make some sense too if you look at Wizarding culture in 
its 
> entirety. It is essentially a medieval culture, based on a medieval 
> world-life view. That's when magic still held credence in our 
> civilization. The Renaissance scrubbed our minds of that nonsense 
and 
> replaced it with good, solid, experimetnally provable science. This 
> hasn't happened to our counterparts in the Wizarding World, however. 
> They are still in the middle ages in many ways, although they do 
have 
> many of the trappings of modern society, copied and made to work not 
> with technology and science but with magic spells. Like the Knight 
> Bus and the Wizarding Wireless, these things do not fit exactly or 
> work the same. They are copies based on what they see to meet the 
> same basic needs of society--mass trasit, mass communications--
> although they do not understand the scientific concepts behind the 
> Muggle things they copy. 

I think it's the other way around, for the most part.  Muggles have 
found all sorts of ways to cope with the inability to do magic (as AW 
says and as you quote in the lexicon--"ingenious, really . . .").  
This is not only funny and more sympathetic to the wizarding world, 
but it fits with the way history has really gone.  For centuries we 
Muggles have dreamed and written about magical/science fictional/etc. 
ways to transport ourselves over great distances quickly, talk to 
people who are far away, create instant images, fly, travel back in 
time, create light and heat instantly, etc.  Some of those things we 
have managed to bring into being through technology in just the past 
couple hundred years:  photography, telephones, electric power, 
airplanes.  But we're still trying to catch up with the wizards, who 
have always known how to do these things and more!


Amy Z
who, as you may guess from the volume of my posting, REALLY needs to 
be doing work right now instead of having fun on HPforGU


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"And some old witch in Bath had a book that you could *never
stop reading*!  You just had to wander around with your nose 
in it, trying to do everything one-handed."
                    --Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
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