Since your last exam on September 22, 2006 (and since Monday September 25), I've tried to discuss change and the idea that ALL individuals attempt to interpret their place in the universe. You've also read:
"He was an Englishman who went on a five-year voyage when he was young and then retired to a house in the country, not far from London. He wrote an account of his voyage, and then he wrote a book setting down his theory of evolution, based on a process he called natural selection, a theory that provided the foundation for modern biology. He was often ill and never left England again [stress added]." John P. Wiley, Jr., 1998, Expressions: The Visible Link. Smithsonian, June, pages 22-24, page 22.
"The great value of Darwinism, it seems to me, was that it jolted modern men into questioning various sentimental beliefs about nature and man's place in it. In this, Darwin's influence closely parallels that of Galileo [1564-1642]. Just as the first modern astronomers and physicists destroyed a naive geocentrism, so Darwin and his successorsoverwhelmingly displaced what may be called homocentrism, the belief that nature exists for the sake of man [stress added]." Jacob Needleman, 1975, A Sense of the Cosmos: The Encounter of Modern Science and Ancient Truth (NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc.), page 72.
You have been taken, via videos, to various parts of the world: prior to EXAM I you had information about the traditional aborigines of Australia as well as the Bushmen; now we have been to the South Pacific (that region of the globe that lies below the equator) and read and saw information concerning "revitalization movements" in Melanesia. And it was pointed out that "Margaret Mead popularized cultural anthropology 70 years ago with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa" but what have individuals (anthropologists and indigenous people) said about her work lately? You have observed the Tasmanian aborigines and the Netsilik, and you have seen traditional activities and change in New Guinea. Different anthropologists also have different interepretations over time and please consider the following:
"What she [Mead] concluded after visitng the Manua'an Island, 2,300 miles south of Hawaii, was that teenage girls and boys there were free of the hang-ups of their Western counterparts and that sexual promiscuity was common. ... These conclusions long have been scoffed at by American Samoans. And now a conservative think tank has rekindled the debate by naming Mead's 1928 treatise the worst nonfiction book of the past 100 years. ... 'So amusing did the native find the white women's prurient questions that they told her the wildest tales--and she believed them!' [stress added]." Jean Christensen, February 2, 2000, Mead's 'Coming of Age in Samoa' Called Worst Nonfiction of Century, The San Francisco Chronicle, page A5.
"When Columbus set sail from Spain in 1492, he speculated that his fastest route to the gold and spices of the Orient was west by sea....Had we been able to visit the coast of California between 5000 and 400 years ago we would have seen a remarkable sight....The pucará [fortress] of Sascahuamán [in Perú, South America] is not only one of the greatest single structures ever built in preliterate America...."
"What enabled the Incas to establish the greatest empire of the New World? Most scholars agree it was a combination of outstanding military organization and effective administration of conquered peoples."
"The story of Ishi begins for us early in the morning of the twenty-ninth day of August in the year 1911 and in the corral of a slaughter house. It begins with the shaorp barking of dogs which roused the sleeping butchers. In the dawn light they saw a man at bay, crouching against the corral fence--[the person who would eventually known as] Ishi."
"What do the Indian nations of Arizona, California, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington and several other states have now that they did not have 15 years ago? The answer is political clout. ..."
"The film The Last Tasmanian was described as "a shocking and heart-wrenching portrait of a primitive [sic.] culture wiped out in the name of civilization and Christianity. When the British first colonized the island of Tasmania in 1803...."
The term "genocide" was first used by Raphael Lemkin [1900-1949] in his 1944 publication entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: "By genocide we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group." Lemkin combined a Greek and Latin root to create the word. On the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel: "But because of his telling, many who did not care to believe have come to believe, and some who did not care have come to care. He tells the story out of infinite pain, partly to honor the dead, but also to warn the living--to warn the living that it could happen again and that it must never happen again. Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all."
I have tried to stress "adaptation to the environment" and "change" as being constant and like this phrase from one the Guidebook:
"My reasons for hope are fourfold: (1) the human brain; (2) the resilience of nature; (3) the energy and enthusiasm that isfound or can be found or can be kindled among young people worldwide; and (4) the indomitable human spirit [stress added]." Jane Goodall [with Phillip Berman].
"Peaceful cooperation, that's the key." (Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington - also known as Nearly Headless Nick} J. K. Rowling, 2003, Harry Potter And the Order of The Phoenix (NY: Scholastic Press), page 209.
Finally, "The barbarous heathen are nothing more strange to us than we are to them.... Human reason is a tincture in like weight and measure infused into all our opinions and customs, what form soever they be, infinite in matter, infinite in diversity."