I Knew It!

Believe it or not, I do think about other things than being snarky about right-wingers.

Northwest Coast totems

I spend a lot of time at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, which is no surprise, given my life-long fascination with the natural world and the way it works, which in my mature years has also become a fascination with human cultures and their origins. (Sometimes the processes can be remarkably similar, if mostly metaphorical.) On a couple of recent trips, I noticed the strong resemblance between the iconography of the Northwest Coast peoples of America, the high cultures of Meso-America, and the Polynesian peoples of the Pacific, and in fact an affinity between the art of those groups and certain motifs in Chinese and Japanese depictions of, for example, gods and demons -- common motifs, such as large, staring eyes and protruding tongues as a sign of power. I considered the possibility that there was a common origin somewhere back in the mists of time, especially since evidence points to origins of at least some of the American Indians and the peoples of the Pacific island in close proximity --possibly in Southeast Asia and/or the area of Indonesia and New Guinea.

Well, lo and behold! While reading Joseph Campbell's The Flight of the Wild Gander, a group of his essays that deal with the origins of myth and religion, I ran across a passage in "Bios and Mythos" (pp.30-31 of the New World Library edition of the collected works) in which Campbell notes the work of a number of anthropologists who have entertained similar ideas, specifically the work of Robert Heine-Gedern, who, he says, "showed that late Chou Dynasty art motifs had been somehow diffused from China to Indonesia and Middle America."

Maori totems

And searching through that rag-bag memory of mine, I remember references to the Lapita people of Taiwan, coastal Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago, who are generally considered to be the ancestors of the peoples of the Pacific Islands. This ties in with another memory of a reference to the origins of some Amerindian languages in Southeast Asia, but I don't remember the specific locality that was mentioned. (This is kind of a sketchy association, since there are a number of languages spoken in that region, some of which are relatively recent results of movements of peoples from mainland China and possibly India. I really can't confess to be up to snuff on that particular area.)

The bottom line is that there is some validity to my idea of a common artistic tradition between America, East Asia, and the Pacific Islands.

(A side note: at the beginning of the exhibition "Ancient Americas," the Field has a video outlining the two main theories of how people arrived in the Americas from Asia: either via the Bering land bridge during the most recent glaciation, or by boat. These are always presented as two theories in opposition, but it occurs to me that they're not mutually exclusive. Another booby-trap engendered by either/or thinking.)

Polynesian panel

Working Together? What's That About?

Tom Sullivan has an interesting post at Hullabaloo that points up, more or less explicitly, how far over the edge the Republican party has gone.

He starts with a recollection of the war effort in the 1940s:

Baby Boomers are too young to remember victory gardens, bacon grease recycling, and Rosie the Riveter, the icon celebrating American women working in WWII factories to build tanks and ships and airplanes for the war effort. But that was over 70 years ago. Somewhere along the way, the Midas cult soured on Americans pulling together. That spirit is dead.

Just how dead is illustrated by Ill. GOP Rep. John Shimkus wondering why he should pay for women's prenatal care:

The Republican congressman voiced complaints about coverage mandated in the Affordable Care Act. Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle (Pa.) asked him to give specifics:

"What about men having to purchase prenatal care?" Shimkus replied. "I’m just ... is that not correct? And should they?"

Doyle reminded Shimkus there is no health care plan that covers only the personal medical choices of each person.

"There's no such thing as a la carte insurance, John," Doyle stated.

"That's the point, that's the point," Shimkus countered. "We want the consumer to be able to go to the insurance market and be able to negotiate on a plan."

"You tell me what insurance company will [negotiate a plan]," Doyle fired back. "There isn't a single insurance company in the world that does that, John. You're talking about something that doesn't exist."

Just think about one thing for a minute: if you could, in fact, negotiate a policy with an insurance company to include only those items you think you need, what kind of premium would you be paying?

And MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle explains to Shimkus why men should be paying for prenatal care. (Her comment is in the last 12 or so seconds, but Austan Goolsbee's explanation is worth hearing. Besides, he's cute, in a nerdy sort of way.)

I noted yesterday Paul Ryan's brilliant observation on how he thinks insurance is supposed to work, which is of a piece with Shimkus' idea.

The underlying concept here, and it's one that I think is fundamental to human society, morality, what have you that makes human sociality a viable characteristic, is just what Sullivan outlined in his opening paragraph, and it's one that pops out every time you look at our history, or any other history: human societies are the result of people working together toward a desired goal. And Sullivan notes one thing that seems to have become bedrock for contemporary "conservatism":

But what really churns my gut is this anti-American view among the likes of Ryan and Shimkus that it is somehow anti-American for Americans to pull together, to pool resources and have each other's backs. You know, all that "We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again" stuff. All that working together for the common good from before my time when America was supposed to be great or something. Now it's "American" to think I've got mine, screw you.

(Emphasis added.)

So now, according to the Ayn Rand fanatics who have taken over the government, it's anti-American to behave like a human being.

I wonder if we're going to survive until the midterms.

Today in Disgusting People

Actually, it's not an individual, it's an institution.

It may come as no surprise that I have no respect for the Roman Catholic Church or its hierarchy -- quite aside from my thoughts on Christianity in general, which are mixed. And frankly, I had hopes for Francis' call to re-orient the Church's mission away from persecuting minorities and back to those basic Christian teachings -- you know, things like sheltering the homeless and feeding the hungry, things that the movers and shakers among the hierarchy can't be bothered with.

Sadly,the Church is falling back into old patterns, with Francis at the head:

The supposedly “moderate” Pope Francis was recently quoted in a meeting with Polish bishops as saying, “Today, in schools they are teaching this to children – to children! – that everyone can choose their gender… We are living a moment of annihilation of man as image of God.” He accused Western countries that tolerate transgender people of “ideological colonizing,” stating: “One such colonization, I'll say it clearly with its first and last name – is gender.”

He repeated these claims about “indoctrination” and “ideological colonization,” when speaking to reporters this week. He attacks schools which accept transgender youth describing the "'nasty' tendency of schools to 'indoctrinate' children with the idea that their gender is something that can be picked and chosen and changed."

Other high level Catholic officials have also made recent statements that leave no doubt that the Church has decided transgender people, and acceptance of them, are some of the most dangerous evils on the face of the Earth. Pope Francis previously stated that transgender people are a “threat to the order of creation,” and compared danger of transgender people to nuclear weapons, stating: “Let’s think of the nuclear arms, of the possibility to annihilate in a few instants a very high number of human beings. Let’s think also of… of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation.”

This is all the expected follow-up to the pope's somewhat incoherent rants against "gender ideology," whatever that is, and, given the Church's fixation on morality as a function of genitals, it's not really a surprise. It is, however, somewhat disheartening to see the hierarchy once again institutionalizing ignorance -- it's quite clear that the pope and the bishops have no clue as to what trans folk are about. ("Disheartening" because the Roman Catholic Church quite easily accepted the theory of evolution, after performing the necessary theological cartwheels.)

Aside from the sheer viciousness of the rhetoric, the irony is of staggering proportions: "ideological colonization" is a nice succinct summary of the history of the Catholic Church. It's a phenomenon not readily apparent in the West -- Europe and North America, where governments and cultures in general are more secular -- but it's a very dangerous trend in Africa and the Catholic portions of Asia. The Church has a long, dirty history of selling social outcasts -- the very people it should be trying to protect, according to its own teachings -- down the river. (Another screaming irony: African clergy maintaining that homosexuality and gender fluidity are "not African" while clinging desperately to the worst and most ignorant aspects of Colonial rule -- and nothing could be less African than the Christian churches and their teachings on sexuality. Anyone with the slightest reading knowledge of anthropology understands that most "primitive" societies had a much more accurate and realistic understanding of sexuality and its variations than the "enlightened" Christian Europeans who were determined to obliterate their cultures.)

Read the whole article. It's infuriating, but at least it's not Trump.

Saturay Science: Oral Histories

Did you ever stop to think about how much of what we know about the past comes from oral tradition? Because, of course, most people, until quite recently, couldn't write. Just think about how long things like the Iliad, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, all those epics, not to mention the myths, legends, and teaching stories, must have been around before anyone wrote them down.

It turns out some people were really, really good at remembering their stories:

Without using written languages, Australian tribes passed memories of life before, and during, post-glacial shoreline inundations through hundreds of generations as high-fidelity oral history. Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist — and provide their original names.

That’s the conclusion of linguists and a geographer, who have together identified 18 Aboriginal stories — many of which were transcribed by early settlers before the tribes that told them succumbed to murderous and disease-spreading immigrants from afar — that they say accurately described geographical features that predated the last post-ice age rising of the seas.

I suspect the accuracy of the collective memory of the Australian natives in this case has a lot to do with their highly refined sense of place:

“Dreamings” are a particularly Australian thing that finds parallels in other cultures but has a distinctly unique flavor. Marett discusses Dreamings quite clearly as a phenomenon that has to do with the spiritual and the eternal, most commonly expressed in the Daly region, the focus of this study, as “that which derives from the eternal, uncreated, springing out of itself.” This is pretty much in direct opposition to Western thought, which has difficulty dealing with the idea that something just is, and has been. It is symptomatic of the unified conceptual framework of the Aborigines that the meaning can be danced as easily as verbalized, and the dance will probably carry that meaning more clearly than the words.

Aboriginal ritual springs from the need to acknowledge and clarify the relationship of the group to the land, which includes origins, traditions, and the relationship of the living to the dead, the dead having gone back into the land with the potential of being reborn.

So think twice before you dismiss legends and folk tales as mere fictions. Because they're probably not.