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kleenexwomanSkipped D&D tonight, ostensibly to study German and finish reading "Frankenstein." How far I'm going to get on that, I don't know. German class is kicking my ass, and I need to get a tutor.
I even went to the U.C. bookstore and got some flashcards and a little box for the flashcards and everything. Ended up spending more than I'd thought on postcards and eyeball gum and books and some other things that I don't actually remember buying. They do sell postcards, on a little teeny rack in the back, and that surprised me. Granted, they're all pictures of buildings. Nothing pretty like trees or the library park, like the lovely pictures of the Corpus Christi campus that I just got from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nyghtshayde (squee! happy! warm fuzzies! pretty flowers!).
The two books I got from the U.C. bookstore: "An Anthropologist on Mars," by Oliver Sacks, and "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches," by Marvin Harris. Read the latter during dinner. It's pretty short, only 260 pages, but covers a lot of ground. Answers such questions as:
Why can't Jews eat pigs, besides "God said so"?
Jews come from the desert, and the desert isn't a very good place to raise pigs. Pigs like shade, moisture, and eating things that only grow in forested regions. Keeping sheep and goats is more economically reasonable for desert-dwellers.
(Since Michigan is a pretty heavily forested state, I now expect everyone in Oak Park to start chowing down on barbecued ribs.)
Why is there war?
War emerged as a way to conserve resources. In many primitive tribes (particularly the example shown in the book), women are expected to plant crops and tend them, or herd animals, often clearing away forest in the process. Men are expected to strut around and kill other men, and often contribute little to the actual economy of the tribe. While there's no limit to what a tribe can consume, there is a definite limit to how much the tribe's women can produce, how many crops they can plant, how many animals they can herd. When there are a lot of women to do this kind of productive work, a lot of productive work will be done, often to a ridiculous extent. So much productive work may be done that it will exhaust the resources in the area, and then the tribe will starve while they wait for the forest to grow back or the ground to replenish itself.
In a culture that glorifies war, the men who can fight the war are going to be considered the more valuable sex. Male babies will be pampered and prized, while female babies will often actually be killed at birth. Fewer female babies mean fewer women to plant crops, and fewer crops planted means fewer resources used up. More men means more men fighting, more men fighting means more men dying, and more men dying means fewer men to eat up the crops that the women plant.
This doesn't seem to be a deliberate ploy, like with the pigs, but rather a type of evolution. The tribes that don't fight with each other die out, whereas the tribes that do fight with each other hang on by the skin of their teeth. (Hence why these tribes haven't figured out yet that they can get men to do women's work: When they do figure this out, they use up their resources and die.)
What were the medieval witch hunts really about?
There was a lot more dissent in the medieval era than you might think, particularly against the church. Little revolutions and rival Christian sects were popping up all over the place. The witch hunts were a way to scare the peasants into fearing each other and relying on the church to protect them.
There's also some fascinating information on the Hindu sacred cow and the economy of India, the potlatch ceremonies of the Northwestern aboriginal tribes (which almost makes me want to write "Dead Man" fanfic), the political context of the Gospels, South Sea cargo cults (protests against colonial exploitation. Still, it was the most interesting chapter in the book), and why the New Age movement did absoulutely nothing to mitigate the influence of the corporate-industrial complex.
I really like the idea that things like war and organized religion and rampant xenophobia are just social responses to economic factors. This might be wishful thinking on my part, but a lot of what I've been learning does point towards this. Even in Psych class, where the material tends to focus on the biological aspects of psychology, my prof likes to remind us that things like depression and addiction are often cognitive or environmental problems, rather than physiological conditions. Environment can count for so much.
I even went to the U.C. bookstore and got some flashcards and a little box for the flashcards and everything. Ended up spending more than I'd thought on postcards and eyeball gum and books and some other things that I don't actually remember buying. They do sell postcards, on a little teeny rack in the back, and that surprised me. Granted, they're all pictures of buildings. Nothing pretty like trees or the library park, like the lovely pictures of the Corpus Christi campus that I just got from
nyghtshayde (squee! happy! warm fuzzies! pretty flowers!). The two books I got from the U.C. bookstore: "An Anthropologist on Mars," by Oliver Sacks, and "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches," by Marvin Harris. Read the latter during dinner. It's pretty short, only 260 pages, but covers a lot of ground. Answers such questions as:
Why can't Jews eat pigs, besides "God said so"?
Jews come from the desert, and the desert isn't a very good place to raise pigs. Pigs like shade, moisture, and eating things that only grow in forested regions. Keeping sheep and goats is more economically reasonable for desert-dwellers.
(Since Michigan is a pretty heavily forested state, I now expect everyone in Oak Park to start chowing down on barbecued ribs.)
Why is there war?
War emerged as a way to conserve resources. In many primitive tribes (particularly the example shown in the book), women are expected to plant crops and tend them, or herd animals, often clearing away forest in the process. Men are expected to strut around and kill other men, and often contribute little to the actual economy of the tribe. While there's no limit to what a tribe can consume, there is a definite limit to how much the tribe's women can produce, how many crops they can plant, how many animals they can herd. When there are a lot of women to do this kind of productive work, a lot of productive work will be done, often to a ridiculous extent. So much productive work may be done that it will exhaust the resources in the area, and then the tribe will starve while they wait for the forest to grow back or the ground to replenish itself.
In a culture that glorifies war, the men who can fight the war are going to be considered the more valuable sex. Male babies will be pampered and prized, while female babies will often actually be killed at birth. Fewer female babies mean fewer women to plant crops, and fewer crops planted means fewer resources used up. More men means more men fighting, more men fighting means more men dying, and more men dying means fewer men to eat up the crops that the women plant.
This doesn't seem to be a deliberate ploy, like with the pigs, but rather a type of evolution. The tribes that don't fight with each other die out, whereas the tribes that do fight with each other hang on by the skin of their teeth. (Hence why these tribes haven't figured out yet that they can get men to do women's work: When they do figure this out, they use up their resources and die.)
What were the medieval witch hunts really about?
There was a lot more dissent in the medieval era than you might think, particularly against the church. Little revolutions and rival Christian sects were popping up all over the place. The witch hunts were a way to scare the peasants into fearing each other and relying on the church to protect them.
There's also some fascinating information on the Hindu sacred cow and the economy of India, the potlatch ceremonies of the Northwestern aboriginal tribes (which almost makes me want to write "Dead Man" fanfic), the political context of the Gospels, South Sea cargo cults (protests against colonial exploitation. Still, it was the most interesting chapter in the book), and why the New Age movement did absoulutely nothing to mitigate the influence of the corporate-industrial complex.
I really like the idea that things like war and organized religion and rampant xenophobia are just social responses to economic factors. This might be wishful thinking on my part, but a lot of what I've been learning does point towards this. Even in Psych class, where the material tends to focus on the biological aspects of psychology, my prof likes to remind us that things like depression and addiction are often cognitive or environmental problems, rather than physiological conditions. Environment can count for so much.
