Understanding the Cultural Landscape
Language: English
Pages: 406
ISBN: 1593851197
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Note: Many additional photographs related to the themes addressed in the book are available at the author's website (www.greatmirror.com.)
The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal
Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology
Precious Cargo: How Foods From the Americas Changed The World
Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth
Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures
is an important point, because it conflicts with the so-called stress models that we almost instinctively turn to when we try to explain the rise of agriculture. Stress models rest on the deceptively attractive assumption that agriculture arose because people were hungry. The grandaddy among this family of explanations was proposed by the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, whose much-reprinted New Light on the Most Ancient East (1928) proposed that hunters turned to farming when the postglacial
map of China shows a far western province of Xinjiang. (If you’re using an old atlas, it probably shows this province as Sinkiang. That’s because other methods of transliterating Chinese were used in the past. For more on these systems, see the note at the end of this chapter.) Xinjiang comprises two arid basins separated by the Tian Shan, or Heavenly Mountains. The basins are the more northerly Dzungaria, through which the old Silk Road passed, and the more southerly Kashgaria, also known as the
was using the next. It was apparently coined by Theodore Levitt, writing in the Harvard Business Review in 1983 to suggest that multinational companies were tending to market identical products around the world. Critics have pointed out that this hasn’t happened, at least not yet. McDonald’s serves congee, or rice porridge, in China, not Colorado; it serves Chicken Maharajah Macs in India, not Indiana. But if globalization hasn’t yet occurred in exactly the way Levitt meant, it certainly is
intermediate languages may be necessary, raising questions about the accuracy of the final translation of a speech delivered in Finnish, translated perhaps to German, then to Italian, and finally to Maltese. The best solution is bilingualism or multilingualism. That’s the position of Raymond Cohen, an Israeli who contrasts the “threadbare” English typically used by foreign speakers with the “luxuriant native language” used by native English speakers. Cohen argues that people whose native tongue
Powell River. They were icons of the provincial economy, but that didn’t stop them from being sold in 1987 to a New Zealand company which in turn sold them in 2000 to Norske Skog. The other two giants were Abitibi, based in Quebec and serving the big newspapers of the American Northeast, and Bowater, a South Carolina company tapping those fast-growing Southern pine forests. Competition for these companies may come from Russia, which has immense timber resources but whose forest-products output