afternoon chats with the nurse
One of my favourite parts of any day at Takeeda, my smallest elementary school, has come to be my afternoon chats with the school nurse. My classes at this school are all in the morning now, and with only 25 students, she isn't exactly run off her feet. She doesn't speak any more English than the average person off the street, but she's keen to learn, and with my keitai jisho (dictionary on my mobile), we have some decent conversations.
She likes to ask about whatever I'm reading; at the moment it's Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Taking that book and its pictures of various ethnic groups, we managed to discuss the following:
1. The axis theory of the spread of culture and technology*
2. Why we, as northern Asians and Europeans, are pale-skinned whilst indigenous Australians, Africans, etc are dark-skinned.
3. The diversity of religions, animals and cultures in Indonesia.
Also, I played soccer with half the school (ie a dozen kids) at lunchtime. We jankened to make teams and I ended up on a team with all the year 1 kids. After 15 minutes or so of running, I was exhausted. I may have climbed Fuji, but I'm still horribly unfit.
*In short, Eurasia has an east-west axis (ie its greater distance is east-west) whilst the Americas and Africa have north-south axes. Travelling east to west, you travel through largely similar climates; these similar climates make it easier for crops and domestic animals, and later culture and technology, to travel; hence both Japan and Spain have the same animals and crops. Going north to south, you travel through a variety of climates, from temperate to tropical to temperate. Crops and animals cannot be brought from a warm climate to a cool one, or vice versa, and hence cannot spread easily along a north-south axis. In practice, this meant that goods and ideas spread easily throughout Eurasia, giving its cultures a boost in progress, whilst the same was impossible in the Americas and Africa, thus hindering their progress in technology, agriculture etc etc. Phew!
posted by Bob @ 9:24 pm
3 Comments:
My theory was always that development is mainly influenced by temperature/climate.
In Europe / Nothern Hemisphere / N-America, you have bitter cold climates in winter. Snow even. From years ago, people were forced to think ahead, build shelther, save up provisions, and all those things that spurted First world development.
When you're in Africa, tehre is no need for thinking ahead. In fact, the only need is to chill under a tree, because the sun is so damn hot, you cannot really move around and build a house or teach your kids the new alphabet. Food was never a problem, as livestock were, well, around, and grains grew relatively easily without any brain-bending agricultural tricks. So Africa evolved into the lazy nation, missing out on the second world, and finally settling for third place. Wouldn't you have? It's so much less trouble.
Could not work out exactly how much tongue in cheek the previous comment was so I thought I would wave my African ancestory flag.
Ever heard of civilisations by the names of Carthaginian, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, Persian, Phoenician, Khmyer, Southern China, Incan? All of which lay fairly close to the middle bits and quite warm and pretty good at adding to our worldly development. Also the warmer Roman guys had little trouble in conquering the colder northern guys, but found the warmer Carthage guys quite a handful. It was also those Roman hotbots who really "spurted" North/West Europe from abject dumbness into "civilization" Just read your Asterix.
Yeah, development is spurted by whatever happens to be available in your area. Each part of the world that developed agriculture independently is pretty warm. The colder climes just adopted it (and writing, and politics, etc) from other warmer folk. Then the axis theory helped the spread of such things in Eurasia, but not the other continents.
This is what I get from reading Diamond. Sorry.
(ps, first commenter is African, so... yeah)
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