Brookdale Community College
History 105 Readings
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Contents
Contents ................................................................................................................................................. 1
Topic 1—Early Human History .............................................................................................................. 4
I.1.E.“The Hadza” by Michael Finkel .................................................................................................. 4
I.1.F-1 The Bible: Book of Genesis Chapter 3 ................................................................................... 16
I.1.F-2 The Bible: Book of Genesis Chapter 4 ................................................................................... 17
I.1.B. “Acting like Neanderthals” by Mike Williams ......................................................................... 19
Topic 2—Social Values of Traditional Societies ................................................................................... 23
I.2.E. Characteristics of Traditional Societies .................................................................................. 23
I.2.F. Understanding Patriarchy by bell hooks................................................................................. 24
I.2.A. “The Birth of Religion” by Charles C. Mann ........................................................................... 33
Topic 3—Early Civilizations: Middle East and Africa .......................................................................... 42
I.3.D. “Hammurabi’s Code of Laws” (circa 1780 B.C.) ..................................................................... 42
I.3.M. “Negative Confession” (from the Book of the Dead) ............................................................. 65
Topic 4—Early Civilizations: India and China .....................................................................................68
I.4.F. Laws of Manu, Selections Relating to Caste ...........................................................................68
Topic 5 – Early Civilizations: The Americas and Oceana .................................................................... 70
I.5.B. “Mystery of the Olmec” by Michael D. Lemonick ................................................................... 70
Topic 6—Unification of China .............................................................................................................. 74
II.6.A. Confucius Kongfuzi (c. 500 CE): The Analects, excerpts ...................................................... 74
II.6.D. Dao De Jing: Tao Te Ching, Selections ................................................................................. 75
II.6.G Han Fei-tzu (d. 233 BCE): Legalist Views on Good Government .......................................... 76
II.6.E. “The Five Vermin,” Selections from the Han Feizi: Chapter 49............................................ 77
II.6.I “Women in Traditional China” by Patricia Ebrey ................................................................... 83
Topic 7—State, Society, and the Quest for Salvation in India ..............................................................88
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II.7.A. “How Kisa-Gotami Came to Understand Sorrow and Death” ...............................................88
II.7.F. “The Laws of Manu” ..............................................................................................................90
II.7.E. “Svetaketu’s Education” ........................................................................................................ 91
II.7.D. “Jain Doctrines and Practices of Nonviolence” ..................................................................... 93
II.7.H. World Scripture, Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts ................................................... 95
Topic 8 – The Empires of Persia .......................................................................................................... 96
II.8.A. “On The Customs of the Persians,” Herodotus, c. 430 BCE ................................................. 96
II.8.F. 300: Those Manly Spartans! ................................................................................................. 99
II.8.G. History of the Peloponnesian War (431 BC), by Thucydides .............................................. 101
Topic 9—Ancient Greece and Rome................................................................................................... 107
II.9.H. “The Allegory of the Cave.” ................................................................................................. 107
II.9.G. Pericles' Funeral Oration, Thucydides ................................................................................. 111
II.9.N. Res Gestae Divi Augusti (ca. 14 CE) ..................................................................................... 117
II.9.Q. “Women’s Life in Greece & Rome,” Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant ................... 127
Topic 10—Cultural Diffusion Along the Silk Road ............................................................................. 130
II.10.F. Southernization1 by Lynda Shaffer.................................................................................... 130
Topic 11—The Rise and Spread of Islam ............................................................................................ 137
III.11.H. Selections from the KORAN (QURAN) ............................................................................ 137
III.11.E. Mircea Eliade “From Primitives to Zen”: Muhammad’s Call ........................................... 142
III.11.G. “How Islam Won, and Lost, the Lead in Science,” Dennis Overbye................................. 144
III.11.A. The Prophet Muhammad’s Last Sermon .......................................................................... 150
III.11.J. Muquaddimah, Chapter 2.6 by Ibn Khaldun ..................................................................... 151
Topic 12—Growth and Spread of Civilization in Asia ........................................................................ 155
III.12.E. The Constitution of Prince Shōtoku ................................................................................. 155
III.12.B. Emperor Wuzong’s Edict on the Suppression of Buddhism: The Edict of the Eighth Month
(selection) ........................................................................................................................................157
Topic 13—Growth and Spread of European Civilizations .................................................................. 159
III.13.C. The Decameron - Introduction, Boccaccio ....................................................................... 159
III.13.E. “Call to Crusade,” Pope Urban II (as told by Robert the Monk) ...................................... 163
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III.13.J. “Go East, Young Knight,” Peter Frankopan ...................................................................... 166
III.13.A. “Life of Charlemagne,” Einhard ....................................................................................... 168
Topic 14—Inner Eurasia and the Mongol Empire.............................................................................. 172
IV.14.D. “All the Khan’s Horses,” Morris Rossabi .......................................................................... 172
IV.14.G. “Mongolia Sees Genghis Khan's Good Side,” The New York Times ..................................175
Topic 15—Pre-Modern Africa ............................................................................................................. 178
IV.15.F. “Africa’s Storied Past,” Roderick J. McIntosh .................................................................. 178
IV.15.E. “When Timbuktu Was the Paris of Islamic Intellectuals in Africa,” Lila Azam Zanganeh 179
Topic 16—Worlds Apart: The Americas and Oceania ........................................................................ 182
IV.16.F. “Lofty Ambitions of the Inca,” Heather Pringle ................................................................ 182
IV.16.B. “The Maoris, 1777-73,” James Burney .............................................................................. 187
Topic 17—Cross Cultural Interactions and the Columbian Exchange ................................................ 191
IV.17.G. “Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress,” Howard Zinn ....................................... 191
IV.17.F An Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico.....................................................................209
IV.17.I. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African
......................................................................................................................................................... 211
IV.17.J. “Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies. (1542),” Bartoleme de Las Casas ........... 222
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Topic 1—Early Human History
I.1.E.“The Hadza” by Michael Finkel
They grow no food, raise no livestock, and live without rules or calendars. They are living a huntergatherer existence that is little changed from 10,000 years ago. What do they know that we've
forgotten?
"I'm hungry," says Onwas, squatting by his fire, blinking placidly through the smoke. The men beside
him murmur in assent. It's late at night, deep in the East African bush. Singing, a rhythmic chant,
drifts over from the women's camp. Onwas mentions a tree he spotted during his daytime travels.
The men around the fire push closer. It is in a difficult spot, Onwas explains, at the summit of a steep
hill that rises from the grassy plain. But the tree, he adds, spreading his arms wide like branches, is
heavy with baboons. There are more murmurs. Embers rise to a sky infinite with stars. And then it is
agreed. Everyone stands and grabs his hunting bow.
Onwas is an old man, perhaps over 60—years are not a unit of time he uses—but thin and fit in the
Hadza way. He's maybe five feet tall. Across his arms and chest are the hieroglyphs of a lifetime in
the bush: scars from hunts, scars from snakebites, scars from arrows and knives and scorpions and
thorns. Scars from falling out of a baobab tree. Scars from a leopard attack. Half his teeth remain. He
is wearing tire-tread sandals and tattered brown shorts. A hunting knife is strapped to his hip, in a
sheath made of dik-dik hide. He's removed his shirt, as have most of the other men, because he
wants to blend into the night.
Onwas looks at me and speaks for a few moments in his native language, Hadzane. To my ear it
sounds strangely bipolar—lilting and gentle for a phrase or two, then jarring and percussive, with
tongue clicks and glottic pops. It's a language not closely related to any other that still exists: to use
the linguists' term, an isolate.
I have arrived in the Hadza homeland in northern Tanzania with an interpreter, a Hadza woman
named Mariamu. She is Onwas's niece. She attended school for 11 years and is one of only a handful
of people in the world who can speak both English and Hadzane. She interprets Onwas's words: Do I
want to come?
Merely getting this far, to a traditional Hadza encampment, is not an easy task. Years aren't the only
unit of time the Hadza do not keep close track of—they also ignore hours and days and weeks and
months. The Hadza language doesn't have words for numbers past three or four. Making an
appointment can be a tricky matter. But I had contacted the owner of a tourist camp not far outside
the Hadza territory to see if he could arrange for me to spend time with a remote Hadza group. While
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on a camping trip in the bush, the owner came across Onwas and asked him, in Swahili, if I might
visit. The Hadza tend to be gregarious people, and Onwas readily agreed. He said I'd be the first
foreigner ever to live in his camp. He promised to send his son to a particular tree at the edge of the
bush to meet me when I was scheduled to arrive, in three weeks.
Sure enough, three weeks later, when my interpreter and I arrived by Land Rover in the bush, there
was Onwas's son Ngaola waiting for us. Apparently, Onwas had noted the stages of the moon, and
when he felt enough time had passed, he sent his son to the tree. I asked Ngaola if he'd waited a long
time for me. "No," he said. "Only a few days."
At first, it was clear that everyone in camp—about two dozen Hadza, ranging from infants to
grandparents—felt uncomfortable with my presence. There was a lot of staring, some nervous laughs.
I'd brought along a photo album, and passing it around helped mitigate the awkwardness. Onwas
was interested in a picture of my cat. "How does it taste?" he asked. One photo captured everyone's
attention. It was of me participating in a New Year's Day polar bear swim, leaping into a hole cut in a
frozen lake. Hadza hunters can seem fearless; Onwas regularly sneaks up on leopards and races after
giraffes. But the idea of winter weather terrified him. He ran around camp with the picture, telling
everyone I was a brave man, and this helped greatly with my acceptance. A man who can leap into
ice, Onwas must have figured, is certainly a man who'd have no trouble facing a wild baboon. So on
the third night of my stay, he asks if I want to join the hunting trip.
I do. I leave my shirt on—my skin does not blend well with the night—and I follow Onwas and ten
other hunters and two younger boys out of camp in a single-file line. Walking through Hadza country
in the dark is challenging; thornbushes and spiked acacia trees dominate the terrain, and even
during the day there is no way to avoid being jabbed and scratched and punctured. A long trek in the
Hadza bush can feel like receiving a gradual full-body tattoo. The Hadza spend a significant portion
of their rest time digging thorns out of one another with the tips of their knives.
At night the thorns are all but invisible, and navigation seems impossible. There are no trails and few
landmarks. To walk confidently in the bush, in the dark, without a flashlight, requires the sort of
familiarity one has with, say, one's own bedroom. Except this is a thousand-square-mile bedroom,
with lions and leopards and hyenas prowling in the shadows.
For Onwas such navigation is no problem. He has lived all his life in the bush. He can start a fire,
twirling a stick between his palms, in less than 30 seconds. He can converse with a honeyguide bird,
whistling back and forth, and be led directly to a teeming beehive. He knows everything there is to
know about the bush and virtually nothing of the land beyond. One time I showed Onwas a map of
the world. I spread it open on the dirt and anchored the corners with stones. A crowd gathered.
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Onwas stared. I pointed out the continent of Africa, then the country of Tanzania, then the region
where he lived. I showed him the United States.
I asked him what he knew about America—the name of the president, the capital city. He said he
knew nothing. He could not name the leader of his own country. I asked him, as politely as possible,
if he knew anything about any country. He paused for a moment, evidently deep in thought, then
suddenly shouted, "London!" He couldn't say precisely what London was. He just knew it was
someplace not in the bush.
About a thousand Hadza live in their traditional homeland, a broad plain encompassing shallow,
salty Lake Eyasi and sheltered by the ramparts of the Great Rift Valley. Some have moved close to
villages and taken jobs as farmhands or tour guides. But approximately one-quarter of all Hadza,
including those in Onwas's camp, remain true hunter-gatherers. They have no crops, no livestock, no
permanent shelters. They live just south of the same section of the valley in which some of the oldest
fossil evidence of early humans has been found. Genetic testing indicates that they may represent
one of the primary roots of the human family tree—perhaps more than 100,000 years old.
What the Hadza appear to offer—and why they are of great interest to anthropologists—is a glimpse
of what life may have been like before the birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Anthropologists are
wary of viewing contemporary hunter-gatherers as "living fossils," says Frank Marlowe, a Florida
State University professor of anthropology who has spent the past 15 years studying the Hadza. Time
has not stood still for them. But they have maintained their foraging lifestyle in spite of long
exposure to surrounding agriculturalist groups, and, says Marlowe, it's possible that their lives have
changed very little over the ages.
For more than 99 percent of the time since the genus Homo arose two million years ago, everyone
lived as hunter-gatherers. Then, once plants and animals were domesticated, the discovery sparked a
complete reorganization of the globe. Food production marched in lockstep with greater population
densities, which allowed farm-based societies to displace or destroy hunter-gatherer groups. Villages
were formed, then cities, then nations. And in a relatively brief period, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle
was all but extinguished. Today only a handful of scattered peoples—some in the Amazon, a couple in
the Arctic, a few in Papua New Guinea, and a tiny number of African groups—maintain a primarily
hunter-gatherer existence. Agriculture's sudden rise, however, came with a price. It introduced
infectious-disease epidemics, social stratification, intermittent famines, and large-scale war. Jared
Diamond, the UCLA professor and writer, has called the adoption of agriculture nothing less than
"the worst mistake in human history"—a mistake, he suggests, from which we have never recovered.
The Hadza do not engage in warfare. They've never lived densely enough to be seriously threatened
by an infectious outbreak. They have no known history of famine; rather, there is evidence of people
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from a farming group coming to live with them during a time of crop failure. The Hadza diet remains
even today more stable and varied than that of most of the world's citizens. They enjoy an
extraordinary amount of leisure time. Anthropologists have estimated that they "work"—actively
pursue food—four to six hours a day. And over all these thousands of years, they've left hardly more
than a footprint on the land.
Traditional Hadza, like Onwas and his camp mates, live almost entirely free of possessions. The
things they own—a cooking pot, a water container, an ax—can be wrapped in a blanket and carried
over a shoulder. Hadza women gather berries and baobab fruit and dig edible tubers. Men collect
honey and hunt. Nighttime baboon stalking is a group affair, conducted only a handful of times each
year; typically, hunting is a solo pursuit. They will eat almost anything they can kill, from birds to
wildebeest to zebras to buffalo. They dine on warthog and bush pig and hyrax. They love baboon;
Onwas joked to me that a Hadza man cannot marry until he has killed five baboons. The chief
exception is snakes. The Hadza hate snakes.
The poison the men smear on their arrowheads, made of the boiled sap of the desert rose, is powerful
enough to bring down a giraffe. But it cannot kill a full-grown elephant. If hunters come across a
recently dead elephant, they will crawl inside and cut out meat and organs and fat and cook them
over a fire. Sometimes, rather than drag a large animal back to camp, the entire camp will move to
the carcass.
Hadza camps are loose affiliations of relatives and in-laws and friends. Each camp has a few core
members—Onwas's two sons, Giga and Ngaola, are often with him—but most others come and go as
they please. The Hadza recognize no official leaders. Camps are traditionally named after a senior
male (hence, Onwas's camp), but this honor does not confer any particular power. Individual
autonomy is the hallmark of the Hadza. No Hadza adult has authority over any other. None has more
wealth; or, rather, they all have no wealth. There are few social obligations—no birthdays, no
religious holidays, no anniversaries.
People sleep whenever they want. Some stay up much of the night and doze during the heat of the
day. Dawn and dusk are the prime hunting times; otherwise, the men often hang out in camp,
straightening arrow shafts, whittling bows, making bowstrings out of the ligaments of giraffes or
impalas, hammering nails into arrowheads. They trade honey for the nails and for colorful plastic
and glass beads that the women fashion into necklaces. If a man receives one as a gift, it's a good sign
he has a female admirer.
There are no wedding ceremonies. A couple that sleeps at the same fire for a while may eventually
refer to themselves as married. Most of the Hadza I met, men and women alike, were serial
monogamists, changing spouses every few years. Onwas is an exception; he and his wife, Mille, have
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been with each other all their adult lives, and they have seven living children and several
grandchildren. There was a bevy of children in the camp, with the resident grandmother, a tiny,
cheerful lady named Nsalu, running a sort of day care while the adults were in the bush. Except for
breast-feeding infants, it was hard to determine which kids belonged to which parents.
Gender roles are distinct, but for women there is none of the forced subservience knit into many
other cultures. A significant number of Hadza women who marry out of the group soon return,
unwilling to accept bullying treatment. Among the Hadza, women are frequently the ones who
initiate a breakup—woe to the man who proves himself an incompetent hunter or treats his wife
poorly. In Onwas's camp, some of the loudest, brashest members were women. One in particular,
Nduku, appointed herself my language teacher and spent a good percentage of every lesson teasing
me mercilessly, often rolling around in laughter as I failed miserably at reproducing the distinct,
tongue-tricky clicks.
Onwas knows of about 20 Hadza groups roaming the bush in his area, constantly swapping
members, like a giant square dance. Most conflicts are resolved by the feuding parties simply
separating into different camps. If a hunter brings home a kill, it is shared by everyone in his camp.
This is why the camp size is usually no more than 30 people—that's the largest number who can
share a good-size game animal or two and feel decently sated.
I was there during the six-month dry season, May through October, when the Hadza sleep in the
open, wrapped in a thin blanket beside a campfire—two to six people at each hearth, eight or nine
fires spread in a wide semicircle fronting a brush-swept common area. The sleep groupings were
various: families, single men, young women (with an older woman as minder), couples. During the
rainy season, they construct little domed shelters made of interwoven twigs and long grasses:
basically, upside-down bird's nests. To build one takes no more than an hour. They move camp
roughly once a month, when the berries run low or the hunting becomes tough or there's a severe
sickness or death.
No one sleeps alone in Onwas's camp. He assigned his son Ngaola, the one who had waited a few
days by the tree, to stay with me, and Ngaola recruited his friend Maduru to join us. The three of us
slept in a triangle, head to toe to head around our fire, though when the mosquitoes were fierce, I
slept in my tent.
Ngaola is quiet and introspective and a really poor hunter. He's about 30 years old and still
unmarried; bedeviled, perhaps, by the five-baboon rule. It pains him that his older brother, Giga, is
probably the most skilled archer in camp. Maduru is a solid outdoorsman, an especially good honey
finder, but something of a Hadza misfit. When a natural snakebite remedy was passed around camp,
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Maduru was left out of the distribution. This upset him greatly, and Onwas had to spend an hour
beside him, an arm slung avuncularly over his shoulder, calming him down.
Maduru is the one who assumes responsibility for me during the nighttime baboon quest. As we
move through the bush, he snaps off eye-level acacia branches with thorns the size of toothpicks and
repeatedly checks to make sure I'm keeping pace. Onwas leads us to the hill where he'd seen the tree
full of baboons.
Here we stop. There are hand signals, some clipped chatter. I'm unsure of what is going on—my
translator has remained back at camp. The hunt is only for men. But Maduru taps me on the
shoulder and motions for me to follow. The other hunters begin fanning out around the base of the
hill, and I tail Maduru as he plunges into the brush and starts to climb. The slope seems practically
vertical—hands are required to haul yourself up—and the thickets are as dense as Brillo pads. Thorns
slice into my hands, my face. A trickle of blood oozes into my eye. We climb. I follow Maduru closely;
I do not want to become separated.
Finally, I understand. We are climbing up, from all sides, toward the baboons. We are trying to
startle them, to make them run. From the baboons' perch atop the hill, there is no place to go but
down. The Hadza have encircled the hill; therefore, the baboons will be running toward the hunters.
Possibly toward Maduru and me.
Have you ever seen a baboon up close? They have teeth designed for ripping flesh. An adult male can
weigh more than 80 pounds. And here we are, marching upward, purposely trying to provoke them.
The Hadza are armed with bows and arrows. I have a pocketknife.
We move higher. Maduru and I break out of the undergrowth and onto the rocks. I feel as though I've
emerged from beneath a blanket. There is a sickle of moon, a breeze. We are near the summit—the
top is just over a stack of boulders, maybe 20 feet above our head. The baboon tree is up there, barely
out of eyesight.
Then I hear it—a crazed screeching sound. The baboons are aware that something is amiss. The
sound is piercing, panicked. I do not speak baboon, but it is not difficult to interpret. Go away! Do
not come closer! But Maduru clambers farther, up onto a flat rock. I follow. The baboons are
surrounded, and they seem to sense it.
Abruptly, there's a new sound. The crack of branches snapping overhead. The baboons are
descending, shrieking. Maduru freezes, drops to one knee, slides an arrow into position, pulls back
the bowstring. He is ready. I'm hiding behind him. I hope, I fervently hope, that no baboons run at
us. I reach into my pocket, pull out my knife, unfold it. The blade is maybe two inches long. It feels
ridiculous, but that is what I do.
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The screeching intensifies. And then, directly over us, in stark silhouette against the backdrop of
stars, is a baboon. Scrambling. Moving along the rock's lip. Maduru stands, takes aim, tracking the
baboon from left to right, the arrow slotted, the bowstring at maximum stretch. Every muscle in my
body tenses. My head pulses with panic. I grip my knife.
The chief reason the Hadza have been able to maintain their lifestyle so long is that their homeland
has never been an inviting place. The soil is briny; fresh water is scarce; the bugs can be intolerable.
For tens of thousands of years, it seems, no one else wanted to live here. So the Hadza were left
alone. Recently, however, escalating population pressures have brought a flood of people into Hadza
lands. The fact that the Hadza are such gentle stewards of the land has, in a way, hurt them—the
region has generally been viewed by outsiders as empty and unused, a place sorely in need of
development. The Hadza, who by nature are not a combative people, have almost always moved
away rather than fight. But now there is nowhere to retreat.
There are currently cattle herders in the Hadza bush, and goat herders, and onion farmers, and corn
growers, and sport hunters, and game poachers. Water holes are fouled by cow excrement.
Vegetation is trampled beneath cattle's hooves. Brush is cleared to make way for crops; scarce water
is used to irrigate them. Game animals have migrated to national parks, where the Hadza can't
follow. Berry groves and trees that attract bees have been destroyed. Over the past century, the
Hadza have lost exclusive possession of as much as 90 percent of their homeland.
None of the other ethnic groups living in the area—the Datoga, the Iraqw, the Isanzu, the Sukuma,
the Iramba—are hunter-gatherers. They live in mud huts, often surrounded by livestock enclosures.
Many of them look down on the Hadza and view them with a mix of pity and disgust: the
untouchables of Tanzania. I once watched as a Datoga tribesman prevented several Hadza women
from approaching a communal water hole until his cows had finished drinking.
Dirt roads are now carved into the edges of the Hadza bush. A paved road is within a four-day walk.
From many high points there is decent cell phone reception. Most Hadza, including Onwas, have
learned to speak some Swahili, in order to communicate with other groups. I was asked by a few of
the younger Hadza hunters if I could give them a gun, to make it easier to harvest game. Onwas
himself, though he's scarcely ventured beyond the periphery of the bush, senses that profound
changes are coming. This does not appear to bother him. Onwas, as he repeatedly told me, doesn't
worry about the future. He doesn't worry about anything. No Hadza I met, in fact, seemed prone to
worry. It was a mind-set that astounded me, for the Hadza, to my way of thinking, have very
legitimate worries. Will I eat tomorrow? Will something eat me tomorrow? Yet they live a
remarkably present-tense existence.
Unit 1—Topic 1
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This may be one reason farming has never appealed to the Hadza—growing crops requires planning;
seeds are sown now for plants that won't be edible for months. Domestic animals must be fed and
protected long before they're ready to butcher. To a Hadza, this makes no sense. Why grow food or
rear animals when it's being done for you, naturally, in the bush? When they want berries, they walk
to a berry shrub. When they desire baobab fruit, they visit a baobab tree. Honey waits for them in
wild hives. And they keep their meat in the biggest storehouse in the world—their land. All that's
required is a bit of stalking and a well-shot arrow.
There are other people, however, who do ponder the Hadza's future. Officials in the Tanzanian
government, for starters. Tanzania is a future-oriented nation, anxious to merge into the slipstream
of the global economy. Baboon-hunting bushmen is not an image many of the country's leaders wish
to project. One minister has referred to the Hadza as backward. Tanzania's president, Jakaya
Kikwete, has said that the Hadza "have to be transformed." The government wants them schooled
and housed and set to work at proper jobs.
Even the one Hadza who has become the group's de facto spokesperson, a man named Richard
Baalow, generally agrees with the government's aims. Baalow, who adopted a non-Hadza first name,
was one of the first Hadza to attend school. In the 1960s his family lived in government-built
housing—an attempt at settling the Hadza that soon failed. Baalow, 53, speaks excellent English. He
wants the Hadza to become politically active, to fight for legal protection of their land, and to seek
jobs as hunting guides or park rangers. He encourages Hadza children to attend the regional primary
school that provides room and board to Hadza students during the academic year, then escorts them
back to the bush when school is out.
The school-age kids I spoke with in Onwas's group all said they had no interest in sitting in a
classroom. If they went to school, many told me, they'd never master the skills needed for survival.
They'd be outcasts among their own people. And if they tried their luck in the modern world—what
then? The women, perhaps, could become maids; the men, menial laborers. It's far better, they said,
to be free and fed in the bush than destitute and hungry in the city.
More Hadza have moved to the traditionally Hadza area of Mangola, at the edge of the bush, where,
in exchange for money, they demonstrate their hunting skills to tourists. These Hadza have proved
that their culture is of significant interest to outsiders and a potential source of income. Yet among
the Hadza of Mangola there has also been a surge in alcoholism, an outbreak of tuberculosis, and a
distressing rise in domestic violence, including at least one report of a Hadza man who beat his wife
to death.
Though the youngsters in Onwas's group show little interest in the outside world, the world is
coming to them. After two million years, the age of the hunter-gatherer is over. The Hadza may hold
Unit 1—Topic 1
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on to their language; they may demonstrate their abilities to tourists. But it's only a matter of time
before there are no more traditional Hadza scrambling in the hills with their bows and arrows,
stalking baboons.
Up on the hill Onwas has led us to, clutching my knife, I crouch behind Maduru as the baboon moves
along a fin of rock. And then, abruptly, the baboon stops. He swivels his head. He is so close we could
reach out to each other and make contact. I stare into his eyes, too frightened to even blink. This lasts
maybe a second. Maduru doesn't shoot, possibly because the animal is too close and could attack us
if wounded—it's often the poison, not the arrow, that kills. An instant later the baboon leaps away
into the bushes.
There is silence for a couple of heartbeats. Then I hear frantic yelping and crashing. It's coming from
the far side of the rock, and I can't tell if it is human or baboon. It's both. We thrash through bushes,
half-tumbling, half-running, until we reach a clearing amid a copse of acacias.
And there it is: the baboon. On his back, mouth open, limbs splayed. Shot by Giga. A nudge with a
toe confirms it—dead. Maduru whistles and shouts, and soon the other hunters arrive. Onwas kneels
and pulls the arrow out of the baboon's shoulder and hands it back to Giga. The men stand around
the baboon in a circle, examining the kill. There is no ceremony. The Hadza are not big on ritual.
There is not much room in their lives, it seems, for mysticism, for spirits, for pondering the
unknown. There is no specific belief in an afterlife—every Hadza I spoke with said he had no idea
what might happen after he died. There are no Hadza priests or shamans or medicine men.
Missionaries have produced few converts. I once asked Onwas to tell me about God, and he said that
God was blindingly bright, extremely powerful, and essential for all life. God, he told me, was the
sun.
The most important Hadza ritual is the epeme dance, which takes place on moonless nights. Men
and women divide into separate groups. The women sing while the men, one at a time, don a
feathered headdress and tie bells around their ankles and strut about, stomping their right foot in
time with the singing. Supposedly, on epeme nights, ancestors emerge from the bush and join the
dancing. One night when I watched the epeme, I spotted a teenage boy, Mataiyo, sneak into the bush
with a young woman. Other men fell asleep after their turn dancing. Like almost every aspect of
Hadza life, the ceremony was informal, with a strictly individual choice of how deeply to participate.
With the Hadza god not due to rise for several hours, Giga grabs the baboon by a rear paw and drags
the animal through the bush back to camp. The baboon is deposited by Onwas's fire, while Giga sits
quietly aside with the other men. It is Hadza custom that the hunter who's made the kill does not
show off. There is a good deal of luck in hunting, and even the best archers will occasionally face a
long dry spell. This is why the Hadza share their meat communally.
Unit 1—Topic 1
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Onwas's wife, Mille, is the first to wake. She's wearing her only set of clothes, a sleeveless T-shirt and
a flower-patterned cloth wrapped about her like a toga. She sees the baboon, and with the merest
sign of pleasure, a brief nod of her chin, she stokes the fire. It's time to cook. The rest of camp is soon
awake—everyone is hungry—and Ngaola skins the baboon and stakes out the pelt with sharpened
twigs. The skin will be dry in a few days and will make a fine sleeping mat. A couple of men butcher
the animal, and cuts of meat are distributed. Onwas, as camp elder, is handed the greatest delicacy:
the head.
The Hadza cooking style is simple—the meat is placed directly on the fire. No grill, no pan. Hadza
mealtime is not an occasion for politeness. Personal space is generally not recognized; no matter how
packed it is around a fire, there's always room for one more, even if you end up on someone's lap.
Once a cut of meat has finished cooking, anyone can grab a bite.
And I mean grab. When the meat is ready, knives are unsheathed and the frenzy begins. There is
grasping and slicing and chewing and pulling. The idea is to tug at a hunk of meat with your teeth,
then use your knife to slice away your share. Elbowing and shoving is standard behavior. Bones are
smashed with rocks and the marrow sucked out. Grease is rubbed on the skin as a sort of
moisturizer. No one speaks a word, but the smacking of lips and gnashing of teeth is almost
comically loud.
I'm ravenous, so I dive into the scrum and snatch up some meat. Baboon steak, I have to say, isn't
terrible—a touch gamy, but it's been a few days since I've eaten protein, and I can feel my body
perking up with every bite. Pure fat, rather than meat, is what the Hadza crave, though most coveted
are the baboon's paw pads. I snag a bit of one and pop it in my mouth, but it's like trying to swallow a
pencil eraser. When I spit the gob of paw pad out, a young boy instantly picks it up and swallows it.
Onwas, with the baboon's head, is comfortably above the fray. He sits cross-legged at his fire and eats
the cheeks, the eyeballs, the neck meat, and the forehead skin, using the soles of his sandals as a
cutting board. He gnaws the skull clean to the bone, then plunges it into the fire and calls me and the
hunters over for a smoke.
It is impossible to overstate just how much Onwas—and most Hadza—love to smoke. The four
possessions every Hadza man owns are a bow, some arrows, a knife, and a pipe, made from a
hollowed-out, soft stone. The smoking material, tobacco or cannabis, is acquired from a neighboring
group, usually the Datoga, in exchange for honey. Onwas has a small amount of tobacco, which is
tied into a ball inside his shirttail. He retrieves it, stuffs it all into his pipe, and then, holding the pipe
vertically, plucks an ember from the fire and places it atop his pipe. Pulsing his cheeks in and out like
a bellows, he inhales the greatest quantity of smoke he possibly can. He passes the pipe to Giga.
Unit 1—Topic 1
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Then the fun begins. Onwas starts to cough, slowly at first, then rapidly, then uncontrollably with
tears bursting from his eyes, then with palms pushing against his head, and then, finally, rolling onto
his back, spitting and gasping for air. In the meantime, Giga has begun a similar hacking session and
has passed the pipe to Maduru, who then passes the pipe to me. Soon, all of us, the whole circle of
men, are hacking and crying and rolling on our backs. The smoke session ends when the last man sits
up, grinning, and brushes the dirt from his hair.
With the baboon skull still in the fire, Onwas rises to his feet and claps his hands and begins to speak.
It's a giraffe-hunting story—Onwas's favorite kind. I know this even though Mariamu, my translator,
is not next to me. I know because Onwas, like many Hadza, is a story performer. There are no
televisions or board games or books in Onwas's camp. But there is entertainment. The women sing
songs. And the men tell campfire stories, the Kabuki of the bush.
Onwas elongates his neck and moves around on all fours when he's playing the part of the giraffe. He
jumps and ducks and pantomimes shooting a bow when he's illustrating his own role. Arrows
whoosh. Beasts roar. Children run to the fire and stand around, listening intently; this is their
schooling. The story ends with a dead giraffe—and as a finale, a call and response.
"Am I a man?" asks Onwas, holding out his hands.
"Yes!" shouts the group. "You are a man."
"Am I a man?" asks Onwas again, louder.
"Yes!" shouts the group, their voices also louder. "You are a man!"
Onwas then reaches into the fire and pulls out the skull. He hacks it open, like a coconut, exposing
the brains, which have been boiling for a good hour inside the skull. They look like ramen noodles,
yellowish white, lightly steaming. He holds the skull out, and the men, including myself, surge
forward and stick our fingers inside the skull and scoop up a handful of brains and slurp them down.
With this, the night, at last, comes to an end.
The baboon hunt, it seems, was something of an initiation for me. The next day, Nyudu hacks down a
thick branch from a mutateko tree, then carefully carves a bow for me, long and gracefully curved.
Several other men make me arrows. Onwas presents me with a pipe. Nkulu handles my shooting
lessons. I begin to carry my bow and arrows and pipe with me wherever I go (along with my waterpurification kit, my sunscreen, my bug spray, and my eyeglass-cleaning cloth).
I am also invited to bathe with the men. We walk to a shallow, muddy hole—more of a large puddle,
with lumps of cow manure bobbing about—and remove our clothes. Handfuls of mud are rubbed
against the skin as an exfoliant, and we splash ourselves clean. While Hadza have a word for body
odor, the men tell me that they prefer their women not to bathe—the longer they go between baths,
Unit 1—Topic 1
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they say, the more attractive they are. Nduku, my Hadza language teacher, said she sometimes waits
months between baths, though she can't understand why her husband wants her that way. I also
discover, by listening to Mille and Onwas, that bickering with one's spouse is probably a universal
human trait. "Isn't it your turn to fetch water?" "Why are you napping instead of hunting?" "Can you
explain why the last animal brought to camp was skinned so poorly?" It occurs to me that these same
arguments, in this same valley, have been taking place for thousands of years.
There are things I envy about the Hadza—mostly, how free they appear to be. Free from possessions.
Free of most social duties. Free from religious strictures. Free of many family responsibilities. Free
from schedules, jobs, bosses, bills, traffic, taxes, laws, news, and money. Free from worry. Free to
burp and fart without apology, to grab food and smoke and run shirtless through the thorns.
But I could never live like the Hadza. Their entire life, it appears to me, is one insanely committed
camping trip. It's incredibly risky. Medical help is far away. One bad fall from a tree, one bite from a
black mamba snake, one lunge from a lion, and you're dead. Women give birth in the bush,
squatting. About a fifth of all babies die within their first year, and nearly half of all children do not
make it to age 15. They have to cope with extreme heat and frequent thirst and swarming tsetse flies
and malaria-laced mosquitoes.
The days I spent with the Hadza altered my perception of the world. They instilled in me something I
call the "Hadza effect"—they made me feel calmer, more attuned to the moment, more self-sufficient,
a little braver, and in less of a constant rush. I don't care if this sounds maudlin: My time with the
Hadza made me happier. It made me wish there was some way to prolong the reign of the huntergatherers, though I know it's almost certainly too late.
It was my body, more than anything, that let me know it was time to leave the bush. I was bitten and
bruised and sunburned and stomachachy and exhausted. So, after two weeks, I told everyone in
camp I had to go.
There was little reaction. The Hadza are not sentimental like that. They don't do extended goodbyes.
Even when one of their own dies, there is not a lot of fuss. They dig a hole and place the body inside.
A generation ago, they didn't even do that—they simply left a body out on the ground to be eaten by
hyenas. There is still no Hadza grave marker. There is no funeral. There's no service at all, of any
sort. This could be a person they had lived with their entire life. Yet they just toss a few dry twigs on
top of the grave. And they walk away.
© Michael Finkel/National Geographic Creative
Unit 1—Topic 1
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I.1.F-1 The Bible: Book of Genesis Chapter 3
1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And
he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it,
neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as
gods, knowing good and evil.
6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and
a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto
her husband with her; and he did eat.
7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig
leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
8 And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam
and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.
9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid
myself.
11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I
commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did
eat.
13 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said,
The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all
cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the
days of thy life:
15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall
bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
Unit 1—Topic 1
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16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou
shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of
the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy
sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast
thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
20 And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now,
lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence
he was taken.
24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a
flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
1769 King James Version
I.1.F-2 The Bible: Book of Genesis Chapter 4
1 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from
the LORD.
2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the
ground.
3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto
the LORD.
4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had
respect unto Abel and to his offering:
5 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his
countenance fell.
6 And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?
Unit 1—Topic 1
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7 If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And
unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.
8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain
rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
9 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my
brother's keeper?
10 And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the
ground.
11 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's
blood from thy hand;
12 When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a
vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
13 And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear.
14 Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be
hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one
that findeth me shall slay me.
15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him
sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.
16 And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of
Eden.
17 And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the
name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.
18 And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and
Methusael begat Lamech.
19 And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other
Zillah.
20 And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle.
21 And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.
22 And Zillah, she also bare Tubalcain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron: and the
sister of Tubalcain was Naamah.
Unit 1—Topic 1
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23 And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken
unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
24 If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.
25 And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she,
hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.
26 And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to
call upon the name of the LORD.
1769 King James Version
I.1.B. “Acting like Neanderthals” by Mike Williams
In modern times we know that the Earth is warming and most of us accept the blame lies squarely
with ourselves. We release gasses from burning fossil fuels that slowly but surely build up in the
atmosphere to trap more and more heat. Glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising and already
creatures are becoming extinct. Yet this is not the first time the Earth has faced such changes. In the
past, climate change may have been entirely natural but the ramifications of a rapidly warming
planet were much the same, including the extinction of species. Except that, long ago, among the
species that disappeared were archaic humans-Neanderthals. Could the same ever happen to us?
Neanderthals were the first Europeans, occupying the continent from 300,000, possibly even
400,000, years ago, until the last one perished around 28,000 years ago. The landscape they
inhabited was one of wildly fluctuating temperatures. Physically adapted to cope with the Ice Age —
which affected Europe for much of the time they were around — they had bodies far more suited to a
cold environment than ours. Their frames were stocky with short limbs to conserve heat, their noses
were large and flared to warm and humidify the cold air that they breathed. But Neanderthals also
had to deal with sudden periods of warming and even, on occasions, sub-tropical environments.
During the last inter-glacial (the warmer period between Ice Ages) between 128,000 and 118,000
years ago, there were even hippos basking in sunny southern England. Sudden climate change was
nothing new to the Neanderthals and, overall, they coped with it remarkably well.
When we consider that homo sapiens has only been around for a fraction of the time the
Neanderthals lived in Europe, we realise that they must have been supremely adapted to their world.
Even their brains were larger than ours but size is not everything and it is unlikely that the
Neanderthal brain had the myriad of neural connections that are contained in a modern human
brain. Crucially, these connections are vital for advanced intelligence.
Unit 1—Topic 1
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Our brains contain a central processor as well as many sub-domains. One sub-domain might relate
to sociability, another to technicality, while another may relate to living in the environment. We can
easily join up these sub-domains so that we can effortlessly think about buying an umbrella
(technical sub-domain) to cheer up Uncle Fred (social sub-domain) since he has to go out this
afternoon in what looks like rain (environment sub-domain). In so doing, we simultaneously use all
three domains to process a single thought.
Neanderthals could not do this as each domain was entirely separate. So they would have to take the
thought about Uncle Fred, bring it to the central processor and then root around in the other subdomains to find accompanying thoughts, which they also had to bring into the central processor. It
was as cumbersome as it sounds and it is highly likely that they would have given up halfway
through. This explains why most of the tools that Neanderthals made conformed to a standardised
design. They could not link up the requirement for a specialised tool (technical sub-domain) with the
task that lay before them (environmental sub-domain) so they just fell back on a familiar one-sizefits-all solution. Moreover, after they had finished the task, they often discarded the tool. Forward
planning was another area where the Neanderthals struggled.
The lack of connection between sub-domains also denied Neanderthals any form of symbolic
thought. One thing could never stand for anything else since this necessarily crossed the subdomains. Yet we utilise symbolic thought all the time. The words on this page are symbolic — they
stand for something else. The clothes you wear, the ring on your finger, the car that you drive, all
have meaning to you that goes far beyond a mere physical presence. To a Neanderthal, all this was
unfathomable. This is probably why there is only the smallest hint of Neanderthal art. By definition,
art always represents something else, but to a Neanderthal, however much a stone was sculpted and
decorated, it remained just a stone.
The last of the Neanderthals did start wearing jewelry and they may have even tried their hand at a
bit of art. Yet this was not some evolutionary threshold they had breached but had more to do with
copying their new neighbours. From about 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals had to share their world
with a new type of species-modern humans-us.
Our distant ancestors, homo sapiens, had left Africa some years previously in their journey to
colonise the world. They might never have stood a chance in Europe against the supremely adapted
Neanderthals except for the vagaries of climate. All of a sudden, the temperature wobbled, taking the
continent from Ice Age to thick forest and back again, in rapid succession. Even over a lifetime a
single individual would have noticed the change. In a way it was highly comparable to today.
The Neanderthals had survived warm spells before so they had proved their adaptability. But
surviving was not thriving. Take their diet for example. They were big meat eaters and their choice
Unit 1—Topic 1
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cuts came from big animals. Mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, even lions. They also hunted with few
weapons, probably just a stabbing spear and a knife. The Neanderthals got in close for the kill. This is
probably why their bones show such extreme injury and wear. The only modern humans that come
anywhere close are rodeo riders.
When the warm spells struck, the large game headed north, where it was cooler, and the
Neanderthals probably followed. Their overall population almost certainly diminished, less space
meant less food to go around, but as soon as temperatures dropped, the Neanderthals could expand
from their refuge and their numbers would rebound. It was a natural cycle of ebb and flow.
During the most recent climatic fluctuations around 35-30,000 years ago, however, the
Neanderthals had competition and it was to prove their undoing. Our ancestors might have hunted
large game but they did so by throwing spears, keeping a safe distance from the dangerous prey.
However, they also hunted smaller creatures like hares, reptiles and birds and they fished, both in
rivers and along the shore. Plants, nuts and berries provided another source of food. Modern
humans had a range of strategies to gain sustenance and, when the climate warmed, they were able
to shift their attention to something else. Their advanced intelligence enabled them to plan, innovate
and formulate novel solutions to problems. Rather than retreat to cooler climes when the ice
retreated, as the Neanderthals did, modern humans adapted their strategy to cope. When the climate
cooled and the Neanderthals headed south again, they probably found that all the best spots were
now occupied.
Our ancestors did not annihilate the indigenous Neanderthals in the manner of colonialist
expansion, but they certainly outwitted them. By linking thought across the sub-domains, modern
humans could cope where the Neanderthals struggled. Extinction rests on these tiny margins. A
difference in infant mortality between Neanderthals and modern humans of only two per cent would
have wiped out the Neanderthals in 30 generations, or about 1,000 years.
The last Neanderthals retreated to the remote margins of Europe and it is in one of those places,
Leiria, in Portugal, where the astonishing discovery of a buried young child may hint at their final
fate. Whereas the trunk and leg bones are of the usual Neanderthal stockiness, the arms are gracile
and more akin to a modern .human. The evidence for a chin seems to confirm that one of the parents
of this child was Neanderthal, perhaps the mother, but the father was a modern human. How the
parents met and raised a child is something we will never know, nor how the child lived its life: as a
Neanderthal or as a modern human. Opinions vary as to how much interbreeding went on as the
Neanderthals fade from history but recent DNA analysis suggests that it may be just enough to make
us reconsider our roots.
Unit 1—Topic 1
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We seem to be waging our current battle with global warming using the limited intelligence of
Neanderthals rather than with the adaptive minds of modern humans. The Neanderthals could not
help what happened to them. Global warming was not their fault and they met its myriad trials in the
only way they were equipped to: by trying to maintain their old and familiar way of life. It proved
fatal, but can we honestly say that we are not doing the same now? The lesson from history is stark.
Adapt and survive or continue and perish. The Neanderthals simply did not have the intelligence to
meet the challenge of climate change. The question is do we?
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Unit 1—Topic 1
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Topic 2—Social Values of Traditional Societies
I.2.E. Characteristics of Traditional Societies
In World Civilization I you will be studying the major traditional societies of the world from a
number of different perspectives. In this and the following readings, you are going to examine the
chief characteristics of their social institutions and values. The following general list will help you
better understand the readings in the text and this book related to this topic. You will quickly
discover that traditional societies are in many ways very different from modern ones and one of your
major goals will be to discover why they held their particular values and, by inference, why we
moderns don’t.
1. There is no idea or ideal of progress. This does not mean that traditional societies did not in
fact progress – they did – all of them show impressive advancements in the arts, technology,
science, political organization, etc. What is missing is the idea that progress is usually (or
always) good or desirable and a veritable duty or obligation of man. What is also missing is the
idea that history shows that progress is a fact.
2. Generally speaking, traditional societies have only (judged by our modern circumstances)
limited technology available to them. But this technology is sufficient to produce those foods
and materials necessary for survival and quite a bit more (especially for some groups). In any
case, technology is not so advanced and advancing that significant and permanent change is
visible from generation to generation. Traditional societies are not technology driven and
technology has no ideological value; technology is used to make society function better, not to
change its values or relationships.
3. The lack of an ideal of progress and of rapid technological change leads people to believe that
life will be pretty much the same from age to age and that values need not change to fit
particular circumstances or periods of history.
4. All traditional societies are agricultural – the vast majority of the population must toil in the
fields not only to support themselves but also support the minority which does the other tasks of
a civilized society. Wealth is usually equivalent to the ownership of productive land (which is a
limited commodity) and this limits the number of people who can be “well off.” This usually
necessitates a very conservative and frugal outlook for most people.
24
5. Because of the limited nature of wealth, traditional societies are “Dual Culture Societies.”
There exists and elite which, because of its near monopolization of surplus wealth, political
power, etc., lives in a different realm of culture than the average person (mostly farmers). The
elite alone participates in and creates the highest elements of culture such as in the arts, science,
literature, philosophy, and most of the aspects of religion. Travel, leisure, elegance and luxury in
all their forms belong to this elite. They may speak a different dialect or even a different
language and may be the only literate element in society. Their culture alone is not limited to
certain localities, but is the dominant culture of the society as a whole (sometimes called the
“Great Tradition”) and transcends parochial cultures.
6. For most people life is dealt with exclusively on a local basis. Seldom do people move from
where they were born. The goal is local self-sufficiency; most people consume what they produce
and produce what they consume. Also, the family, clan, caste or village is the normal agency of
social control. Traditional societies are “self-policing,” i.e. people try to handle their own
problems locally rather than resorting to outsiders or a higher authority. The central
government is a feature of the elite culture, not that of the average person.
7. There is not ethic of social mobility – occupation and status are determined almost exclusively
by birth not choice. The circumstances of birth are not seen as the result of chance, but rather as
part of some cosmic order of which all individuals are a part. People’s lives are comprised mostly
of duties, responsibilities and obligations not freedoms, liberties or rights. Limited wealth
means limited opportunity. Traditional societies believe there is a way things are meant to be –
and people should fit this “way,” not rebel against it.
8. The group is more important than the individual. Individuals identify almost exclusively with
their family, clan or caste; they do not see themselves as having an independent destiny apart
from the group. Traditional societies are therefore collectivistic rather than individualistic.
I.2.F. Understanding Patriarchy by bell hooks
Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our
nation. Yet most men do not use the word “patriarchy” in everyday life. Most men never think about
patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in our nation would not be
able to spell the word or pronounce it correctly. The word “patriarchy” just is not a part of their
normal everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it
with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own
Unit 1—Topic 2
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experiences. I have been standing at podiums talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It
is a word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me what I mean by it.
Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as all-powerful more than their basic
ignorance of a major facet of the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of
self from birth until death. I often use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist
patriarchy” to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s
politics. Of these systems the one that we all learn the most about growing up is the system of
patriarchy, even if we never know the word, because patriarchal gender roles are assigned to us as
children and we are given continual guidance about the ways we can best fulfill these roles.
Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to
everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate
and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological
terrorism and violence. When my older brother and I were born with a year separating us in age,
patriarchy determined how we would each be regarded by our parents. Both our parents believed in
patriarchy; they had been taught patriarchal thinking through religion.
At church they had learned that God created man to rule the world and everything in it and that it
was the work of women to help men perform these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a
subordinate role in relation to a powerful man. They were taught that God was male. These teachings
were reinforced in every institution they encountered—schools, courthouses, clubs, sports arenas, as
well as churches. Embracing patriarchal thinking, like everyone else around them, they taught it to
their children because it seemed like a “natural” way to organize life.
As their daughter I was taught that it was my role to serve, to be weak, to be free from the burden of
thinking, to caretake and nurture others. My brother was taught that it was his role to be served; to
provide; to be strong; to think, strategize, and plan; and to refuse to caretake or nurture others. I was
taught that it was not proper for a female to be violent, that it was “unnatural.” My brother was
taught hat his value would be determined by his will to do violence (albeit in appropriate settings).
He was taught that for a boy, enjoying violence was a good thing (albeit in appropriate settings). He
was taught that a boy should not express feelings. I was taught that girls could and should express
feelings, or at least some of them. When I responded with rage at being denied a toy, I was taught as
a girl in a patriarchal household that rage was not an appropriate feminine feeling, that it should be
not only not be expressed but be eradicated. When my brother responded with rage at being denied a
toy, he was taught as a boy in a patriarchal household that his ability to express rage was good but
that he had to learn the best setting to unleash his hostility. It was not good for him to use his rage to
oppose the wishes of his parents, but later, when he grew up, he was taught that rage was permitted
and that allowing rage to provoke him to violence would help him protect home and nation.
Unit 1—Topic 2
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We lived in farm country, isolated from other people. Our sense of gender roles was learned from our
parents, from the ways we saw them behave. My brother and I remember our confusion about
gender. In reality I was stronger and more violent than my brother, which we learned quickly was
bad. And he was a gentle, peaceful boy, which we learned was really bad. Although we were often
confused, we knew one fact for certain: we could not be and act the way we wanted to, doing what we
felt like. It was clear to us that our behavior had to follow a predetermined, gendered script. We both
learned the word “patriarchy” in our adult life, when we learned that the script that had determined
what we should be, the identities we should make, was based on patriarchal values and beliefs about
gender.
I was always more interested in challenging patriarchy than my brother was because it was the
system that was always leaving me out of things that I wanted to be part of. In our family life of the
fifties, marbles were a boy’s game. My brother had inherited his marbles from men in the family; he
had a tin box to keep them in. All sizes and shapes, marvelously colored, they were to my eye the
most beautiful objects. We played together with them, often with me aggressively clinging to the
marble I liked best, refusing to share. When Dad was at work, our stay-at-home mom was quite
content to see us playing marbles together. Yet Dad, looking at our play from a patriarchal
perspective, was disturbed by what he saw. His daughter, aggressive and competitive, was a better
player than his son. His son was passive; the boy did not really seem to care who won and was willing
to give over marbles on demand. Dad decided that this play had to end, that both my brother and I
needed to learn a lesson about appropriate gender roles.
One evening my brother was given permission by Dad to bring out the tin of marbles. I announced
my desire to play and was told by my brother that “girls did not play with marbles,” that it was a
boy’s game. This made no sense to my four- or five-year-old mind, and I insisted on my right to play
by picking up marbles and shooting them. Dad intervened to tell me to stop. I did not listen. His
voice grew louder and louder. Then suddenly he snatched me up, broke a board from our screen
door, and began to beat me with it, telling me, “You’re just a little girl. When I tell you to do
something, I mean for you to do it.” He beat me and he beat me, wanting me to acknowledge that I
understood what I had done. His rage, his violence captured everyone’s attention. Our family sat
spellbound, rapt before the pornography of patriarchal violence. After this beating I was banished—
forced to stay alone in the dark. Mama came into the bedroom to soothe the pain, telling me in her
soft southern voice, “I tried to warn you. You need to accept that you are just a little girl and girls
can’t do what boys do.” In service to patriarchy her task was to reinforce that Dad had done the right
thing by, putting me in my place, by restoring the natural social order.
I remember this traumatic event so well because it was a story told again and again within our
family. No one cared that the constant retelling might trigger post-traumatic stress; the retelling was
Unit 1—Topic 2
27
necessary to reinforce both the message and the remembered state of absolute powerlessness. The
recollection of this brutal whipping of a little-girl daughter by a big strong man, served as more than
just a reminder to me of my gendered place, it was a reminder to everyone watching/remembering,
to all my siblings, male and female, and to our grownwoman mother that our patriarchal father was
the ruler in our household. We were to remember that if we did not obey his rules, we would be
punished, punished even unto death. This is the way we were experientially schooled in the art of
patriarchy.
There is nothing unique or even exceptional about this experience. Listen to the voices of wounded
grown children raised in patriarchal homes and you will hear different versions with the same
underlying theme, the use of violence to reinforce our indoctrination and acceptance of patriarchy. In
How Can I Get Through to You? family therapist Terrence Real tells how his sons were initiated into
patriarchal thinking even as their parents worked to create a loving home in which antipatriarchal
values prevailed. He tells of how his young son Alexander enjoyed dressing as Barbie until boys
playing with his older brother witnessed his Barbie persona and let him know by their gaze and their
shocked, disapproving silence that his behavior was unacceptable:
Without a shred of malevolence, the stare my son received transmitted a message. You are
not to do this. And the medium that message was broadcast in was a potent emotion: shame.
At three, Alexander was learning the rules. A ten second wordless transaction was powerful
enough to dissuade my son from that instant forward from what had been a favorite activity.
I call such moments of induction the “normal traumatization” of boys.
To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their
feelings.
My stories took place in the fifties; the stories Real tells are recent. They all underscore the tyranny of
patriarchal thinking, the power of patriarchal culture to hold us captive. Real is one of the most
enlightened thinkers on the subject of patriarchal masculinity in our nation, and yet he lets readers
know that he is not able to keep his boys out of patriarchy’s reach. They suffer its assaults, as do all
boys and girls, to a greater or lesser degree. No doubt by creating a loving home that is not
patriarchal, Real at least offers his boys a choice: they can choose to be themselves or they can choose
conformity with patriarchal roles. Real uses the phrase “psychological patriarchy” to describe the
patriarchal thinking common to females and males. Despite the contemporary visionary feminist
thinking that makes clear that a patriarchal thinker need not be a male, most folks continue to see
men as the problem of patriarchy. This is simply not the case. Women can be as wedded to
patriarchal thinking and action as men.
Unit 1—Topic 2
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Psychotherapist John Bradshaw’s clearsighted definition of patriarchy in Creating Love is a useful
one: “The dictionary defines ‘patriarchy’ as a ‘social organization marked by the supremacy of the
father in the clan or family in both domestic and religious functions’.” Patriarchy is characterized by
male domination and power. He states further that “patriarchal rules still govern most of the world’s
religious, school systems, and family systems.” Describing the most damaging of these rules,
Bradshaw lists “blind obedience—the foundation upon which patriarchy stands; the repression of all
emotions except fear; the destruction of individual willpower; and the repression of thinking
whenever it departs from the authority figure’s way of thinking.” Patriarchal thinking shapes the
values of our culture. We are socialized into this system, females as well as males. Most of us learned
patriarchal attitudes in our family of origin, and they were usually taught to us by our mothers. These
attitudes were reinforced in schools and religious institutions.
The contemporary presence of female-headed house holds has led many people to assume that
children in these households are not learning patriarchal values because no male is present. They
assume that men are the sole teachers of patriarchal thinking. Yet many female-headed households
endorse and promote patriarchal thinking with far greater passion than two-parent households.
Because they do not have an experiential reality to challenge false fantasies of gender roles, women
in such households are far more likely to idealize the patriarchal male role and patriarchal men than
are women who live with patriarchal men every day. We need to highlight the role women play in
perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system
women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling
and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together.
Clearly we cannot dismantle a system as long as we engage in collective denial about its impact on
our lives. Patriarchy requires male dominance by any means necessary, hence it supports, promotes,
and condones sexist violence. We hear the most about sexist violence in public discourses about rape
and abuse by domestic partners. But the most common forms of patriarchal violence are those that
take place in the home between patriarchal parents and children. The point of such violence is
usually to reinforce a dominator model, in which the authority figure is deemed ruler over those
without power and given the right to maintain that rule through practices of subjugation,
subordination, and submission.
Keeping males and females from telling the truth about what happens to them in families is one way
patriarchal culture is maintained. A great majority of individuals enforce an unspoken rule in the
culture as a whole that demands we keep the secrets of patriarchy, thereby protecting the rule of the
father. This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word
“patriarchy.” Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionalized gender roles, so
Unit 1—Topic 2
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rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to
challenge and change a system that cannot be named?
It is no accident that feminists began to use the word “patriarchy” to replace the more commonly
used “male chauvanism” and “sexism.” These courageous voices wanted men and women to become
more aware of the way patriarchy affects us all. In popular culture the word itself was hardly used
during the heyday of contemporary feminism. Antimale activists were no more eager than their
sexist male counterparts to emphasize the system of patriarchy and the way it works. For to do so
would have automatically exposed the notion that men were all-powerful and women powerless, that
all men were oppressive and women always and only victims. By placing the blame for the
perpetuation of sexism solely on men, these women could maintain their own allegiance to
patriarchy, their own lust for power. They masked their longing to be dominators by taking on the
mantle of victimhood.
Like many visionary radical feminists I challenged the misguided notion, put forward by women who
were simply fed up with male exploitation and oppression, that men were “the enemy.” As early as
1984 I included a chapter with the title “Men: Comrades in Struggle” in my book Feminist Theory:
From Margin to Center urging advocates of feminist politics to challenge any rhetoric which placed
the sole blame for perpetuating patriarchy and male domination onto men:
Separatist ideology encourages women to ignore the negative impact of sexism on male
personhood. It stresses polarization between the sexes. According to Joy Justice, separatists
believe that there are “two basic perspectives” on the issue of naming the victims of sexism:
“There is the perspective that men oppress women. And there is the perspective that people
are people, and we are all hurt by rigid sex roles.”…Both perspectives accurately describe our
predicament. Men do oppress women. People are hurt by rigid sexist role patterns, These two
realities coexist. Male oppression of women cannot be excused by the recognition that there
are ways men are hurt by rigid sexist roles. Feminist activists should acknowledge that hurt,
and work to change it—it exists. It does not erase or lessen male responsibility for supporting
and perpetuating their power under patriarchy to exploit and oppress women in a manner far
more grievous than the serious psychological stress and emotional pain caused by male
conformity to rigid sexist role patterns.
Throughout this essay I stressed that feminist advocates collude in the pain of men wounded by
patriarchy when they falsely represent men as always and only powerful, as always and only gaining
privileges from their blind obedience to patriarchy. I emphasized that patriarchal ideology
brainwashes men to believe that their domination of women is beneficial when it is not:
Unit 1—Topic 2
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Often feminist activists affirm this logic when we should be constantly naming these acts as
expressions of perverted power relations, general lack of control of one’s actions, emotional
powerlessness, extreme irrationality, and in many cases, outright insanity. Passive male
absorption of sexist ideology enables men to falsely interpret this disturbed behavior
positively. As long as men are brainwashed to equate violent domination and abuse of
women with privilege, they will have no understanding of the damage done to themselves or
to others, and no motivation to change.
Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that
denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against
patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.
The man who has been my primary bond for more than twelve years was traumatized by the
patriarchal dynamics in his family of origin. When I met him he was in his twenties. While his
formative years had been spent in the company of a violent, alcoholic dad, his circumstances
changed when he was twelve and he began to live alone with his mother.
In the early years of our relationship he talked openly about his hostility and rage toward his abusing
dad. He was not interested in forgiving him or understanding the circumstances that had shaped and
influenced his dad’s life, either in his childhood or in his working life as a military man. In the early
years of our relationship he was extremely critical of male domination of women and children.
Although he did not use the word “patriarchy,” he understood its meaning and he opposed it. His
gentle, quiet manner often led folks to ignore him, counting him among the weak and the powerless.
By the age of thirty he began to assume a more macho persona, embracing the dominator model that
he had once critiqued. Donning the mantle of patriarch, he gained greater respect and visibility.
More women were drawn to him. He was noticed more in public spheres. His criticism of male
domination ceased. And indeed he begin to mouth patriarchal rhetoric, saying the kind of sexist stuff
that would have appalled him in the past.
These changes in his thinking and behavior were triggered by his desire to be accepted and affirmed
in a patriarchal workplace and rationalized by his desire to get ahead. His story is not unusual. Boys
brutalized and victimized by patriarchy more often than not become patriarchal, embodying the
abusive patriarchal masculinity that they once clearly recognized as evil. Few men brutally abused as
boys in the name of patriarchal maleness courageously resist the brainwashing and remain true to
themselves. Most males conform to patriarchy in one way or another.
Indeed, radical feminist critique of patriarchy has practically been silenced in our culture. It has
become a subcultural discourse available only to well-educated elites. Even in those circles, using the
word “patriarchy” is regarded as passé. Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist
Unit 1—Topic 2
31
white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh.
No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a
weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is
being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they
describe. I interpret this laughter as the audience’s way of showing discomfort with being asked to
ally themselves with an antipatriarchal disobedient critique. This laughter reminds me that if I dare
to challenge patriarchy openly, I risk not being taken seriously.
Citizens in this nation fear challenging patriarchy even as they lack overt awareness that they are
fearful, so deeply embedded in our collective unconscious are the rules of patriarchy. I often tell
audiences that if we were to go door-to-door asking if we should end male violence against women,
most people would give their unequivocal support. Then if you told them we can only stop male
violence against women by ending male domination, by eradicating patriarchy, they would begin to
hesitate, to change their position. Despite the many gains of contemporary feminist movement—
greater equality for women in the workforce, more tolerance for the relinquishing of rigid gender
roles—patriarchy as a system remains intact, and many people continue to believe that it is needed if
humans are to survive as a species. This belief seems ironic, given that patriarchal methods of
organizing nations, especially the insistence on violence as a means of social control, has actually led
to the slaughter of millions of people on the planet.
Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates, we
cannot address male pain. We cannot demand for men the right to be whole, to be givers and
sustainers of life. Obviously some patriarchal men are reliable and even benevolent caretakers and
providers, but still they are imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health.
Patriarchy promotes insanity. It is at the root of the psychological ills troubling men in our nation.
Nevertheless there is no mass concern for the plight of men. In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American
Man, Susan Faludi includes very little discussion of patriarchy:
Ask feminists to diagnose men’s problems and you will often get a very clear explanation:
men are in crisis because women are properly challenging male dominance. Women are
asking men to share the public reins and men can’t bear it. Ask antifeminists and you will get
a diagnosis that is, in one respect, similar. Men are troubled, many conservative pundits say,
because women have gone far beyond their demands for equal treatment and are now trying
to take power and control away from men…The underlying message: men cannot be men,
only eunuchs, if they are not in control. Both the feminist and antifeminist views are rooted
in a peculiarly modern American perception that to be a man means to be at the controls and
at all times to feel yourself in control.
Unit 1—Topic 2
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Faludi never interrogates the notion of control. She never considers that the notion that men were
somehow in control, in power, and satisfied with their lives before contemporary feminist movement
is false.
Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as
feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others. To
truly address male pain and male crisis we must as a nation be willing to expose the harsh reality that
patriarchy has damaged men in the past and continues to damage them in the present. If patriarchy
were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would
not exist. This violence was not created by feminism. If patriarchy were rewarding, the overwhelming
dissatisfaction most men feel in their work lives—a dissatisfaction extensively documented in the
work of Studs Terkel and echoed in Faludi’s treatise—would not exist.
In many ways Stiffed was yet another betrayal of American men because Faludi spends so much time
trying not to challenge patriarchy that she fails to highlight the necessity of ending patriarchy if we
are to liberate men. Rather she writes:
Instead of wondering why men resist women’s struggle for a freer and healthier life, I began
to wonder why men refrain from engaging in their own struggle. Why, despite a crescendo of
random tantrums, have they offered no methodical, reasoned response to their predicament:
Given the untenable and insulting nature of the demands placed on men to prove themselves
in our culture, why don’t men revolt?…Why haven’t men responded to the series of betrayals
in their own lives—to the failures of their fathers to make good on their promises–with some
thing coequal to feminism?
Note that Faludi does not dare risk either the ire of feminist females by suggesting that men can find
salvation in feminist movement or rejection by potential male readers who are solidly antifeminist by
suggesting that they have something to gain from engaging feminism.
So far in our nation visionary feminist movement is the only struggle for justice that emphasizes the
need to end patriarchy. No mass body of women has challenged patriarchy and neither has any
group of men come together to lead the struggle. The crisis facing men is not the crisis of
masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will
continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat. Distinguishing political
patriarchy, which he sees as largely committed to ending sexism, therapist Terrence Real makes clear
that the patriarchy damaging us all is embedded in our psyches:
Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and
“feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued.
Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a
Unit 1—Topic 2
33
“dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex,
covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the
unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation
after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.
By highlighting psychological patriarchy, we see that everyone is implicated and we are freed from
the misperception that men are the enemy. To end patriarchy we must challenge both its
psychological and its concrete manifestations in daily life. There are folks who are able to critique
patriarchy but unable to act in an antipatriarchal manner.
To end male pain, to respond effectively to male crisis, we have to name the problem. We have to
both acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy and work to end patriarchy. Terrence Real offers
this valuable insight: “The reclamation of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men than it
has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large.” If men
are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of
openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must
envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.
Louisville Anarchist Federation /No Borders Louisville’s Radical Lending Library
I.2.A. “The Birth of Religion” by Charles C. Mann
We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art, and religion. Now the world’s
oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.
Every now and then the dawn of civilization is reenacted on a remote hilltop in southern Turkey.
The reenactors are busloads of tourists—usually Turkish, sometimes European. The buses (white,
air-conditioned, equipped with televisions) blunder over the winding, indifferently paved road to the
ridge and dock like dreadnoughts before a stone portal. Visitors flood out, fumbling with water
bottles and MP3 players. Guides call out instructions and explanations. Paying no attention, the
visitors straggle up the hill. When they reach the top, their mouths flop open with amazement,
making a line of perfect cartoon O's.
Before them are dozens of massive stone pillars arranged into a set of rings, one mashed up against
the next. Known as Göbekli Tepe (pronounced Guh-behk-LEE TEH-peh), the site is vaguely
reminiscent of Stonehenge, except that Göbekli Tepe was built much earlier and is made not from
roughly hewn blocks but from cleanly carved limestone pillars splashed with bas-reliefs of animals—
a cavalcade of gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and ferocious wild boars. The assemblage was built
some 11,600 years ago, seven millennia before the Great Pyramid of Giza. It contains the oldest
Unit 1—Topic 2
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known temple. Indeed, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known example of monumental architecture—the
first structure human beings put together that was bigger and more complicated than a hut. When
these pillars were erected, so far as we know, nothing of comparable scale existed in the world.
At the time of Göbekli Tepe's construction much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands
that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have
required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before. Amazingly, the
temple's builders were able to cut, shape, and transport 16-ton stones hundreds of feet despite
having no wheels or beasts of burden. The pilgrims who came to Göbekli Tepe lived in a world
without writing, metal, or pottery; to those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have
loomed overhead like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight—emissaries
from a spiritual world that the human mind may have only begun to envision.
Archaeologists are still excavating Göbekli Tepe and debating its meaning. What they do know is that
the site is the most significant in a volley of unexpected findings that have overturned earlier ideas
about our species' deep past. Just 20 years ago most researchers believed they knew the time, place,
and rough sequence of the Neolithic Revolution—the critical transition that resulted in the birth of
agriculture, taking Homo sapiens from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers to farming villages and
from there to technologically sophisticated societies with great temples and towers and kings and
priests who directed the labor of their subjects and recorded their feats in written form. But in recent
years multiple new discoveries, Göbekli Tepe preeminent among them, have begun forcing
archaeologists to reconsider.
At first the Neolithic Revolution was viewed as a single event—a sudden flash of genius—that
occurred in a single location, Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now
southern Iraq, then spread to India, Europe, and beyond. Most archaeologists believed this sudden
blossoming of civilization was driven largely by environmental changes: a gradual warming as the Ice
Age ended that allowed some people to begin cultivating plants and herding animals in abundance.
The new research suggests that the "revolution" was actually carried out by many hands across a
huge area and over thousands of years. And it may have been driven not by the environment but by
something else entirely.
After a moment of stunned quiet, tourists at the site busily snap pictures with cameras and cell
phones. Eleven millennia ago nobody had digital imaging equipment, of course. Yet things have
changed less than one might think. Most of the world's great religious centers, past and present, have
been destinations for pilgrimages—think of the Vatican, Mecca, Jerusalem, Bodh Gaya (where
Buddha was enlightened), or Cahokia (the enormous Native American complex near St. Louis). They
are monuments for spiritual travelers, who often came great distances, to gawk at and be stirred by.
Göbekli Tepe may be the first of all of them, the beginning of a pattern. What it suggests, at least to
Unit 1—Topic 2
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the archaeologists working there, is that the human sense of the sacred—and the human love of a
good spectacle—may have given rise to civilization itself.
Klaus Schmidt knew almost instantly that he was going to be spending a lot of time at Göbekli
Tepe. Now a researcher at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Schmidt had spent the
autumn of 1994 trundling across southeastern Turkey. He had been working at a site there for a few
years and was looking for another place to excavate. The biggest city in the area is Şanlıurfa
(pronounced shan-LYOOR-fa). By the standards of a brash newcomer like London, Şanlıurfa is
incredibly old—the place where the Prophet Abraham supposedly was born. Schmidt was in the city
to find a place that would help him understand the Neolithic, a place that would make Şanlıurfa look
young. North of Şanlıurfa the ground ripples into the first foothills of the mountains that run across
southern Turkey, source of the famous Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Nine miles outside of town is a
long ridge with a rounded crest that locals call Potbelly Hill—Göbekli Tepe.
In the 1960s archaeologists from the University of Chicago had surveyed the region and concluded
that Göbekli Tepe was of little interest. Disturbance was evident at the top of the hill, but they
attributed it to the activities of a Byzantine-era military outpost. Here and there were broken pieces
of limestone they thought were gravestones. Schmidt had come across the Chicago researchers' brief
description of the hilltop and decided to check it out. On the ground he saw flint chips—huge
numbers of them. "Within minutes of getting there," Schmidt says, he realized that he was looking at
a place where scores or even hundreds of people had worked in millennia past. The limestone slabs
were not Byzantine graves but something much older. In collaboration with the DAI and the
Şanlıurfa Museum, he set to work the next year.
Inches below the surface the team struck an elaborately fashioned stone. Then another, and
another—a ring of standing pillars. As the months and years went by, Schmidt's team, a shifting crew
of German and Turkish graduate students and 50 or more local villagers, found a second circle of
stones, then a third, and then more. Geomagnetic surveys i...
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