WEBVTT - Cultures at the Dawn of Everything Ft. Andrew 0:00:05.000 --> 0:00:07.560 Hello, everyone, Welcome to it could happen here at the 0:00:07.600 --> 0:00:11.520 podcast about things falling apart and sometimes have you come 0:00:11.560 --> 0:00:16.440 put them back together. Today it's me Garrison Chris our 0:00:16.480 --> 0:00:21.200 producer Sophie, and Andrew joins us once again. I love 0:00:21.239 --> 0:00:26.920 that guy. Me too, Me too, Hi everyone. Um, another 0:00:27.880 --> 0:00:34.560 episode of Andrew talking about whatever he feels like talking about. Okay, 0:00:36.159 --> 0:00:39.159 today's episode, UM, I am happy to announce that I 0:00:39.320 --> 0:00:48.240 finally finally finished Don't Have Everything by gradually. It took 0:00:48.440 --> 0:00:50.600 it took a while, you know, there was some points 0:00:50.600 --> 0:00:52.479 in time, some weeks it just went by way. I 0:00:52.479 --> 0:00:55.960 didn't even like make a dent um. You know, life 0:00:55.960 --> 0:00:58.200 got in the way and stuff. But I finally finally 0:00:58.240 --> 0:01:01.280 finished it and I get to talk voted and say, 0:01:01.600 --> 0:01:04.720 you know, with some authority that I've read dont of Everything. 0:01:05.680 --> 0:01:09.759 You know, yeah, it's a very dense book, but it 0:01:09.840 --> 0:01:12.160 was with it. I mean, there are some critiques that 0:01:12.240 --> 0:01:17.560 I've been taking into by some authors in the field. UM, 0:01:17.600 --> 0:01:20.040 and so I highly recommend people look for critiques as well, 0:01:20.080 --> 0:01:22.320 not just you know, taking it to and consuming who 0:01:22.319 --> 0:01:27.200 will seal, but in addition to those critiques, like armed 0:01:27.200 --> 0:01:30.720 with those critiques, UM, such as by people like um, 0:01:30.720 --> 0:01:33.160 what is politics on YouTube? And also a couple of 0:01:33.160 --> 0:01:35.520 academic writers as well. I think you could get a 0:01:35.520 --> 0:01:38.600 lot out of the book, and I certainly have. Yeah, 0:01:38.640 --> 0:01:39.800 this is it. This is a this is a very 0:01:39.800 --> 0:01:41.559 good book, and I'm excited to talk about it because 0:01:41.560 --> 0:01:45.600 I read it like it was a while ago. Now 0:01:46.720 --> 0:01:53.120 like it's like five months ago or something. Wow, talk 0:01:53.160 --> 0:01:58.240 about it. I've been like waiting for I've been trying. 0:01:58.240 --> 0:02:01.040 I've been I've been picking bits and pieces of it, 0:02:01.120 --> 0:02:04.920 but unfortunately my book list to get through is way 0:02:04.920 --> 0:02:07.120 too long at the moment, so I've not been able 0:02:07.200 --> 0:02:11.880 to actually dive fully into the text itself. Um, but 0:02:12.000 --> 0:02:14.679 it is definitely on my list after I get through 0:02:14.720 --> 0:02:19.000 my twenty other books I need to read for my job. Yeah, 0:02:19.000 --> 0:02:21.280 it's a lot, it's a lot. Um. At least we 0:02:21.280 --> 0:02:23.560 got to read books for a living. It was something 0:02:23.639 --> 0:02:28.480 adjacent to that. Um. And I mean it is a 0:02:28.600 --> 0:02:31.600 difficult book. I would say to like discussing its entirety, 0:02:31.639 --> 0:02:34.600 and I didn't. I don't intend to not to read 0:02:34.639 --> 0:02:37.200 any preat or anything, Chris, but I don't tend to 0:02:37.200 --> 0:02:39.840 talk about the entire book, you know, because that's like 0:02:40.720 --> 0:02:44.840 several hundred pages, you know, and each chapter covers like 0:02:45.000 --> 0:02:47.720 so so much UM. But I actually wanted to talk 0:02:47.760 --> 0:02:53.919 about chapter four in particular, UM, where the authors explore 0:02:54.840 --> 0:02:58.160 the concept and the origins in a sense of cultures 0:02:58.840 --> 0:03:02.000 UM in one particular set month. I mean, a lot 0:03:02.000 --> 0:03:07.119 of mysteries of the Upper Pelilithic that we don't know, right, 0:03:07.400 --> 0:03:10.920 I mean, that's why the mysteries UM. But you know, 0:03:10.960 --> 0:03:12.880 we've come to learn, you know, through the course of 0:03:12.880 --> 0:03:16.520 the book that this assumption that everything was just these small, 0:03:16.600 --> 0:03:19.680 tight knit bands, UM, and that was just the entirety 0:03:19.720 --> 0:03:22.760 of the human social arrangement into the states. You know, 0:03:23.919 --> 0:03:27.160 at least it's new to the layman to realize that 0:03:27.200 --> 0:03:30.320 this is not necessarily the case, you know, UM, that 0:03:30.440 --> 0:03:37.840 there is a lot more political structural diversity in that 0:03:37.960 --> 0:03:42.640 time period. We don't know at that point in time, 0:03:42.680 --> 0:03:45.400 you know, what languages PEO who were speaking. You know. 0:03:45.520 --> 0:03:48.400 Of course, linguists have been able to like reconstruct like 0:03:49.000 --> 0:03:52.600 proto languages and stuff. And I mean, I'm just a 0:03:52.680 --> 0:03:55.360 hobby Linquist, just like I'm a hobby everything else. But 0:03:55.400 --> 0:03:57.560 I think it's been really cool to see how I 0:03:57.600 --> 0:03:59.360 think was just able to do that, Like can we 0:03:59.400 --> 0:04:02.120 just take a second and to realize that, like linguist 0:04:02.240 --> 0:04:05.240 able to take scraps of existing languages and just kind 0:04:05.240 --> 0:04:07.200 of piece them together to get a sense of like 0:04:07.240 --> 0:04:12.400 how they're related. Like how do you all do that? Um, 0:04:12.720 --> 0:04:14.160 there's a lots we don't know, right, We don't know 0:04:14.160 --> 0:04:17.480 about their language, don't know about their myths, you know, um, 0:04:17.520 --> 0:04:21.360 their conceptions of the soul, what their favorite foods were. 0:04:21.880 --> 0:04:23.840 You know, they ate, but we don't know what like 0:04:24.680 --> 0:04:28.240 Joe Skeleton thoughts about his breakfast that morning. But what 0:04:28.320 --> 0:04:30.480 we do know is that you know, from the Swiss 0:04:30.480 --> 0:04:34.159 Alps to out Mongolia in the Upper Piolithic people were 0:04:34.320 --> 0:04:37.760 using a lot of the same tools, um, playing a 0:04:37.800 --> 0:04:45.240 lot of similar musical instruments, carving similar rather interesting female figurines, um, 0:04:45.320 --> 0:04:50.960 wearing similar ornaments, and conducting similar funeral rites. And there's 0:04:51.000 --> 0:04:55.480 also reason to believe that people actually traveled a lot 0:04:55.560 --> 0:04:58.440 more than we would expect them to do, and tra 0:04:58.520 --> 0:05:02.320 actually traveled a lot good distances then we would expect 0:05:02.320 --> 0:05:04.560 for that time period. I mean, we don't have they 0:05:04.560 --> 0:05:08.400 didn't have rather you know, like cause or or chariots 0:05:08.560 --> 0:05:13.520 or trains or plans or anything like that. So to 0:05:13.600 --> 0:05:19.200 think that these long distance um journeys were occurring, you know, 0:05:19.760 --> 0:05:22.720 places like Australia or in like North America is just 0:05:23.520 --> 0:05:25.840 really interesting to think about. Yeah, I was one of 0:05:25.880 --> 0:05:27.080 your friend talked about Like one of the things I 0:05:27.080 --> 0:05:32.719 thought was really interesting about this is the way that 0:05:32.800 --> 0:05:37.159 they talk about culture areas where you have these like yeah, yeah, 0:05:37.200 --> 0:05:40.560 you have these like very large I mean like almost 0:05:40.560 --> 0:05:43.320 like like half continent sized areas where people are speaking 0:05:43.360 --> 0:05:46.159 similar languages, like the same language, and you have these 0:05:46.200 --> 0:05:50.760 like you have like these clan structures that are like 0:05:51.560 --> 0:05:54.200 you know, you you you can go from like and 0:05:54.279 --> 0:05:57.360 go from like Missouri, and you can end up in 0:05:57.360 --> 0:06:00.360 like Mississippi, and you'll be in a place where they 0:06:00.400 --> 0:06:02.240 still have like you know, the sort of like four 0:06:02.279 --> 0:06:06.120 basic like plan lodges are still the same. You'll beat 0:06:06.160 --> 0:06:09.760 people who are like from your clan. And he has 0:06:09.760 --> 0:06:12.880 this really interesting line about how like sort of kind 0:06:12.880 --> 0:06:16.840 of intuitively like the world's gotten like the world like 0:06:16.880 --> 0:06:20.040 even even when there was like people spread over geographic distance, 0:06:20.040 --> 0:06:23.520 like the world sort of got larger as technology progress 0:06:23.560 --> 0:06:25.200 and not sort of like smaller in the way that 0:06:25.240 --> 0:06:30.279 people sort of think about it, because like I don't 0:06:30.279 --> 0:06:34.880 know instead of there being these sort of like mega 0:06:35.120 --> 0:06:37.719 like culture areas. You can go from one place to 0:06:37.760 --> 0:06:40.880 another and you'll there'll the people who speak the same language, 0:06:40.880 --> 0:06:44.360 and you can sort of slot into the like systems 0:06:44.400 --> 0:06:46.840 that are there. You suddenly have this incredible diversity of 0:06:46.839 --> 0:06:53.719 stuff right right, So I mean specific to like North America. 0:06:53.960 --> 0:06:57.200 You know, Um, we had all these different clan structures 0:06:58.000 --> 0:07:01.280 we usually tend to think of, um, you know, these 0:07:01.279 --> 0:07:05.719 groups says and you know, especially like your immediate relations 0:07:05.760 --> 0:07:08.919 with people that you know, it's like close skin family, 0:07:08.960 --> 0:07:15.240 that kind of thing. Um. But there's actually, at least 0:07:15.520 --> 0:07:18.160 in some studies of un together as, there's some suggestion 0:07:18.240 --> 0:07:22.560 that their composition can be quite cosmopolitan. So you know, 0:07:22.600 --> 0:07:27.160 you have these these groups and biological relations might only 0:07:27.160 --> 0:07:30.520 make up a small percentage of like total membership. They're 0:07:30.520 --> 0:07:33.640 actually drawn from a wide pool of individuals of a 0:07:33.720 --> 0:07:36.760 larger stretch of area. You know, not all of them 0:07:36.760 --> 0:07:40.680 even speak necessarily the same first language. Um. This is 0:07:40.720 --> 0:07:44.920 YouTuber Indigenous sonics YouTuber named twin Rabbit, and he had 0:07:44.960 --> 0:07:47.600 this excellent, excellent video I need to rewatch it on 0:07:48.000 --> 0:07:52.440 planes Sign language, which is this um method of communication 0:07:52.720 --> 0:07:58.679 that Indigenous Americans um used across you know, the planes 0:07:59.200 --> 0:08:03.760 to conduct trade and diplomacy and discussions, even if they 0:08:03.760 --> 0:08:10.440 didn't share the same language. UM. In Aboriginal Australia, people 0:08:10.440 --> 0:08:14.360 were able to travel halfway across the continent, moving across 0:08:14.400 --> 0:08:18.600 people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find you know, 0:08:18.960 --> 0:08:23.040 camps that had people of you know, their same to 0:08:23.120 --> 0:08:26.800 atomic mighty you know, and those people were we treated 0:08:26.840 --> 0:08:30.000 like their brothers and sisters, you know, so like no 0:08:30.120 --> 0:08:33.679 hanky panky, but you know they had this this you 0:08:33.679 --> 0:08:42.280 know cross continental bond of like hospitality. From the Great Lakes, 0:08:42.320 --> 0:08:45.400 you know, the Louisiana Bayous, you can find settlements of 0:08:45.440 --> 0:08:50.320 people speaking entirely, entirely separate languages, unrelated to their own. 0:08:51.040 --> 0:08:53.920 And yet still you will find you know, bear clans 0:08:54.040 --> 0:08:57.560 or elk clans or beaver clans that were obliged to 0:08:57.600 --> 0:09:01.160 host and feed them, you know. UM. And we could 0:09:01.160 --> 0:09:04.040 only really guess as to like what kind of systems 0:09:04.040 --> 0:09:06.640 were like and how those systems might have worked for 0:09:07.320 --> 0:09:10.840 years ago, you know, in the Upper Pyoithic. But what 0:09:10.960 --> 0:09:13.760 we do see with the you know, similarities and material 0:09:14.640 --> 0:09:18.920 um uniformities and stuff of these different tools and musical 0:09:18.960 --> 0:09:22.760 instruments and stuff suggests that there might be a bit 0:09:23.040 --> 0:09:36.200 of a similar system in place at that time. Roughly 0:09:36.240 --> 0:09:41.680 around like twelve, we see we start seeing like new pottery, 0:09:42.240 --> 0:09:44.839 you know, getting dropped. We started to see the outlines 0:09:45.080 --> 0:09:51.280 of more specific cultures in specific areas, new stone grinding tools, 0:09:52.160 --> 0:09:54.839 new ways of preparing and eating wild grains and roots 0:09:54.840 --> 0:09:59.600 and other vegetables, um, Different ways of chopping, slicing, creating, grinding, 0:09:59.679 --> 0:10:02.640 super can train in boiling and store and smoking and 0:10:02.679 --> 0:10:05.400 preserving meats, plant foods, and fish. And so when we 0:10:05.400 --> 0:10:08.760 start to see something that really brings people together, and 0:10:08.800 --> 0:10:14.640 that is cuisine and cuisine you know, being the birth 0:10:14.640 --> 0:10:22.160 of cuisine, being the booth of like really more specific cultures, um, 0:10:22.200 --> 0:10:25.120 you know, the kinds of soups and porridges and stews 0:10:25.160 --> 0:10:29.920 and broths. And basically what they were talking about was 0:10:29.960 --> 0:10:32.200 the way that people who like wake up and eat 0:10:32.240 --> 0:10:36.640 fish stews every morning tend to you know, develop a 0:10:36.760 --> 0:10:39.880 different center themselves relation to their world compared people who 0:10:39.960 --> 0:10:42.520 might wake up in the morning and eat some porridge 0:10:42.600 --> 0:10:46.600 with like berries and wild oats, you know, and then 0:10:46.640 --> 0:10:48.840 from there they start to develop different tastes and in 0:10:48.960 --> 0:10:53.520 clothing you know, in in dancing and drugs and here styles. 0:10:54.040 --> 0:10:58.600 I remember laster on the book um the David's points 0:10:58.600 --> 0:11:04.000 out that some addigenous um Nat American groups who are 0:11:04.000 --> 0:11:08.400 actually known for specific hair styles. And I kind of 0:11:08.480 --> 0:11:10.840 knew that based on the fact that, you know, we 0:11:10.880 --> 0:11:14.120 tend to associate morehawks with people, you know, morehawkey air style, 0:11:14.160 --> 0:11:17.040 morehawk people, but I didn't realize that, you know, other 0:11:18.080 --> 0:11:21.000 groups also had their own kind of like culturally specific 0:11:21.400 --> 0:11:24.640 hair styles, right, And there's also like courtship rituals and 0:11:25.120 --> 0:11:29.400 forms of kinship and styles of rhetoric, and so of 0:11:29.400 --> 0:11:32.160 course you still have these large cultural areas in the Mesolithic, 0:11:32.720 --> 0:11:37.319 larger than some nation states. But he's starting to see 0:11:37.360 --> 0:11:41.000 a bit more specificity, in a bit more diversity in 0:11:41.280 --> 0:11:46.960 shorter um spans of area. If we look at now, 0:11:47.080 --> 0:11:49.840 for example, where you know, we have in the Amazon 0:11:50.320 --> 0:11:53.600 all these different languages and cultures that co exist merely 0:11:53.800 --> 0:11:58.439 kilometers from each other. I think the overall trend um 0:11:58.559 --> 0:12:02.440 of human cultures, you know, over the past tens of 0:12:02.480 --> 0:12:07.319 thousands of years, has been the opposite of marginalization. And 0:12:07.360 --> 0:12:09.880 it makes me think a bit about the whole concept 0:12:09.880 --> 0:12:11.720 of the nation states and how it tries to like 0:12:12.400 --> 0:12:15.600 bring people together to this like one narrow conception of 0:12:15.640 --> 0:12:17.480 what it means to be you know, X, y Z, 0:12:18.360 --> 0:12:25.160 and how humanity naturally seems to like resist that and 0:12:25.920 --> 0:12:28.480 naturally seems to like split all from that. Like, even 0:12:28.480 --> 0:12:32.160 when you have situations with the forceful spread of English 0:12:32.360 --> 0:12:35.480 in you know, the Caribbean colonies, you still see like 0:12:35.679 --> 0:12:38.240 a diversity springing up with a bunch of different unique 0:12:38.320 --> 0:12:42.440 creoles and dialects making the language something different. You know what, 0:12:42.840 --> 0:12:48.760 if not for the enforcement of language satinization through the 0:12:49.440 --> 0:12:52.640 school system, I think you would actually see an even 0:12:52.640 --> 0:13:00.439 more rapid um explosion of you know, linguistic diversity developing 0:13:00.440 --> 0:13:03.120 out of these creoles and dialects, you know, like a 0:13:03.120 --> 0:13:07.520 couple of centuries. So now you know, Patua and in 0:13:07.559 --> 0:13:12.800 Creole and British English maybe entirely incompatible. Even in Britain itself. 0:13:13.200 --> 0:13:16.600 You know, you might have a case where London English 0:13:16.679 --> 0:13:20.320 and I don't know, Sussex English or whatever starts to 0:13:20.360 --> 0:13:23.280 sound like entirely different. And we already have that with accents. 0:13:23.360 --> 0:13:26.800 But just to see how, you know, even in short 0:13:26.840 --> 0:13:30.400 spaces of time, a short as a century or two, 0:13:31.000 --> 0:13:35.559 because for example, Trinidad, Um was not always an English 0:13:35.559 --> 0:13:38.320 speaking colony. Um. We actually spoke French Creole for the 0:13:38.320 --> 0:13:41.240 most of our history, and only in the nineteenth century 0:13:41.240 --> 0:13:45.000 did we have that period of Anglicization where English was 0:13:45.120 --> 0:13:47.880 you know, brought in Um. And to see that in 0:13:47.920 --> 0:13:50.160 that short space of time, in that handful of centuries 0:13:50.600 --> 0:13:53.720 that you know not already has its own unique English 0:13:53.760 --> 0:13:59.160 based creole, you know, it's just fascinating to see. Um. 0:13:59.320 --> 0:14:01.360 There's something real interesting to me about the way this 0:14:01.400 --> 0:14:05.880 process plays out because it's it's it's almost like because 0:14:06.240 --> 0:14:09.560 you have this sort of like like you have this 0:14:09.679 --> 0:14:15.960 period and it's the Mesolithic. All the period names are 0:14:15.960 --> 0:14:19.280 blinking out of my head. But like like what you say, yeah, 0:14:19.520 --> 0:14:22.000 like you have this period where you have kind of 0:14:22.600 --> 0:14:25.440 like you have a lot of cultural standardization, like spread 0:14:25.440 --> 0:14:28.240 across a long period, like a bunch of places, and 0:14:28.280 --> 0:14:30.880 it's used sort of as a mutual aid thing. It 0:14:30.880 --> 0:14:32.640 allows people to travel because you can go to a 0:14:32.640 --> 0:14:35.560 place and know that like there will be people who 0:14:35.840 --> 0:14:38.000 are like you there and they will take care of you. 0:14:38.560 --> 0:14:40.600 And it's interesting to me. It's like, Okay, so this 0:14:40.720 --> 0:14:44.200 breaks apart as sort of like these these new cultures 0:14:44.360 --> 0:14:47.080 like a people develop local cultures around like food and 0:14:47.120 --> 0:14:50.960 around just like Graver has this thing that he loves 0:14:51.000 --> 0:14:54.400 talking about. These were talking about for ages called scisspo genesis, 0:14:54.880 --> 0:14:58.560 which is like you have two people, you know, was 0:14:58.600 --> 0:15:00.440 like I think, I think there. His position apples like 0:15:00.480 --> 0:15:02.040 a few people who are arguing with each other and 0:15:02.080 --> 0:15:04.440 they like disagree minor ly over like one thing, and 0:15:04.480 --> 0:15:07.080 then by the end of the argument, like they're they've 0:15:07.120 --> 0:15:10.040 they've taken like completely mutually opposed identities to each other 0:15:10.080 --> 0:15:13.240 based on like an incredibly minor disagreement. And you get 0:15:13.280 --> 0:15:14.960 this with yeah, like you get cultures to sort of 0:15:14.960 --> 0:15:16.920 like define themselves against each other and like they have 0:15:17.000 --> 0:15:18.400 things that they like and things that they don't like. 0:15:19.040 --> 0:15:22.200 It's interesting to me that that you see you see 0:15:22.280 --> 0:15:26.640 the state trying to sort of like reimpose the kind 0:15:26.640 --> 0:15:31.000 of like like forty year old cultural homogey on all 0:15:31.000 --> 0:15:34.000 of these places that are like incredibly not homogeous. But 0:15:34.040 --> 0:15:36.040 they're doing it for like the opposite reason. They're doing 0:15:36.120 --> 0:15:38.400 it because they need senatorization in order to sort of 0:15:38.440 --> 0:15:41.960 like make their make their bureaucratic like systems work better 0:15:42.000 --> 0:15:46.080 and make their sort of like seeing like a stage. Yeah. Yeah, 0:15:46.080 --> 0:15:48.280 and also like like I mean, this is a huge thing. 0:15:48.280 --> 0:15:49.760 Everyone in the in the like the early the late 0:15:49.800 --> 0:15:52.280 nineties and early two thousands thought that like the extent 0:15:52.360 --> 0:15:54.480 of capitalism on the around the globe was going to 0:15:54.560 --> 0:15:57.400 make everything exactly the same, there's only to be one culture, 0:15:57.440 --> 0:16:01.720 and that like kind of really didn't happen. But there 0:16:01.800 --> 0:16:06.440 was this real sort of I don't know, like that 0:16:06.720 --> 0:16:10.520 there was this real sort of fear that that it 0:16:10.560 --> 0:16:12.920 wasn't just gonna be the nation state spreading like comoganization, 0:16:12.960 --> 0:16:15.440 but like capitalism was going to sort of like spread emoganization. 0:16:15.440 --> 0:16:16.760 And I guess I guess the thing that they wound 0:16:16.840 --> 0:16:19.000 up doing aga instead was like figuring out that you 0:16:19.000 --> 0:16:22.680 could just sell everyone into their individual cultural niche, which 0:16:23.480 --> 0:16:26.680 to some extent, yeah, because like we see McDonald's in 0:16:27.040 --> 0:16:30.760 the US and McDonald's in Bangladesh and McDonald's in Japan, 0:16:30.920 --> 0:16:33.800 and they sell all of the same McDonald's stuff, but 0:16:33.800 --> 0:16:36.480 they've also like sort of specified to the you know, 0:16:36.840 --> 0:16:39.720 specific country. Yeah, we have the worst version. The US 0:16:39.800 --> 0:16:41.960 is the worst version of it. By the day. The 0:16:41.960 --> 0:16:45.880 the the like Taiwan has one that has like they 0:16:45.880 --> 0:16:49.920 have like rice sticky rice, patties. It's it's so much 0:16:49.960 --> 0:16:53.520 better than Yeah. I mean, I will say that if 0:16:53.560 --> 0:16:57.280 I did end up traveling to Taiwan, McDonald's probably be 0:16:57.280 --> 0:17:00.200 the last place I would want to go. Yeah, we 0:17:00.200 --> 0:17:01.960 wanted beating there, and we we were we had to 0:17:02.000 --> 0:17:06.240 catch a plane, so we wound up eating like Taiwanese 0:17:07.960 --> 0:17:11.200 Donalds airport food because we had like five minutes. It 0:17:11.359 --> 0:17:18.480 was a you know they say about airplane food. Um, 0:17:18.520 --> 0:17:20.800 but yeah, that's exactly us about to get into. Actually 0:17:20.800 --> 0:17:24.680 the whole idea of cultural differentiation, you know, um, and 0:17:25.119 --> 0:17:28.359 this this tendency of humans have to subdivide and to 0:17:28.440 --> 0:17:32.560 distinguish themselves from their neighbors. And I mean it's natural 0:17:32.600 --> 0:17:34.959 to assume that, you know, this differentiation comes from like 0:17:35.640 --> 0:17:39.000 differences and like language, you know, with you know, language 0:17:39.000 --> 0:17:42.000 splitting off over the centuries and people associating with the 0:17:42.080 --> 0:17:46.000 native language and ethnicity. But I already tell the full story, 0:17:46.359 --> 0:17:49.159 you know, Like, for example, in northern California in the 0:17:49.200 --> 0:17:54.600 early century, the ethern linguistic map had really a jumble 0:17:54.800 --> 0:17:58.879 of languages that drew from entirely different language families. You know, 0:17:58.880 --> 0:18:02.160 it's distant from one another, as like Arabic and Tamil 0:18:02.280 --> 0:18:06.800 and Portuguese. And yet these groups still shared you know, 0:18:06.840 --> 0:18:10.479 broad similarities. You know, how they went to board gathering 0:18:10.480 --> 0:18:14.320 and processing food, you know, their most important religious rituals, 0:18:14.720 --> 0:18:19.480 how they organized their political life. Um. And they also 0:18:19.760 --> 0:18:21.800 managed to keep themselves distinct. You know, you had the 0:18:21.840 --> 0:18:24.800 Iuroque and the Hoop and the Karak and so forth. 0:18:25.680 --> 0:18:28.000 And I mean to some extent, these identities did map 0:18:28.000 --> 0:18:34.119 on to linguistic differences, but their neighbors who spoke different 0:18:34.200 --> 0:18:38.919 languages still had more in common with them than people 0:18:39.000 --> 0:18:42.000 who came from their same language family in another part 0:18:42.240 --> 0:18:45.920 of North America. Of course, you know, European colonization had 0:18:45.960 --> 0:18:51.560 like a severe impact on like how neat Americans were distributed. Um. 0:18:51.600 --> 0:18:53.760 But we still tend to see this trend of how 0:18:54.000 --> 0:18:57.679 like these modern nation states they went around at the 0:18:57.760 --> 0:19:00.640 time to you know, or the population. And since these 0:19:00.720 --> 0:19:04.480 neat ethno linguistic groups. You know, this idea that the 0:19:04.480 --> 0:19:07.520 world should be divided into these like homogeneous units with 0:19:07.560 --> 0:19:10.760 their own history and everyone has a claim to like 0:19:10.760 --> 0:19:13.560 a certain territory and all that. It's mean, it's really 0:19:14.080 --> 0:19:17.400 a concept that is going onto this mythology of the 0:19:17.520 --> 0:19:20.040 nation state and you know, of course, we have to 0:19:20.040 --> 0:19:22.879 be real careful before we project those kind of uniformity 0:19:23.040 --> 0:19:26.760 is back in time. Yeah, it's definitely really like two 0:19:27.240 --> 0:19:31.440 years old, like it's it's pretty young. Yeah, exactly exactly. 0:19:31.920 --> 0:19:35.359 But um, there are some concerns, you know, with the 0:19:35.400 --> 0:19:39.639 concept of culture areas, because that whole notion of culture 0:19:39.640 --> 0:19:43.320 areas came out of North American museums who wanted to 0:19:43.600 --> 0:19:47.399 arrange their stolen artifacts to illustrate their theories of the 0:19:47.400 --> 0:19:50.440 different stages of human adaptation, you know, like Colover's lower 0:19:50.480 --> 0:19:54.639 savagery and upper savagery and Lober lower barbarism and so on. 0:19:55.640 --> 0:19:58.280 And so they had in whether they're in organize these 0:19:58.359 --> 0:20:05.880 artifacts based on like language, family, or regional clusters um 0:20:06.119 --> 0:20:10.080 or some sort of like traced history of of of 0:20:10.200 --> 0:20:17.480 regional of ancient migrations. Right. Eventually they realized that, you know, 0:20:17.560 --> 0:20:20.879 this way of organizing into regional clusters seem to work best. 0:20:21.840 --> 0:20:26.359 The art and technology of different Eastern Woodlands tribes had 0:20:26.520 --> 0:20:30.560 some very similar um things in common compared to like 0:20:31.200 --> 0:20:34.640 trying to group people based on like say the Athabaskan 0:20:34.760 --> 0:20:38.000 language or all the people who relied on fishing, or 0:20:38.160 --> 0:20:43.560 all people cultivate to me is um and they were 0:20:43.600 --> 0:20:47.520 able to find similar patterns in the neolithic villages of 0:20:47.640 --> 0:20:51.600 Central Europe, you know, finding these regional clusters of domestic 0:20:51.720 --> 0:20:56.080 life and art and ritual and so like this whole 0:20:56.119 --> 0:20:58.119 cultural area concept is kind of a way of pushing 0:20:58.119 --> 0:21:02.080 back against this way have you know, talking about humanistry 0:21:02.600 --> 0:21:07.800 that like ranked populations into higher or lower anything. You know, 0:21:08.000 --> 0:21:10.480 this this idea of of claiming that you know, people 0:21:10.480 --> 0:21:14.840 were of a certain superior genetic stock and vicious sign 0:21:14.880 --> 0:21:20.240 ad fance level of technological evolution and so rather this, 0:21:20.640 --> 0:21:24.159 there's been there was a shift in anthropological focus to 0:21:24.200 --> 0:21:27.680 look at the diffusion of more cultural traits like ceramics 0:21:27.720 --> 0:21:33.120 and sweat lodges and you know, the treatment of young 0:21:33.200 --> 0:21:38.200 men or certain sports um as. They wanted to try 0:21:38.240 --> 0:21:41.760 to understand how these different tribes of certain region came 0:21:41.840 --> 0:21:46.040 to share this mesh of culture traits. So one of 0:21:46.080 --> 0:21:48.879 the people who were thinking on this you know, whole 0:21:48.960 --> 0:21:54.560 culture traits cluster idea um it was guy named bous Right, 0:21:55.560 --> 0:21:58.800 and he wanted to figure out why is that, Like 0:21:59.240 --> 0:22:02.800 geography seemed to define the circulation of ideas, you know, 0:22:02.840 --> 0:22:06.639 with like mountains and deserts from these natural barriers, and 0:22:07.160 --> 0:22:12.880 how basically the diffusion within those regions was basically historical accident, 0:22:13.480 --> 0:22:17.720 a legal hypothesizing that there was some sort of like 0:22:18.760 --> 0:22:21.360 way to eventually develop a kind of a natural science 0:22:22.480 --> 0:22:27.560 developing how and even predicting the ebb and flow of styles, habits, 0:22:27.560 --> 0:22:32.320 and social forms, and eventually muscle Mouse pulls up, you know, 0:22:32.560 --> 0:22:35.840 and he's basically taught he basically, like right, a bunch 0:22:35.840 --> 0:22:40.000 of essays on nationalism and civilization, and he says, it's basically, 0:22:40.600 --> 0:22:44.840 this whole idea of cultural diffusion is nonsense because it's 0:22:44.880 --> 0:22:47.760 based on a false assumption. And the false assumption is 0:22:47.800 --> 0:22:51.800 that the movement of people, technologies, and ideas is some 0:22:51.880 --> 0:22:56.320 sort of rarity, something unusual. Instead, Mouse argues that like, 0:22:56.400 --> 0:23:01.000 people in past times traveled even more than people do today, 0:23:01.400 --> 0:23:05.520 and it's just that when these people interact with people 0:23:05.560 --> 0:23:10.160 of other cultures and they see their cultural traits, they 0:23:10.240 --> 0:23:15.119 reflect on that and find a way to relate that 0:23:15.280 --> 0:23:18.159 to their own cultures. Right, so that people who are 0:23:18.200 --> 0:23:20.720 traveling back then, obviously all of them, you know, we're 0:23:20.760 --> 0:23:27.320 aware of basketry, you know, or or or feather works 0:23:27.520 --> 0:23:29.920 or whatever the case may be that other people were 0:23:29.960 --> 0:23:33.840 using a couple of miles away seem to be said 0:23:33.880 --> 0:23:41.240 for like certain drum rhythms or certain you know, games, 0:23:41.520 --> 0:23:44.639 or like For example, he spent some time focusing on 0:23:44.680 --> 0:23:50.600 the distribution of the ball games around the Pacific Ocean, 0:23:50.640 --> 0:23:54.639 around the Pacific Rim from Japan's New Zealand to California, 0:23:55.600 --> 0:24:02.040 and what he realized is that while the people pick 0:24:02.080 --> 0:24:05.160 up certain ideas certain traits from other cultures, comes down 0:24:05.240 --> 0:24:09.760 to how they'd want to be defined against their neighbors, 0:24:09.880 --> 0:24:15.560 against their closest neighbors. The question becomes less about why 0:24:15.680 --> 0:24:19.960 certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn't. 0:24:20.400 --> 0:24:22.080 Because if you were aware of all the things that 0:24:22.160 --> 0:24:24.600 your neighbors and stuff are doing, all these foreign customs 0:24:24.640 --> 0:24:27.159 and arts and technologies. I mean, we know that the 0:24:27.200 --> 0:24:29.520 Silk Road, for example, when we talk about the Silk Road, 0:24:30.320 --> 0:24:32.520 you know, we had a Silk roup growing from China 0:24:32.640 --> 0:24:35.639 all the way into Europe and all across the Silk Root, 0:24:35.680 --> 0:24:40.520 all across Central Asia and West Asia. And despite that 0:24:40.720 --> 0:24:44.960 constant you know, sharing of ideas, not every idea that 0:24:45.040 --> 0:24:49.960 you know came from China or came from Pussia, or 0:24:50.720 --> 0:24:52.760 I don't know if Pussia was around during the Silk Rude. 0:24:52.760 --> 0:24:54.720 But you know what I'm saying, like, not every idea 0:24:54.840 --> 0:24:58.080 that was along the Silk roud everyone necessarily picked up on, 0:24:58.560 --> 0:25:01.880 even if it was a technology that might have benefited them, 0:25:01.920 --> 0:25:10.080 because cultures effectively structures of refusal. So for example, um, 0:25:11.359 --> 0:25:14.959 there's this guy on YouTube Religion for Breakfast. He did 0:25:14.960 --> 0:25:19.960 a video recently on the pork taboo in certain cultures 0:25:19.960 --> 0:25:23.480 and certain religions, right, And one of the things he 0:25:23.520 --> 0:25:28.280 pointed out was that the taboo tends to be strengthened 0:25:28.320 --> 0:25:32.119 in times of like repression so for example, or in 0:25:32.160 --> 0:25:40.960 times of cultural um definition. So for example, he was 0:25:41.000 --> 0:25:45.639 pointing out that in the period of Roman conquest, the 0:25:45.720 --> 0:25:49.879 Jewish people were more inclined to define themselves as you know, 0:25:50.560 --> 0:25:55.199