Hi X,
Continued reading about the Lakes people.. Talking about spatial boundaries between cultures..
"Likely some frustrated souls wish for clear and quantifiable aboriginal territories better suited to the needs of our present-day political dilemmas. "Is it too much to expect simple reality?' they might ask. Of course many of us forget that territory is a temporal entity, that a people's places changes over time. A territory and it's borders maybe either new, as in the case of modern nation-states, or considerably older. Yet no matter what the depth of antiquity, drawing concrete boundaries is an acquiescence to a false idea of stasis: it is like stopping time at one point in a people's history."
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It goes on.."Anthropologist A.L. Kroeber (1963 [1939]: 5) agrees that drawing boundaries between cultural-political groups is the 'weakest feature of any mapping.' Unfortunately most methods of depicting time, space and culture all together provide a most inadequate representation of the actual complexity on the ground."
Most of us know this, well some anyway.<g> ie: the former Soviet Republic of course being a prime recent example.. And I do not think it can be stopped. Like
so many do that want to put up a hard and fast spatial and cultural boundary around the U.S. It won't work IMO, in the long run..
Possibly looking down the road, a 1000 years or so, anthropologists studying North America, will move all boundaries north.. Or better yet, realize by then, there was no need for spatial boundaries, only recognizing differences in cultures.. OR BETTER yet
Maybe "countries" are akin to "plate tectonics" in geology.. Plates of people floating around on the surface of the Earth, always in motion, always changing, with all eventually being eaten up by subduction zones when their time comes.. LOL.
Take care ....and beware.. of those subduction zones and we will jump to the next one when ours is ready to dive under..<gg>
m |
