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  • From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] RE: Major histocompatibility complex (MHC)
  • Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 20:53:05 -0800


On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 06:01 AM, Marimike6@cs.com wrote:

The Chinese in the Pacific Rim and Latin America, the Indians in East Africa and the Greeks and Syrian-Lebanese all over the world are other examples of weeds that readily transplant and thrive. This is due to their cultural, not gross racial, characteristics. They tend to dominate economically.

To this list you might add the Maori and their conquering of many peoples who lived on neighboring (and some not so neighboring) islands, like the Moriori; the Polynesians and their 2000+ year spread across the Pacific from near New Guinea across the whole South Pacific up to Hawai'i; countless waves of Native Americans from the Chinook to the Inca and further south who pushed out or conquered earlier inhabitants; the Bantu, who overran much of central and south Africa sometime before 500 CE, shoving aside the Khoisa and other groups; the often violent spread of Islam from Palestine across India to Indonesia, and on and on and on. In other words, I don't think the trait of wiping out or assimilating other cultures can be ascribed to any particular group of humanity. It seems to be a fundamental human characteristic. We (people) seem to do it whenever we can, given the technology, food supply, population pressure, ideological drive, or just about any excuse. (Pardon my Darwinism; generally I like to look for examples of cooperation rather than competition.)

We don't necessarily assimilate other cultures only by violence. It's done by merging cultural ideas until one group no longer differs from the other, or via ideological dominance, or by overwhelming another group with new technologies that they hurry to adopt until they lose the heart of their own culture. Cultures, from a long-term perspective, seem pretty fluid.

Toby



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