Culture
Former civilizations here
The news in this book is that the New World was an old world. It was far more populated, far more developed, far longer before the arrival of Columbus, then orthodox history believes. Charles Mann makes the best case yet, in non-technical prose, for the emerging archeological view that native Americans (north and south) had created vast cities and civilizations on a scale that dwarfed Europe at the time. These bustling cities, not just in MesoAmerica, but in the Mississippi and the Amazon, were erased into invisibility ahead of settlers (and textbooks) by disease and environmental factors. In scope this book is a good compliment to Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel. But 1491 heightens the discrepancy of development described by Diamond because now we see how far along American civilizations were before they unraveled on contact with the old world.
-- KK
1491
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Charles Mann
2005, 480 pages
$19
Available from Amazon
Sample excerpts:
When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about thirteen thousand years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation the continents remained mostly wilderness. Schools still impart the same ideas today. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balee would be to say that they regard this picture of Indian life as wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly marked by humankind.
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In 1501, just nine years after Columbus's first voyage, the Portuguese adventurer Gaspar Corte-Real abducted fifty-odd Indians from Maine. Examining the captives, Corte-Real found to his astonishment that two were wearing items from Venice: a broken sword and two silver rings. As James Axtell has noted, Corte-Real probably was able to kidnap such a large number of people only because the Indians were already so comfortable dealing with Europeans that big groups willingly came aboard his ship.
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The British and French, many of whom had not taken a bath in their entire lives, were amazed by the Indian interest in personal cleanliness. A Jesuit reported that the "savages" were disgusted by handkerchiefs: "They say, we place what is unclean in a fine white piece of linen, and put it away in our pockets as something very precious, while they throw it upon the ground." The Micmac in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia scoffed at the notion of European superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants all trying to settle somewhere else?
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It is true that European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British -- or, rather that terms like "superior" and "inferior" do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.
Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice -- their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth-century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than my be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious of an arrow shot. To the colonists' dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, "which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce it."
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Utterly without fear, De Soto ignored the taunts and occasional volleys of arrows and poled over the river into what is now Eastern Arkansas, a land '"thickly set with great towns," according to the account, "two or three of them to be seen from one." Each city protected itself with earthen walls, sizable moats, and deadeye archers. In his brazen fashion, De Soto marched right in, demanded food, and marched out.
After De Soto left, no Europeans visited this part of the Mississippi Valley for more than a century. Early in 1682 white people appeared again, this time Frenchmen in canoes. In one seat was Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. La Salle passed through the area where De Soto had found cities cheek by jowl. It was deserted -- the French didn't see an Indian village for two hundred miles. About fifty settlements existed in this strip of the Mississippi when De Soto showed up, according to Anne Ramenofsky, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico. By La Salle's time the number had shrunk to perhaps ten, some probably inhabited by recent immigrants. De Soto "had a privileged glimpse" of an Indian world, Hudson told me. "The window opened and slammed shut. When the French came in and the record opened up again, it was a transformed reality. A civilization crumbled. The question is, how did this happen?"
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The Caddo had a taste for monumental architecture; public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After De Soto's army left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500 -- a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000, not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. "That's one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters" Russell, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me. "Everything else - -all the heavily populated urbanized societies -- was wiped out."
Catalog of ethnic diversity
What a mysterious and fantastical book. This hefty softcover is a facsimile collection of thousands of exotic and sensational photographs dating from around the turn of the century when news of any sort from far away lands was rare. It's sort of a combination of early uncensored National Geographic and Ripley's Believe It or Not. Reproduced without a known author, or copyright, or even authentication of the captions, it was for many years a "secret" underground publication. And for pure gawking pleasures it still can't be beat. Cannibals, executioners, and fakirs, oh my! Toolwise, it serves as a mighty sourcebook of amazing costumes, body modifications and hairdos, architectural novelties, and extinct strange rituals. (I'm convinced science fiction film directors mine this for alien worlds.) I like to think of this book as the best one volume catalog of cultural diversity on Earth. For the most part these societies are long gone, and remain only in rare books like this one. It's a super bargain at $25.
-- KK
Secret Museum of Mankind
David Stiffler
1999, 576 pages
$25
Available from
Amazon
Sample excerpts:
As a young boy from a largely white middle-class neighborhood, I held my breath as I incredulously leafed through the tinted pages of the most fantastic book I had ever opened. The book was in tatters, for it had passed through many hands and a few generations. I believe the book came to me from my grandfather, a lay pastor and naturalist healer. This, my original copy of the book, was somewhat defaced and edited by someone who took offense at the naked body, indicated by the way each illustration depicting an exposed female African, Asian, or Polynesian nipple was scratched out with a penknife. Aside from such human imagery, the book was full of visuals depicting practices and ceremonies rarely witnessed by Westerners and even less commonly understood, hence the appropriate use of the word secret in the title. Here in this book I saw tribal maidens, executioners whose swords had decapitated 20,000 prisoners, medicine men, chiefs, warriors, hula girls, Dutch girls in their tulip hats, rickshaw drivers, fakirs and Moslem women veiled in purdah, "savage" races, cannibals, tattooed faces and cicatrization, holy penitents, gauchos, snake charmers, nomads, gypsies, crude medical practices, strange initiation rites, matadors, Eskimos, and more all laid out as, the anonymous author put it, "five volumes in one."
It was at this point that I realized my worldview and perspective of life and peoples of the world were extremely limited. Viewing this book really caused me to examine my own surroundings and environment, and I must admit it caused a certain degree of alienation from my peers and challenged my own upbringing and values. I could no longer believe that Greensburg, Pennsylvania, was the whole world when the door to the "secret" world had been opened for me.
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This detailed face pattern in ridged flesh is known as a "full rasp." The man could only be photographed asleep; he fled the camera as witchcraft.
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Camel-Borne Palanquins for Arab Women in the Desert
Arab women of the better class travel in palanquins resembling square tents erected on the humps of camels. Gaudy striped cloth is stretched round the framework of the tent, giving an odd cage-like effect to the contrivance viewed from a little distance. When on the move over the desert, servant women walk beside the camels, and men on horseback guard the caravan.
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Cage of Death in a Lonely Pass
If one could peek through the bars of this cage there would be seen a little rubbish on the floor of it. That rubbish was once a man caught thieving in the Lataband Pass from Afghanistan into Bokhara. He was placed in this iron cage at the top of the pole and left to die of hunger. These man-cages are a favourite Afghan method of dealing with criminals.
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Quaint Freaks of Fashion That Please Mongolian Wives
Padded shoulders with chequered sleeves of grotesque length are the salient points of these ladies' strange dress, which shows how world-wide is the desire for adornment extraordinary. But the crowning effect is produced by the winged headdress through which the hair is threaded, hanging pendent from the extremities. Shoes with pointed toes complete this truly surprising accoutrement.
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Martial Dignity in Old-Time Splendid Panoply
Decoration ran riot in the headgear of officers of the old Korean army, whose service was indeed rather ornamental than military. This melancholy-looking individual, huddled up with the correct air of aristocratic helplessness on his palanquin, is a general officer. The palanquin is fitted with a single wheel which relieves the bearers of something of the weight of so much dignity.
How to survive jail
Yes, you are a good person. But a relative or friend may not be so law-abiding. And stuff happens. Here is what to do if you are ever arrested (mostly what not to do) and what you can expect if put behind bars. Written by two professors of criminology; one was a former correctional officer, and the other served eleven years in federal custody, including maximum security. They know what they are talking about, and they dispense their straight dope with surprising clarity and uncommon elegance and wit. (One chapter is called "You've Got Jail!"). They've written a guidebook to a distant country and its alien customs and ways; may you never arrive there. You get street-smarts from inmates and wise counsel from the Man. I rank my books by how dog-eared they are; this one had nearly every page marked and underlined. This is one of the books you want to read before you need it.
-- KK
Behind Bars
Surviving Prison
Jeffrey Ian Ross & Stephen C. Richards
2002, 219 pages
$10
Amazon
Sample excerpts:
The first thing you need to remember [if arrested] is keep your mouth shut and do not discuss your arrest or case with anyone, police or fellow inmates.
Jailhouse holding tanks are usually bugged with hidden microphones and video cameras. This technology is only incidentally for your protection. Its primary function is to provide the judicial system with an opportunity to gather more incriminating evidence.
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Whomever you call, never discuss your case on the phone. Any admission of guilt will be used against you in court. Let us repeat: Any admission of guilt will be used against you in court.
The same warning applies to mail, both sent or received, which will be opened and copied by jail staff. Remember, you have no privacy in jail, and every word you say, phone call you make, or letter you write, can be used in court to make a case against you or drum up additional indictments against you or others.
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In general, with few exceptions, attorneys want their money up front, in advance, or they leave you to throw yourself on the mercy of the court. The reasons are simple enough. If you are found guilty and sent to prison, you will be in no mood to pay your legal bill. Also, many of their clients are crooks who are not overly inclined toward scrupulous bill-paying in the first place. These facts lawyers know only too well, so they will exert great pressure on you to pay up front before your case is decided. You must resist their demands for large sums of money and only pay the attorney a portion of what they ask.
Defense attorneys are like stockbrokers: They collect their fees and commissions on the amount of business they do, no matter whether their customers win or lose. As officers of the court, their first allegiance is to the legal system, even at the expense of their clients. Most lawyers who practice in criminal courts make a good living losing most of their cases, a fact that they rarely share with their clients.
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You may think the 14th Amendment guarantees you due process, meaning bail, attorney, and a trial by peers. Unfortunately, after being locked up in the county jail, you discover that bail may be denied, lawyers are expensive, and few defendants ever get a trial. The fact is, most people plead guilty to a lesser or reduced charge simply because they get tired of being locked up in jail, their legal defense funds run out, and they fear the possible consequences of losing a trial.
These are the cold, hard equations of crime and punishment. Most cases never go to trial. The attorney persuades the defendant (often after the lawyer has bled the patient dry of money for pre-trial hearings) not to go to trial, arguing that if they lose -- and they probably will -- they will be sentenced to the full extent of the law.
Yes, you have a Constitutional right to a fair trial, but if you exercise that right and lose the case, the prosecution most likely will demand severe sentencing penalties, in return for your having made them take the case to trial.
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Another possibility, rarely understood by first-time defendants, but well known to those with lengthier police records, is that once you plead guilty, which becomes public record and part of your police criminal justice dossier, you are more likely to be rearrested, and are easier to convict.
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The Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) is thought by convicts to operate a better system than most states. The prisons are cleaner, with more desirable food, and the prison staff is better educated, trained, and paid. It is fair to say that most prisoners would prefer to do federal time, day for day, as compared to state time.
That said, federal prisoners are usually allowed fewer material possessions than state convicts. Individuals serving time in state prisons may have their own televisions, collections of books, music, clothes, and posters or pictures hung on their cell walls. Federal prison cells are more austere. These prisoners are restricted to only basic items, such as five books, toiletries, and a few changes of institutional clothes, no television. All of these possessions must be able to fit in one small locker.
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You will find that every cellblock has "jailhouse lawyers" who will give you more truth than your attorney ever dared to share. (In case you were wondering, jailhouse lawyers are looked down upon by prison administrators, because they can file legal briefs for themselves and fellow inmates; it's not unusual for cons well versed in the law to find themselves transferred frequently.)
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The Convict Code
What follows is the convict code, at least the idealized version cons give lip service to and outwardly endorse:
Do:
Mind your own business
Watch what you say
Be loyal to convicts as a group
Play it cool
Be sharp
Be honorable
Do your own time
Be tough
Be a man
Pay your debts
Don't:
Snitch on another convict
Pressure another convict
Lose your head
Attract attention
Exploit other convicts
Break your word
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Warning: Many men and women with no previous drug experience have become addicted to narcotics while in prison.
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Although all gambling is against official rules, it is a common practice throughout the prison system -- especially sports betting -- and it is probably responsible for more institutional violence than drugs or gang affiliation.
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You buy enough food to cover the cafeteria meals you plan to skip, and store it in your locker. In short, this scenario should convince you that it costs money to live in prison. Most estimates suggest that you need about $100 a month to go to commissary, and more if you smoke.
Most prisoners keep instant coffee or tea -- which, like everything else, they buy from commissary -- in their locker. Provided the dormitory or cellblock has hot water, you can prepare hot drinks, even soup, in coffee cups. Some lower-security institutions may even provide microwave ovens for the use of prisoners to heat up commissary or vending machine items. The prison administrators are happy to have you pay for your own food.
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Her's another scenario. You make 20 bucks a month. You got it all worked out what you're going to buy and what it's going to cost you, but your calculations are off by a few cents and you don't have enough money. That's enough for a correctional officer to forego giving you commissary that time. Hacks have little patience for sloppy arithmetic or bad attitudes.
How do you get money placed in your commissary account? One way is for outsiders to mail you a postal money order. The officers, when they inspect the mail, are supposed to take it out and place it in your name on the books. Alternatively, the meager amount of money you make, your pay, gets placed in the account.
Why does this system exist? Part of the reason is that you're not allowed to carry any dollar bills or coins in most prisons. The administration doesn't want you to have any money to use if you escape.
Prison administrators never tell convicts how much money they have in their accounts. Nor are the officers going to tell you. You're supposed to keep track of it. They don't maintain a system like a bank, which mails you a monthly statement, nor are there any ATM machines for easy access.
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For example, gang bangers (members) may try to extort cigarettes from you or do a cell invasion in which they simply run into your house and grab your stuff. If you don't retaliate, they'll continue to do it to you. In this case, you may think that it's in your best interest to either join another gang for self-protection or "strap up" (get a shank) and hunt down your perpetrators and stick and cut them.
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Your going to prison is like a death in the family, minus the medical bills, bedside vigil, or funeral expenses. If they care, the others can write or come to visit you in the pen. But the longer you stay incarcerated, the more you lose. Stay in prison long enough and even the most loving of families are liable to forget you ever existed.
Numbers are so elemental that it seems inconceivable we could have lived without them, yet numbers are only an abstract idea that gradually dawned on humans. The evolution of numbers as they inhabited cultures, then faded, and erupted again, diversifying in hundreds of filigreed variations, is really a history of thinking itself. Beginning with numbers--even more than letters--we began living in our heads. Thousands of years later a restless man sets out to answer an almost childlike question: where did numbers come from? In his pursuit--becoming a world expert along the way--he uncovers this exponentially complex, infinitely fascinating, and forever enlightening history. This is the ultimate archive about the culture of numbers. No other source knows as much about numberhood.
-- KK
The Universal History of Numbers
From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer
Georges Ifrah
2000, 633 pages
$16
Amazon
Sample excerpt:
Most peoples throughout history failed to discover the rule of position, which was discovered in fact only four times in the history of the world. (The rule of position is the principle of a numbering system in which a 9, let's say, has a different magnitude depending on whether it comes in first, second, third... position in a numerical expression.) The first discovery of this essential tool of mathematics was made in Babylon in the second millennium BCE. It was then rediscovered by Chinese arithmeticians at around the start of the Common Era. In the third to fifth centuries CE, Mayan astronomers reinvented it, and in the fifth century CE it was rediscovered for the last time, in India.
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Obviously, no civilization outside of these four ever felt the need to invent zero; but as soon as the rule of position became the basis for a numbering system, a zero was needed. All the same, only three of the four (the Babylonians, the Mayans, and the Indians) managed to develop this final abstraction of number; the Chinese only acquired it through Indian influences. However, the Babylonian and Mayan zeros were not conceived of as numbers, and only the Indian zero had roughly the same potential as the one we use nowadays. That is because it is indeed the Indian zero, transmitted to us through the Arabs together with the number-symbols that we call Arabic numerals and which are in reality Indian numerals, with their appearance altered somewhat by time, use and travel.
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If you wanted to schematise the history of numbering systems, you could say that it fills the space between One and Zero, the two concepts which have become the symbols of modern technological society.
Nowadays we step with careless ease from Zero to One, so confident are we, thanks to computer scientists and our mathematical masters, that the Void always comes before the Unit. We never stop to think for a moment that in terms of time it is a huge step from the invention of the number "one", the first of all numbers even in the chronological sense, to the invention of the number "zero", the last major invention in the story of numbers. For in fact the whole history of humanity is spread out backwards between the time when it was realised that the void was "nothing" and the time when the sense of "oneness" first arose, as humans became aware of their individual solitude in the face of life and death, of the specificity of their species as distinct from other living beings, of the singularity of their selves as distinct from others, or of the difference of their sex as distinct from that of their partners.
Origin and evolution of the numeral 3.
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Secret alphabet (still used in Turkey, Egypt, and Syria in the nineteenth century) compared with the Arabic, Palmyrenean, and Hebrew alphabets.
A readable chronicle of what ordinary life felt like 1,000 years ago, in England.
-- KK
The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium
Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger
1999, 230 pages
$10
Little, Brown
Amazon
Sample Excerpt:
It is a commonplace that slavery made up the basis of life in the classical world, but it is sometimes assumed that slavery came to an end with the fall of Rome. In fact, the Germanic tribes who conquered Rome captured, kept, and traded slaves as energetically as the Romans did—as indeed did the Arab conquerors of the Mediterranean. The purpose of war from the fifth to the tenth centuries was as much to capture bodies as it was to capture land, and the tribes of central Germany enjoyed particular success raiding their Slavic neighbors. If you purchased a bondservant in Europe in the centuries leading up to the year 1000, the chances were that he or she was a “Slav”—hence the word “slave.”
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Slavery still exists today in a few corners of the world, and from the security of our own freedom, we find the concept degrading and inhuman. But in the year 1000 very few people were free in the sense that we understand the word today. Almost everyone was beholden to someone more powerful than themselves, and the men and women who had surrendered themselves into bondage lived in conditions that were little different to those of any other member of the labouring classes.
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There was no spinach. This did not appear in European gardens until spinach seeds were brought back from the Crusades in the twelfth century. Broccoli, cauliflower, runner beans, and brussels sprouts were all developed in later centuries by subsequent generations of horticulturalists. Nor were there any potatoes or tomatoes. Europe had to wait five centuries for those, until the exploration of the Americas, and though the recipe books describe warm possets and herbal infusions, there were none of the still-to-be-imported stimulants—tea, coffee, or chocolate.
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Outlaw handbooks
This is a school for outlaws. Most of the time law breakers should be arrested as quickly as possible; very occasionally an outlaw becomes a hero, like in a movie. This catalog of 800 instruction manuals for how to break laws (and all ten commandments) makes no subtle distinction between these modes. That essential chore is up to you.
Use these books with discretion -- most of them are pretty lame, and primarily feed the fantasies of 17-year old boys and genuine misanthropes. Some are reprehensible and evil. However, I find value in simply knowing that anti-establishment information (How to Survive Federal Prison Camp, How to Use Fake IDs to Disappear in America, How to Beat Your Parking Ticket) has a home and can be read. Just for curiosity's sake, of course.
A friend of mine leaves a copy of Loopmanic's "How to Survice Federal Prison Camp" sitting on the tank of his guest bathroom toilet. Since it is about the prison grind for white-collar felons he says it's a BIG crowd pleaser.
-- KK
Loompanics
Understanding the culture of poverty
Poverty is not just a condition of not having enough money. It is a realm of particular rules, emotions, and knowledge that override all other ways of building relationships and making a life. This book was written as a guide and exercise book for middle-class teachers, who often don't connect with their impoverished students--largely because they don't understand the hidden rules of poverty. In the same way, poor children misconnect with school because they don't understand the hidden rules of middle-class life. Ruby Payne, a former teacher and principal who has been a member of all three of the economic cultures of our time (poor, middle-class, and wealthy) compassionately and dispassionately describes the hidden rules and knowledge of each. I think it's useful not just for educators, but for anyone who has to deal with people of different backgrounds. Having read it, I feel a lot more confident about dealing with people as people, not as representatives of their social class.
Every class assumes that their knowledge is known by everyone, which is one reason they assume that people in other classes don't "get it." It's possible for anyone to shift classes, but only at the price of leaving behind your existing personal relationships.
-- Art Kleiner
A Framework for Understanding Poverty
Ruby K. Payne
1998, 204 pages
$22
Aha! Processing
Highlands, TX 77562
800/424-9484
Amazon
Excerpts:
The mother is always at the center, though she may have multiple sexual relations.
Analytical globalism
The most global of all magazines. This previously rarified academic backwater is now the frontline forum for debating the form of the global village. Bold, brash, and intelligent. There are more Big Ideas per issue than anywhere else.
-- KK
Foreign Affairs
6 issues per year
$32 per year, US
PO Box 420235
Palm Coast, FL 32142
800/829-5539
Excerpts:
The current American policy is to try to stop proliferation while simultaneously continuing to hold on to its nuclear arsenal indefinitely. But these objectives are contradictory. The current policy is a way of avoiding choice--a policy without traction in the world as it really is. --Jonathan Schell, "The Folly of Arms Control."
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Twenty-first-century America is one of the most litigious societies the world has ever known. Civil lawsuits in American courts are used to resolve an ever-expanding list of conflicts. But new forms of litigation can have powerful and wide-ranging consequences, both intended and unforeseen. This is especially obvious in one area long thought outside the power of domestic courts: foreign policy. Increasing numbers of individuals, including torture and terrorism victims, Holocaust survivors, and denizens of the dwindling Amazon rain forest, are now using lawsuits to defend their rights under international law. --Anne-Marie Slaughter and David Bosco, "Plaintiff's Dimplomacy."
All the languages
The Ethnologue is one of the most satisfying and evocative global snapshots I've ever come across. Compiled by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a global Bible-translation organization, the Ethnologue is an attempt to inventory and describe all extant (and many dying) languages around the world--in two fat, complete volumes. Open up to the "Language Family Index" and you can test your knowledge of the relationships between ethnic groups in your favorite part of the world. How about the various writing systems for Batak Toba, or the total number of languages in Papua New Guinea, or the population of Swahili speakers in the United States? I often find myself roaming through it, wandering imaginatively across the tangled pathways of evolutionary, political, and economic history that these 7,000 languages represent.
-- Jim Mason
Ethnologue
Barbara F. Grimes
1999 (14th Edition)
Vol I:Languages of the World, 858 pages
Vol II: Maps and Indexes, 727 pages
CD-ROM version, including both volumes
Summer Institute of Linguistics
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road
Dallas, TX 75236
972/708-7404
Amazon
Much of the material is online in a very searchable
format here
Excerpt:
Poem about humanity
A cinematic poem celebrating the human relation to the eternal. Not a word is spoken, but every person alive in the twenty-four countries this was filmed in would understand it. It’s about Us on Earth Now. It’s the first truly sacred film I’ve seen (best viewed in DVD on as large a screen as possible). Next time they send a disc into space to be viewed by aliens, this is the disc they should send.
-- KK
Baraka
Ron Fricke
1992, 104 minutes
$15
MPI Media Group
Netflix
Amazon
Visual history
We badly need more "wide history" as developed in this remarkable work by John Man. Rather than go linear, Man goes wide with a view of dispersed cultures interacting at one time--in this case in the year 1000. He shows what's happening during this "year" in each region of the planet (say, Tibet, Oceania, South America) and how events then resonate across the globe. The first millennium was the first era when most of the world was settled, and the first time immigration and travel created a robust communication network. Globalism, it turns out, was a medieval event. The picture I got from this book of diagrams was of a world far more sophisticated in its reach and depth then I knew.
-- KK
Atlas of the Year 1000
John Man
1999, 144 pages
$14
Harvard University Press
Amazon
Excerpt:
It is often said that the year 1000 has no 'real' importance, that it acquires significance only from its zeroes, from our determination to read significance into birthdays and big numbers. Far from it: the time has a real historical significance, rooted in the way human society developed, from scattered diversity to today's 'one world.'
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The significance is this: by pure coincidence, the year 1000, or thereabouts, marked the first time in human history that it was possible to pass an object, or a message, right around the world.
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This is very different from history as written in Europe, China or the Islamic world, where the story of the past is in large measure rooted in human character--history as narrative. In the American drama, this element is missing. This section of the Atlas, like other sections on nonliterate cultures, necessarily has a wide focus. There are few incidents, few individuals--in all of North America around 1000 there was no native American whose name has survived.
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India: Fleeting Power, Enduring Glory
The Chola dynasty sprang from the rice-rich plain of the River Kaceri, today's Tamil Nadu. They had ruled here as minor chieftains for 800 years when, in the middle of the 9th century, they emerged as heads of a small independent state.
Diversity extravaganza
One doesn't read this; one falls into it, like an experience. Printed in lavish color in large format, this two-volume celebration of contemporary ritual in Africa is shocking in its lushness. It seems to explode with possibilities--of what ritual and ceremony could be, of how many different ways there are to find meaning in life. It also presents the best argument for why Africa should not be written off: it has difference, and difference is the engine behind innovation. Although expensive, this box set is cheaper than a rocket ship to another galaxy--which is the only other thing I can imagine having similar effect of this work.
Two remarkable women, who first started photographing the jewelry of Africa, developed these books over decades of fieldwork. Some of their work has been published in National Geographic and their other books. Beside eye-popping photos, there is outstanding text on what is pictured. This is spectacle with intelligence. To offset the pricey cost of this magnum opus, their publisher has recently issued a paperback selection called Passages: Photographs in Africa, which presents highlights from Ceremonies. But this abridgement has only one-tenth the 850 images in Ceremonies, and I feel it misses the point of the larger work: glorious, extravagant diversity.
-- KK
African Ceremonies
Carol Beckwith, Angela Fisher
1999, 744 pages (two volumes)
$105
Harry N. Abrams
Amazon
Excerpt:
Wearing costumes fashioned from hibiscus fibers and cowerie shells, and with coconut shells as breasts, dancers on stilts rest before performing. Their teetering dance and flapping arm movements imitate a long-legged water bird, but it is also mischievously said that their antics mimic their neighbors, the tall, pointy-breasted Fulani women.
Katjambia summons all her powers to draw the lion spirit out of the woman. Her eyes roll back and she enters a trance, absorbing the evil force into her own body. Forced into Katjambia's body, the lion spirit remains so powerful that she is unable to expel it no matter how she tries. Barely able to speak, she whispers that she must retreat to her family village to call on the help of ancestral spirits contained in the sacred fire.
Another grand video survey of the African continent worth tracking down. Created by National Geographic, this ambitious series deals with the vastness of Africa by following eight contemporary Africans in their ordinary lives and ordinary dreams. One is a Tulerag camel boy, another is a soccer-playing fisherman, and another is a female gold miner. Each vignette is a one-hour mini-story compressing a year or so at a different corner of Africa, and each story is able to connect you to Africa now. Taken together, they deliver as honest a portrait of a continent as one could hope to get in a 9-hour feast.
-- KK
Africa
2001, 540 min
$90 VHS
Produced by Andrew Jackson
Netflix
Amazon
First person accounts
Most of what you read about what happened in the past is written by someone who read what someone else read about it. Here is a diverse collection of short first-hand, eyewitness accounts of what proved later to be important events. Vivid, uncensored, naked testimony from someone there at the time. Make up your own mind.
-- KK
Eyewitness To History
John Carey, ed.
1987, 706 pages
$15
Avon Books
Amazon
Here is a companion site to the book
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Memorable immersive history series
The premise of this first reality-TV program is brilliant. Take an ordinary middle class family of the year 2000 and make them live for 6 months like an ordinary middle class family of the year 1900. The London-based producers succeed in this transformation by getting every detail of Victorian domestic life exactly right and complete. The volunteer family is plunked down in a different era as if by time machine, and there is no escape. No shampoo, either. The edited 6-hour result is deep, instructive, and totally riveting, Kids who hate history are mesmerized by it. Because it is so visual and visceral, it changed the discussion of chores and gender roles in our household. Better than 100 essays, this video series reveals the notion of progress. It is now my favorite history "book."
The success of 1900 House spawned Frontier House, a parallel experiment that transfers the conceit to the edge of Montana in 1893 during homesteading days. It ups the challenge by requiring the participants to build their homesteads and raise all their own food while sticking to period tools and the lifestyle of pioneers. The three families who settle in a beautiful valley need to stockpile enough food, shelter and firewood to last a Montanan winter. Instead of cooperating, they compete against each other, making this remarkable 6 hours series into what Survivor should have been - an authentic test of surviving. There is probably no greater persuader of women's inequality than this pair of films. The guys loved being pioneers, while the women and girls were imprisoned by it.
Both series come with books you can forget. The documentaries on the other hand are memorable and entertaining works that would be fantastic in any classroom, and ones that I would require every child in 21st century America to view. If I had to choose only one to see, I'd go with Frontier House. There's more going on, more intra-personal weirdness, more learning and more failures. Best would be witnessing both, as the London Victorian house closer reflects what the majority back then experienced. These are the nearest things yet to a time machine.
–KK
1900 House
$27 VHS
Amazon
Netflix
1900 House
Mark McCrum and Matthew Sturgis
1999, 192 pages
$20
Macmillan
Frontier House
$50 VHS or DVD
Amazon
Netflix
Flippant, but painless, world history
Larry Gonick, the over-educated cartoonist, continues his series of book-length comic-strips that illustrate ancient history. This new 300-page installment covers the rise of Arabia and the role of "Orientals" in crafting the culture we have today. In Gonick's hands history is a hoot, and very much about ideas. I particularly savor this latest volume because by moving the center of the universe somewhere east of Europe -- delving into Islam, Africa and East Asia -- Gonick's cartoons can remedy the ignorance and arrogance of the west. Laugh your way to enlightenment!
--KK
Cartoon History of the Universe III
Larry Gonick
2002, 307 pages
$15
Amazon
Access to historical civilizations of Africa
Most reports about Africa emphasize one of two well-worn themes: a) Africa's awesome natural environment, or b) its titillating variety of tribal life. This 6-hour video series illuminates a third, refreshing, little-seen dimension: African civilizations. Harvard professor Skip Gates narrates his very personal investigations into the overlooked black civilizations that blossomed on the African continent. Sometimes Gates is a little too full of himself, but other times his intensely idiosyncratic road show works perfectly in conveying the magic of ancient civilizations few Westerns are aware of. This video series is oddly better than any book about this overlooked subject -- perhaps because the film succeeds in reflecting the tremendous oral and visual nature of these cultures. I had my mind changed.
-- KK
Wonders of the African World
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
1999, 6 hours
$50 VHS
Netflix
Amazon
Global perspective of human civilization
This textbook is the best one-volume survey of earlier civilizations I've found. It supplies a couple of overview chapters and then summarizes every ancient civilization in Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Americas in fair detail. I relish its planetary perspective.
-- KK
Ancient Civilizations
Christopher Scarre & Brian M. Fagan
1997, 466 pages
Longman
Amazon
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Ultra-trendy Asian popculture
Bill Gibson turned me onto this one. This festive, juvenile, over-the-top magazine is your one-stop shop for Asia Pop Culture. Asia as in India, China and California -- you know, the future. Pop culture as in Filipino urban superstitions, Japanese vending machine food, Chinese tattoos, Korean dating booths, Thai Scrabble champions, thumb tribes, Viet rock and roll, and all things anime. It's so fast-forward that it is outrunning Wired by a decade.
-- KK
$24/year
Giant Robot
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