Current Feed Content from 3 Oct 08 00:12
Why School Shootings Happen in Affluent Cultures?
Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:13:00 +0000
Yet another school massacre at Kauhajoki in Finland, leaves a nation shell-shocked with grief.
Another round of analysis and questioning “Why again?” is followed by fault-finding, blame-shifting and political promises – all just before the upcoming communal elections.
School shootings are isolated incidents of someone killing one or more persons with a firearm or a death resulting from a gang fight. School massacres, are mass killing rampages by usually lone gunmen like the one in Kauhajoki. Many people remember the tragedies at Columbine High, Virginia Tech and think that such rampages only happen in the USA. But these massacres happen in other wealthy and stable democracies too. Emsdetten or Erfurt in Germany, Dunblane in Scotland, Aarhus University in Denmark, Ma’alot and Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva religious school in Jerusalem, Israel, Concordia University and École Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada experienced terrible massacres.
The Copycat Effect is said to be very crucial for the planning and motives of gunmen. Martin Bryant, the gunman responsible for the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre in Australia had studied and copied Thomas Hamilton, who massacred innocent children at Dunblane. Similarly, newspaper reports have hinted that Matti Saari, the killer of Kauhajoki copied Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the killer at Jokela a few months earlier. Martin Bryant had been diagnosed as mentally retarded with a low IQ and serious disorders. He had told neighbours "I'll do something that will make everyone remember me".
What does a society do to stop these killing rampages? Does it go on a spree of arming schools with metal detectors, surveillance cameras and armed guards? Only the butchering at Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva religious school massacre in Israel was cut shot by one student, Yitzhak Dadon. He shot the gunman shooting with an AK-47 with his own pistol.
Do societies go on a witch hunt by profiling people who can and who cannot kill as in "The Classroom Avenger, " James P. McGee and Caren R. DeBernardo, Forensic Examiner (May-June, 1999)?
The U.S. secret service has researched all the US school shootings and massacres as well as the foreign ones. They warn against any kind of student profiling for would-be killers. This kind of ‘profile’ would fit too many students and miss the real killers. In the Concordia University massacre it was a dismissed assistant professor. Some American school massacre gunmen lived with both parents in "an ideal, All-American family." Others came from broken homes, or lived in foster homes. Significantly, a few were loners, but most had close friends. Some of them had been teased at school but most of them had not. The killer at École Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada separated his victims and killed only women (fourteen of them).
Can a society like Finland, which has the third highest number of guns in the world after USA and Yemen, decide to ban handguns? Gun controls were intensified in Scotland after Dunblane. but Guns haven’t been banned in USA after repeated school massacres and neither in Yemen after the Sanaa massacre in 1997.
The outcry in Finland after the Jokela massacre has been to increase the number of school psychologists. Many school killers had regular consultations with psychologists, but it didn’t stop them. In countries like India, Bolivia or Thailand with no school psychologists, school massacres fortunately haven’t happened.
Could the potential killer’s soul get poisoned by an inability to measure up to the demands of a society too bent upon achieving more and more? Can we blame a society for becoming too performance oriented, too materialistic so that human values take the back seat? Can we say that the people in a certain country are too busy and have become cold?
The social system in rich countries takes care of people and responds to situations. But systems function with cold efficiency and can never have human warmth. Can more of the 'system' reach out and touch the lost ones? Can a professional shrink reach lonely children if the parents are too busy chasing results in their jobs? Does it help if doctors prescribe stimulants for depressed people with no reason to live and let live?
Could the inner recesses of a potential killer become devoid of human warmth, dignity and respect so that the only way to escape that persistent laceration of self-hatred is to feel oneself superior by using weapons? Helsingin Sanomat, the leading newspaper in Finland put the killer's picture on the front page in place of the usual ads. In 25 years the only other time news replaced ads was the 9/11 terrorist attacks. If you murder 10 innocent people, the leading paper of the land recognizes you as a major celebrity. This is media-sponsored egoism at its worst.
When religious myths do not speak to us any more, when social structures like marriage and family start to crumble, what else can fill in the vacuum of values but a mythology of hatred and violence?
Should we recognize that in spite of all the progress and riches, in many countries, it is the end of living and the beginning of survival for many? Neither a Mink coat nor the flame from the muzzle of a gun can save you from the cold embrace of death when your heart is frozen. You need care and love from people to remain a warm human being. Since when do systems give that!
Rather than running after PISA rankings to measure school efficiency, should schools teach students how to live good lives?
Should richer countries seriously start to measure success and prosperity by Gross National Happiness like in Bhutan? The Fourth International Conference on Gross National Happiness will be held 24-26 November 2008 in Thimphu, Bhutan.
noreply@blogger.com (Rana Sinha)Can Liberal Women Talk About Their Own Abortions!
Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:20:00 +0000
Can US Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin become the Bête noire of the liberal press?
How do people from other cultures see her?
Governor Palin’s statements like “The Iraq war is a task from God” and that she wouldn’t hesitate to start a war even with Russia are very belligerent words.
For people in cultures outside the USA, this type of talk is standard George Bush rhetoric. Hot-headed political leaders like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and President Hugo Chávez delight us regularly with phrases which provoke animated discussions. However, Sarah Palin’s statements, which she made to Charles Gibson of ABC News should be understood within the vote-catching context of election politics.
But, what has annoyed many liberal feminist women in Western countries is Sarah Palin’s vehement anti-abortion stand. Religious fundamentalists and extreme right-wing republican women in the USA and tens of millions of people in other cultures may not feel that this is a negotiable issue.
In all cultures, abortion is a strange topic, almost ghost-like. Even in the most liberal countries like Finland in Scandinavia, abortion is a slippery subject. Jan-Erik Andelin of the Finnish-Swedish daily Hufvudstadbladet in Finland writes that women can discuss their sex-lives or lack of it, personal accounts of severe depressions and financial mishaps, but “Abortion is a taboo in 2008”.
You can talk about abortion as a phenomenon, a statistic, a right, a political issue, but you can never talk about your own abortion even among women. No one will speak out aloud why she herself had to resort to abortion by explaining that she was 15, alone, and destitute. Most likely, even among militant feminists, only an embarrassed silence will follow if anyone present brings her personal case of abortion to the discussion.
What are the reasons for this embarrassment? Is abortion then after all, a feminist issue? Women in many parts of the world consider the right to decide what they should do with their own bodies, as sacred, worth fighting for. Not having the right to choose to do an abortion means letting someone else’s interest, in this case her own child’s, override the woman’s rights of bodily self-determination.
Is it that in a liberal society you are supposed to take care of your own contraception and if it fails, it is your own fault?
Does it become a performance issue, after all? In earlier days, when a woman was supposed to give birth to many children and rear them into decent members of society, abortions were seen as eroding the base of functionality in a society.
Is the shame of the unemployed the same as that of the mother who had chosen to do abortion?
Photo by: Rachel Montiel http://www.morguefile.com/
noreply@blogger.com (Rana Sinha)Two Languages Two Minds!
Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:10:00 +0000
Do you behave differently in different surroundings, especially when you are speaking in different languages?
Are you aware of CFS or cultural frame switching?
Cultural frame switching refers to the phenomenon where bicultural individuals shift values and attributions in the presence of culture-relevant stimuli.
I notice that I am a very different person while I speak Italian compared to when I converse in Finnish. Many bilingual individuals speak about their similar experiences with speaking different languages. For example, in one context they are more extravert and open, while they are more subdued and conscientious in another. They say that they feel like a different person depending on which language they are speaking. A new study lends credence to their claims.
Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, charted the personality traits of 225 Spanish/English bilingual subjects in both the U.S. and Mexico as they responded to questions presented in each language.
The five dimensions along which difference were noticed among bilinguals are:
Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. Ramírez-Esparza and her colleagues found that when using English in USA, the bilinguals were more extraverted, agreeable and conscientious than when using Spanish. The differences in neuroticism were not significant.
Previously researchers have shown before that bicultural individuals can assume different roles depending on environmental cues. But the new results indicate that character itself can morph. “To show that changes in personality—albeit modest ones—can be triggered by something as subtle as the language you’re speaking suggests that personality is more malleable than is widely expected, ” Ramírez-Esparza explains.
When bilinguals answer questions in their native language the values and attitudes associated with that language condition their answers. When they respond to a questionnaire in their second language, norms and values associated with that language affect their responses.
Though switching tongues will not turn a bookworm into a party animal, but the variances are noticeable nonetheless.
The number of bilingual and bicultural people in the world is significant. Does having the ability to function in different personality modes give you skill and competence advantages as an employee or as a community member? Does it make you a better team member or a better boss?
Pictures by courtesy: http://www.morguefile.com/ Photographers: taliesin and Keith Richardson
noreply@blogger.com (Rana Sinha)Not Only Humans But Animals, Even Bacteria are Altruistic
Sat, 23 Aug 2008 22:07:00 +0000
There is not a single human society, past or present, where altruism of some kind is not considered a superior characteristic. Altruistic behaviour is seen to arise out of soulful maturity. Sacrificing oneself for the greater good of many is the ultimate act of self-negation and the true mark of a hero.
Altruism is a divine quality that distinguishes the noble from the base. We humans would like to think that we are the pinnacles of development, created in the image of divinity.
When we are ashamed of some kind of behaviour, we label that behaviour as animal. Rather conveniently we forget that we as humans are indeed biped primates belonging to the Family Hominidae, Order Primates, Class Mammalia, Phylum Chordata, and Kingdom Animalia. Of course, we never ask other animals what they think of us humans on this issue of supriority, especially the fact that there is no record of any animal acting stupidly out of deliberate choice as many humans do repeatedly.
Would animals laugh if we told them that only the higher primates of the family Hominidae could practice altruism? Yes they would. Altruism is not uncommon in the animal world. Even the lowly bacteria consistently exhibit altruism.
Salmonella bacteria sacrifice themselves for the greater good. As they enter the digestive tract, it’s a hostile world as other bacteria have dug themselves into good strategic positions. So the salmonella ‘select’ one in six microbes during cell division as an advance group. As they dig into the intestinal tissues, they cause the human defence system to inundate the tract. This clears away all the other bacteria, when colonization by other salmonella can begin. To paraphrase the great Winston Churchill, “Never in the field of intestinal conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Dogs often adopt orphaned human babies in Argentina, squirrels, cats, ducks and even tiger cub triplets.
Huani feeds the tiger triplets and her own puppy at the Paomaling Zoo in Jinan, China. Photograph: Lu Chuanquan/Xinhua/AP
Dolphins regularly support sick or injured animals by swimming under them and pushing them to surface so that they can breathe. One extreme example of altruism is the Stegodyphus spider, which has a unique system of matriphagy, when the offspring actually eats the mother. Felix Warneken and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology present experimental evidence that Chimpanzees often help other species, even humans without any reward.
James Shreeve, in his book The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1995, presents his theory of why the Neanderthal man became extinct. He says that Neanderthal man was an exaggerated case of Me, Myself and I. In time, Neanderthal man became extinct because of an inability to produce altruistic and cooperative behaviour towards other Neanderthals, especially the females and children of their own clans. The ability to share experience, artefacts and values with others created culture in the weaker Cro-Magnon man helped them survive and evolve.
noreply@blogger.com (Rana Sinha)Why are Seats Empty at Beijing?
Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:21:00 +0000
The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was a spectacular show.
The entire choreography was flawlessly executed, with each minute detail falling in place to showcase China’s might and prowess to the world.
But people could notice an embarrassing factor even at the most spectacular show on the planet – empty seats.
Officially all the events are sold out. According to a BBC report, Wang Wei, a senior official with the Beijing organising committee (Bocog), said empty seats was not a problem unique to Beijing and other Olympics had experienced similar problems. This spokesman blamed the weather for being too hot and too humid and then too rainy. The Chinese authorities have tried to address the problem of empty stands by hiring volunteers, dressing them up in yellow and filling the empty seats to act as cheerleaders. They have been given instructions to cheer for both teams to improve the atmosphere in the stands.
Some people claim that many of the corporate seats are empty because the corporate tickets were handed out only the day before to prevent blackmarketeering and busy executives can’t make it to the events at such short notice.
Is there some other explanation to why the stands are empty? Do the local Chinese see the sports events as strange and Western?
Do the Chinese people find the idea of paying hefty prices for attending mass sports events too strange? Are the tickets too expensive?
For example, tickets for softball started at $100 for pool play and go up to $400+ for the gold medal game. In Athens, the same tickets were going for about $10 and $40 respectively. The tickets for the Men’s single tennis finals in 2008, are priced at 545€ plus 29€ for delivery charges. According the People's Daily in China, the average monthly income in Beijing is 227 US dollars. Domestic sports fans would definitely find the ticket prices rather expensive.
The Sydney 2000 Olympic record for ticket sales was 91% of available tickets breaking the previous record for ticket sales of more than 82% set in Atlanta.
Rumours of terrorism drove crowds away from the preliminary competitions of the games in Athens, but attendance picked up soon.
What about the foreign sport fans in Beijing? Is it too difficult and expensive getting visas, finding accommodation, getting tickets or are spectators choosing to watch events on TV from the comfort of their homes?
noreply@blogger.com (Rana Sinha)Is Backpacking Out and Flashpacking In?
Sat, 02 Aug 2008 20:38:00 +0000
Do you like the idea of adventure and freedom in backpacking but prefer security, style, and luxury?
Are you in your thirties or forties and have more than enough money to spend while travelling?
Would you rather spend a few hundred dollars on flights rather than emerge half-dead from 18-hour bus trips?
If you answered yes, then you are a Flashpacker!
Most people don’t have a clue what flashpacker means. The term flashpacker comes from the same roots as backpacker – flash (ostentatious) + (back) packer. Flashpackers can be called business class backpackers.
Since the sixties, backpackers have been travelling light and living frugally. They don’t carry iPods, PDAs, laptops or expensive digital equipment. Backpackers like to travel with no fixed schedules on long trips, and be independent while travelling. Backpacking evolved out of the hippie movement in the West. People in many traditional non-Western countries regarded backpackers to be more interested in chilling-out, using drugs and exhibiting looser sexual morals than actually learning about the places and cultures they were in.
Would you spot a flashpacker on an 18-hour bus ride to save fifty dollars? No, ‘it is too backpacker’ they would say and fly. For a flashpacker, style is more important.
Instead of ‘slumming it out’ in budget accommodation, flashpackers spend nights in comfortable hotel rooms and dine in upscale restaurants. Flashpackers always choose to remain connected with their friends or contacts through digital devices they carry with them. Many people criticize that hardcore flashpackers just play with their electronic gadgets in different parts of the world, and have no time, energy, or inclination to actually make contact with anyone outside their digital communities. “Critics are envious as they can’t afford what we can”, say the flashpackers and move on.
More about flashpackers here.
noreply@blogger.com (Rana Sinha)Should the Great Apes have Human Rights?
Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:29:00 +0000
Is it true that humans have a divine right to rule over all animals and they have only rights we give them?
We are taught in school that selfish and corrupt dictators, and fascist regimes typically abuse human rights.
Sometimes hawkish leaders come up with innovative methods of classification to marginalize some people on us versus them axes so that ‘they’ can be ‘contained’ for the protection of ‘us’. Currently we have at least two ongoing wars where the purported aim is to improve the human right situation of these countries where the wars are being fought. What is perceived as cultural legacy in one country is considered human rights abuse in another. Yet, we have a universal concept for human rights.
To give a clear idea of what “Human Rights” means, the United Nation declares that all human beings are born free and are equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. The United Nations universal declaration of human rights can be found in 360 languages.
As the first country in the “Modern world”, Spain has extended this protection to the Great Apes by passing a law.
The Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and Orangutans, called the Great Apes are our cousins on the biological tree. Along with humans, they belong to the subfamily Homininae of the biological family Hominidae. The Great Apes share about 96% of their DNA with humans. Mice share about 90% while plants have more DNA than humans. Scientists estimate that humans and chimpanzees probably split less than 5.4 million years ago.
The Spanish parliament has approved resolutions, which argues that "non-human hominids" should enjoy the right to life, freedom, and not to be tortured. The philosophers Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, who started the Great Apes project argue that the apes are the closest genetic relative to humans and display emotions such as love, fear, anxiety and jealousy – and should be protected by similar laws as humans. Arguing that this law would be going against divine will, which puts man above animals, the Catholic bishops are dead against giving legal protection to animals.
Using apes in circuses, television commercials, or filming will also be banned and while housing apes in Spanish zoos, of which there are currently 315, will remain legal, their living conditions need to improve substantially.
In 1999, New Zealand's parliament gave the great apes legal protection from animal experimentation. Britain now forbid experiments on chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas. The German parliament voted in 2002 to add the phrase “and animals” to a clause in the country’s constitution requiring the state to uphold the dignity of humans. In 1992, Switzerland amended its constitution to recognize animals as “beings, ” and not “things.”
In the ancient world, respect for animals wasn’t totally unknown. In cave paintings of Lascaux or Altamira, 15, 000-30, 000 years ago the artists rarely portrayed the animals as being hunted or eaten. They were rather mythical figures of worship.
In his (The Fourteen Rock Edicts, 1) Emperor Ashoka of India decrees "No living beings are to be slaughtered or offered in sacrifice". Herodotus (484-425 BC) tells us that “
The Egyptian Priests do to kill anything that has life, except such things as they offer in sacrifice, and animals are accounted sacred. Should any one kill any of these beasts, if wilfully, death is the punishment”.
In any culture, the mentally ill or retarded can be stripped of their human rights to free movement by being strapped to their beds. Western democracies with women presidents snugly accept that they can’t have women priests, as they are considered inferior to men. 4 million Americans, over 80% of them black, have been permanently disenfranchised because of even petty crimes. Has anyone ever heard of monkeys being jailed for stealing bananas or seagulls detained as “unlawful enemy combatants” and given shock treatments for terrorising people in market squares?
Now, as the seventh Great Ape, humans are consistently driving the other six to extinction, extending ‘human’ rights to animals is a great moral step for the human animal.
noreply@blogger.com (Rana Sinha)Midsummer Ritual Bonfire in Different Cultures
Sat, 12 Jul 2008 09:54:00 +0000
Why do people in different cultures celebrate natural phenomena?
Are these rituals remnants of an ignorant “pagan” past or are they quests for discovering man’s own identity and finding answers to questions about our origin and destiny, our role in the big picture?
Midsummer or summer solstice is celebrated in many cultures as the longest day of the year. Especially in the northern hemisphere, from Finland to Spain, it is often associated with bonfires. In many European countries people gather around bonfires, often fed with old and unwanted wooden furniture, broken boats and some people jump over the fire while making wishes. Though 24th June is technically the longest day, 21st June is celebrated in most countries since the Gregorian calendar reform. But neo-pagans celebrate summer solstice on June 24th along with most European folk festivals.
As with many other pagan festivals, midsummer has been Christianized in most Western countries. In England it has become “St. John’s Eve”, “St John’s Day” or feast of John the Baptist in many countries, in Russia it is Ivan Kupala Day, in Poland it is Noc Kupały or Noc Świętojańska.
The ancient Germanic, Slav and Celtic tribes in Europe celebrated Midsummer with bonfires. Midsummer night, when in the far reaches of the northern hemisphere the sun does not sink even at midnight, was full of fire festivals and love magic, and divination. Pairs of lovers would jump through the luck-bringing flames believing that the crops would grow as high as the couples were able to jump. Through the fire's power, maidens tried to find out about their future husband, and spirits and demons were banished.
Like the ancient Celts, the modern Wiccans believe that at Litha or the Feast of the Faeries at twilight in midsummer, the portals between the worlds open and faeries may enter our world. Humans who welcome them are blessed with joy and wisdom. The modern Druids call midsummer Alban Hefin while the ancient druids called it “Alban Heruin” or "Light of the Shore".
There is evidence of Midsummer festivals in Newgrange in Ireland from around 3000 BC, among the Essenes, a Jewish sect from 1st century A.D., the ancient Hopi and the Nachez people in the Americas as well as the Chinese. For the Chinese the summer solstice ceremony celebrates the earth, the feminine yin force. It complemented the winter solstice, which celebrates the heavens, masculinity and yang forces. Even the peoples of North Africa, particularly in Morocco and Algeria, especially the Berbers also celebrate midsummer.
In many countries there are many kinds of beliefs and traditions related to Midsummer. Even William Shakespeare speaks of “Midsummer madness” in his most delightful play, Twelfth Night as a form of madness brought on by the heat of midsummer.
In Finland, midsummer or Juhannus is the main festival of the year when cities are virtually empty as people go to their countryside cottages. People gather around the kokko or bonfires and watch the fire. It is a popular day for weddings as also unfortunately excessive drinking, drowning and accident figures are the highest in the year. In earlier days, maidens went naked to the meadows the night before to collect seven different wild flowers, which they placed under their pillows so that they then dreamt of the man who would become their husband.
More here.
noreply@blogger.com (Rana Sinha)Who Will Soon Go Hungry?
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:02:00 +0000
Increasing food prices have recently been blamed on food shortages though there are no major crop failures, famines, pestilence or other tangible epidemic involving large areas in the world today, where food production drops drastically. Is this food crisis going to affect the rich nations or will it drive the starving poor into even more abject despair?
There are winners and losers in this crisis. The Farm Belt has become one of the most prosperous regions of the United States due to skyrocketing food prices, while many regions in the world have slid from poverty into hunger. The Food and Agriculture Organization, a branch of the United Nations, has identified 36 "crisis" countries, 21 of which are in Africa.
Paul Krugman in his article gives four reasons for the present food crisis:
- The explosive growth of high-calorie food habits in emerging economies like China. 700 calories of animal feed is needed to produce a 100-calorie chunk of beef.
- Rise in oil prices. Modern food production is highly energy intensive, so high fuel costs drive food prices up. The invasion of Iraq, rather than lower oil prices, raised them.
- Climate change resulting in drought and crop decreases in key wheat growing areas like Australia.
- Complacence in the food market: precautionary inventories have shrunk on the belief that more can always be imported.
An estimated 820 million of the 850 million people in the world today suffering from hunger, live in developing countries. These are the countries most affected by climate change. Food prices have risen 83% in the last three years, according to the World Bank, pushing 100 million more people into hunger.
Have governments and international organisations taken the spectre of doom seriously? The UN summit on global food crisis called by secretary general Ban Ki Moon declared that world food production must rise by 50% by 2030, trade barriers should be lowered and export bans removed to stop the spread of hunger.
Rich countries spend billions of dollars on farm subsidies and wasteful food consumption. "The excess consumption by the world's obese costs $20bn annually, to which must be added indirect costs of $100bn resulting from premature death and related diseases, " according to the director-general of the UN's Food And Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf. He adds that the unprecedented hike in food prices, which rose 52 percent between 2007 and 2008 led to explosion of agricultural imports in the last 30 years. Africa has become a net importer of agricultural commodities, 87 percent of which were food products in 2005. Only 14 percent of Africa’s 184 million hectares of arable land is under cultivation and most of the rest in a state of accelerated degradation.
Many food-exporting countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have tried limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers. Not only has this led to angry protests from farmers because of losses in income, but it has also made things even worse in countries that need to import food.
There are other voices totally disagreeing with these approaches. Gonzalo Oviedo, the senior advisor on social policy at the International Union for Conservation of Nature blames human neglect of nature. The modern business-dominated agricultural industry, he argues, promotes the degradation of nature leading to less and worse food.
The existing food production systems, which is based on high inputs like fertilisers and is only accessible through market mechanisms, should be changed to systems based on locally available and more environmentally friendly inputs reducing high payouts to middlemen and big agribusinesses. Further, according to Oviedo, the main culprit is the prevailing model of concentration of land in small groups of big landowners who are dropping food production for local markets and moving to big industrial production of commodities that produce no local benefits and deprive small farmers and landless peasants of access to productive assets like land, water sources and fisheries.
noreply@blogger.com (Rana Sinha)- The explosive growth of high-calorie food habits in emerging economies like China. 700 calories of animal feed is needed to produce a 100-calorie chunk of beef.
Japan Recognises AINUs – First Colonizers of America
Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:49:00 +0000
Mainstream cultures assimilate minorities. It’s a bit like big fish eating small ones. History is full of countless examples. Some of these happen right before our eyes. Tibet has received much attention recently but very few people know about the AINU of Japan.
Ainus - The first Americans? The theory that the Ainus were the first to settle North America is based largely on skeletal and cultural evidence among tribes living in the western part of North America and certain parts of Latin America. The controversial conclusions of Anthropologist Joseph Powell of the University of New Mexico after examining the 9300 year-old remains of Kennewick Man also support this. More about this here.
Who are the AINU? Only about 15 people today speak native Ainu, a language not related to any other. The 150 000 AINU still alive can be found in Hokkaido island of Japan, the Kuril Islands and Sakhalin belonging to Russia now. Many of them may not even know that they are Ainus, as parents and grandparents had to become Japanese and hid their origins to protect children from racial discrimination. Many Ainus dislike the term Ainu because of a common derogatory pronunciation of the word in Japanese (A! Inu!, which means "Ah! A dog!" in Japanese) and prefer to identify themselves as Utari (comrade in the Ainu language).
"The Ainu lived in this place a hundred thousand years before the Children of the Sun came" is told in one of the Ainu legends (Yukar Upopo). In the Jōmon period (14 000 BC – 400 BC) the Japanese people came probably from Korea and drove the native Ainus to the northern periphery islands of Japan. The word ainu means human as opposed to kamuy, a spirit.
One Ainu myth says that the Ainu, who have a great deal of body hair, are descended from a bear god. A bear sacrifice ritual is still practised by the Ainu in which the sacrificed bear is sent “home” to the ancestors. The bear is probably the oldest form of deity known to primitive man in the northern regions and common in Britain, Celtic Gaul, and North America. The Greek goddess Artemis transforms Callisto
