How geography shapes cultural diversity (fwd link)

Sun Jun 17 03:03:04 UTC 2012

Thanks Rudy...with a different approach to the supposed information, I
arrived at the same conclusions you make with your final statement. The
checkerboard of juridical boundaries has over whelmed the pre-colonial
patterns of movement and relationships of peoples and cultures, at least, in
the Americas. Most of the old stories tell of people moving north to south
and vice versa. Groups of people would go South travelling for up to three
years or so and return with parrot feathers and cocoa laves for medicine.
Also, the major migrations of birds, buffalo, butterflies and etc. were and
still are North South movements.The people moved North and South following
these migrations which were sustenance. The East West movement is probably
postcolonial and probably as a direct result of the fur trades and the
European passionate indulgence in a search for a passage to the wealth of
the Orient.
Forth years ago a Cherokee and Anthropologist friend of mine would tease me
that civilization grew North out of Mexico and colonization has not changed
that. He would tell me to not be surprised when some morning I wake up and
there is a Taco Bell being built up across the street. We would laugh about
this but I have watches how the adopted language of Spanish/Mexican has
moved, in a 40 year period, across the American/Canadian borders into
Canada. He has long since passed and our daughter married a Spanish American
youth from Tucson and my two eldest Grandchildren are Spanish American,
Apache, Potowatomi, Odawa and Ojibwa...there is also some European but that
certainly keeps getting watered down. And now, my Great Granddaughter, 9
months, is Spanish American, Apache, Cree, Odawa, Potowatomi and Ojibwa.
Again there is a watered down mitochondrial connection to some
Europeans...there may be a bit of French or English or maybe Scottish. I am
often complimented by having Spanish/Mexican people assuming I am Mexican
and speaking to me in Spanish. That I cannot, usually embarrasses both of
us....so, before I get off topic, I think there is as much or even more
practical evidence to indicate the greater movement on a North South axis.
Numbers can be skewed by any bookie science but the major North South
highways being built on old Indian trails or along migration paths of
buffalo and other wildlife is much more a part of the story of the earth
itself. 

wahjeh
rolland nadjiwon
_____________________________________
  “in the cabaret of globalization, the state appears as a stripper — 
it strips off all its characteristics until only the bare essential remains:
repressive force.” SubCommander Marcos...

  _____  

From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Troike, Rudolph C - (rtroike)
Sent: June-16-12 1:26 AM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ILAT] How geography shapes cultural diversity (fwd link)

Well, if you take out all sorts of things like mountains, oceans, and other
obstacles to population movement, 
the differences between ecological zones generally makes it easier to move
laterally than vertically. There 
is clear evidence in the English invasion-settlement of North America,
settlers tended to move westward 
into ecologically compatible zones -- you can't plant cotton in North
Dakota, nor grow wheat very successfully 
in Alabama. But the Romans moved from lower Italy to northern Britain, the
Egyptians consolidated the 
length of the Nile, and then went north as far as Syria (but not east or
west), the Austronesians (depending 
on whose story you accept), may have spread from Taiwan all the way south to
Indonesia before turning 
eastward, and the Uto-Aztecans spread in one direction as far south as
Guatemala and as far north as Utah. 
But Algonkians covered the whole breadth of Canada and even into northern
California, as well as down 
the east coast to Virginia. Simplistic ideas of taking a political boundary
(usually a late one) and using that 
as a boundary for measuring diversity, are just that -- ignorantly
simplistic, no matter how sophisticated the 
mathematic mumbo-jumbo is. 

    Rudy Troike
    University of Arizona

ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU 
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From: Rolland Nadjiwon [mikinakn at SHAW.CA]
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2012 2:24 PM
Subject: Re: How geography shapes cultural diversity (fwd link)

So...do you have an opinion on this and if so, I would appreciate reading
it....or anyone else...particularly indigenous people on the
list....probably worded wrong but not meant to be exclusive or
chauvinistic(not a gender statement)...

wahjeh
rolland nadjiwon
_____________________________________
  “in the cabaret of globalization, the state appears as a stripper — 
it strips off all its characteristics until only the bare essential remains:
repressive force.” SubCommander Marcos...

  _____  

From: Indigenous Languages and Technology [mailto:ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU]
On Behalf Of Phillip E Cash Cash
Sent: June-12-12 1:53 PM
To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU
Subject: [ILAT] How geography shapes cultural diversity (fwd link)

How geography shapes cultural diversity

Study offers evidence that long countries give better protection to
languages than those that are wide.

Zoë Corbyn
11 June 2012

One reason that Eurasian civilizations dominated the globe is because they
came from a continent that was broader in an east–west direction than
north–south, claimed geographer Jared Diamond in his famous 1997 book Guns,
Germs and Steel. Now, a modelling study has found evidence to support this
'continental axis theory'.

Continents that span narrower bands of latitude have less variation in
climate, which means a set of plants and animals that are adapted to more
similar conditions. That is an advantage, says Diamond, because it means
that agricultural innovations are able to diffuse more easily, with culture
and ideas following suit. As a result, Diamond's hypothesis predicts, along
lines of latitude there will be more cultural homogeneity than along lines
of longitude.

To test that prediction, researchers at Stanford University in California
used language persistence as a proxy for cultural diversity, and analysed
the percentage of historically indigenous languages that remain in use in
147 countries today relative to their shape. For example, the team looked at
the difference between Chile, which has a long north–south axis, and Turkey,
which has a wider axis running east to west.

Access full article below:
http://www.nature.com/news/how-geography-shapes-cultural-diversity-1.10808

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