Which is funny. Because … oh, never mind.

So you acknowledge that society tends to be eager to place labels, then you just go right ahead and do it? I can’t figure out if you’re contradicting yourself or if you just don’t care that you’re flagrantly generalizing. I’ve travelled to many places in my short life.. and I’ve met just about as many jerks in India as I have in Indiana. You ditch your credibility when you say things like, “this particular group of people is mostly such-and-such..”

“Assholes” ..? If going to recite mindless slander, at least be specific with your negativity.

Such a comment is hardly one befitting an educated anthropologist, and it makes everything else you wrote difficult to take seriously.

Then I suggest you run away as fast as you can, because the logic that if you disagree with something someone said means that everything else they say is questionable (especially when you are wrong in your disagreement) indicates a very poorly developed, immature intellect. This is the kind of thinking we try to weed out in High School.

Perhaps Harvard forgot to mention that, whatever you believe concerning Jesus, there is no other person from the ancient world whose existence is more thoroughly documented

Harvard who,Steve?

Huh? What about Julius? The Plinies? Or even someone like Socrates who didn’t publish anything himself? (He is caricatured in a play by Sophocles and mentioned by both Plato and Xenophon.)

There’s practically no basis for believing there ever was a Jesus

Yeah, I remember Harvard telling me about those guys, now that you mention it!

Perhaps Harvard forgot to mention that, whatever you believe concerning Jesus, there is no other person from the ancient world whose existence is more thoroughly documented, but any child with a western calendar might be able to help you there.

Huh? What about Julius? The Plinies? Or even someone like Socrates who didn’t publish anything himself? (He is caricatured in a play by Sophocles and mentioned by both Plato and Xenophon.)

There’s practically no basis for believing there ever was a Jesus or that he was in any way important to the Jews of his time. Not to mention that whole Son of God thing…

What any child with a Western (Northern) calendar can help you with is the timing of the Solstice. Some of them will also know that it was celebrated before Christianity and that it took the Christians quite some time before they decided that Jesus must have been born at that time.

What really astonished me about your essay, however, was your remark questioning whether Jesus had “really lived.” Such a comment is hardly one befitting an educated anthropologist, and it makes everything else you wrote difficult to take seriously. Perhaps Harvard forgot to mention that, whatever you believe concerning Jesus, there is no other person from the ancient world whose existence is more thoroughly documented, but any child with a western calendar might be able to help you there.

I want to digest it all before I make any comments of substance.

I dug out one of the few books I have on Africa: Victor Turner’s “The Ritual Process”. One of the central rituals (among the Ndembu) described in the book is almost entirely made up of binary oppositions. And that’s in central Africa. I understand that this is only one society, and that should be made clear. But I’d also say that this is reasonable evidence that there is a certain amount of thinking in binary oppositions in an indigenous context in central Africa. That’s as far as I’ll go with that.

And for people outside of Africa, as an example: the Biwat tribe in New Guinea – studied by Margaret Mead – clearly had a concept of an in-group and an out-group (and they’re far from the only ones). If a person spoke the Biwat language, then you couldn’t eat them, unless they lived a certain distance away, at which point it became kosher. (That’s in both Mead (1935) and Foley (1986), The Papuan Languages of New Guinea, CUP). I use that as an example because until the 1930s, the Biwat had no contact with Europeans, so their behaviour could not be said to come from a Christian imposition. Nor did they speak an Austronesian language or have any contact with the Indonesian, Muslim, world. If you want evidence that native American people use binary oppositions in their thought, or used them previously, then you could do worse than Mythologiques, but I’m certain you’ve already heard of or read it.

I think it’s possible that you could be right. Maybe there is a society out there that doesn’t use binary oppositions in thought and maybe it is in Africa. Maybe Leviticus is responsible for binary thought in Europe and the west. But I see no evidence, only (at best) a correlation between the binary ideas and racism of Leviticus with the binary ideas and racism of the west (possibly in former times more than now). I also think you’re having a bit of a strop, because we haven’t accepted the premise without thinking. I have no prejudice against Africa. I do have a prejudice against ideas without much basis. I also have a prejudice against off-hand rejections of reasonable criticism.

As it is it is a blog post suggesting that a) there is a binary nature to blame and shame in western society that b) I happen to think is missing in the African cultures I’ve lived in, and c) I see this binary thing so strongly in traditional Abrahamamic thinking that I suspect that is a sourse of it.

Well, I won’t deny that Jewish and Italian mothers are world-class guilt trippers. However, the same elements appear to be solidly entrenched in pre-Christian Persian, Mesopotamian, Celtic, Western Aryan, and Hindu cultures — and that’s just the stuff tracing back in one way or another to Asia Minor.

In the Western Hemisphere you get a hefty dose in Olmec, Mayan, Aztec, and Athabascan cultures. None of which had a whole lot of Abrahamic influence.

I don’t pretend to be a cultural anthropologist, but I’m a wee bit of an amateur historian. So far as I’ve turned up, there’s little to no controversy over the picture I’ve presented on these aspects of Western Hemisphere and pre-Christian European cultures. I won’t speak to the same question on Asian cultures outside of India.

From here one can develop hypotheses, perhaps, but probably not yet.