ARE THE DESERT PEOPLE WINNING?

摘要

My desk, like the desk of most research scientists, sees an overwhelming traffic of scholarly journals and articles—reams of pages of the latest cutting-edge discoveries, destined to be outdated before next week. But one study, A Cross-Cultural Summary, written in 1967 by the Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor, has remained firmly planted there for some time now—and not only because, at 3,000 pages long, it's rather hard to pick up and move. Textor's massive tome contains a cultural correlation that bears disquietingly on the type of planet we humans have produced for ourselves today, and my mind turns to it more and more of late. All across the world, the sort of culture you live in has something to do with the ecosystem around it. Traditional tundra societies are more likely to share cultural patterns with each other than with tropical rain forest societies, regardless of whether some descended from a common ancestral culture. High-altitude plateau cultures differ in systematic ways from fishing cultures in island archipelagoes. Some of these correlations are fairly predictable: Tuareg desert nomads are not likely to have 27 different words for types of snow or fishhooks. But as Textor found, some of the correlations are far from predictable and have helped contribute to the sociopolitical mess we now inhabit.