Human Heritage
Catalogue Description: This two-term course is a study of Western, Chinese, and Native American intellectual traditions. The course is designed to help students understand how our cultural traditions influence our ways of looking at the world and how studying cultures other than our own expands and challenges our frame of reference. The course emphasizes intellectual, artistic, political, scientific, religious, and economic aspects of the three cultures from selected periods in history. . . .
As the description says, we look at three cultures at various periods of time. We look at the cultures critically, not comprehensively. That is, we're very selective: of all the possibilities, why these three cultures? why not others? why so few historical periods for comparison?
We hope in this study to understand how our own cultural traditions influence our perspectives and how those from other cultural traditions perceive the world differently. That understanding of cultural difference helps us see our own frames of reference more clearly and challenges us to understand others' frames of reference. We hope that acknowledging difference leads to respect, tolerance, and an enlarged compassion. In that spirit, we end the first semester with a study of the "foundations" of each culture--their founding philosophies and world views. But difference also has some harsher realities.
We concentrate on certain periods of time, and we chose to begin with the nineteenth century, the 1800's. That period of time has often been called the Age of Imperialism, and it is the West's imperialism that provides the name. Why weren't the Chinese the imperialists in the 19th century? Why weren't the Native Americans imperialists? When we conceived the course, we decided to begin in the 19th century partly because that century shows the tensions and conflicts and patterns of dominance that are with us today. We chose it partly because western hegemony at that time seemed particularly stark with respect to both the Americas and China. We chose it partly because the fact of the British Empire at that time shows a culmination of historical forces that had been clear from the beginning of what's called The Encounter, when the West began to go out from its shores and explore the world. That decision highlights one theme of the course: western dominance, western aggression, western hegemony.
Beneath that theme in the course, lies one often unasked question: Why Europe? Why did it fall to Europe to leave its shores so aggressively? (China had sailed as widely a hundred years or so before the Europeans, and it's common knowledge that the Chinese had gunpowder earlier, and printing. Some Native Americans had better calendars, some had larger and cleaner cities, some had more sophisticated and more democratic governance, and some had more sophisticated relationships between individuals and their communities.)
So . . . Why Europe? Why did Europe, around 1500, have the will to dominate as it did? Why did it have the numerous technologies that made domination seem easy? Why, in other words, is the Encounter often referred to as The Conquest?