Setting a Plot

By Brandon Spars

Setting a Plot: The Impact of Geography on Culture, Myth, and Storytelling is a sourcebook for storytellers as well as teachers and students in the classroom. Epics and myths from India, Indonesia, Australia, and Tibet, which include The Ramayana, The Calonarang, The Wauwalak Sisters (a Songline Epic), The Life and Liberation of Padmasambhava, and many others form the basis for an engaging analysis of how the different geographies of those respective places inspires needs, values, and concerns that shape the respective plots. 

This book provides the storyteller, lecturer, and student not only with detailed summaries of many great stories from around the world, but also a means to understand the significance of those stories and how and why they are told the way they are. Sacrifice, cleansing, the exchange of people, and boundary making are just some of the different topics that link geography to story. Storyteller, teacher, and student will leave with a better understanding of world literature, history, culture, and geography after reading this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayzgoose Press
• Release date: Aug 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393774273

Book preview

Chapter One

Introduction

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel emphasizes the tremendous impact that geography has had on the development of cultures. More specifically, Diamond adopts a question that a local politician he met wandering the beaches of New Guinea asked, known more widely as Yali’s question. Yali asked Diamond, Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own? (Diamond 14). The question referred undoubtedly to the cameras and lenses and pens and notebooks dangling from Diamond’s REI tropical suit. This question put Diamond on some pretty thin ice. Rather than making the same mistake as generations of colonialists by suggesting that the tropical regions of Asia and Africa as backward, incompetent, and most troublesome of all, incapable of producing cultures with advanced technologies and industrial production Diamond reassures us immediately that his investigation, while similar in its starting point to the racist discourses of the last two centuries, will not take us down a similar path of prejudice when he asserts that his New Guinean colleagues are just as intelligent, or even more intelligent, than those he has in the West. How then does he answer that question that had led the previous two centuries into bigotry and narrow mindedness?

Diamond’s argument is founded upon the circumstances in which the various groups of humans found themselves. These circumstances are two-fold: weather patterns and geography, including not only the shape and contour of the landscape but also the availability of water, and viability of crops and domesticated animals. As Diamond argues, the fact that the Fertile Crescent arose as the cradle of civilization had far less to do with its people than with the wild varieties of wheat and barley growing in the hills surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates, and that the of the four most important domesticates, three of them, sheep, goats, and cattle were found in this region. ¹

There were two important moments when all world cultures might be said to be on par with one another when it came to development, or their amounts of cargo. The first, called The Great Leap Forward, occurred in 40,000 BCE. when a new species of human arose, the Cro-Magnon. The transition from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon, while it did not alter the fact that humans were hunter/gatherers, did greatly expand the distribution of humans across the earth. This expansion resulted in the first colonization of the Australian Continent as well as North and South America. During these colonizations, the sudden arrival of humans on large expanses filled with large animals that had never before had predators, precluded the possibility of the domestication of large beasts of burden because these viable candidates were quite simply driven to extinction by over-hunting. Thus, while these cultures did cultivate crops, because they killed off all the large candidates for domestication in the first thousand years of their respective arrivals, there was no chance for them to have the beasts of burden that would prove so crucial to Europe, the Middle East, and South and East Asia. By virtue of Australia and the America’s locations being remote from the origins of Cro-Magnon people, there was no chance for them to develop the larger populations that these beasts of burden would have helped support, nor the resistance to diseases that these domesticates and their human owners would have shared.

The second point on the timeline is referred to by Diamond as The Starting Line. While the Great Leap Forward happened more than 40,000 years ago, Diamond places The Starting Line at around 11,000 BCE. My students have, through five years of this course being offered, developed the joke that the answer to any question asking for a date is either 40,000 BCE or 11,000 BCE Since these dates form the basic timeline in Diamond’s book, they come up just about every other day in our classroom. Of the two, The Starting Line might be used with the greater frequency because this is the date where we start seeing the divergence that forms the basic difference between Yali’s people and those that trace themselves back to the river valleys where crops and animals were domesticated. In 11,000 BCE, some people in some parts of the world began to settle, raise crops, and breed animals, while other people, who lacked domesticable plants or animals, remained nomadic hunter/gatherers.

This difference, sedentary vs. nomadic, forms an underlying lynch pin for the examination of our essential question: how does geography shape culture? Desert cultures, such as the people of Aboriginal Australia, are nomadic hunters and gatherers, while the people of the Indo-Gangetic River Valley of what are today Pakistan and India, form the other end of the spectrum in that they became examples of some of the earliest, sedentary, farming communities. Diamond’s Starting Line, then, is the point where the farmers of South and East Asia and the Middle East diverge from what had been the only way of life up to that point. Indians became farmers and herders while Aboriginals continued the nomadic way of life that could be traced back to The Great Leap Forward and earlier.

Diamond’s argument has done much to lay the foundations for the investigation of geography as a determining force in the fates of different societies. Rather than relying on racist explanations that attribute greater intelligence or capability to certain societies, Diamond does not explain the domination of one people by another (as exemplified in two cases he examines in detail: the Spanish over the Aztecs and the Maori over the indigenous peoples of New Zealand) as the result of pure chance: Where there were domesticable animals, there were larger populations, which resulted in both the practice of metallurgy and the development of resistance to particularly nefarious diseases.

Our freshman class uses Diamond as a foundation for our study. In addition to looking at these two crucial moments in history and their monumental effects on the development of various societies, we take the time to trace the influence that early moments have had on the religion, literature, and culture of those respective societies. In particular, we examine how the respective societies of different geographical environments—river valleys, islands, deserts, and mountains—imagine their origins in the rich narratives that form the basis for their religion and classical literature. In each case, it is a story told over and over in many different ways, but it is the repetition of these stories indicates the true import of the question we are studying. Once these cultures arise, in all of their diversity and uniqueness, the geography continues to influence and inform them, creating a tone that is markedly different from island to river valley, and from mountain to desert. It is these tones that have given the ninth grade freshman humanities program it course title, A Sense of Place. Each of the different environments has a very different sense of place, emanating from the basic challenges, benefits, and general features of the geography itself.

I came to Sonoma Academy with extensive knowledge of island cultures, but less exposure to the history, literature, and culture of Indian river valleys, and little knowledge of either the deserts of Australia or the mountains of Tibet. I had written articles on the purification rituals that I had filmed in Bali, always tracing how the Balinese were negotiating the divide between their oral tradition and the modern, literate world of print and television. I had never asked myself what the relationship was between the Balinese preoccupation with purity and the simple fact that they had been practicing a sustainable lifestyle on a small island with limited resources for more than a millennium.

In many ways, the essential question of the freshman humanities curriculum is as direct and honest as Yali’s question was for Jared Diamond. In my years reading Indonesian texts and studying ritual drama, I may have overlooked one of the most obvious and important factors in shaping how those dramas and epics were crafted. I had long noticed that the Balinese were preoccupied with purity, but I had always stopped at the level of spiritual purity, never guessing that parallel to this was an equal, if not more pressing, concern with managing, even engineering, a landscape that was constantly in danger of becoming polluted and toxic. As part of my journey to answering this question, I read an article on the fate of Easter Island, which was home to a culture that, in a matter of a couple hundred years, polluted and destroyed its island. Easter Island, once home to a thriving and successful civilization, is now a barren wasteland, a home only to sheep. With this risk and these consequences in mind, I began to re-evaluate the role that the physical island of Bali itself plays in shaping the culture and the imaginations of the people that live there. Given their limited resources, the Balinese, like other islanders, became masters of renewing and rejuvenating their land, as well as the spiritual conditions of their people. For these people, the origin of their society takes on a special meaning, because this origin, imagined as the moment when the first person set foot on the island, constitutes the perfect, pure moment. Since then, human activity and waste have threatened to permeate the small, delicate paradise. The islanders’ greatest human endeavor is to ward off toxicity and pollution through a constant return to the moment of creation, employing rituals that coordinate the use and replenishing of the land as well as the spiritual rejuvenation of its inhabitants. In writing this narrative, I began to believe that we, now as a global community in danger of depleting our earthly resources and polluting our world water supply, have perhaps the most to learn from island cultures that have faced this threat throughout their long histories.

Once, while I was presenting the content of our course at an open house, a parent asked me how much of the material the students were able to understand and retain. It was an interesting question because I had never thought of the course material as being difficult. As I mentioned earlier, when I arrived at Sonoma Academy I wasn’t well-versed in the units on India, Australia, and Tibet… so I was learning the material (and continue to learn it) with my students. While we read several sophisticated texts, such as The Ramayana and The Epic of Gilgamesh, all of the insight and analysis is made during our class discussions. Thus, to answer the parent’s question, it was never a question of the material being too difficult or academic for the students because, to put it quite simply, the students were creating the material for the class. More than anything, more than breadth of historical knowledge or soundness in an academic approach to the material, our success has lain in our ability to ask honest, direct questions, and then to pursue the answers to these questions. Having sat through many academic seminars and academic conferences, I can say with certainty that high school students ask the best questions. It has been my job as a teacher to entertain the questions, give students the means to answer them, and then to guide us back to our overall, essential question: how does geography shape culture.

The river valley unit has, to my surprise, become my favorite, and understanding some of the basic features of the river valley culture gives us a starting point with which to compare and contrast the other three kinds of environments. Jared Diamond’s Starting Line marks the beginning of those river valley civilizations that began only after farming and herding were developed. It is hard to overestimate the impact that this change in lifestyle had on such cultures. Those that embarked on this path were led ultimately to the guns, germs, and steel that would enable them to achieve technological advantages over the other kinds of societies that we examine. And yet, this departure from the hunting/gathering lifestyle was not always a blessing. In fact, again and again, we find reference to the departure from the original nomadic lifestyle as a fall or great tragedy. When we ask ourselves why river valley cultures would bemoan the very evolutionary process that led them to becoming the most technologically advanced and most effective on the battlefields, we have to remember that agriculture was probably one of the greatest transformations of the earth’s landscape to ever take place. Not only were fields and villages set off from forests and plains, but the people who inhabited them found themselves in a very new and different position vis a vis nature. Whereas they were once part of nature, sharing common bonds not only with all other people but also with the animals on which they subsisted, now, as farmers and herders, they became separate and distinct. The unified fabric that was once nature was cleft into domesticated and undomesticated spheres. The world was, for the first time, fragmented.

This rift between humans and nature was so traumatic that people were driven to heal it. One of the most common ways they attempted to do so was through acts of sacrifice. In the chapter following this introduction, we will discuss how sacrifice aims to undo the irreconcilable opposition between the domesticated sphere of the human world and the natural world of the forest. The rupture can only partially and temporarily be healed, leading to the perpetuation of sacrifice and its permeation into many of the activities and endeavors of river valley peoples (Heesterman 29-33).

One of the nicest things about teaching a high school humanities course is that we are constantly fixed on the big picture. With the same honesty that Yali exhibited with Jared Diamond, the students constantly pepper the class with their questions and the bits and pieces of knowledge about classical ancient civilizations they learned in previous grades. If anything, teaching high school has allowed me to embrace what I could have easily dismissed as intrusive assertions or even interruptions. I distinctly remember that one young man remarked that the Greek helmets, with their decorative brushes, made the soldiers look like horses. In a way that only an engaged group of uninhibited young people can be, someone chimed in, Like the Trojan Horse. And the classroom took off. The link was made between sacrifice and warfare (see Heesterman 44; Baring 167), in which the soldiers become substitutes for the original victim, who, as we will see, was the Neolithic King.

Our endeavor cannot be said to be scholarly, and I say this because we are not contributing any new data to the fields of history or geography. We are, however, weaving information together in a unique and honest way. It is not unique to study the pyramids, the Great Wall of China, or the city wall of Uruk where Gilgamesh ruled in the third millennium BCE. However, to ask why it was specifically river valley civilizations that generally produced such lasting, massive monuments is a different matter. It leads us not to a typical recitation of dates and details but to an understanding of the most salient features of these cultures. Instead of causing us to shrink toward minutia the question expands and embraces the pyramids and The Great Wall. We begin to realize that since geography truly is a shaping force, it has inspired people to build such monuments… and, as we will see in the next chapter, has even made their building inevitable. The fact that the domestication of crops first took place in river valleys is related to the building of such monuments, which, in their massive immobility, stand as testaments to the difference between these sedentary cultures and the nomadic groups which lay beyond them and from which they were originally derived. The monuments, like warfare, can be viewed as extensions of that same sacrificial endeavor that seeks to commemorate and condemn the mixed blessings of agriculture and the sedentary lifestyle brought into being by the rivers themselves.

As we turn from our study of river valleys and to a consideration of the deserts of Central Australia, we come face to face with place in its most powerful form. Jared Diamond’s discussion of the rupture between humans and nature precipitated by farming gave us some insights as to why Australian Aboriginals may have either remained or chosen to remain nomadic hunter/gatherers. By looking at their large body of Dreamtime myths and legends, we see the extent to which cultural imaginations of both desert culture and river valley culture were shaped by whether or not they suffered the rupture with nature symptomatic of farming societies. In river valley cultures, the evolution of agriculture caused the human body, perhaps linked to the human domination of the landscape, to rise as a premier organizing principle. Many of these cultures shared a creation myth in which the universe was formed from the self-sacrifice of a divine, cosmic being, known in Vedic India as the Purusha. Earth was made from his feet; the atmosphere from his navel; the sun, from his eye; the moon, from his mind. Society was also derived from his body: the high caste brahmins from his head, while the ksatrian warriors from his arms. This cosmogony clearly privileges the human body, and was embraced only in societies in which humans were felt to participate in the process of creation through the selection of seeds, their planting, and their harvest as well as the selective breeding of animals.

In the deserts of Australia, people do not presume to have this degree of control over creation, and the human body, therefore, does not function as an organizing principle in their mythology. Aboriginals, while they are quite aware of the body’s role in human reproduction, believe that the true source of their being is the land itself. The desert is alive with spirit children that enter the wombs of the women and grow into children. A society that does not view the human body as the most fundamental concept is, in contrast to river valley civilizations, less likely to think in terms of universals. Without the overarching principle of the body giving design to all places and people, the unique features of every locale retain their integrity. Interestingly, as we will discuss in great detail in the fourth chapter, the most noticeable result is the suppression of time as a quality that links all people and places together in the desert (see Swain 36-49).

The river valley imagination forms a direct contrast to that of the desert cultures. In the river valley cosmological view, the world is made up of different places, but these places are similar in the sense that they all have the human body as their organizing principle. All places are linked together through the fabric of a larger cosmos, which is also imagined in terms of the human body. Also linking them is time, for these different societies progress through time simultaneously, which is most remarkable when one society actually conquers and incorporates another, creating a sense of historical progression toward a future that is shared.

The conscious and deliberate disavowal of the body by the Australian nomads reduces time to a mere possibility. Aboriginal stories are full of bodies threatening to assert themselves over the land, of time clamoring to break free from its dormancy, but while these stories express the full capacity to imagine such a course—the course that river valley societies have taken—the body is always erased and restored to its subservient position. What surprised our class most when studying the Aboriginal desert narratives was that their nomadic, hunting/gathering lifestyle seemed to be less a necessity than a choice. Such a conclusion presses against the assertions made by Jared Diamond who claimed that farming and herding were made impossible when the first individuals to arrive on this continent killed off the domesticable animals. This led to further questions. What could have led these people to choose a nomadic existence in the desert over the security promised by farming, herding, and homebuilding? Did the nomadic lifestyle have a hidden value? And why, if it was indeed valuable, didn’t it save the Aboriginals from colonization and genocide by Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? If aboriginals were choosing not to farm or herd, to what extent did the geography play a role in shaping Aboriginal society? While I cannot answer these questions satisfactorily in this introduction, I can suggest that geography still does play a crucial role, but a less deterministic one than we first imagined. The fragility of the desert environment forced the people into the roles of caretakers of the land. Therefore, rather than there being a single event (the overkill hypothesis) that determined the fate of the Aboriginal societies for more than forty millennia, we learn that Aboriginal nomadism is a cultural practice formed through constant interaction with the limitations of Australia’s delicate, desert environment. The discoveries gleaned from Dreamtime stories do not contradict Jared Diamond’s assertions; rather they add to the importance he places on geography’s role in the shaping of human history. Our analysis of cultural material gives geography an abiding role, and it allows room for human decisions to be taken into account.

As we will see in great detail in the third chapter, the principle organizing feature of Aboriginal society is the totem. A totem is a specific animal or plant that becomes a core source of identity for a clan. For each totem, there is a Dreamtime cycle of legends as well as an elaborate system of rituals devoted to inspiring the renewal and regeneration of these different species. Taboos prevented the Aboriginals who were charged with caring for these totems from consuming them at all, leaving them available for members of other clans to come in and harvest. The Aboriginal desert, then, rather than being made up of places linked together within a grand, universal cosmos, is composed of dependent, interlocking sites. The sites are linked together through physical journeys, but there is no sense of abstract space or time that is shared between them. Humans do not own the land, nor do they work themselves into the land through farming or herding. The land simply remains, and while there is tremendous significance given to where one’s spirit essence is from, or where a Dreamtime hero originated, moved, and sank back into the land, questions of when, such as when one was born or when one will die, are largely irrelevant.

The desert culture is inevitably the hardest for students to understand or relate to. The Dreamtime stories that form the texts we discuss in class are the hardest to interpret, because, to put it quite simply, they often resist interpretation. A Dreamtime hero will emerge from the land, move, leave some spirit essences, and then sink back into the land. Getting a student to write an essay on this kind of material can, at times, feel like an exercise in futility because most of the features they identify with literature, such as confrontation, vanquishing, exile, or romance are all absent. Nonetheless, I always feel that the students are aware that they are at the surface of something vastly different, though not different in the sense that some orientalist discourses might frame the word. They do not, for instance, see Aboriginal culture as an escape back into an innocent past, free of technology, or like a mirror opposite to the cultures of the Europeans who first observed them. Whereas the island and mountain cultures derived from the river valley civilizations, the ancient desert remained beyond their influence. Right into the twentieth century, the desert continued to pose a challenge to the worldview that history can be divided into haves and have-nots. In the chapter on desert culture, I discuss how, within the context of the desert, Yali’s question takes on an entirely different meaning. In island, river, and mountain cultures, technology is synonymous with superiority. A culture with more technology is capable of consuming or incorporating one with less. However, within the Aboriginal context, the question would have been asked only after the Europeans had already violated Dreamtime Law. Dreamtime Law was the unspoken understanding that each clan was a custodian of its totem, and part of this custodianship involved specifically preserving these totems so that other clans could come and harvest them. This sort of interdependency inherent in the Dreamtime Law, while in may not preclude conquest, certainly forms a strong prohibition of the kind of domination that was cultivated in river valley societies.

Thus Yali’s question, asked by an Aboriginal, would take on additional resonances and nuances. An Aboriginal Yali would not express an admiration in any way for the European technology. Instead he might ask, If you people do not abide by Dreamtime Law, then by which law do you abide? Are you willing to treat me fairly within that law? The answer, unfortunately, is evidenced by the open genocide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and then the resettlement of the Aboriginals often hundreds of miles away from the land that had given birth to them.

A Common Culture ²

Before my freshman classes begin our comparative study, and before we begin our unit on Indian River Valleys, I always show a slide. I mention to the class that it tells a story… the oldest story we have any record of, and, quite predictably, it is told through a picture rather than through any kind of system of symbols or inscribed writing. It dates back to approximately 22,000 BCE, and it is found deep within the caves of Lascaux. It is known as The Shaman, and indeed a stick figure human with the head of a bird is featured in the center of what becomes, with a little careful observation and speculation, a complete drama. Near the shaman’s right hand is some kind of staff that, in his ecstatic state, he appears to have dropped. To the shaman’s left, a bison is bleeding to death, a spear having been run through his back and out his abdomen. I failed to mention what most of my students see right away but, out of modesty, pretend to overlook: in the midst of this violence, the shaman has a very prominent erection.

I always ask my students what they think is happening in the picture, and inevitably one will say that the buffalo has killed the man with a bird head, but not before he has had a chance to run the buffalo through with a spear. Finally, however, someone will point to the fact that the shaman appears to have an erect penis. I suppose it just takes a few minutes for someone to actually dare to state such a thing in front of eleven newly acquainted peers. The question then rises, how could the shaman be dying with an erection? And so the class eventually arrives at what Joseph Campbell describes as the shaman’s state of ecstatic trance (Campbell Primitive Mythology 257).

Baring and Cashford in their The Myth of the Goddess take Campbell’s analysis one step further (see Campbell 299-312 and Baring 32-38). Rather than seeing the buffalo simply as a good luck symbol for the hunt, Baring and Cashford reference Campbell’s discussion of the ecstatic (which means outside of time) consciousness in which this image was created. They believe the shaman could be traveling forward through time to meet the bison, but if it were merely to bring luck for the hunt, the image would have undoubtedly represented a hunter at the scene. The shaman plays a specific and crucial role: he has traveled into the moment of the kill to ask the animal for permission to take its life (Baring 37). Indeed, when we stare at the image long enough, the bison is not charging madly or snorting aggressively, but giving a slightly sad, yet definitely acquiescent stare, at the blood that is spilling from its own abdomen.

The passage of life from the buffalo’s loins is directly contrasted with the shaman’s erect penis, which is a promise of new life. The painting is thus telling not just a scene from Paleolithic life, but actually representing a view of the earthly cycle of life and death. The bison has died so that its brethren, the shaman’s people, may continue to live and prosper. And coupled with this image of violent death are the images of thousands of bison that have been painted on the walls of the caves leading into these deeper recesses. The presences of these myriad other bison suggests, according to Campbell, that many of the animals that were actually killed were drawn not prior to their deaths, but after, as though their spirits were being brought into the ritualistic realm of the cave for renewal. No other humans are represented in the cave save the shaman.

Just when we think we are finished with our interpretation of the painting, I always toss out that we haven’t talked about the third character in the painting. You mean the bird, someone will say. No, I say, and I change the slide. I mean her. And I bring up the next image: the Mother Goddess. In this specific image, known as The Goddess of Laussel, an enormous, stately woman appears holding a crescent shape in her right hand. On this crescent are thirteen lines. Inevitably the students are able to arrive at what has become a standard interpretation: the lines represent the lunar months of the year. The crescent shape, while definitely invoking the bison’s horn, is also a representation of the moon itself. And the goddess’s upturned face, gazing to heavens, supports this. Why then is the moon held in her hand? Why not carve a moon shining over her head? It is what her other hand is doing that helps us to understand the cosmological unity that is being forged in this carving. The goddess’s right hand is placed very distinctly over her womb, casting fertility once again in a central role in this unfolding story. The rhythms of the female reproductive cycle, like the shaman’s erection, become linked not only to the world with its cycles of life and death, but also to the heavens, and specifically to the waxing and waning of the moon itself.

But why did I ask the class if there was anyone else present in the Lascaux painting? Inevitably they demand that I point at her mysterious presence, and I do. I point to the negative space in the painting, the wall of the cave itself. She is there, I say. And there, and there. It always helps to point out that statues very similar to the Laussel carving were found outside the cave, an act of Paleolithic signification that connects the narrative of the goddess with that of the shaman (Baring 6). At this point, my students, their eyes shining in the dim projector light, get it. The goddess is so vast that she contains the images. The shaman with his staff and the dying bison have been painted inside her,on the very walls of her womb.

The placement of these images, the shaman and the bison on the walls of the goddess’s womb, thus inscribes one narrative within the other to create a Paleolithic view of cosmological order (Baring 39). The painting of the shaman and the bison, in all of its violence, takes on even greater significance, and the kill forms a core tension that threatens to rupture the unity of both earthly order as well as cosmological. The bison, whose deep eyes are painted to display more emotion and feeling than either the shaman or the mother goddess, is not reduced to a mere means of sustenance, but becomes more of an equal to its human counterpart, like a sibling. Its death, rather than something to be sought with as great of frequency as possible, becomes a crucial time in which the bond and closeness between humans and their animal world is in danger of being ruptured (Baring 29).

Two forces stitch and smooth over this rift: the shaman himself and the Goddess. The dual nature of the shaman, as human and animal, casts him as a go between, a suture between the world of the animals and the humans which prey upon them. The bird head of the shaman emphasizes the view that humans and animals are partners in the same cycle, each subject to the same cyclical patterns of life, death, and rebirth. Mediating both the human and animals is the Goddess, from whom all life issues (like the waxing moon) and to whom all life returns (like the waning moon). Most importantly, the Goddess provides the comforting correlative to the spilling of blood; she is the promise that in giving its life, the bison, and all other animals etched on the walls of her womb, will be reborn once again.

We might expect that, since the Aboriginals of Australia remained nomadic, they would be living examples of this Paleolithic culture. We might expect that they continue to worship the Mother Goddess and continue to find kinship in the animal world around them and that it would therefore be reasonable to begin this discussion with an analysis of Aboriginal culture. Another, often unstated, reason for beginning with the Aboriginals might be because we assume that they are the most primitive of the cultures that we study. Our assumption stems from the limited images of naked men and women holding spears we have been exposed to, and from the lack of any sophisticated discussion around these images. To assume Aboriginals are the most primitive is to assume that, although they never developed farming or herding, they did not change in other ways. It is also to assume that they did not develop farming because it never occurred to them to farm, or that they had tried farming and failed because of their extreme climate. All of these assumptions, by the end of the freshman course, are hopefully dismissed. Most importantly, the freshmen learn that the Aboriginals have evolved and changed over the millennia just as much (or even more) than river valleys or islands did.

Although most would assume that Aboriginal culture should resemble Paleolithic culture, the two cultures are vastly different. The Paleolithic culture evolved eventually into the culture of river valleys, islands, and mountains. The Aboriginals, however, because they did not share the incorporative tendencies of the other three environments, have escaped the path often considered pre-destined and deterministic: from chiefdoms into kingdoms and finally nation-states.

David Turner, a scholar of nomadic societies, discusses inherent tendencies in cultures that are present prior to becoming sedentary. According to Turner, a locality-incorporative mindset is what leads to a culture’s embrace of the technological advancements that take them down the path of guns, germs, and steel. This means that various hunting and gathering groups, exemplified in his analysis of Algonkian societies, claimed and defended their rights to hunt and gather in well-specified territories. Because there is such emphasis given on an individual’s rights to a certain locality, specifically the right to take the resources that are available there, Turner notes that there is a strong distinction of an us, which refers to those who have hunting rights to a certain territory, and a them, referring to those who do not possess such rights. Because of the pressure to form successful hunting groups, individuals seek to maximize the territory to which they have access, and this, according to Turner, is accomplished through marriage. The us and the them are aligned with non-marriageable individuals within the small group (including siblings, parents, and sibling’s spouses) and members of foreign, marriageable groups. Marriage is always directed outside the group, thus incorporating women from foreign groups into the group of her husband. Such marriages, according to Turner, keep the gene pool healthy, and also result in rights to larger hunting and gathering territories, as the husband will gain access to the territory in which his wife’s brothers hunt. Likewise, the man’s sisters and parents will be able to gather in the same territory that the wife has originally shared with her childhood group.

As I will discuss, such marriage traditions are directed away from self-sufficiency, through which a group would find candidates within themselves, and according to the logic of this tradition, wither as a result of limited hunting and gathering territories. As Turner writes, within the outward marriage system, there was an inbuilt pressure for technological change (Turner 10). As groups competed to constantly expand and incorporate new territories, technology such as guns helped certain groups achieve greater influence through warfare. Groups would align themselves and attach others so as to take over possession and rights to more land.

This incorporative mentality, quite different from the behavior of Aboriginal groups, formed the basis for the rise of river valley civilizations. With the advent of farming, river valleys developed increasingly larger and larger populations, which not only became an advantage over other groups in and of itself, but also resulted in a transformation in values away from hunting and gathering, in which groups sought to incorporate foreign women into their own ranks, to form stable, self-sufficient societies.

We begin our discussion of geography and culture with river valleys simply because they reveal the strongest connection with the Paleolithic hunter gatherer societies, which form the direct ancestors of these first sedentary farmers. Mingled with river valley cultures’ distaste for the nomads who continued to exist side by side with them, often as direct, physical threats, was a curious nostalgia for the lost, Edenic existence they epitomized, one in which humans were part of the natural world and not separate from it. As mentioned earlier, much of river valley ritual is actually an attempt to recover the unity that was lost with the break caused by farming and herding. Paradoxically, members of river valley cultures also felt a strong aversion to the values and traditions of the nomadic past, especially the incorporation of foreign women into their society.

This basic contradiction, the nostalgia for the hunting and gathering past and the direct disavowal of the incorporative tendencies by which such hunting groups lived, forms an important lens through which we analyze the first of our case studies, Vedic India. Such an approach helps us to understand many of the otherwise esoteric and puzzling aspects of both ritual practice and narrative literature. One of the most rewarding results of our analysis has been to understand the pre-occupation that river valley civilizations have with women, especially with the threat of their abduction. While the exchange of women formed the cultural norm in smaller, nomadic groups, the prohibition of such an exchange became central to the more widely read epics of many of these early river valley cultures. The Greek and Roman epic story of Helen’s abduction by Paris, and the war fought for her recovery, contrasts strongly with the narratives that Turner analyzes from the Algonkians, in which such an exchange is not just sought but mandatory. The Vedic narrative The Ramayana tells a similar story, in which Sita is abducted by Ravana and taken to a foreign realm and Rama wages an epic battle in order to recover her. We might just as easily analyze the story of Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, who is abducted by a young Egyptian. Jacob’s sons wage war on the Egyptians, who have surreptitiously convinced them to circumcise themselves. The Egyptians are slaughtered and Dinah is returned to her family. In China, myths, stories, and legends about princesses who were abducted by or reluctantly given in marriage to fierce nomadic peoples such as the Tubo, the Huns, or the Mongols form various reprisals of this theme. Princess Wencheng who was sent in marriage to the Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo will be discussed in the fourth chapter. Another case that would provide fruitful analysis in this light is that of Cai Wenji, who was abducted by the Xiongnu in the second century. Eventually war between the Han and the Xiongnu was averted when the Xiongnu accepted a ransom for her.

Our investigation of the essential question for the freshman humanities core does not aim to unearth small details about the cultures that we study. We remain at the level of the big picture. Hence, we know we are doing our jobs if we are able to make a link between the basic geographic features in question—rivers, islands, deserts, and mountains—and the most prominent aspects of those cultures. We know we are doing our jobs if we are able to cast light on the plots of the main epics of those respective cultures, or find a link between some of the most distinctive qualities of those cultures and the geography in which they arise. One of the greatest achievements that such an approach, initiated by the work of Jared Diamond, yields is that we may delve beneath the prejudices that many of us bear, especially the conception that the river valleys, with all