Mountaincentric vs Desertcentric
Bret Cahill
notice the mountains. When I'm in the desert it's reversed; I
occasionally notice some mountains but mostly I see desert.
This always comes as a surprise. I wonder if I cannot even be aware of
big mountains or large deserts, then how can I be any good at dealing
with large foreign nations or peoples?
Bret Cahill
"Up in the Mountain Air"
-- the alternate or subtitle of _Zarathustra_
Immortalist
Bret Cahill wrote:
> When I'm up in the mountains I see some desert sometimes but mostly I
> notice the mountains. When I'm in the desert it's reversed; I
> occasionally notice some mountains but mostly I see desert.
>
Environmental Preference
One of the most important considerations in the survival of any
organism is habitat selection. Until the development of cities 10,000
years ago, human life was mostly nomadic. Finding desirable conditions
for survival, particularly with an eye towards potential food and
predators, would have selectively affected the human response to
landscape-the capacity of landscape types to evoke positive emotions,
rejection, inquisitiveness, and a desire to explore, or a general sense
of comfort.
Responses to landscape types have been tested in an experiment in which
standardized photographs of landscape types were shown to people of
different ages and in different countries:
deciduous forest
tropical forest
open savannah with trees
coniferous forest
desert.
Among adults, no category stood out as preferred (except that the
desert landscape fell slightly below the preference rating of the
others). However, when the experiment was applied to young children, it
was found that they showed a marked preference for savannahs with
trees-exactly the East African landscape where much early human
evolution took place (Orians and Heerwagen 1992).
Beyond a liking for savannahs, there is a general preference for
landscapes with water;
a variety of open and wooded space (indicating places to hide and
places for game to hide);
trees that fork near the ground (provide escape possibilities) with
fruiting potential a metre or two from the ground;
vistas that recede in the distance, including a path or river that
bends out of view but invites exploration;
the direct presence or implication of game animals;
and variegated cloud patterns.
The savannah environment is in fact a singularly food-rich environment
(calculated in terms of kilograms of protein per square kilometre), and
highly desirable for a hunter-gatherer way of life. Not surprisingly,
these are the very elements we see repeated endlessly in both calendar
art and in the design of public parks worldwide.
The idea of a pervasive Pleistocene taste in landscape received support
from an unusual project undertaken by two Russian émigré artists,
Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, in 1993. They hired a professional
polling organization to conduct a broad survey of art preferences of
people living in ten countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the
Americas (Wypijewski 1997). Blue turned out to be the favourite colour
worldwide, with green in second place. Respondents expressed a liking
for realistic representative paintings. Preferred elements included
water, trees and other plants, human beings (with a preference for
women and children, and also for historical figures, such as Jomo
Kenyatta or Sun Yat-sen), and animals, especially large mammals, both
wild and domestic. Using the statistical preferences as a guide, Komar
and Melamid then produced a favourite painting for each country. Their
intent was clearly ironic, as the painting humorously mixed completely
incompatible elements-America's Most Wanted, as it was titled,
presented a Hudson River School scene, with George Washington standing
beside a lake in which a large hippo is bellowing. But there was also a
serious side to the project; for the paintings, though created from the
choices of different cultures, tended to share a remarkably similar set
of preferences-they looked like ordinary European landscape calendar
art, both photographic and painted. In an attempt to explain this odd
cross-cultural uniformity-which had East Africans choosing the lush
calendar scenes over landscapes they might be familiar with in their
own daily lives-Arthur Danto claimed that the Komar-Melamid paintings
demonstrate the power of the international calendar industry to
influence taste away from indigenous values and towards European
conventions. While he admits that the Kenyans preferred scenes that
looked more like upper New York State than like Kenya, the polling work
also indicated that most Kenyans had calendars in their homes (Danto,
in Wypijewski 1997). What this does not acknowledge is the question of
why worldwide calendars have the same landscape themes-the very
themes that evolutionary psychology would predict. The real question is
"Why are calendars so uniform in their content worldwide?" a
uniformity that includes other, non-landscape, objects of attention,
such as babies, pretty girls, children, and animals. It is the calendar
industry that has, by meeting market demands, discovered a Pleistocene
taste in outdoor scenes.
http://www.denisdutton.com/aesthetics_&_evolutionary_psychology.htm
> This always comes as a surprise. I wonder if I cannot even be aware of
> big mountains or large deserts, then how can I be any good at dealing
> with large foreign nations or peoples?
>
Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes
ANNOTATION
An account of daily life in a community of chimpanzees that reveals
sexual rivalries and complex political strategies.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
This extraordinary account of schmoozing, scheming, and consensus
building among the chimpanzees of a large zoo colony in Arnhem, The
Netherlands, attracted attention. Throughout this revised edition -
which features a new gallery of color photographs along with a new
introduction and epilogue - de Waal expands and updates his story of
the Arnhem colony and its continuing political upheavals. We learn the
fate of many memorable characters and meet the colony's current leaders
and their allies. The new edition remains a detailed and thoroughly
engrossing account - of sexual rivalries and coalitions, of actions
governed by intelligence rather than instinct - and it reaffirms the
complex bond between humans and their closest living relatives. As we
watch the chimpanzees of Arnhem behave in ways we recognize from
Machiavelli (and from the nightly news), de Waal reminds us again that
the roots of politics are older than humanity.
SYNOPSIS
First published in 1982, "Chimpanzee Politics" helped to establish the
now accepted view that the higher animals experience desires,
intentions, and even consciousness. With this edition, de Waal brings
his revealing study of primate politics up to date. 147 illustrations.
22 pp. in color. 216 pp.
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?isbn=0801863368
Bill Snyder
"Bret Cahill" <BretC...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1135619106.0...@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> When I'm up in the mountains I see some desert sometimes but mostly I
> notice the mountains. When I'm in the desert it's reversed; I
> occasionally notice some mountains but mostly I see desert.
>
> This always comes as a surprise. I wonder if I cannot even be aware of
> big mountains or large deserts, then how can I be any good at dealing
> with large foreign nations or peoples?
>
So you might not be so apt to view where you are through the eyes of someone
who constantly brings their preferred thing to view to bear on what is
before them. When in the mountains view mountains; when in the desert view
the desert. Just good sense. Similarly, when in Egypt, view Egypt, don't
look at it as if it were the US. Same with Iraq or Afghanistan or China or
Mexico or ..... We US travellers tend to view wherever we visit through its
similarity and difference with the US. That's viewing the mountains as if
they were the desert.
BS
Robert Cohen
Jared Diamond wouldn't tell you this, but I will:
Take plenty of container water into the desert, and watch where you
walk on the mountain.
Though Diamond has somethings less insightful to add:
Bret Cahill
cannot help lingering. The desert mountain rivals the marshes of Glenn
Co. especially when you consider there are only a few small mosquitoes.
Bret Cahill