hong kong dragon!
Although I dread Thursdays because I have 4 classes and rediculous amounts of things to do, yesterday was pretty good. It was a reflective day. I got to sleep in a little bit and wake up slow because I was off work and catch up with my room mates who I never see anymore. Then I had my first 3 classes which were pretty boring and regular. I invited my friend Emily who's in the last two of those classes to get some half price sushi with me at this place near campus. Aaron came too. We enjoyed our lunch and I was off to skim some reading before my next class at 6. For some reason it was just beautiful on campus, the sun was setting and the temperature was perfect and I just sat at a picnic table reading about this Native American group.
The topic for this week was Spritual Ecology which I found myself to really enjoy. They were sustained primarily by fish and as part of their religion they believed that fish were actually people dressed in fish skins that had sacrificed themselves to feed their brothers. After the fish were consumed these people would thank the fish and ceremoniously return their bones to the stream where they came. (This is common among native americans to return people's bones to the believed place of origin to rest the spirits.) As it turns out, from an ecological standpoint, future generations of the salmon survived off of the nutrients provided by the bone deposits in the stream and continued to thrive in an area where otherwise they would not.
We had a guest speaker Dr. Eugene Anderson. He was hillarious and brought up some points that really provoked my thought. He made the point that it is a universal human trait to give the plants, animals, and inatimate objects that influence our lives agency. It can be seen all over the world corss culturally. This agency is important because even though we may not know "scientifically" how something works, ritual and religious knowledge is usually a step ahead. Many people... well "educated" people and scholarly people scoff at religion and dismiss it's validity because it's just some magical stories that people create. But really it has a lot of purpose.
He gave the example of some of his field work in Hong Kong where these people wanted to build a hospital and in construction it undercut the base of this mountain. The local superstition was that the mountains were actually dragons and if you cut into the dragon's flesh you will anger it. As it turns out after this hospital was built several people were killed because of some sort of landslide thing that western scientists at the time knew very little about. So if you look at it from the perspective of the locals, the dragon really did get angry.
Some things to think about, I guess.
The topic for this week was Spritual Ecology which I found myself to really enjoy. They were sustained primarily by fish and as part of their religion they believed that fish were actually people dressed in fish skins that had sacrificed themselves to feed their brothers. After the fish were consumed these people would thank the fish and ceremoniously return their bones to the stream where they came. (This is common among native americans to return people's bones to the believed place of origin to rest the spirits.) As it turns out, from an ecological standpoint, future generations of the salmon survived off of the nutrients provided by the bone deposits in the stream and continued to thrive in an area where otherwise they would not.
We had a guest speaker Dr. Eugene Anderson. He was hillarious and brought up some points that really provoked my thought. He made the point that it is a universal human trait to give the plants, animals, and inatimate objects that influence our lives agency. It can be seen all over the world corss culturally. This agency is important because even though we may not know "scientifically" how something works, ritual and religious knowledge is usually a step ahead. Many people... well "educated" people and scholarly people scoff at religion and dismiss it's validity because it's just some magical stories that people create. But really it has a lot of purpose.
He gave the example of some of his field work in Hong Kong where these people wanted to build a hospital and in construction it undercut the base of this mountain. The local superstition was that the mountains were actually dragons and if you cut into the dragon's flesh you will anger it. As it turns out after this hospital was built several people were killed because of some sort of landslide thing that western scientists at the time knew very little about. So if you look at it from the perspective of the locals, the dragon really did get angry.
Some things to think about, I guess.