Sunday, September 21, 2008

A cultural necessity

Language could arguably be the most important facet of culture or even human existence. With globalization and the modern era,  cultures are connecting on a mass scale. Globalization can be great, like  the availabilities or more jobs and resources. However in my opinion it often does more harm than good. It changes cultures rapidly, by transforming ideals, traditions, pastimes and much more. Languages are becoming extinct because of globalization and modernization. With their extinction, the values, stories and information of those cultures can become extinct as well. Many people believe modern science knows best and is the most advance. While that may be true in a sense of gathering information effectively, what we may find out in thirty years might have been discovered thousands of years ago and accepted by a culture but simply lost by that language becoming extinct. I hope that more of the scientific world begins accepting the idea of local knowledge. It could benefit us greatly to accept what scientific facts have been found by indigenous cultures true and used for hundreds or thousands of years than to start from scratch. Language for indigenous cultures can be extremely telling of their identity as well. For instance in the video it talks about a Siberian culture having extremely specific words concerning reign-deer that would take 5 words to express in english. This would tell us the importance of having knowledge of reign-deer in their culture is. Languages like English, French and Spanish on the other hand don't really tell you anything about the culture. It's the subgroups of languages or the slang that would tell you more. 



I could get this video to upload it so here is the link. 


If you don't want to watch the entire video that I posted which hopefully works, skip to the 13;00 mark. It talks about how some "folk" science or science discovered by an indigenous people can be more advanced than modern science.

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