Patrick Elliott wrote:
> In article <481### [at] hotmailcom>, a_l### [at] hotmailcom 
> says...
>> Yes, you are. More in tone than in observation. One other way to look at 
>> it is that there is a confusion of inheritance of culture and 
>> inheritance of genes. While it is worthwhile to preserve the culture, 
>> not everybody that has the genes is part of that culture. Especially the 
>> ones that have nearly no culture at all, and that preserve what is left 
>> in ethanol.
> Well, we were talking about one specific group of people and if they, 
> by reason of "blood", not "culture", should get some sort of special 
> treatments, not something more general, so.. Also, culture changes over 
> time. You can preserve it by reenacting it, like people do in a "lot" of 
> cases, while still living in the modern world, or you can stuff your 
> head in the sand and render yourself extinct, by sticking to stuff that, 
> maybe, didn't work quite as well as the rose colored glasses look, which 
> some people get looking at their pasts, implies.

There is more to culture than artifacts and habits. It often goes with a 
set of ideas that go much further than that. E.g the fact that americans 
as a group have difficulty planning ahead for more than 5 years and that 
europeans are often unable to not take 20 years ahead into consideration 
is culture. Thinking of time as progress or as a cyclic thing is 
cultural. Specific types of jokes are cultural. In fact much of what 
people think of as religion is cultural. E.g. much of what we consider 
as offensive in the way some Muslim men treat women is purely cultural. 
It has nothing to do with Islam as a religion, no matter what the local 
imam (or your average islamophobe ) is saying. He is simply passing on 
his local culture (or that of his ancestors) to the people listening. 
The same goes for conservative Christians and in a sense for the 
Catholic church as well. Why am I writing this?... Ah, because I had the 
impression that you may not differentiate between culture with folklore 
in the way that I think you should (indeed, I am Dutch ;) ).

> Sometimes cultures die 
> out from competition, not due to overt and intentional destruction from 
> outside.
> 
>> Your three types are worldwide. There are several tribes trying to live 
>> a traditional way of life in this modern madness and there are those 
>> that do nothing and blame everything on others. My sister was a few 
>> years ago in Cameroon and she was supposed (and subtly forced) to pay 
>> for the food of everybody she met because she was from Europe and, well, 
>> you know, slavery and such.
> The problem imho, is that, rather than figure out what is good from now, 
> a lot of them simply reject everything from now, for some imaginary 
> ideal of the past, forgetting all the bad shit that used to happen when 
> they *did* live in the simple, supposedly non-mad world. I might agree 
> that the US often fails to look at the consequences of progress, and 
> gives up on some stuff too easy. We also, sadly, tend to hang on to some 
> of the stupidest and most useless crap from the past possible, at least 
> among the conservatives, because admitting its crap would be 
> **liberal**, so one must instead fight even harder to preserve it, even 
> when it didn't make sense to 50% of the people when it *was* wide 
> spread...

as a non-native american (and non-non-native american) I think I refrain 
from commenting.

> 
>> One other thing: the three types are actually at least six, because it 
>> is all about a clash of two cultures and you forgot to take the culture 
>> that ends on top into consideration. The remaining ones are: 3b) winning 
>> group basically goes on undisturbed. 1b) Cultures get mixed and 2b) 
>> winning group takes most of the culture over from the defeated (I think 
>> I remember there were case where that happened but can't remember 
>> which). And there is also the situation that no group actually wins totally.
>>
> True enough. And really, there is no such thing as 3b. Something always 
> transfers. 

I think there is little of native american in the US culture as a whole, 
  nor is there much aboriginal culture in Australia (not counting 
'artistic' artifacts). In contrast there appears to be Maori in 
mainstream New Zealand culture.

> The most common tactic is to borrow the idea, claim you came 
> up with it, then vigorously deny it existed "before" you borrowed it. 
> The Catholic church is an expert on that, given that, if what many 
> scholars now consider to be true is, nothing from the NT itself to their 
> rituals, holidays, saints, or **anything** is original. Its all been 
> borrowed from whom ever was the biggest threat to them at the time. lol

I think it is hard to tell and I would not say it so boldly. Anyway even 
the things adopted from other groups were often also adopted by that 
group before. And...

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