If or as one becomes serious about global cultural polyphony, the physical structure that drives that is the earth and the influence exerted by its geophysical challenges and features.

This is a thing so large, so pervasive, we don’t think about it too much, and yet, from what may be used for clothing and how designed to what may be eaten and how prepared, our surrounds are in everything we do.

The intellectual thing we don’t think about and yet have the greatest difficulty in understanding is the invention of our greatest cultural technology: language.  We create it, live suspended in it, are channeled by it in many ways, but it having stability for many good reasons (including the observation that it would not exist or function absent of some stability), we wrestle with it even as it evolves (or I would be typing this in Latin).

For both ethnic and personal self-concept, I would regard land and language _and their legacies_ as fundamental.

The conversation had to do with Indus Valley Civilization and outlooks and tensions involving ethnic, national, and regional self-concept.

Starting Point Reference

God is Red by Vine Deloria, Jr.

Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett.

Note: if any should like books cited in reference to link directly to Amazon in the United States, do tell.  I thought it more universal to link to related reviews and Wikipedia entries.

Also, I’m preparing for this blog a page (in WordPress terms) for my library, which is still of personal size but growing.

Addendum

Tacked on to the same conversation:

A conversation that travels around the world may be about many discovered, renewed, and strengthened alignments and alliances.  It is a conversation that dictators and those of similar mien and ambition must fear because it is out of their control and may go against them.  One cannot keep apart people who have a deep affinity between them; however,a less considerate and strident charismatic and social cabal can and will produce ruin in a hurry, and in history, never more so than today.  Those so much better grounded in their humanity needs must rise to their occasion.