"The Great Pail"
Derivative Project

The Dichotomy of Cultural Anthropology

Two British and American old men, Toynbee and Huntington, started the debate on the grand narrative of civilization. This is undoubtedly a deconstruction of human history, which has triggered a new wave of historical standardization. As the elite members of human beings, the intellectuals have declared without shame that they have the powerful ability to draw a line with the humble animal kingdom, that is, they have found the four great signs that distinguish humans from animals.

The best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari claimed in "A Brief History of Human Beings" that walking upright, having a larger brain capacity, using fire (becoming the earliest cook in the biological world and the inventor of the dark night culture), and being good at socializing are all important. It is the main scale for human beings to differentiate themselves from the animal kingdom, and it is also the four magic weapons for human beings to climb to the top of the biological chain. Although this classification method is crude and uninnovative, it is enough to satisfy the cognitive hunger of the scientifically illiterate public.

This kind of standardized operation can also be repeated in the writing of human history. When people need to name some human historical activities in ancient times, they will use "culture" to name them. For example, historians call the remains of human activities discovered in the Yangshao area "Yangshao Culture". And there are four standards to measure this "culture" -

The first is to have pantheistic religious beliefs and have professionals such as priests and wizards; the second is to master a complex language system and be able to use this language to start a dialogue with gods/humans; the third is to have mobility/settlement The gathering villages and houses with vegetation/stone materials; the fourth is the use of stone and pottery tools, stone tools tend to be more detailed, and there is a differentiation of tools and decorative functions, and it is possible to fire wheeled pottery (especially painted pottery), And make it an important commodity in regional trade.

After the "culture" continued to move forward, people finally waited for the great thing called "civilization". The lonely fireball on the ground slowly illuminates the wise faces of human beings.

Green Daniel proposed three signs to measure civilization. The first is writing, whether it is pure pictographic or pictographic/phonetic double-material writing; the second is the emergence of large-scale cities, even with tall terraces, stairs and city walls. And it can accommodate more than 5,000 residents; the third is the ritual building that forms a system, such as the pyramids of Egypt and Maya; Japanese and Chinese scholars also add a fourth sign, which is the metal manufacturing system marked by bronze casting (mining, smelting and casting technology), this "three plus one" system, has become the basic tableware that people use to taste history.

This is actually the three "globalization" processes in the history of early human evolution. In the first stage of "gene seeding period", the great migration from Africa achieved the great goal of Homo sapiens globalization; and in the second stage of "painted pottery seeding period", human beings promoted The wave of globalization of painted pottery. In the third stage of the "bronze seeding period", human beings completed the process of bronze globalization by means of escape and trade. Without these three baptisms of "globalization", the cultural miracle of the "Axial Age" would not have occurred. (Click here to read the full article)