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We tend to think of ancient cultures as monolithic: the Minoans, the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Romans. But there were subcultures and differing groups within those larger labels, just like there are now among, say, Americans or modern Greek people.
It can be difficult to tease out the identities of the subcultures, but it's important to do so. Why? Because choosing not to bother has the effect of erasing those people from history. I think they deserve better than that.
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I'm standing on a street corner, waiting for the light to change.
There's not a car moving for blocks in either direction. Back home in the US, I'd just cross the street, light or no light.
But I'm not at home; I'm in Germany, standing with a bunch of local people, waiting for the light to change.
Complicating the matter is the fact that, though I'm not a local, I look like one. Anglo-German on one side, Anglo-Austrian on the other: whatever it means to look German, I do. Here, people on the street automatically address me in German.
I stand and wait with the others.
Growing up as a little gay witch kid in a place where it wasn't safe to be either, I learned about inner freedom early on. Beneath your cloak of invisibility, you can be whoever you want to be.
Still, it's a disconcerting moment. If the SS had come to the door and started asking about the neighbors, what would I have told them?
Previous essays in this series
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I’ve recently had my DNA analyzed through 23andMe (a birthday gift) and the most fascinating thing has turned out to be my maternal haplogroup. The mtDNA is found in the mitochondria, and is not subject to recombination at sexual reproduction, and a copy (which can mutate occasionally, which is how subclades and new haplotypes begin) is passed down from mothers to their children, but only daughters pass that same sequence on to the next generation, so it’s a direct matrilineal lineage back to a common ancestor, who was an ancient woman, and my great-something grandmother. In the case of my haplogroup, she was the woman who started the haplotype “U” fairly soon after humans left Africa, and her lineage goes back to the earliest common female ancestor of all humans, in Africa, (called "Mitochondrial Eve") who started the haplotype “L”.
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My first installment demonstrated societies can be understood as ecosystems. When we think of society as an ecosystem, one question moves to the front: people are organisms, but where are the others? Ecosystems are not monocultures. A cultural ecology obviously depends on people and exists at the level of consciousness, so where are the other organisms?
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Memes
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Jarume Uwujare argues cultures should relate as equals when they take something from another, and contribute something to the other in return. I think we all can agree people can and should relate as equals, but I argue this is a confused way to think about cultures.
If I have what you want, we are not equal unless you also have what I want, and want it with about the same intensity. We can easily have a formal equality to make an exchange or not, but this equality is modified, sometimes drastically, by the intensity each of us has to make the exchange. The more desperate one party is compared to the other, the greater an important kind of inequality.
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