“A Great Arc” of Possibilities

Abstract

In June of 1883, a fledgling German physicist sailed from Hamburg to spend a year on Baffin Island, between mainland Canada and Greenland. The purpose of his trip was to live with the native people and study their relationship to the surrounding geography. During the year, he came face to face with the subject of this chapter: the nature of a cultural configuration, and upon his return, he wrote:

After a long and intimate intercourse with the Eskimo, it was with feelings of sorrow and regret that I parted from my Arctic friends. I had seen that they enjoyed life, and a hard life, as we do; that nature is beautiful to them; that feelings of friendship also root in the Eskimo heart; that, although the character of their life is so rude as compared to civilized life, the Eskimo is a man as we are; that his feelings, his virtues and his shortcomings are based in human nature, like ours. (quoted in Herskovits, 1953)

It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious. We won’t be able to construct machines like ourselves until we’ve understood this, and we’re not even close. Lewis Thomas