[lit-ideas] Re: Not very neighbourly
- From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:21:19 -0400
> Given the universal role of sharing food as a marker of community and
well-documented cases of not sharing food as a marker of social
difference -high caste Hindus refusing to eat food touched by low caste
Hindus is a classic example-the implicit meaning of the question is,
"Are you enough like us that we can get along and develop a social
relationship?"
In his book _Plagues and Peoples_, which Jared Diamond so liberally
imitated, O'Neill argues that the ultimate reason for the Hindu social
practices was based on disease. The Dravidians, driven into the South,
were likely vectors for tropical contagion, and so when a high caste
touched a low caste person or food, the high caste person was required
to wash, i.e., to engage in a ritual ablution ceremony. The same
epidemiological reasons, masked by tradition, are at work in Jewish
kosher and Muslim halal prescriptions about food.
Considering that European diseases killed about 90 percent of the Native
Americans, one can see the way epidemiology matters to cultures, and is
then explained religiously. In my opinion, the disease explanation is a
highly effective naturalistic argument for addressing the surface
cultural phenomena.
Now that Western medicine has spread worldwide, and the human population
steadily increased for the first time in history, cultural explanations
based on motives ("Can we understand each other's motives?) do come into
force, as John suggests. though disease and plagues are the naturalistic
root.
Eric
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