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--- 2700:2022:13 [2022/05/23 00:51] – [Secret agents] Ryan Schram (admin)
+++ 2700:2022:13 [2022/05/23 17:50] (current) – [Universal humanity and the colonization of consciousness] Ryan Schram (admin)
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   * Life itself has no single, simple definition. The working assumption is that all living things are related through a single evolutionary origin.
-  * To identify something as a living thing is essentially to say that it has a common ancestry with other living things, and thus has something in common with them, even though we may not know precisely what “it” is.
+    * To identify something as a living thing is essentially to say that it has a common ancestry with other living things, and thus has something in common with them, even though we may not know precisely what “it” is.
-  * What if there was another origin of life on Earth, and a completely separate evolutionary tree branched out from that point.
+  * What if there was another origin of life on Earth, and a completely separate evolutionary tree branched out from that point?
-  * These living things would appear to be nonliving to us, because they don’t have any common ancestors with us.
+    * These living things would appear to be nonliving to us, because they don’t have any common ancestors with us.
 Anthropology, the study of cultural diversity in humanity, is today asking the same thing.
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   * Auhelawa people have always seen themselves as //tomowa//, a type of being that exists alongside other beings seen and unseen. Today //tomowa// is a narrower category because people limit its meaning to the same as the English word //human//.
     * Being tomowa is defined in opposition to nature, rather than coexistence with many different beings.
-    * People take for granted that //papuwa// (Papuans) and //dimdim// (white people) are both //tomowa// because //papuwa// and //dimdim// are God’s children. By contrast, spirits and dwarfs are beliefs have about the world, not facts.
+    * People take for granted that //papuwa// (Papuans) and //dimdim// (white people) are both //tomowa// because //papuwa// and //dimdim// are God’s children. By contrast, spirits and dwarfs are beliefs people have about the world, not facts.
 A universal humanity is a basis for human equality: All people are equal because they are fundamentally the same.
-Yet this universalism also creates inequality of another kind: Alternative conceptions of oneself as a person don’t have the same credibility and authority as the dominant conception of the human subject as an individual.
+Yet this universalism also creates inequality of another kind: Alternative conceptions of oneself as a person don’t have the same credibility and authority as the dominant conception of the human subject as an individual. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o says in a recent profile in //The Atlantic// (Gibson 2022):
+**“The problem with language is hierarchy,” Ngũgĩ said. “It must have come with the conception of the modern state: ‘One language, one language!’ But it is hierarchy. It’s the oppression of many languages in favor of the one. In order for one language to be, others must die. It’s so backward and unproductive.”**
 Should anthropology instead be based on multiple humanities?
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 ———. 1986. //Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective//. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
+Gibson, D. W. 2022. “Ngũgĩ in America.” //The Atlantic//, May 20, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/05/ngugi-wa-thiongo-kenyan-writer-irvine/629923/.