Humanity Quotes

“even if you count back only four or five generations, you have an enormous number of living biological relatives descended from those ancestors. This is why it’s not very unusual if you are descended from George Washington or another founding father or mother.”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“In the early 1980s, the authors of this book first heard about a medical practice that involves integrating music into the treatment of both biomedical and psychological disorders. At the time, we thought the field now called music therapy was a new mode of treatment and a new occupation. As the preceding examples illustrate, many other cultures have long recognized the connection between music and healing and have integrated the performance arts into their treatments.”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“The idea of “art for art’s sake” is a recent Western cultural phenomenon that in some ways both distracts and diminishes the reality of human creative expressions. If we define art broadly, then it permeates virtually every aspect of our lives. All of us search for and attempt to create that which is aesthetically pleasing; thus, we are all “artists.”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“Or we could change the definition in another way. We could remove the part of the definition that refers to “supernatural powers.” Then sorcery and witchcraft would include beliefs that unknown persons harm others using techniques that cannot be demonstrated to be real or that are not observable. In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy played on people’s fears in the 1950s by claiming that the government and Hollywood were filled with Communists dedicated to overturning all that Americans hold dear. In the 1980s and 1990s, various supremacists blamed certain political factions and minorities for social problems and what they believed to be the degeneration of their nation’s values. Will there be other witch hunts in the twenty-first century?”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“Superstition is something that someone else believes in but you do not. Many of our own beliefs seem superstitious to others, and undoubtedly many of the accepted truths of the twenty-first century will be considered superstitions by the twenty-second century.”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“Just because no human group has achieved some state in the past does not mean that none will achieve it in the future”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“Hinduism, the predominant religion (in India), believes in the existence of multiple gods, many of whom are androgynous (having both female and male characteristics). Many Hindu sects are devoted to the worship of specific deities, such as Rama, Vishnu, and Shiva.”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“In Japan:
The shortage of wives for farmers became a rural crisis. In one village in the late 1980s, of unmarried persons between ages 25 and 39, 120 were men and only 31 were women, a ratio of 4:1. Some Japanese villages organized to find wives for their bachelors. One mountain village placed newspaper ads, promising free winter skiing vacations to all young women who visited and agreed to meet its men. Over a fiveyear period, 300 women responded, but none became wives of a village
man. In another mountain village of 7,000, there were three bachelors for every unmarried woman, so the local government became a marriage agent. It brought in 22 women from the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and other Asian countries to marry its men, many in their 40s and 50s. Some marriages endured, but others ended in divorce because of the labor demands of farm life, the burden wives bore in caring for their husband’s elderly parents, and cultural differences. Small businesses developed that offered counseling services for bicultural couples and served as marriage brokers to match Japanese men with foreign women.
Even today, many Japanese farm men remain bachelors. Farming in Japan is now primarily a part-time occupation—farmers find off-season jobs in construction or other tasks, unable to make an acceptable living even with government subsidies. And farming is now largely performed by older persons. For example, in one important rice-growing area, between 1980 and 2003, the number of people making most of their money from farming fell by 56 percent, and the number of people between ages 15 and 59 fell by 83 percent. There was one increase, though: there were 600 more farmers older than 70 in 2003 than in 1980.”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“Will universal health coverage lead the country (USA) down the slippery path to the dreaded European-style socialism?”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“China uses about half of the world’s cement for its new roads and buildings.
According to the World Bank in 2007, China had 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities.
One day in January 2013, the air pollution index in Beijing was 755—measured on a scale of 0 to 500!
In late 2012, 16,000 dead pigs were found floating in the river that supplies water to
Shanghai, the PRC’s largest city.
For 2010, a ministry of the Chinese government estimated the monetary cost of the environmental damage caused by rapid industrialization at $230 billion, which is 3.5 percent of China’s gross domestic product.
Air pollution from Chinese factories wafts over to the Koreas and Japan. Sometimes, upper atmospheric winds carry the sulphur dioxide from China’s coal-burning clear over to North America’s west coast.”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

“Apparently, when conditions were right, peoples of all world regions were quite capable of transforming wild plants into domesticated crops—a good point to keep in mind when next you hear someone claim that some cultures (usually their own) are more inventive or creative than others.”
― James Peoples, Humanity: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology