Posts Tagged ‘Deep World’

Culture and Human Capacities

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

Part of my work has been to study, collect, and apply a portion of the inventory of human capacities as they have developed around the world under different environmental and social conditions. How Africans walk and think and celebrate spirit, how the Chinese teach and study and paint, how Inuit people experience vivid three dimensional inner imagery, how the Balinese learn to perform any manner of artistic endeavor so rapidly and with such high craft, how a tribe along the Amazon raises happy and non-neurotic children, why certain children in India raised amidst traditional music develop extraordinary skill in mathematics–these are capacities no longer limited to place and culture. In this new world of hybrid vigor, all these potentials once nurtured in separate societies are now available to the entire family of humankind.

(more…)