Welcome to the Geography of the Other!!

Dear Engineering Honors Students,

I wanted to welcome you officially to our new blogsite, from where we will launch our commentaries on class and reading and to exchange our ideas about the history of theoretical curiosity and wanderlust. You have your first assignment, which I sent to you via email (reading a passage in Clifford Geertz, and investigating the online resources for the meaning of "other" and "alterity"--a fancier word for the same thing).

Once you log on to this blogsite, I want you to begin some reflection on a small matter that will occupy us off and on for the first month or so. I would like you to consider the familiar culture of our present day. Specifically examine our sedentary existence (the fact that we live in homes, in neighborhoods and communities within cities and suburbs, travel out of leisure rather than economic necessity, and rely upon other enterprises to produce our sustenance) and do so in light of the longer history of human habitation of the globe during which we were nomadic (wandering on foot in occasional alliance with animals living off what the land would yield). Now take some time between now and next Tuesday to jot down some thoughts about this rather significant transformation.

Here are some thoughts/questions to guide your reflections: What are the advantages of nomadic life? What are the advantages of sedentary life? How was this grand transformation effected so thoroughly that we have gone from hunter gatherers to city dwellers with scarcely a memory of the history that brought us here? Does it matter?


Here are a few quotes to addle your thinking apparatus:


Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death. (Blaise Pascal, Pensees)


The founders of monastic rule were forever devising techniques for quelling wanderlust in their novices. "A monk out of his cell," said St. Anthony, "is like a fish out of water." Yet, Christ and the Apostles _walked_ their journeys through the hill of Palestine. (Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)


Life is a bridge; cross over it but build no house on it. (Indian Proverb)


The Desert People (the Bedouin) are closer to being good than settled peoples because they are closer to the First State and are more removed from all the evil habits that have infected the hearts of settlers. (Ib'n Khaldun, Muqaddimah)


Useless to ask a wandering man advice on the construction of a house. The work will never come to completion. (Book of Odes)


He who does not travel does not know the value of men. (Moorish proverb)


In _The Descent of Man_ Darwin notes that in certain birds the migratory impulse is stronger than the maternal. A mother will abandon her fledglings in the nest rather than miss her appointment for the long journey south. (Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines)


I urge you to mull these questions over in light of these quotations and mix in your own sense of the history and lets see what comes out of the effort. Please bring your reflections to class on a sheet of paper with your name and please make certain that they are printed (by means of a computer and a printer) and NOT handwritten.

It will be a pleasure to meet you and to get to work with you over the next two semesters in a course of study that will
take us down a complex path of investigation in arts, anthropology, history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion.

Thanks a lot. I'll see you very soon.

Dr. J.