HUMAN 1C Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Laurens Van Der Post, Ethnography, San People
Document Summary
Historical materialism-makes you think about physical things like artifacts where you can attach meaning to. Time/place specificity makes you focus on what question you want to ask about a group of people in the natural world. Human beings from a particular cultural context will relate to nature differently. Contingency cause and effect interrelatedness-randomness historians cant explain. Causality is rooted in nature, but can also be changed by human agency>>humans can use fertilizer. Components of a historical argument: chronology, evidence, causality, significance. Change over time what changes at historical moments and why. Scale/unit of analysis scale: how wide do you look, how narrow do you look (big scale analysis vs small scale) Our best interpretation of rock art, nature is both material and spiritual. Relations to animals and spirits are constantly shifting. Christians differentiate more clearly between humans and nature, especially nature for human needs. In western intellectual thinking, people tend to be more important than nature.
