Thursday, May 7, 2015
Last quarter I took a class in which I learned about many ancient eastern civilizations around Europe and Asia. One particular civilization I was drawn to throughout the course was the Minoan civilization. The Minoan people lived on the island of Crete in around 3700 BCE. They were a very peaceful people with a culture rooted in ritual and worship. However they did not worship mythological entities, rather they had a sort of religious relationship with the earth and nature: trees, boulders, animals, grains. Something I found particularly interesting is that while their rituals often revolved around plants and animals, their most important and prominent ritual did not involve animal sacrifice, as has been historically customary in many ancient cultures; instead, it involved animal praise through a mutual human-animal interaction. The Minoans has a very special relationship with bulls. They revered them and respected their power and strength. They never killed or hunted them for food, as they were sacred to the culture. They constructed a palace centered around a large plaza solely for the bull ritual, adorned with paintings of bulls. During the ritual, many would gather to watch a performer dance with a bull. In this act of worship, the partaker would perform acrobatic moves, balancing on the bull's horns and leaping over under and around it. This Minoans praised the bulls because they respected their power courage and valiance and strove to emulate these qualities as a society. I think this is a very special relationship in that these people sought harmony with the rest of nature rather than creating distance from it, and they praised it for all it provided them with. To my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong) western culture, today and historically, does not seem to have any human-animal relationships/ traditions of this nature. It may be interesting to ponder why that is, and why western societies seem to have created a distance between themselves and the rest of nature.
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As far as comparing and contrasting our civilization with the Minoan, I would say that capitalism is one of the biggest differences. Capitalism encourages exploitation of animals, and penalizes people/farmers who try to raise animals fairly, since that tends to cost more and hurt profits. Despite the prevalence of it, our culture shows deep signs of unease about this mistreatment. Animals have their names, and the meat products they are turned into have theirs. Pigs turn into pork, and cows turn into beef. This renaming seems to make it easier to separate the product from the sentient creature, and allows a cognitive dissonance that eases our guilt.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you Christopher on the way capitalism has lead western cultures to be profit oriented and has prevented many people within these societies to use their sympathetic imagination in living their lives. I did a little research on any, if at all human-animal traditions that existed in western culture. I discovered an interesting trend in my search results, the term "laboratory culture" kept coming up. I think the main thing that has prevented western cultures from developing close, interpersonal traditions with non-human animals is the way we view animals as proponents of profit, rather that fellow species craving to coexist. I have a feeling if one were to research the religions behind these different cultures, there would be apparent differences in their regards to animals that has connections to how we accept the awful treatment of animals today as a norm.
ReplyDeleteI think our culture still involves animals very much. We might not worship animals as they have in other cultures, but everywhere we look animals make an impact on society. Like if we were to imagine our society of capitalism without animals, how different would it look.
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