The Rise of Cultures and the Subsequent Dissolution of Society - Research Paper Example

Download file to see previous pages Tribes of under a hundred individuals can maintain internal peace through a form of familial consensus. You're much less likely to victimize your community when you personally know everyone, and the group is small enough that everyone knows you. And exile could become a real threat if one were to commit offenses your people regard as a crime.
But a culture expansive enough where you do not have a relationship with a man you might meet down the street, even though he speaks the same language, and has the same religious beliefs, requires a professionalized delineation of the business of survival. And at this level, a single incident of natural violence is unlikely to spell the death-knell of that prosperous culture. But any human society must unavoidably find itself linked the interactions of environmental factors that control biology, via ecology. The premise I will demonstrate is that spontaneous catastrophes cannot annihilate an organized civilization and that only biological factors can determine whether ultimate social collapse is inevitable. These unlikely occurrences were explained as portents of an imminent, yet unknown disaster. It was later explained as a forewarning of the Spanish conquest and the military, social, and ecological consequences therein. Omens of this sort are illustrative of the fear primitive cultures felt in the face of shifts in natural forces that could indeed spell their doom. Although, it is possible that these pronouncements were post-conquest, historical revisions made as an attempt to justify the calamity that befell them, and perhaps to curry favor with the conquerors. ...Download file to see next pagesRead More