Voigtlaender proves once more, how looking at only last fortnight’s history does not suffice to understand today’s problems. The problems of peoples living together, multinational states, and minorities are just as pressing now as they ever were and the solutions that worked best and longest in the past are often not those, current political correctness approves of.
Kitayama, Masuda and Yuki are quite relevant to archaeologists, I think. If differences like that obtain even between concurrent industrial nations, how much more can we expect over wide variations in living conditions and subsistence and across times of thousands of years?
I often wonder how the Cologne Cathedral, well visible from across the intervening twenty kilometres from here, must have seemed to those for whom it was in the far distance more than a day’s journey away and standing completely alone with no other high rise building in sight. What will Göbekli Tepe and the communal halls described by Baird and Mithen have meant to people, to whom cities and monuments were yet unknown.
Another frequently asked question is how much Japanese disinclination to improvise and act independently, disregarding superiors has contributed to the course of events in Fukushima.
Here’s the link to this week’s complete list.