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Civilization

My own most meaningful and relevant portrayal of the human condition

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My own most meaningful and relevant portrayal of the human condition

For our next meeting, write a two-page paper, correctly formatted according to the professional format appropriate to your major (you may use MLA if you prefer), detailing your response to the course texts, lectures, and discussions so far.  Referring when appropriate to the concepts, critical terms, and readings discussed in class, and quoting the texts where appropriate, write the paper conveying your own most meaningful and relevant portrayal of the human condition.  Be sure to give your paper an original and appropriate title (not a perfunctory or unimaginative one).

You are encouraged to structure your paper such that it incorporates the issues, themes, and texts that have most mattered to you, and expresses your own interests, questions, and point of view most effectively, concisely, and frankly.  Feel free to bring up any issues the course has caused you to ponder, whether about the human condition or (more specifically) yourself.[unique_solution]

Please consult the sample summary of the Genesis and Babylonian texts that I have posted under “documents” on our course Blackboard page, and use it as a loose model for how to incorporate quotes and structure your paper in a thematically unified and compelling way.  I recommend referencing two or three of the texts that most captivated you; there is no need to reference all of the texts, for example, and you should only do so if that feels necessary to conveying your most candid impression of the course so far.  Your writing should strive for clarity and avoid jargon.

Do your best, and be sure to hand in a carefully edited and proofread paper.

Texts considered so far:  the short stories “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Tablet IV of the Babylonian creation myth; Genesis 4, the story of Cain and Abel; the social psychological experiments by Stanley Milgram (Obedience to Authority experiment), Philip Zimbardo (the Stanford Prison Experiment), and Solomon Asch (Conformity experiment); the April 4, 2016 Nature article by Joseph Watts et al, “Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies”; the reading from Brian Hayden’s 2018 book The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and the Origin of Social Complexity; the reading from the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi.

Themes and critical terms include violent ritual (including ritual human sacrifice) and its putative role in the maintenance of two primary forms of human social organization, egalitarian (Ernest Gellner’s “tyranny of the cousins”) and transegalitarian (Gellner’s “tyranny of the king”); the theoretical role of secret societies in social stratification; the socially “generative” role of coercion; the problem of human “badness” or evil (Xunzi, Paul Ricœur); sorcery, witchcraft and witchcraft beliefs; the goodness paradox, human domestication, and the alleged role of intraspecial remote killing in human evolution (Richard Wrangham); the sacrificial origins of the state (or civilization) as related in myth (sacred narrative); the role of the sacred executioner (Hyam Maccoby’s phrase) in myth and anthropology.

  Remember! This is just a sample.

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