As to fire being "invented" (or more appropriately, "developed") in China, I would disagree with this larger premise, but I would suggest that Sesame chose a poor choice of words to express a larger concept. I suspect he meant to imply that "fire" was akin to "fireworks," or an artistry of using fire and flammable materials. I'll let him clarify his own position, but if this broader definition is applied, I most hardily agree, as our classical notion of "fireworks" is almost universally credited to the region of China.
For that matter, I don't think that Sesame necessarily espouses a Indo-centric perspective of human development, but I think that he attempts to counter the rather obvious Euro-centric view that has come to dominate MUCH of academia. Contemporary studies have done much to discredit the Euro-centric view, and this is admirable, but we still have MUCH to learn. The West still has much to embrace that came from the East, or farther. Even with our best hypotheses of how the "New World" came to be settled, it is our Mayan ancestors that developed perhaps the single best calendar in the history of mankind. Their calendar is more accurate (down to tenths or hundredths of a second) than our own Gregorian means of keeping time. This makes you really ponder what we consider "primitive" culture???
|
08-31-2008
Hybrid Mode
