Nuclear Family Is Not A Given

New data using DNA from victims of the Pompeii eruption has highlighted the distorted conception our civilisation has been attempting to impose nuclear family as the forever and unique and culturally superior vision of family.

The DNA obtained on the corpses still intact from the eruption and the plaster cast has shown people in arms found under the same roof thought to be a parent and their child are not related. First of all, adoption was a trend at the time explaining some parenthood not being blood relationship. While we can deconstruct the idea on nuclear blood-related families leaving their final moments in each other’s arms, it does not necessarily mean households at the time were a mix of individuals living together. The reality is roman households were also the home of slaves and it was common practice for masters and slaves to live with their families together under the same roof.

Origins of Mankind Through Data Extrapolation

What is history and how does it relate to humankind’s story?

History is a series of events that shaped our species into being what it is. These events can be man made but are also beyond the scope of Man’s actions; such is the case of climate and geological formations that changed the landscape where our ancestors evolved. Not only did nature change our relation to the world and its environment and wildlife, but it also modifies greatly how we interact with our fellow man or woman. Our species is the only one to have spread on such a scale that we now inhabit every continent except Antarctica. While our adaptation and curiosity pushed our species to always venture further, we were however the subject of geographic distances and disturbances that created differentiation inside our species. And so much so that individuals discovering new land were surprised to see communities that had thrived there for thousands of years without any contact with others. And finally, because history does not permeates through time, we have to discover events that happened over the millennia.

Orientalism and Harems

We have been talking on this blog about how Western hegemony has influenced and continues to maintain stereotypes on cultures which have seen better recognition from the work of scholars in many fields of study (archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, etc.). Schools of thought carried by European nations, reinforced during their subjugation of parts of the world as colonisers,

Fantasy as reality

The school of thought carried by European nations, reinforced during their subjugation of parts of the world as colonisers, that lesser peoples possess cultural phenomenons inherent to their late and immature development is still, to this day, source of fantasies in the collective imagination. Authors would often use tropes to expose issues Europeans were facing in terms of religious code of conduct governing even the slightest parts of everyday life and marital relations; for example, the Ottoman Empire was thought to harbour the most ludicrous aspects of men to women relationships, eroticism and lovers intrigue taking up most of a sultan’s busy day. Such fantasies include the harem, a place forbidden to men where the monarch where he would store his women to fulfill his most epicurean depravity on the most lavish setting which would certainly contrast with a king’s way of life on the European continent. These orientalist clichés scholars have been trying to deconstruct are still common tropes in today’s fiction, from cinema to literature.

Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood

The idea that theories of yesteryear were developed considering tools and information available at the time leads us to understand the writings not as true statements but as the start of critical thinking by rejecting them using new data.

Because Jean-Jacques Rousseau was living at a time when Europeans were discovering a new continent and new people displaying what appeared rudimentary customs (or so they thought by comparison with life in Europe), he was led to believe that they were the exact model of a way of life before civilisation transformed humans into a social species. To say that these “savages” reflected what humanity was stuck doing for thousands of years (we are here talking about those who still harbour this same line of thinking even with modern archaeological advancements), it is foregoing our creative, inventive and curious nature trying to rise above our condition: too simple of a thought.