Thin Cultures?

Spring Moon of the Southern Cross

34 degrees 43 minutes S 57 degrees 48 minutes W course 300 WNW Rio de Plata estuary

Threw out my back this morning. Gonna curb sightseeing here. Damn.

Our journey up the Rio de Plata to Buenos Aires moves forward at 12 knots, a stately pace, occasioned in part at least depth, I’m sure, and other traffic.

A cargo ship of some kind just passed us headed east toward the Atlantic. It had storage containers of a kind I saw in Ushuaia and couldn’t suss out. They were flat, about 2.5 feet deep and maybe 30×30, made of metal.

The water in the estuary is no longer ocean blue, but top soil brown. Rivers have many functions, but one of them deposits wind blown and erosion carried soil out first to deltas and then to sea.

It made me wonder if a time will come when we mine estuary bottoms and the fanned out oceanic streams of soil to replenish our ruined agricultural lands. A problem with that, of course, lies in the concentration of pesticides, fertilizers and toxic metals held in the soil. In the great fan of soil in the Gulf of Mexico, carried down by the Mississippi, the same phenomenon has created a great dead zone that no longer supports either plant or animal.

Today we return to Latin America though I learned last night from Table 31 dining partner Jerry that Argentina has a largely Italian heritage population, something in the range of 50%. Why not speak Italian?

The law of first impact. That’s why. This law of immigration studies says the first ethnic communities to settle (or seize) a new land have a disproportionate effect on later culture. This explains why Minnesota seems to have a largely Scandinavian heritage when in fact the dominant country of origin is Germany.

Caveat. We’ve seen port cities and then through a glass darkly. Still. The cultures of Latin America, at least the dominant European influenced cultures, those with Spanish or Portuguese first impact, seem thin to me. That is, the distinctions among them so far seem minor, the cultural equivalent of dialects, not different languages.

Also, the histories seem, as the United States must seem to Europeans, Asians and Africans, shallow. Long ago historical events happen in the 16th and 17th centuries, like the coming of the Conquistadors and the gradual settlement of South America by Spain and Portugal.

In the Andes or in the jungle there are cultures with deep histories, hundreds and thousands of years stretching away from the present, but this immersion in coastal South America has given me no opportunity to experience them.

From the top of our Arctic head to the tip of our Tierra del Fuegan toes, the dominant political cultures of the Americas are new. We are, in that sense, still very much the New World. Of course, for thousands of years there have been indigenous people here though even they crossed over from Asia.

Jumped up nouveau riche. Johnny come latelies to the human sport of culture creation.

The rise of China has put forward a civilization that is the exact opposite. It has known only internal struggle and change for most of the last 5,000 years and even has a dominant ethnic group, the Han, who have been present and in power, again, for much of those 5,000 years.

This means that the world will now have a hegemon as much civilization as state (one analyst calls China a civilization-state) and a second hegemon barely 400 years old, one with no dominant ethnic group and a changing, swirling ethnic mix. As they say, interesting times.