EVOLVING WORLD CULTURES: A Framework With A Canadian Interpretation
Author: Henry D’Souza

Summary From Back Cover: This informative and multi-disciplinary study presents a model for viewing globcultures. It provides a new definition of "culture" and a tri-polar paradigm for conceptualising cultural similarities and differences, while stressing the dominance of little-known international culture over national and ethnic cultures. The study of cultural development from the time of recorded history reveals more consistency with the "Out of Asia" theory than with " Out of of Africa" one. Economic disparities between North and South can be explained partly by cultural prejudices and partly by racial subjugation through education and finance. The book argues that if traditional policies of encirclement continue a racial war is inevitable despite the fact that the world is moving towards an integrated civilisation.

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Excerpts from Chapter 4 - CULTURAL ROOTS

.....Most westeners see their civilisation, and therefore their education, as originating in the Aegean and receiving its real character from the culture of Greece, Rome and Jerusalem".....

.... Western education is founded on Christianity, which together with Judaism, are eastern religions.....

....The story of the sacred tree in paradise also has its parallels in the ancient world. The Indus Valley seals, 2000B.C., show a tree guarded by a spirit while a composite creature, a tiger demon, tries to steal it. A thousand years earlier, or is it later, in Mesopotamia the sacred tree is guarded by a composite animal with an elephant's head and a bovine body. Mathieson quotes the Nuer in Africa as saying that the tree where man was born still stood within living memory. Shastri states that the sacred tree was usually the pipal or acacia but others were chosen later. In the case of Buddha the bodhi tree inspired revelation.

There are other religious borrowings with adaptations. The seven-branched menorah of Judaism is like the thicket without the ram associated with the statue at Ur. The tale of the Flood occurs in a Persian pre-historic epic: after a Divine warning of another Ice-age, a fortress, var, was filled with the finest animal and plant species so that procreation could continue. India's pre-Vedic Noah was Manu. The roots of the Bible can be traced through the Jewish Torah, 400 B.C., the Persian Avesta, 500 B.C., the Buddhist Pali Canon which was expounded between 500 and 250 B.C., the Confucian Analects, 500 B.C., and the Vedas, 4000 B.C.. Just as a select group of priests compiled the Rabbinical works of the Jews, the Talmud and Midrah, the "rishis" had their interpretations collected in the Indian Upanishad. No wonder the consultants to Life's The World's Great Religions concluded that, "without question it( Hinduism) has influenced western thought indirectly for centuries.....

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