Reflection Blog

Aishwarya Tiwari, First Year Masters, Integrated Digital Media.

Scientific cosmology is how humans made sense of the universe, using astronomy and physics. However, cosmology also has a significant cultural impact that not many of us often consider. It’s fascinating to think about how different communities had different ways of making sense of their realities. It was reflective of their unique ideas, shown in the things they created by acting on them and how they treated other humans and nature in general.

Soon after we developed language, people started coming up with theories about the universe and how the world worked around them. One of them, Tetsuro Watsuji, believed climate was the single most important thing that influenced human culture and practices. His theory distinguished climate into three types: desert, monsoon and meadow. He discussed specific characteristics of the people who lived in these circumstances, for example, “it is the rainy season, brought by the monsoon, that has done most to create the resignation of the Indian”, “The desert is characterised by dryness and it is this dryness that first sets up the relationship of opposition and struggle between man and the world and, second, fosters the individual’s absolute submission to the whole”. I agree climate does influence our lifestyle in a few major ways: the way we dress, the food we eat, the ideas we have (to some extent), and the things we invent. However, I don’t think it restricts us from having thoughts that aren’t controlled by our climatic conditions alone. Watsuji’s work seems to speak of environmental determinism, disregarding human free will. We can’t be sure that the different ideas of gods amongst the desert and monsoon cultures, as claimed by Watsuji, stemmed from the differences in their climate alone. Beliefs and value systems constantly evolve over time and reflect what we find important.They aren’t static and are cultivated and refined based on our life experiences, cultural surroundings, social groups and even technology. Watsuji’s work also seemed ethnocentric because he kept trying to bring out the specific peculiarity of the Japanese throughout.

This confuses me though, what happens to these thought processes and cultural differences when the climate goes through sudden and radical change? If a piece of inhabited land, once a jungle, gets stripped down to a desert, would their belief systems drastically change too? Or if people move to a different climate, do their ideas of God change too? And on a tangential note, if technology is what caused the currently ongoing climatic tragedy, do we solve it with more technology or do we lay down our technological firearms and let nature repair itself?

Moving on, there have been communities that believed in a non-dualist cosmology: that nature and culture weren’t separate entities. Totemism is one that claims all living or non-living beings are hybrids. According to totemists, we all have a part of plant or animal within us. This reminds me of zodiac signs, and people relating to characteristics found in the animal that corresponds to their sign. It also unites us in a way, we’re all like each other. Which is the opposite of Analogism which claims we’re all different, and all reality is made up of a set of resources that connects us all. Karma could be an analogist theory about the spiritual principle of cause and effect; whatever we do affects our physical reality in a different way.

Related posts:

This article will help you learn about destructors in Java in detail.

You learned how to import a design from Figma into Power Apps in the previous article "Figma design import to Power Apps". You will be able to create mobile apps in Figma almost 1:1 without any…

Right now you are aspiring to be a writer on medium and I hope you are a successful writer by the time you see reading this. I want to write a book someday let’s hope you made that possible. I went…