Migration 7: Flannery's Cooperation

If Flannery (Flannery, Tim; "Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet",2010, Melbourne) wants to counter Dawkins' selfish genes, he needs cooperation to work at all levels, and most especially the human. He needs to counter "ruthless selfishness" (17), and the example of the child using its smile to manipulate the parent. Which he does with an assertion of complexity.

HE IS AN INDIAN HISTORIAN; A book critique

Part 1

In WE ARE AN INDIAN NATION  A History of the Hualapai People (U. of Arizona Press, 2010), J.P. Shepherd dedicates his work to "the people of the Hualapai nation", and then spends several pages introducing the ambiguity and ambivalence that attend his book and the Hualapai -- just like the history & politics of the rest of us. 

"The point of this book, then, is that colonization and persistence can exist in the same geographical and interpretive space."(page 8) Of course it can, for under other names, these are the qualities that characterize the actors, players, protagonists, who engage with each other in the American political-legal system; the system, Shepherd would remind us, put into place by whitefolk conquest. And in this system, colonizers and persisters, dominant groups and challengers, rulers and petitioners, stand-patters and protesters, the status quo and the counter-culture; all come and go, form, shape up, exercise power in some way, fade or get a place at the trough.  

Not About the Grand Canyon

IS TUCSON AIRPORT AN APPROPRIATE EXAMPLE?

Nothing is quite so neat a microcosm of our security-based control-freak (S&C) society as an airport arrival-departure area. Larded up with uniformed shouters, bikers, threateners, and cloggers*, their basic stance toward people bringing and taking away other people is that of cattle-killing operators before the reforms of Temple Grandin**.