“Men, Women, and Children Starving”: Archaeology of the Donner Family Camp

2010 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly J. Dixon ◽  
Shannon A. Novak ◽  
Gwen Robbins ◽  
Julie M. Schablitsky ◽  
G. Richard Scott ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
Human Tissue ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Animal Tissue ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Game ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Lake Site ◽  
The Human Condition

In spring of 1846, the George and Jacob Donner families and some 80 traveling companions began their overland trek to California. When the party ascended the Sierra Nevada in late October, a snowstorm forced the group to bivouac. At this point, the train became separated into two contingents; the larger party camped near Donner Lake and the smaller group—including the Donner families—settled at Alder Creek. Though written accounts from the Lake site imply many resorted to cannibalism, no such records exist for Alder Creek. Here we present archaeological findings that support identification of the Alder Creek camp. We triangulate between historical context, archaeological traces of the camp, and osteological remains to examine the human condition amid the backdrops of starvation and cannibalism. A stepped analytical approach was developed to examine the site’s fragmentary bone assemblage (n= 16,204). Macroscopic and histological analyses indicate that the emigrants consumed domestic cattle and horse and procured wild game, including deer, rabbit, and rodent. Bladed tools were used to extensively process animal tissue. Moreover, bone was being reduced to small fragments; pot polish indicates these fragments were boiled to extract grease. It remains inconclusive, however, whether such processing, or the assemblage, includes human tissue.

The Epic of Gilgamesh

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-46
Author(s):  
Jon Stewart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Human Mortality ◽  
Wild Man ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Human Condition

Chapter 1 gives a reading of the Mesopotamian The Epic of Gilgamesh. At the outset an account is provided of the historical context of the work in antiquity and its discovery and translation in the nineteenth century. An interpretation is given of the creation of the wild man Enkidu. Parallels are pointed out between this story and that of the Fall in Genesis. The nature of the Mesopotamian gods is also explored in the context of an interpretation of the episode featuring the goddess Ishtar. Angered by Gilgamesh’s rejection of her advances, Ishtar sends the Bull of Heaven to destroy Uruk. Gilgamesh and Enkidu manage to kill it, but only after it has caused much death and destruction. Enkidu insults Ishtar, and she in turn causes his death. Gilgamesh is deeply distraught by the death of his friend and goes in search of a solution to the problem of human mortality. He has many adventures and ultimately finds Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah, who survives the Flood and is made immortal. An account is given to the parallels of this episode and that of the Flood in Genesis. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh about a magic plant that can restore youth. Gilgamesh manages to find it, but he loses it right away to a snake. The story is interpreted as a statement of the finitude and limitations of the human condition.

We Have Always Been Biased

Public ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Kevin Donnelly
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Data Mining ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Technical Issue ◽  
Biometric Data ◽  
The Past ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
The Human Condition

This paper aims to provide a historical context in which to appreciate the shared problems faced by social and computer scientists in using and creating biometric data. While historians of science are well aware of the trials (and errors) of previous attempts to quantify the human condition, this literature has not always made it into discussions of modern biometrics. Indeed, manuals for what are now called the computational social sciences often imagine that data mining and statistical averages are new, and that “Big Data” has only existed for the past decade. Such historical amnesia has led, this paper argues, to problems of modern bias emerging in the literature as a technical issue rather than a full-fledged conceptual barrier with long roots. Seen only in the light of present politics and practical concerns, I argue that these problems will remain intractable.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

Dreams of a Black Commons on Turtle Island

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Wild Mushrooms ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Black Freedom ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty ◽  
Black Land ◽  
The Human Condition

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  

Das Internet der Tiere: Natur 4.0 und die conditio humana

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-124
Author(s):  
Alexander Pschera
Keyword(s):  
Industry 4.0 ◽  
Industrie 4.0 ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Conditio Humana ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Human Condition

"Neben der Industrie hat die Digitalisierung auch die Natur ergriffen. Die Tatsache, dass Tausende von Tieren mit GPS-Sendern aus- gerüstet und überwacht werden, erlaubt, analog zur Industrie 4.0 auch von einer Natur 4.0 zu sprechen. Dieses Internet der Tiere verändert den Begriff, den der Mensch von der Natur hat. Er transformiert die Wahrnehmung vor allem der Natur als etwas fundamental An- deren. Neben den vielen kulturellen Problematisierungen, die das Internet der Tiere mit sich bringt, lassen sich aber auch die Umrisse einer neuen, ganz und gar nicht esoterischen planetarisch-post-digitalen Kultur aufzeigen, die die conditio humana verändert. In addition to industry, digitalization has also taken hold of nature. The fact that thousands of animals are provided and monitored with GPS transmitters allows to speak of nature 4.0 by way of analogy to industry 4.0. This internet of animals changes our idea of nature. Most of all, it transforms the perception of nature as something fundamentally other. Beside the many cultural problems that the internet of animals implies, it can also outline a new, not at all esoteric planetary post-digital culture that is about to change the human condition. "

Los avatares del logos

2001 ◽  
pp. 21-31
Author(s):  
Leticia Flores Farfán
Keyword(s):  
Georges Bataille ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Mircea Eliade ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

Assuming with Georges Bataille that men is a being who is not in the world “like water within the water”, that is to say, in an immanent and lack of distinction state, but that its destiny is shaped in the permanent significant joint or logos to which its unfinished nature jeopardizes him, we analyze the form in which the mythical story, characterized like a sacred word with symbolic and ontological quality within the perspective of Mircea Eliade, gives account of the wound or the original tear that constitutes the human condition.

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