My interest in the field of anthropology began early, before I knew what anthropology was. Raised in a small town in Northern Ontario, a grandson of a Native Canadian Cree grandparents on one side, and Italian immigrants on the other, the contrast of cultures, values and views raised many questions in me.
I faced many, sometimes confusing differences in cultural attitudes. My Italian grandparents were strong Catholics. 'Nona', (grandmother) was an overprotective and highly emotional woman. 'Nono', (grandfather) was a silent man longing to return to the 'old country'. They raised a family of two boys and three girls. With the exception of my mother, the eldest, they all were emotionally fixated to varying degrees: the products of an over-protective parents reacting to cultural shock, locking them at their respective stages of emotional development, when my mother chose to marry outside her nationality, culture and religion.
My Native Canadian grandmother, 'Granny', was a devout Anglican, her husband, my 'Grampa', was a man holding a quiet Native philosophy based on nature and a hunting way of life carried with him from his birthplace in Moose Factory, on James Bay. They raised two confident and well adjusted sons.
My own parents raised four sons. As a family, we grew up with what we still consider a unique environment. When I (the eldest) was eight, my father began a part-time guiding catering to American sportsmen. His specialty service was hunting, a way of life he lived until his death at sixty-seven. The business grew to a point that it became a full time occupation.
As I and my brothers matured, we learned wilderness and hunting skills from our father and his father. We also learned to deal with the American hunting public. By rough calculation I have lived with over seven hundred and fifty hunters, both men and women, on weekly hunting expeditions. I have guided that many again on one or two-day events.
Our clients ranged widely over the North American human spectrum, from doctors and lawyers, to unemployed West Virginian "mountain men"; people with white, black, brown and yellow skins, and mixtures in between; from Evangelical preachers to persons of downright questionable character.
At eighteen, I faced my own cultural shock, entering the urban and technological society of Toronto, employed in the data processing field (now called Information Technology). After seven years, I left what I found to be a society of insecure, self conscious, status oriented, and lost people.
These backgrounds have left me with many different questions about people, their ideas, values, and cultures. My family background in particular, gave me questions about personality and emotional development; my Cree grandfather's native attitudes have had a great influence on my values, the hunting and wilderness training has given me an appreciation for animal life, nature, and life in general; the guiding has exposed me to a cross section of people, their views and values. My background in information technology has placed me in a position where I try to integrate all of these into a framework of understanding.
My grandfather's views were American Indian - he was a part of nature. I stop my car and apologize to a snake I have just run over.
My Nona's views were European immigrant - she lead a life laced with hopes for the North American dream of financial success. I work in an office because "thatsa nice-a job".
The extremes of my lifestyles and exposure to various attitudes and values have instilled a search for the origins of commonalties and differences in cultural attitudes. I find glimmers of answers in several fields of knowledge but I am drawn further, to questions of ultimate causation. My search is for the beginnings of consciousness in the animal that became man. In doing so, I hope, and it is only a hope, that I can understand what happened to that animal and why it chooses to live lives the way we do.
My genes have come from Africa: Half, upwards, through Europe, across the Atlantic. The other half traveling up from Africa, across Asia, over the Bering Strait to be rejoined, again, in me. I have traveled the globe without awareness, and I am impressed by the fact that matter can become conscious... And I question. What made man the animal he is? Where did it happen? When did it happen?
My current proposal is that the consciousness (the state of being aware of one's self in a manner that one understands that the environment can be influenced for the one's benefit) arose at a stage in what I call "the animal that became man" much earlier than many care to acknowledge. And that this consciousness was the real cause of that animal's rapid evolution and physical changes that lead to what we now call man.
I argue this proposal using a comparative study of primate behavior to show the level of being at which such an animal could have begun the move to 'human being', Homo sapiens sapiens.
In doing so, I have drawn from several sources and attempt to draw a conclusion on the beginnings of humanity which I feel occurred primarily 'in the mind', rather than in the physical structure of the body.
I welcome your comments.
Lark Ritchie, 1986
Copyright Lark Ritchie 1986. 1999. All Rights Reserved.
© 1986, 1999 Lark Ritchie. Contact me at
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Table of Contents
These pages will grow, as I have time to think, and others critique my thoughts. Com'on... Help me! Drop me a line!
The 'Human Being' - A search for ultimate causation
The 'Human Being' - A search for ultimate causation - Part 2
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