Only In Kenya

[lederhosen]

From locked post which points out the idiocy of this quiz: "what type of animal spirit do you have? Native American Shamans believe that every animal has its own special wisdom to teach humans, gleaned from thousands of years of experience. We've selected fifteen beasts from all corners of the animal kingdom. Which one is your animal guide?"

To save you doing the quiz, the possible outcomes (which don't actually add to ten, maybe the shamans dropped a slab coming down the mountain) are listed here. Some of the Highly Authentic Native American Totem Animals Going Back Thousands Of Years include camels, mongooses, and horses*. Oh, and apparently the same mythology has both mooses and armadillos, because all Native Americans have the same culture.

And speaking of the collective shamanistic wisdom of thousands of years, did you know that the mongoose is the only animal that would risk life and limb for a loved one?

*I'm reluctantly letting lions by, on the grounds that there were prehistoric ones that probably did overlap with NAs in some areas.

Comments

[cornute.livejournal.com]

When people arrived in the Americas, there were a lot more large land animals, including lions and horses and camels* and wooooooolly mammoths.

Then we humans arrived and ate them all up.

Can't help you on the mongoose, mind you.

(The linked quiz includes, with the results, a "learn more about this animal" link; the one for the camel specifically says that they lived in North America prehistorically, here (http://www.fresnochaffeezoo.com/animals/camel.html).)

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Well, that's something I didn't know. I'm still a little bit sceptical about those animals having been preserved as spirit wossnames for thousands of years after they died out, mind...

(And if we're going prehistoric, I want to be a killer duck!)

[cornute.livejournal.com]

I want to be a giant armadillo!!! Or a ssssssabertooth.

Seriously, if you consider the introduction to the quiz-- there are two statements made. One is that Native Americans [sic] believed that certain animals were important, and the other is about picking animals "from all the corners of the animal kingdom". If you consider those as two separate statements that are not related, is either one objectionable?

I don't really like the sort of watered-down "general overview" crap that gets peddled at kids, and this is certainly a prime example-- they make statements of the form "General statement, specific statement" and don't make clear which parts are which.

As far as spirit wossnames, am I remembering correctly that some of the verbal traditions of the Australian aborigines were interpreted to go as far back as the end of the last glaciation? (Sorry, my cite's at home. I'll drag it out when I get home in the morning if you want.)

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

If you consider those as two separate statements that are not related, is either one objectionable?

It would be less objectionable on the 'Native American mongoose?!?' front, certainly. But I'm reluctant to entirely accept that separation. The quiz begins by saying "Native American Shamans believe that every animal has its own special wisdom to teach humans, gleaned from thousands of years of experience". Every single one of the quiz results is then presented with the phrase "according to shamanistic wisdom". Up to this point there's no mention of any other variety of shamanism; there's no notice that we're suddenly shifting to African or Siberian or India-Indian shamans instead. If it's meant as shamanism-in-general, why exclude all but 'Native American shamans' in the intro text?

(My suspicion would be that it sounds a bit more 'authentic' if you give the impression it's all from one unified mythology. And quite possibly the quiz-writer doesn't realise that shamanism varies significantly from one place to another; there's a lot of truly awful pop-spirituality out there.)

As for 'all corners of the animal kingdom'... I count nine mammals, one bird, zero anything-else. Not very representative from a biologist's POV, and I'd be surprised if it was very representative of any real-world variety of shamanism either.

As far as spirit wossnames, am I remembering correctly that some of the verbal traditions of the Australian aborigines were interpreted to go as far back as the end of the last glaciation? (Sorry, my cite's at home. I'll drag it out when I get home in the morning if you want.)

I'd be interested to see it. I don't actually know a great deal about Aboriginal culture; there's a lot of it around, but so much of it has been politicised, commercialised, or appropriated by new-age crystal-dolphin-worshippers that I tend to assume the stuff I run into has very little resemblance to the way things were in 1787.

I have seen a claim that the Aboriginal 'rainbow serpent' myths are connected to Chinese dragon mythology, implying that the legend goes back to their settlement of Australia (which would indeed take it back to Ice-Age times), but from what I recall it wasn't a very reliable source.

[cornute.livejournal.com]

The version of "verbal pre-history" I've seen refers to discussions of geographical/ecological things that haven't been true since the last glaciation. I'll have to look it up when I get home, I suppose.

"The quiz begins by saying "Native American Shamans believe that every animal has its own special wisdom to teach humans, gleaned from thousands of years of experience"."

These guys are about 90% full of it, although they might have stumbled across a fact or two by accident. However, I've seen some terrible presentations of the "General, and specific" form which manage to mangle actual facts to unusable format, and they're a prime example of the form itself.

[nicked-metal.livejournal.com]

If you consider those as two separate statements that are not related, is either one objectionable?

But they're not separate statements, and they are related. (You're both right about all the stuff that matters, but I don't think that it's particularly fair to ask someone to treat those statements separately.)

[fluffy-cloud.livejournal.com]

But... but... I've seen the movie Ice Age. And a wooly mamoth, a tree sloth and a saber tooth tiger saved the baby. I saw it in a movie so it must be historicaly accurate.