There Isn't Such Thing as Civilisation

Herodotus

Herodotus

________ admitted to being puzzled, in fact, as to "why the earth, which is one, has three names, all womens.

Social identities

________ connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns.

Tylor

________ was impressed by what he called "the evidence of an immense ancient population.

Tylor thought it

________ absurd to propose that a person could lack culture.

Identities

________ can be held together by narratives, in short, without essences.

Organicism

________ explained how our everyday selves could be dusted with gold.

18th century historian Edward Gibbon

The ________, overstating somewhat, observed that if the Arabs had won at Tours, they could have sailed up the Thames.

natural contrast

The ________ was not between Islam and the west, but between Christendom and Dar al‑Islam, each of which regarded the other as infidels, defined by their unbelief.

Muslim essence

No ________ stops the inhabitants of Dar al- Islam from taking up anything from western civilisation, including Christianity or democracy.

Today the classical heritage

________ plays no greater role in the everyday lives of most Americans or Britons.

term western culture

The ________ "is surprisingly modern- more recent certainly than the phonograph.

Muslim conquerors of Spain

The ________ had not planned to stop at the Pyrenees, and they made regular attempts in the early years to move further north.

western essence

What is there to stop a New Yorker of any ancestry taking up Islam? Answer with a single words or term.

pitfalls of this sort of essentialism

It imagines western culture as the expression of an essence- a something- which has been passed from hand to hand on its historic journey. What are evident in a wide range of cases? Answer with a single words or term.

story of the golden nugget

The ________ suggests that we can not help caring about the traditions of "the west "because they are ours: in fact, the opposite is true.

Tylor

________ came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the resources for a long trip.