World Civilization Essays - Windows Games, Cultural Anthropology

World Civilization What are the major defining characteristics of a civilization? How has the defining characteristics of a civilization in the past been evolved to better people's lives today? Many factors have been used to develop a civilization. Some have been more effective than others have. Throughout this paper, I plan on analyzing the factors that perennial civilizations before our time used to become effective and prosperous. I will also describe what factors they had and how some of those factors became very important to today?s society. Most of the perennial civilizations have been revolutionized throughout the years to enhance the way of life even today. Many people have debated if civilization was evolutionary or passed down progressively with people learning from their mistakes. Some people claim other reasons for civilization to be far greater than the others. Other people claim that all of the reasons in the coming about of civilization played a balance part . I really don't know which reason were more influential than the others, but I do know that all these ?theories? are hard to be proven flawless. Civilization represents the highest level of human organization. But, how did civilization get to be the impressive and astonishing way it is today? I will use the most prominent civilizations of the past to evaluate what the important characteristics were that helped design society as it is today and made the evolution process of civilization smoothly and successful. I will use Article #11(written by John Pfieffer, Horizon, fall 1972; Article #9 (written by Jared Diamond, Discover, June 1994); and Article #39 (written by David Landes, History Today, January 1984) to shed light on my topic. Article #11, How Man Invented Cities, talked about the rise of urbanizations in civilizations. Webster defines civilization as a relatively high level of cultural and technological development and/or the culture characteristic of a time or place. Many people use the word civilization to mean ?urbanization? or ?sophistication?. The word is often applied to one's own group; by implication, other groups are denigrated as less civilized or as civilized barbarians. Pfieffer depicted urbanization, a key to prominent civilizations, as unplanned and a rose from a combination of population pressures and plentiful local food resources. This theory is very logic. It might have been very coincidental, but it was a very significant and important coincidence in the world of civilizations. The transition from nomadic life to urbanization took a mere five or six millenniums, practically overnight on the evolutionary time scale. It occurred so swiftly and widespread that man hardly had a chance to get use to it, but they were able to handle it and make the best of it. Urbanization gave people a chance to interact with each other, unlike the previous nomadic lives in tribes. This made people working together a more important role, in contrast to everyone taking care of themselves in early civilizations. Trade, agriculture and other commerce ignited monopolies due to the rise of urbanization. The rise of urbanization brought change that people accepted because everyone, especially society, wants to be ?civilized?. Most of the time society i s misguided, but in this situation society played an important role in establishing urbanization and the rise of civilization with civilized people. Most importantly urbanization led to communication. Even though the communication was nothing close to today's communication with technology, but it was based on literacy. In Article #9, Writing Right, literacy is considered one of the hallmarks of civilization. Without the craving for civilization (people wanting to be civilized), literacy would have never came to part. ?Civilized? people have always considered literacy as division between themselves and barbarians. This perception is used even in today's society because it has been passed down in different forms with the same meaning as it did years before. When you see someone that doesn't look educated, you look down upon him or her as if you were superior to them. Most written language reflects the precise reflection of the speech of the language, while others (like English) are a complete mess. Jared Diamond, the author of this article, even poses the question: Is this alphabetical evolution or just the unequal application of l ogic to literacy? Personally, I think that