Tuesday, 25 August 2009 21:24
Millennium
VHS, 60 min. each, 1992, Teacher's guide available CC
The ten-part Millennium series introduces viewers to eleven indigenous societies. The series facilitates an exchange of ideas between these societies and ours, focusing on issues that are confounding our own society wealth and poverty, marriage and divorce, religion and spirituality, the individual's place in society and society's place in nature, medicine, art and the future and exploring the ways these societies address the issues. An innovative approach to understanding our multicultural world. Hosted by David Maybury-Lewis.
1. The Art of Living
Travel to the Wodaabe tribe of Niger and the Dogon people of Mali to witness the ways they celebrate life and death with acts of beauty and grace. Meet a North American artist who shows us his way of connecting his art to the meaning of life and death.
2. At the Threshold
Journey to the Xavante tribe in the jungles of Brazil, the Navajo of the American Southwest, and elsewhere to review the primary wisdoms that tribal people offer to our modernized world. Then travel to central France to explore the most perplexing dilemmas of the Western World heart versus mind, body versus soul, the desires of the individual versus the needs of society.
3. An Ecology of Mind The Makuna leading a camel - from the video "An Ecology of Mind"
Learn how the Makuna of Colombia pass their sophisticated ecological awareness from generation to generation through complex myths and rituals. And understand how tribal peoples' views contrast with the revolutionary ideas handed down to the modern world from the Bible and from 19th century Darwinian theory. Then meet a gardener who exemplifies the new attitudes Western cultures will need to ensure humanity's survival on the Earth.
4. Inventing Reality
Go to the Huichol Indian villages of central Mexico to witness a Mexican doctor and a tribal shaman battling an epidemic of a rare strain of deadly measles. Then visit a cancer treatment center in Canada. Understand how the certainties of science combine with natural conceptions of disease in the thinking of both worlds. Then travel to Australia to ask: Is reality something we shape, as the Australian Aborigines believe, or does it shape us?
5. Mistaken Identity
Explore views of life and death: Who are you? Where does your individual identity begin and end? Western societies strive to answer these questions through a biological view tribal cultures define identity by the myths and rituals, by the people who rear them, and by an organic continuum to which they belong. Scenes are taken from an abortion counselor in Canada, a boy's initiation into manhood in a Brazilian Xavante tribe, a high school girl's attempted suicide, and an Indonesian Sumba tribesman's relationship to his dead relatives.
6. A Poor Man Shames Us All
Explore the alternative views of wealth and society that are exhibited in the lives of tribal cultures. Viewers journey from a New York ad agency to the jungles of Indonesia and the plains of Kenya. Learn why our Western views of wealth and economic needs have created a society of strangers in the midst of material riches, while tribal cultures such as the Weyewa of Indonesia and the Gabra of Kenya create economies of dependency on others and measure wealth through people, not possessions.
7. The Shock of the Other
The Western world's desire to remake other societies into its own image has robbed us of the gifts of other cultures. Visit with David Maybury-Lewis and his Xavante brother in central Brazil where he explains the need to find balance between cultural diversity and our desire to be like one another. Then journey deep into the heart of the Amazon where they seek to unravel the mystery of a small tribe called the Mashco-Piro who remain hidden from the outside world.
8. Strange Relations
Explore how marriages in tribal societies from the valleys of Nepal and the plains of Niger challenge Western ideas and sensibilities yet are moral in the tribal world. Explore the uncertainties that characterize marriages in Western societies. Travel to Provence, France, to learn how Western attitudes toward love and marriage were changed in the Middle Ages.
9. The Tightrope of Power
Contrast the Western forms of state to the tribal practice of democracy through consensus. Travel to Canada to witness the struggles of the Objibwa-Cree and Mohawk tribes against the Canadian federal government. Understand how their visions of the world can help us refine our definitions of democracy and pluralism.
10. Touching the Timeless
Accompany the Huichol people of Mexico on their annual pilgrimage to collect peyote, the sacred food of the gods; and visit the house of a Navajo medicine man who invites the spirits into his world through sand painting, chanting, and "walking in beauty." Then consider why modernization can be viewed as secularization and what the consequences of this means to Western people.
The ten-part Millennium series introduces viewers to eleven indigenous societies. The series facilitates an exchange of ideas between these societies and ours, focusing on issues that are confounding our own society wealth and poverty, marriage and divorce, religion and spirituality, the individual's place in society and society's place in nature, medicine, art and the future and exploring the ways these societies address the issues. An innovative approach to understanding our multicultural world. Hosted by David Maybury-Lewis.
1. The Art of Living
Travel to the Wodaabe tribe of Niger and the Dogon people of Mali to witness the ways they celebrate life and death with acts of beauty and grace. Meet a North American artist who shows us his way of connecting his art to the meaning of life and death.
2. At the Threshold
Journey to the Xavante tribe in the jungles of Brazil, the Navajo of the American Southwest, and elsewhere to review the primary wisdoms that tribal people offer to our modernized world. Then travel to central France to explore the most perplexing dilemmas of the Western World heart versus mind, body versus soul, the desires of the individual versus the needs of society.
3. An Ecology of Mind The Makuna leading a camel - from the video "An Ecology of Mind"
Learn how the Makuna of Colombia pass their sophisticated ecological awareness from generation to generation through complex myths and rituals. And understand how tribal peoples' views contrast with the revolutionary ideas handed down to the modern world from the Bible and from 19th century Darwinian theory. Then meet a gardener who exemplifies the new attitudes Western cultures will need to ensure humanity's survival on the Earth.
4. Inventing Reality
Go to the Huichol Indian villages of central Mexico to witness a Mexican doctor and a tribal shaman battling an epidemic of a rare strain of deadly measles. Then visit a cancer treatment center in Canada. Understand how the certainties of science combine with natural conceptions of disease in the thinking of both worlds. Then travel to Australia to ask: Is reality something we shape, as the Australian Aborigines believe, or does it shape us?
5. Mistaken Identity
Explore views of life and death: Who are you? Where does your individual identity begin and end? Western societies strive to answer these questions through a biological view tribal cultures define identity by the myths and rituals, by the people who rear them, and by an organic continuum to which they belong. Scenes are taken from an abortion counselor in Canada, a boy's initiation into manhood in a Brazilian Xavante tribe, a high school girl's attempted suicide, and an Indonesian Sumba tribesman's relationship to his dead relatives.
6. A Poor Man Shames Us All
Explore the alternative views of wealth and society that are exhibited in the lives of tribal cultures. Viewers journey from a New York ad agency to the jungles of Indonesia and the plains of Kenya. Learn why our Western views of wealth and economic needs have created a society of strangers in the midst of material riches, while tribal cultures such as the Weyewa of Indonesia and the Gabra of Kenya create economies of dependency on others and measure wealth through people, not possessions.
7. The Shock of the Other
The Western world's desire to remake other societies into its own image has robbed us of the gifts of other cultures. Visit with David Maybury-Lewis and his Xavante brother in central Brazil where he explains the need to find balance between cultural diversity and our desire to be like one another. Then journey deep into the heart of the Amazon where they seek to unravel the mystery of a small tribe called the Mashco-Piro who remain hidden from the outside world.
8. Strange Relations
Explore how marriages in tribal societies from the valleys of Nepal and the plains of Niger challenge Western ideas and sensibilities yet are moral in the tribal world. Explore the uncertainties that characterize marriages in Western societies. Travel to Provence, France, to learn how Western attitudes toward love and marriage were changed in the Middle Ages.
9. The Tightrope of Power
Contrast the Western forms of state to the tribal practice of democracy through consensus. Travel to Canada to witness the struggles of the Objibwa-Cree and Mohawk tribes against the Canadian federal government. Understand how their visions of the world can help us refine our definitions of democracy and pluralism.
10. Touching the Timeless
Accompany the Huichol people of Mexico on their annual pilgrimage to collect peyote, the sacred food of the gods; and visit the house of a Navajo medicine man who invites the spirits into his world through sand painting, chanting, and "walking in beauty." Then consider why modernization can be viewed as secularization and what the consequences of this means to Western people.
Category:
Anthropology and Archaeology