Module 2 • People and Culture: Places, Legends, Language
Module Question
Is culture a resource and what is its significance?
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Nearly half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan wrote in his book Understanding Media, “Today, after
more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a
global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” McLuhan’s idea
of a “global village,” is a place in which all people on earth are connected. They are able to experi-
ence events far from their own homes in “real time,” the same way that humans experienced local
events when they lived in small villages. McLuhan was actually predicting the future of technology
and media rather than documenting it in the year 1964. Since the publication of his book, advances
in communications have truly moved our planet closer to being an electronic village.
If people everywhere have the capacity to communicate with one another and to learn of events
as they are happening thousands of miles away, what becomes of the importance of geography in
how people see their place in society? What happens to indigenous cultures—those patterns of tra-
ditional knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors tied to a specific place that one generation passes down
to the next?
The proliferation of satellite and cable television, computers, and the Internet is really only the lat-
est chapter in the history of culture clash. These recent technological advances just make the pro-
cess quicker and more thorough. For hundreds, even thousands of years, the migration of people
to lands with indigenous cultures vastly different from their own have altered the course of life for
both natives and newcomers.
During the five hundred years since Europeans began to explore and settle in the Americas and
the far reaches of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, history has documented a sometimes gradual and
partial, sometimes rapid and total, devaluation and disappearance of indigenous cultures. Lands
that traditional peoples occupied were often the target of exploitation for natural resources, such
as timber and minerals, and handcrafted items for personal and household use. Once Europeans
set up governmental structures to regulate indigenous people, the process of cultural change often
accelerated. And just as often, local people were active participants in their own colonization.
While the stories of the Americas, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific are often
fairly well known, the transformation of societies living near the Arctic Ocean—at the “top of the
world”—are generally less widely known. This includes notably the Soviet Russian presence in pre-
viously isolated regions of the far north east along the Chukchi and Bering Seas, Chukotka. The
people who are native to this area, the Chukchi and the Yu’pik, lived a mostly traditional life until
“sovietization” began in the mid-1900s. This process entailed the incorporation of a vast number of
peoples living over large and diverse regions into the theory and practice of the Soviet Union.
Historically, the land that the Chukchi and Yu’pik occupy is part of what we now call Beringia. In
the 1930s, a scientist suggested the existence in prehistoric times of a land bridge where the Bering
Strait—the narrow body of water separating Chukotka from Alaska—now exists. In recent years,
scientists have come to believe that during the past many millions of years, the land connection
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© NOMADS Online Classroom Expeditions GoNorth! Chukotka 2007 Curriculum 1
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