Australians Dreamtime Essays - Culture, , Term Papers

Australians' Dreamtime I am going to describe anthropologically the aboriginal Australians' Dreamtime.The Dreamtimeis a term that depicts unique stories and beliefs that are claimed and held by different Aboriginal groups within Australia. The historical background of the Dreamtime word and its implications says something about the development of the ideas held aboutthe Aboriginal world, and how they are expressed through art. The Dreamtime appeared as a word to portray the Aboriginal Creation mythology, and was first used in the 1890s. It was developed from Aranda culture by a white man who was based in Alice Springs and had a very good working knowledge of the local Aboriginal languages. During the mid-1890s the Dreamtime was popularized in the work of Baldwin Spencer, who was a prominent anthropologistworking atthetime. The Dreamtime word has since gone into general usage in Australia as a description of the religious beliefs of Aboriginal communities, and has come down through the twentieth centur y as a widely understood term. Traditions Aboriginal religion revolves around the Dreamtime. Totems are also an important part of Aboriginal religious identity. Totems are symbols from the natural world that serve to identify people and their relationships with one another in the social world. For instance, a family or clan may be associated with a certain bird. That bird's nature, whether it is ferocious or peaceful, a bird of prey or a songbird, is associated with the family or clan that uses it as its totem. The religious world of the Aboriginal Australians is inhabited by ghosts of the dead, as well as a variety of spirits who control certain aspects of the natural world, such as the Rainbow Serpent, who brings rain. Rituals are performed to placate these spirits and to increase the fertility of certain species of animals that are important to the Aborigines. Since the colonization of Australia, many Aboriginal people have converted to Christianity, either by choice or through t he influence of education in mission schools. For generations, European colonists would remove children from Aboriginal families and send them to Christian schools. This practice was thought to be in the best interests of the Aborigines. Resentment over these kidnappings is still strong. Cultural relativism wrongly claims that each culture has its own distinct but equally valid mode of perception, thought, and choice. Cultural relativism, the opposite of the idea that moral truth is universal and objective, contends there is no such thing as absolute right and wrong. There is only right and wrong as specified by the moral code of each society. Within a society , a standard of right and wrong can be inviolate. Cultural relativism maintains that man's opinion within a given culture defines what is right and wrong. Cultural relativism is the mistaken idea that there are no objective standards by which our society can be judged because each culture is entitled to its own beliefs and accepted practices. No one can object to any society's intolerance that reflects its indigenous worldview. Because there is no objective moral truth that pertains to all people and for all times, one moral code is no be t ter or no worse than any other. Different scholar s have given their understanding of the term ethnocentrism. According to anthropologists, the concept combines the belief that one's own culture is superior to other cultures, with the practice of judging other cultures by the standards of o ne's own culture. Ethnocentrism is also defined as a feeling that one's own group has a mode of living, values and patterns of adaptation that are superio r to other groups . Ethnology is the scientific study of the origin and functioning of humans and their cultures. It is a major branch of cultural anthropology. The researcher has observed that people in developed countries of Europe and America tend to despise other nations and their customs terming them as queer and foolish, just because they are different from their own. The "western church' has not been spared from prejudices and biases about African religion as revealed by missionary's attitudes. It is believed that ethnocentrism is a major cause of problems between the wes tern industrialized portion of the world and the developing nations. Ethnicity and the related concept