Thursday, March 19, 2020

Modern Times and The Importance of Food †Film Essay

Modern Times and The Importance of Food – Film Essay Free Online Research Papers Modern Times and The Importance of Food Film Essay â€Å"Modern Times† is a black and white film from the nineteen thirties that considers the working man and working conditions during the most crushing times of the Great Depression. Charlie Chaplin is the producer, director, musician and main character of this comic film. Throughout the film he goes through many trying times with his working situations in this silent comedy. Food is given a very important role in this depression era film. Food is looked at in many different ways throughout â€Å"Modern Times†. Because food was very hard to obtain for most you can understand why it is focused on many times during the film. Through the silly and comical situations Charlie gets himself into, he finds himself in jail. To our confusion it doesn’t seem to phase him at all, he almost seems happy to be there. When he is let go he doesn’t want to leave because being in jail means he will at least be fed everyday. When he is let go he tries a few thing to get himself thrown back in jail. He tries to take the blame for a girl who stole some bread and when that doesn’t work he goes to a cafeteria, eats as much as he can, then calls the police before not paying for his dinner. The police come and Charlie is happy to be put back in jail. It must have been a tough time if someone would rather be in jail where they are sure to be fed, then begging on the streets. Another way food is shown in much importance in this film is in day dreaming. Charlie and his girlfriend are sitting on the side of the street when they witness a woman waving goodbye to her husband as he leaves for work. They decide to get a house of their own. They sit on the sidewalk and think about what it would be like. In this daydream there is food everywhere. There is a fruit tree just out the window, another just out the door and a cow walks up for milking as the girl is preparing dinner. This is another way food is shown as such a prized possession in this film. It is almost like the only good thing about living in a house together would be food where that isn’t guaranteed at all. Charlie finds a job working as the night watchmen at a department store. All he seems to notice and care about are the cakes and pastries on the counter. After the store is empty he runs to get the girl so they can both enjoy the food. Not only that but a few men brake in and when he calls them burglars they say they are just hungry so he sees nothing wrong with them being there, even after the shoot the top off a wine bottle. Food is such a valued object that it seems to blind his decision and ends up getting him in trouble. At another job of his he helps a man repairing the machines. While attempting to help he ends up helping the man fall into the machine. The man is stuck in the machine when the lunch bell rings and Charlie stops trying to help him out so he can eat his lunch. After a minute the man gets over the fact that he is no longer helping him and has Charlie feed him his lunch while stuck. Food is of such importance that even being stuck in a machine doesn’t stop either of them for wanting to eat there lunch. It is almost like they think if they don’t eat it now it may not be there later and they may have nothing else to eat for the rest of the day. During the worst times of the depression era food was not something to be wasted and was considered on of the most important things. Today we look at food as very important but we don’t really know what it is like to not have food. Most of us haven’t had to wonder where our next meal was going to come from or how we were going to get it. This film, â€Å"Modern Times† reflects how important food was during that era. You can tell it is of great importance even through the comedy of Charlie Chaplin. Research Papers on "Modern Times" and The Importance of Food - Film EssayThe Effects of Illegal ImmigrationWhere Wild and West MeetCapital PunishmentComparison: Letter from Birmingham and CritoThe Hockey Game19 Century Society: A Deeply Divided EraLifes What IfsHonest Iagos Truth through DeceptionAssess the importance of Nationalism 1815-1850 EuropeUnreasonable Searches and Seizures

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Oasis Theory and the Origins of Agriculture

Oasis Theory and the Origins of Agriculture The Oasis Theory (known variously as the Propinquity Theory or Desiccation Theory) is a core concept in archaeology, referring to one of the main hypotheses about the origins of agriculture: that people started to domesticate plants and animals because they were forced to, because of climate change. The fact that people changed from hunting and gathering to farming as a subsistence method has never seemed like a logical choice. To archaeologists and anthropologists, hunting and gathering in a universe of limited population and plentiful resources is less demanding work than plowing, and certainly more flexible. Agriculture requires cooperation, and living in settlements reaps social impacts, like diseases, ranking, social inequality, and division of labor. Most European and American social scientists in the first half of the 20th century simply didnt believe that human beings were naturally inventive or inclined to change their ways of life unless compelled to do so. Nevertheless, at the end of the last Ice Age, people did reinvent their method of living. What Do Oases Have to Do With the Origins of Agriculture? The Oasis Theory was defined by Australian-born archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe [1892-1957], in his 1928 book, The Most Ancient Near East. Childe was writing decades before the invention of radiocarbon dating and a half-century before the serious collection of the vast amount of climatic information that we have today had begun. He argued that at the end of the Pleistocene, North Africa and the Near East experienced a period of desiccation, a period of an increased occurrence of drought, with higher temperatures and decreased precipitation. That aridity, he argued, drove both people and animals to congregate at oases and river valleys; that propinquity created both population growth and a closer familiarity with plants and animals. Communities developed and were pushed out of the fertile zones, living on the edges of the oases where they were forced to learn how to raise crops and animals in places that were not ideal. Childe was not the first scholar to suggest that cultural change can be driven by environmental changethat was American geologist Raphael Pumpelly [1837-1923] who suggested in 1905 that central Asian cities collapsed because of desiccation. But during the first half of the 20th century, the available evidence suggested that farming appeared first on the dry plains of Mesopotamia with the Sumerians, and the most popular theory for that adoption was environmental change. Modifying the Oasis Theory Generations of scholars beginning in the 1950s with Robert Braidwood, in the 1960s with Lewis Binford, and in the 1980s with Ofer Bar-Yosef, built, dismantled, rebuilt, and refined the environmental hypothesis. And along the way, dating technologies and the ability to identify evidence and timing of past climate change blossomed. Since then, oxygen-isotope variations have allowed scholars to develop detailed reconstructions of the environmental past, and a vastly improved picture of past climate change has been developed. Maher, Banning, and Chazen recently compiled comparative data on radiocarbon dates on cultural developments in the Near East and radiocarbon dates on climatic events during that period. They noted there is substantial and growing evidence that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture was a very long and variable process, lasting thousands of years in some places and with some crops. Further, the physical effects of climate change also were and are variable across the region: some regions were severely impacted, others less so. Maher and colleagues concluded that climate change alone cannot have been the sole trigger for specific shifts in technological and cultural change. They add that that doesnt disqualify climatic instability as providing the context for the long transition from mobile hunter-gatherer to sedentary agricultural societies in the Near East, but rather that the process was simply far more complex than the Oasis theory can sustain. Childes Theories To be fair, though, throughout his career, Childe didnt simply attribute cultural change to environmental change: he said that you had to include significant elements of social change as drivers as well. Archaeologist Bruce Trigger put it this way, restating Ruth Tringhams comprehensive review of a handful of Childe biographies: Childe viewed every society as containing within itself both progressive and conservative tendencies which are linked by dynamic unity as well as by persistent antagonism. The latter provides the energy that in the long run brings about irreversible social change. Hence every society contains within itself the seeds for the destruction of its present state and the creation of a new social order. Sources Braidwood RJ. 1957. Jericho and its Setting in Near Eastern History. Antiquity 31(122):73-81.Braidwood RJ, Çambel H, Lawrence B, Redman CL, and Stewart RB. 1974. Beginnings of Village-Farming Communities in Southeastern Turkey1972. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 71(2):568-572.Childe VG. 1969. New Light on the Most Ancient East. London: Norton Company.Childe VG. 1928. The Most Ancient Near East. London: Norton Company.Maher LA, Banning EB, and Chazan M. 2011. Oasis or Mirage? Assessing the Role of Abrupt Climate Change in the Prehistory of the Southern Levant. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 21(01):1-30.Trigger BG. 1984. Childe and Soviet Archaeology. Australian Archaeology 18:1-16.Tringham R. 1983. V. Gordon Childe 25 Years After: His Relevance for the Archaeology of the Eighties. Journal of Field Archaeology 10(1):85-100.Verhoeven M. 2011. The Birth of a Concept and the Origins of the Neolithic: A History of Prehistoric Farmers in the Near East. Palà ©orient oasis37(1):75-87. Weisdorf JL. 2005. From Foraging To Farming: Explaining The Neolithic Revolution. Journal of Economic Surveys 19(4):561-586.Wright HE. 1970. Environmental Changes and the Origin of Agriculture in the near East. BioScience 20(4):210-217.