Owl & Ibis - A Confluence Of Minds

  Background The human pursuit of power, wealth, and empire derives from a fundamental aspect of life on Earth. It originated with life itself as a response to the need to survive and a desire to flourish. At its birth, its coming to life, every organism grows and exploits to the fullest every useable resource it encounters to serve its need to survive and desire to flourish. It does so until it encounters other living and/or physical environmental constraints. This results in that life form being contained or killed, or its continuing to exploit all it encounters to the point of destroying the resources and life systems that give and sustain its life. Humans have been no exception. With our “sapient” emergence beginning about 300,000 years ago we brought this fundamental drive to survive and desire to flourish with us – something genetically inherited and behaviorally learned from all other life forms that preceded and nourished us. What Old World primate has not encountered a tree fu

  Image: Francks Deceus, Arco Gallery   To understand culture and any particular culture one must first examine how culture content accommodates the needs of mainstream society and its individuals, because the fit and rules of culture are meant to best accommodate the mainstream. One must also look at how a society’s culture is responded to by groups and persons  not  in the mainstream. It is here that the authenticity of the beliefs, values, and norms of a given time are often questioned and challenged. Does the culture content remain suitable for enough people for the society’s survival and possible flourishing? Sometimes efforts, informal or formal, are undertaken to change the content and power of a culture to better suit the times and needs of more or fewer members of a society. Democratic societies seek to make their respective cultures more inclusive; autocracies favor less inclusion. When minority persons join the mainstream, they expand the inclusivity of society. In doing so

  Image: Courtesy of John Cruickshank Kudos to John Cruickshank for his outstanding presentation, "Strategies for Creating African American Museums and Cultural Spaces." Here is a PDF version of John's PowerPoint slideshow. In his comprehensive presentation John covered the institutional history of African American museums, background on Julius Rosenwald and the schools he created, and the views of two prominent African American museum directors, Lonnie Bunch and Bryan Stevenson. John's presentation was particularly focused on the Our Legacy: The Griffin-Spalding African American History Museum in Griffin, Georgia. John is a member of that museum's steering committee. John's Statement of Argumentation In the United States, we have generally done a very poor job of creating cultural spaces that help us understand our history, who we are, the nature of our problems and how those problems emerged. The American South is littered with iconography designed to memor