Master Summary: Collision Of Cultures Essay, Research Paper

Master Summary: Collision of Cultures

Late in the fifteenth century, a group of confused European men mistakenly met up with the natives of a mass unknown land, soon to be called the New World, while they were on their way to India with a desire for riches. These men did not meet with the people that they expected to because of the new route that they chose. It was literally a clash of cultures when the Europeans found a group of naked men and women that were sprawling about when their first boat came to shore. The Indians themselves would not find it so acceptable that the Europeans were only made up of dressed men. Obviously, Christopher Columbus and his men did not anticipate that there would be such a great diversity in the types of people around the world. Failing against European powers, the Indians had no choice but to surrender to the ways of theirs in religious and health ways.

Christopher Columbus was on his voyage to India in a great search for riches and delights. He thought at first that the people would be dressed in fine brocade encrusted with precious jewels, but found that the men and women were almost naked. The females were found only to wear a woven skirt and dabs of paint over parts of their bodies. They were thought to be life-threatening demons at first, but they were curious of the men coming within the new boats. To the Indians, the Europeans were also an eccentric type of people with strange materials on their bodies. Having no women in the group, the Indians first thought these men were exiled from their clan mothers. From drifting for so long among the seas to find India, the Indians thought that the Europeans were a group of uncleanly people.

However, these two groups would treat eachother with great hospitality and generosity despite their differences in order to start their relationship. The Indians were a rather diverse humane society, made up of hundreds of cultures that spoke many languages and ran families of their own. The Quechas found a use for the potato, designed a system of roads and bridges, and formed a nation that taxed for labor. It is said that 40% of our medical world still uses practices used by the Indians before the Europeans came in the year fourteen ninety-two. Giant networks setup for trading had been created by the Mound Builders of central North America. The Indians knew their community as family, and everybody else as they. The Indians didn t have a great deal of war through violence, and their leaders were elected upon their skills of a leader. Land was not owned, it was dependent on how the Indians could take care of the land or use it to everybody s benefit. Everywhere they walked, they would find a differently run tribe, showing their great population and diversity in creativity.

Before the Age of Discovery the Europeans did not come into much contact with other parts of the world. It was no wonder why they believed in ethnocentrism, the belief that one society is supreme to another society. The Europeans thought that in order for the world to continue working, their beliefs would have to be spread among every culture. The definition of true human being would soon be limited to people of their religion and roots, or people that lived the same lives. They brought a plethora of diseases that rattled the Indians because they had no protection against what they were unaware or unexposed to.

The Europeans had a lasting effect on the history of American, and the lives of the Native Americans already in the process of development in the New Land. Even though they brought disease and destroyed many lives of people that did not have the resources to fight against them, we have to believe that we descended from al this change. Because we use the ideas of the Europeans, and the medicines of the Indians we can only accept both in the past of our history of the world. It is clear that the mistake that Christopher Columbus made to voyage here was a one needed to create the wo