Roman ruins that lie underneath the city
Photocredit: www.museuhistoria.bcn.es
The fieldtrip we took today was one of the first ones that i've ever gone to a history museum and actually felt like 'history came alive'. I know that sounds cheesy, but it's true. As we were walking through the old roman ruins, I was literally imagining the people who used to live in the exact spot I was, talking about everyday things, going about their lives. Perhaps it was the way that our professor contextualized what we were seeing and described it in vivid detail: the 12 year-olds slaving away in the dying pools, the women scrubbing away at their clothes with ash and urine...It just all felt so real! I guess i've always had an overactive imagination, and to have someone help it along was awesome. For me, it was so interesting in the museum discovering how culture is changed, re-appropriated, and evolves into something else. In America, we don't really have enough history to have gone through buy maybe one or two large, country wide shifts of culture, and for the most part those changes in culture have been made through media outlets - movies, radio, television, etc. I never thought about the fact that one empire doesn't just disappear and another takes it's place - it's a gradual change and one in which the transition has to be made easily - for example, the tradition of wine being sacred, developed by the romans and used in orgies and other rituals, and then changed when Rome became christian and was included in the communion ritual. It is a way of helping people keep their customs while changing their culture. It's also so interesting to me to think about the old vehicles of culture - namely religion, compared with those of today, media. Globalization has had a giant impact on homogenizing culture across the world - I can travel to an entirely different continent where they don't even speak the same language and they're watching the same shows and movies that I am in the U.S. Yes, It's nice to have something in common with people everywhere, but as methods of communication get faster and globalization continues, are we going to be sacrificing uniqueness and culture for efficiency? Is the world getting too small?
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