Chapter 3

This land is my land Even though children soon experience the things we are going to discuss in this chapter, the theme is a difficult one because there are good reasons for the two attitudes we are about to explain. We have defined these as attitudes as Sedentary and Nomadic, in other words “loving one’s own home”, and “going to someone else’s home” (or “welcoming those who come to our home”). The idea is to encourage young people to grasp the positive aspects of all points of view and to lead them to discuss the limitations of each one. Consequently, with regard to such an apparently simple theme we have to convey the idea that as far as certain problems are concerned there is no one single answer, but many of them, which depend on viewpoint, the particular situation, and so on.At the end of this section we propose several discussion ideas aimed at reconciling the apparent contradiction and at showing how the need for protection and privacy (emphasized by sedentary communities) and the drive to explore (championed by the nomads) are in fact two aspects of the human personality, that these two aspects imply each other and that, therefore, each of us is a little sedentary and a little nomadic (albeit to an extent that varies according to culture and personality).Having established these premises we move on to the second section, devoted to the problem of frontiers, in which the children will be invited to consider the territorial boundaries of their own geographical area.

1 - Territory.

All human beings need a safe place in which to shelter from bad weather and the dangers of the outside world

We are territorial animals

All the human beings feel attracted towards what lies beyond known territory.

We are nomadic animals

All human beings feel attracted to what lies beyond known territory. The call of a distant place, unknown and fascinating, induces people to leave their place of origin in order to head for destinations that may be fairly close or very far away.

The instinct of exploration is just as important as the instinct of preservation, because it leads people to leave a safe base in order to discover the nature of the external environment, what resources it offers, and what there is to be learned from it.

2 - Frontiers.

Lots of people live in the countryside where the land is divided into fields delimited by borders: fencing, barbed wire, or merely some stones placed on the ground to mark the limits of the field.

We are territorial animals

All human beings need a safe place in which to shelter from bad weather and the dangers of the outside world, where they can rest with no fear of being attacked, where they can share some day-to-day experiences with the members of their own family, and where they feel part of a larger group to which they are bound by a common language, by a history and by a series of future projects.The instinct of preservation drives people to seek refuge“in their own home”, and to defend this familiar space from strangers wishing to enter it.

We are nomadic animals

All human beings feel attracted to what lies beyond known territory. The call of a distant place, unknown and fascinating, induces people to leave their place of origin in order to head for destinations that may be fairly close or very far away.

The instinct of exploration is just as important as the instinct of preservation, because it leads people to leave a safe base in order to discover the nature of the external environment, what resources it offers, and what there is to be learned from it.

Personal space Being bound to our own space, our own place of origin, the environment to which we belong, that is to say to our own territory, is called territoriality. Territoriality is a natural phenomenon, common to many animals, and concerns first and foremost the defence of our personal space from intrusion on the part of strangers. If we slowly approach a stray cat, once we get to a certain distance we see that the cat suddenly flees. It is as if we had stepped over an invisible boundary to enter in what the cat perceives as its personal space, and its flight serves to re-establish a “safe distance”. If at this point we were to prevent the cat from running away, and if we continued to move closer to it, it is probable that, on feeling threatened, it would begin to show signs of aggressive behaviour towards us: it would puff up its fur, arch its back, spit, and so on, in an attempt to drive us back.

Ethologists have established that many birds and mammals behave in a similar fashion, both with enemies belonging to other species, and (in certain cases) with members of their own species. In fact, personal space is not just a defence against enemy aggression; for many animals it is also a way of discouraging the excessive nearness of members of the same species, and therefore serves to avoid the effects of overcrowding (if the population is too numerous then there isn’t enough food to go round, individuals disturb one another, diseases may begin to spread, and so on). Consequently, these animals tend to run away or to behave aggressively even when their personal space is “invaded” by their own kind.

Human beings are territorial animals too. If strangers get very close to us, breathe in our face or step on our toes, we feel disturbed by their closeness, and we almost feel like behaving the ways animals do, showing our teeth right away, or running off. Usually we limit ourselves to stepping back a little and keeping our distance. If the space is too small, like when we find ourselves in a lift with a stranger, we try to behave if he or she were not there, for example by turning the other way, or gazing into space. So we too defend our personal space, even though we do this in a way different to animals.

Contact with other people

In the animal kingdom some creatures live in solitude, like certain birds, tigers, lizards or vipers. Others instead live in groups, like lions, zebras, wolves, herring, and very many birds. They do this because living in groups allows individuals to help one another and to find food together, while enabling them to defend themselves better from enemies. When they meet members of their own kind, these animals make attempts to get to know one another and, if possible, to make friends. In order to do this they exchange signals, and since they cannot talk they move their tails, or sniff one another in order to sense from the smell whether they have encountered an animal they can trust, they emit sounds, and sometimes they lick one another. If, by the smell or by other signals, an animal acquires trust in another animal, then the two agree to stay together, behaving as if they could talk to each other, and sometimes even playing together.It looks just like when two children meet. They move close to each other, they wonder “Who are you?” or ask “Do you want to play with me?” or one offers the other a sweet or a plaything. In fact human beings also need to feel the presence of their own kind and seek contact with other people. We have such contacts every day, and when we are alone for too long we get bored and we look for someone. Sometimes people go out into the streets or to the bar merely to enjoy “a chat”. Sometimes we telephone people even though we have nothing in particular to say to them, but just to hear their voice (and to have them hear ours).Contact with others may occur in various ways: sometimes there is eye contact, or a greeting, and we begin to talk or to play together. Even fighting can be a form of contact. When contact is made we admit others into our personal space, and the others do the same for us.

How children construct their own personal space New born babies do not yet have any sense of their own personal space and see no boundaries between themselves and others: during the very first months of life, the external environment manifests itself to babies as a confused thing: babies do not yet know that they have a body of their own, distinct from those of others, nor do they recognize objects and people as things different from themselves. For babies, being in the world means being with mummy, who breastfeeds and fondles them, and there is no difference between the mother’s personal space and that of the child. But, between the second and sixth months, children begin to notice the fact that they and the mother are two different things. And this is how they begin to become aware of a strange “boundary” between themselves and others. It is precisely for this reason that children suffer if the mother (or the person who looks after them) goes away; children follow her with their eyes, call her and, when they cannot see her anymore, they become desperate. But it is thanks to this “experience of separation” that children – at the of age between six and eighteen months – slowly begin to recognize themselves as individuals distinct from others.

And so children gradually begin to recognize their own personal space. Whereas when they were smaller anyone could approach them, as time goes by only a few intimates can penetrate an invisible “limit of nearness” without arousing feelings of anxiety or disquiet. Around three years of age, children begin to keep their distance with regard to adults who are not close family members or friends (while this distance still does not exist as far as their peers are concerned). Still in this period, children begin to distinguish the distances to be kept between males and females, and only in this way do they acquire an awareness of their own “gender” (that is to say, being male or female). On recognizing their own personal space children also acquire a sense of property. Within their personal space children recognize certain objects as theirs, and they defend them from others (everything they like arouses the statement: “that’s mine!”). This “sense of property” is natural and only through training do we learn that we cannot have all the things we want even though they belong to someone else, and that many things must be shared. Learning to respect other people’s

property means, for children, growing up to be social animals, who accept certain rules in order to be able to live in a group, whether it is the family, the street, school, or the village.

Children understand that in certain situations some people should be kept at more of a distance than others (parents teach them not to put their trust in strangers, who might be “bad”) but also that, just as they wish to defend their own space and possessions from the invasion of others, they too must respect other people’s spaces and possessions.

• How children begin to explore Newborn babies spend almost all of the time drifting in a state midway between sleep and wakefulness, waking up when they are hungry or have some other need, and plunging back into sleep as soon as their needs are satisfied. But at around six months of age they begin to “explore” the world around them. The first explorations primarily regard the body of the mother, or whoever looks after the infant: babies pull her hair, nose, ears, put their hands in her mouth, observing and manipulating her from close to. Once they become familiar with the mother’s face, and having realized that this is an entity physically separate from them, at around eight months children can turn with a blend of curiosity and fear to exploring the faces of other people, whose features are compared to those of the mother.

As children gradually acquire mobility and self awareness, they explore the world more and more. At first they limit themselves to grasping, sucking, and touching whatever comes within range. Later, through sight and hearing, they observe more distant objects. As soon as they are able to crawl, they begin to move away from the mother for brief periods: sometimes they become so absorbed in their activities that they seem to forget her presence, but then they are seized by sudden separation anxiety and they return to her. It is as if they make little return trips from the mother to the surrounding environment.

Thus, in a certain sense, children create a kind of “map” of the world they know, learning to recognize and to foresee a growing number of situations, and at the same time learning to understand better what they know and can do. For example, children learn that if they grasp a fragile object and then release their grip, the object falls to the ground and breaks; but, by so doing, they also realize what they can do with their hands. When, towards the end of the first year, children learn to walk, whole new horizons open up for them. By standing on their feet they see their environment from “high up” and they recognize it better. Play introduces new experiences (they learn that balls bounce, that certain objects roll, that others make sounds if shaken, and so on). In the meantime they learn to speak, and gradually become able to share their own experiences with others.

If children see a thing that they like or one that makes an impression on them they begin to say that it is “big” or “nice”, if they see an object or an animal that they know, they will repeat its name pointing at it with a finger, and they try to say the name over and over to others in order to convey their impressions or discoveries.

Territory

Often, animals live in a clearly defined area in which they build their nest or lair, raise their young, find and conserve food, play, and so on. This place is their “territory”, and they defend it from strangers.In order to communicate their presence in the territory to others and to make it known to others who might cross the boundaries of the protected areas, many animals mark the territory in various ways: for example, they may emit acoustic signals (like birdsong or the howling of wolves), visual signals (for example, scratches on tree trunks) or olfactory signals (by emitting smells through glands and urine). If an outsider ignores these signals, this triggers the defensive reactions of those who consider themselves to be the rightful occupants of the territory. Fighting seldom begins. More often there follows a ritualization of the conflict, in which the adversaries limit themselves to showing their aggressiveness through certain external signals until one of the two (usually the invader) beats the retreat.Human beings too need familiar spaces in which to carry on their activities and these spaces are the home, school, the neighbourhood, the village, all the way to far more extensive territories, like the region or the country in which they live. These places are perceived as part of their own personal space and, as such, they are “marked” and defended from intruders. These defensive marks can be of various types: for a house they might be closed doors, signs reading “beware of the dog”, or a gate; for a large country there will be frontiers, where the national flag is flown and where guards keep watch over those crossing the border.

Nomadism The word nomad comes from a Greek word meaning “to roam in search of pasture”, in other words to wander around, sometimes without a fixed destination, and sometimes towards destinations that are far off and still only vaguely defined. Nomadism springs from the desire for freedom, from curiosity, from the desire to go beyond - with the mind or the body - the boundaries of known territory.

On certain occasions, and this happened frequently in the past, an entire population sets to wandering because a food shortage at home or natural catastrophes (floods, earthquakes, plagues) have made it difficult to live in their territory. So they move off in search of a different country, in which there may be fields to cultivate, gardens full of fruit, water, a mild climate and plenty of animals to hunt or to raise. In the chapter on migration we shall be talking about the forms of nomadism in which entire populations go on the move.

The attraction of things that we do not know yet is expressed in many ways. Since childhood, we take an interest in all things that are hidden or secret: store rooms, attics, rooms that we are not permitted to enter, are all places that stimulate the imagination and the desire to explore. Before we explore such places we daydream about them, inventing stories about them. Sometimes these are very beautiful stories, sometimes they are very frightening (like when we believe that the cellar or a certain dark room is inhabited by the bogeyman, the wolf or some other wicked being). As adults we may fantasize about far off lands, but we always feel the need to explore what we do not yet know. In all countries legends have been invented about distant lands, often populated by fantastic creatures.

Naturally, there are people who are more “sedentary”, that is to say with closer bonds to their own territory, who do not want to leave their own home and who suffer if they have to go on even a short journey. But there are also people who are anxious to explore what lies beyond the boundaries

of their territory. Such people are travellers. Certain travellers of the past undertook bold expeditions to distant destinations.

Home For human beings, the instinct to “mark the territory” has not merely a defensive function (keeping out strangers), but also serves to recognize those places as ours. This is why we decorate our houses according to our tastes, arrange the furniture in a certain way, and place the objects we like on the furniture. In this way the house says who we are, what our preferences are, and, on seeing a person’s house, we often understand something of the personality of those who live in it. Then there are the customs of the occupants of a house (birthdays, staying together in the evening to watch television or sitting around the fire) just as there are common customs within the same village or city. All these customs make us feel that we belong to that group, family or village, so much so that when we are far from these places we feel homesick.

There are many types of house and many types of village, and in fact rather than the word house, which suggests the idea of four stone or brick walls covered by a roof, we might talk of a home. We are accustomed to the homes in which we live and sometimes we cannot understand how other people can live in a different type of home, but this depends on the customs of all peoples: there are homes made of wood, others of mud, stone or brick, or plaited leaves or reeds, while some homes are even made of blocks of ice. Nor is it indispensable for the home to be in a fixed place, and so there are populations called “nomads” who move continuously from one territory to another. When they come to a welcoming place they pitch their tents, and for a certain period these will be their homes. Today there are nomads who move in wagons or caravans, and always live in different places. At one time, Australian aborigines wandered continuously through the desert, stopping for the evening to catch some small game to eat, and then sleeping under the stars. The entire desert was their “house”, and they continued to live peacefully in this way until the Europeans came to build their towns and villages. This caused much suffering for the Aborigines because they could not adapt to that transformation of their territory.

Over and above the differences, however, all homes have something to cover them (like a roof) and usually, but not always, they have windows to let in light and air. But there are homes in places that are so hot or so cold that people do not make windows in them, in order to protect themselves from the heat or the cold. All homes, however, have something (usually doors, but sometimes merely a hole) through which people can come in and go out. The home protects us from the outside world but it also allows us to go out and communicate with others. But there are rules. First of all, access to the house is not open to all. The host decides who may come in and what must be done in order to gain admittance. Moreover, inside the house there are certain established rules that both the permanent occupants and guests are obliged to respect: individuals agree to sacrifice some of their own personal freedom in favour of the convenience and greater safety guaranteed by membership of the group. Every culture works out a system of rules that prescribe the behaviour expected of guests, and if guests do not observe these rules they are considered to be invaders. On the other hand, hosts have the bounden duty to behave in a set manner with visitors.

Guests may be people who arrive unexpectedly, but on most occasions guests are desired and invited. Precisely because human beings are social animals who love their homes, they wish to invite guests, to show them how welcoming their home is and how good the food is. In certain cultures guests are felt to be a gift of the gods, and hosts bend over backwards to do them honour, sometimes sharing food even when it is hard to come by. Guests certainly receive a favour from those who welcome them into their homes, but it is in part an exchange, because guests tell of other

places and other customs. Guests bring different territories into contact and foster reciprocal knowledge.

Travel In very many accounts, the protagonist is he (or she) who leaves the place of origin to tackle the perils of the unknown. Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Sindbad, Erik the Red, and countless other characters from legend and story all over the world, would never have had their amazing adventures had they stayed at home. On their way, travellers meet strange people and animals, and find themselves obliged to deal with a variety of obstacles and difficulties. But, when they return from their adventures, these characters are considered heroes, or in any event people who have had extraordinary experiences. These first travellers encountered “strange” peoples. This is another way of saying that they met people whose physical appearance or customs were different from those of the travellers. It was sufficient for these people to have skin of a different colour or a different shape of eyes, or for them to wear animal skins that made them look as if they had fur, or for them to wear hats made of the skinned head of a bull complete with horns, and travellers immediately began talking of the strangest creatures, with fur like monkeys, with tails, with horns, with three eyes or extremely long fangs. But on other occasions more attentive travellers, like Marco Polo, for example realized that they were human beings, only partly different from them, and that they had different customs. Thus while on the one hand many travellers had people believe that far off countries were populated by monsters they had never really seen, on the other they helped their compatriots to understand that the world contains different colours, languages and cultures. Naturally, on learning that different human beings exist outside their territory, those inhabiting a certain territory begin to distinguish between Us and the Others. This distinction can produce opposite reactions: either there is a growing fear of an invasion by the Others, or people begin to want to make expeditions to those far off places in order to conquer the Others. But sometimes the decision is taken to make new journeys in order to establish trade with the Others. Thus, first in the Ancient World and later in the Middle Ages, long journeys were made to the Orient in order to import the spices that were highly prized in Europe for their capacity to make food taste better and to preserve it, or to buy silk, which was produced only on the other side of the world. Reciprocal knowledge often led to an improvement in domestic living standards, and to an overall enhancement of both the cultures that came into contact with each other.

Europeans have often thought that they were the ones that went off to discover the Others. But there are accounts of Chinese and Arab voyages in which we learn that frequently those people who Europeans thought of as the Others had made journeys to discover the Europeans. This tells us that every people is inclined to distinguish between Us and the Others. We must try to understand, wherever we live, that We are the Others for those we think of as the Others.Peoples cannot be divided into the ‘discovered’ and the ‘discoverers’ because each of the two is both of these things at the same time. Let’s think about what happens when we receive a visit from a traveller coming from other another country. Those who come into contact with the traveller share in the experience of different customs. People who live in a country visited by many foreigners (emigrants, tourists or even an occupying army) get to know different people. They may accept or reject the strangers, but they have to admit that they are different from them in some way.

Things that may seem natural or very beautiful to the inhabitants of a determined place may seem bizarre or terrible to the visitor, and vice-versa. Europeans find it almost inconceivable that some Chinese eat dogs, but Muslims find the European habit of eating pork just as distasteful. There was a time when the English found it bizarre that the French eat frogs (which are considered very good eating in many countries). Italian cuisine offers many excellent dishes based on raw meat, but in

America this food was viewed with deep suspicion. Those who ate raw meat in Europe were amazed to learn that the Japanese eat raw fish while the Chinese eat shark’s fins. Yet all we need do is think of how reciprocal travel (which has led many inhabitants of one country to get to know about the customs of those living in another), immigration (which has brought the Chinese, for example, into half the countries of the world) or tourism, have changed the customs of various peoples. Now raw fish is eaten in the United States too, just as Americans eat Italian pizza and spaghetti, while there are Chinese restaurants in every western city. Certain customs have endured, however, and westerners are still not prepared to eat dogs, but reciprocal distrust regarding eating habits has diminished greatly. This means that travel helps people from different countries to get to know one another better and to exchange experiences.

Homeland We have said that the close relationship that binds individuals to their homes, and that leads to domestic space being perceived as an extension of personal space, may extend to far larger territories, such as the neighbourhood, the village, or the nation. In all these cases, the territory is identified with the community that inhabits it, in other words with the more or less extended group of people that feel bound strongly to one another. Usually, we say that they belong to the same homeland, to the same nation, or to the same country. In order to represent this community, special symbols are used, like flags for example.

What do the inhabitants of the same national community have in common? First of all, a language: speaking the same language means sharing a certain way of thinking. Those who have lived in small villages where people still speak in the local dialect know that certain things that can be expressed well in dialect cannot be said in the national language (or vice-versa) and on certain occasions we realize that some jokes can be understood only by those who speak the same dialect.

For this reason people from a given place are sometimes embarrassed or uneasy when people arrive there (as immigrants) speaking a dialect that the locals do not understand. Sometimes it is also important to recognize the accent of one’s birthplace. It sometimes happens, when we are far from home, that we experience a sense of familiarity on hearing someone talk in accents that we recognize as those of our home area. But we must also try to see things from the standpoint of those who are guests in a foreign place, and feel isolated because they do not understand the local dialect or language. The obligations of hospitality prompt us therefore to put these “outsiders” at their ease, just as we would like to be treated were we to find ourselves far from home. Moreover, if our dialect strikes us interesting and beautiful, it would be important to understand other people’s dialects too.

People from the same village or the same nation also share a tradition of legends, stories that relate the birth of their town or city, as well as folk tales and stories. This tradition is transmitted from generation to generation. Common “stories” contribute to the creation of the collective identity. Through these accounts, the community is united by a common past and everyone sets ideals and goals to be attained together.

The members of a community also share various social and cultural practices, religious beliefs, rules of conduct, dietary precepts, and artistic traditions, ways of dressing, decorating spaces, and so on: in short, they share the same culture.

The nation, the country, or the homeland is a place belonging to a group of people bound by a system of common traditions, the same language, even the same landscape, with the result that the inhabitants of a city on the sea love the great stretch of water, but the inhabitants of a desert region feel at home with the great expanses of sand and could not live in a valley hemmed in by snow-covered mountains, as certain mountain populations do. All those who belong to the same country have similar concepts of good and evil, beautiful and ugly (these ideas are called common values, i.e., things that hold for everyone).The homeland is the place where we are born, where our parents were born, and where we hope our own children will be born. It is the place where we feel surrounded by friendly people, with whom we have an understanding and with whom we co-operate in order to obtain things that every member of the community desires.But it should never be forgotten that foreigners too have feelings for their homeland. The world contains not one but many homelands and every one of us loves his or her own. We also have to respect the feelings for their homeland that are shared by those who speak a language different from ours. We ought never to say “my homeland is the only good and beautiful one, and yours shouldn’t even exist”, because others too will think the same thing. It is this way of thinking that has led to those wars in which some peoples, in order to impose the languages and the values of their own homeland, have tried to invade and destroy that of others. Do you know of any cases where this occurred?When our land is threatened by people from another country who invade us as if we were enemies, then we are right to defend ourselves from these attacks. This is why every country has its own army, which must not be used to invade other people’s countries but to defend its own.However, it very often happens that foreigners do not come to us as invaders, but as immigrants, looking for jobs that they cannot find in their own country.

Immigrations and Migrations We have to draw a distinction between immigration and migration. Migrations occur when an entire population abandons its own land and settles land held by another people. Migrations involve enormous numbers of people who all go on the move together.

Immigrations occur when people from a certain country, in order to find work, go to another country. This is not a movement of an entire population, most of which remains on its own territory, but only of a part of the inhabitants. In other words immigrants do not all go to the same place, but spread out through those countries in which they hope to find work. They do not want to conquer the country they have chosen, but merely to find better living conditions. • Migrations In ancient times, there were many migrations. It may well be that we and our communities are the results of an ancient migration. According to most scientists, humankind as a species was born millions of years ago in Africa and then began to migrate to other continents, from Europe to Asia, and all the way to America and Australia.Towards the end of the Roman Empire there were migrations of northern peoples, which the Romans called “barbarians” (but in those days, barbarians – from the Greek word barbaros – meant “foreigner”), who occasionally settled peacefully within Roman territory but more often than not invaded it. From the union between the Romans (who in those days dominated all of Europe) and these new peoples sprang the languages that many of us speak today (such as Spanish, French, English, German, Italian, Rumanian, etc.). Then they all became Christians and all Europeans are the descendants of those migrants.

With Mohammed, the Arabs – who had previously lived solely in the Arabian peninsula – expanded first of all throughout Northern Africa as far as Spain, then they spread their religion throughout most of Asia, and what we now know as the Islamic World springs from that enormous movement of peoples.The two Americas were also originally populated solely by the local populations (North American Indians, Aztecs, Toltecs and Mayas in the area now known as Mexico, the Incas in Peru, and various tribes in the Brazilian forests). At first the Europeans conquered (in an extremely savage fashion) the territories held by those populations, but then in the course of several centuries they began to migrate to these new lands in great numbers. Therefore not only the United States and Canada, but also all the countries of Latin America as we know them today, are the result of that slow and continuous European migration, which lasted four hundred years. The Australians of today are also the descendants of migrants.

Therefore migrations have very often been bloody affairs. But on other occasions they have been peaceful, and in any case they are usually unstoppable because when an entire population decides to move it is difficult to stop it. Generally speaking, migrations have changed the face of the world, transforming it into the place we know today. Go to the examples and the exercises • Immigrations Waves of immigration have usually proved to be a good thing for the host country. For example, the United States became a great country thanks to the arrival of millions of immigrants who have worked hard and contributed to the development of great cities like New York. Over the years, these immigrants became American citizens, who still bear Italian, Polish, Irish or Latin American names. Chinese and Indian people have immigrated to various parts of the world and have created some very highly populated communities. Today millions of people are emigrating from the Philippines, Turkey and Africa, in order to work in European countries. Albanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Romanians, and so on, have always emigrated from eastern Europe towards Western Europe and this is a process that is still going on. Go to exercises

Immigrants try to integrate themselves in the country they have chosen and try to find work there because the reason they left their country of origin is that they could not find enough work to enable them to live decently. Some of these people, even though they earn extremely little, make sacrifices in order to send a little money to the families they have left at home. Many of them fail to find a steady job and so take on even the humblest tasks. In large cities, we tend to notice those immigrants who beg or try to peddle low-priced objects, and most people are unaware that in many places immigrants are at work in the fields or in the factories, and little by little they manage to earn enough to enable their families to join them. Many things that we use every day are produced thanks to the work of immigrants. Go to exercises

Countries are often unable to accept all the immigrants who would like to go there and so many attempt to get in clandestinely, driven by the hope of being able to find a decent standard of living. These clandestine immigrants are exploited by criminals who transport them illegally to their destination only to abandon them to their fate. Sometimes unscrupulous people pretend to help illegal immigrants but in reality all they want to do is exploit them or force them to take part in criminal activities. Go to exercises

When many immigrants arrive in the host country, they may create embarrassing situations. The citizens of the host country begin to see growing numbers of people who may perhaps have a different colour of skin, speak another language, or have habits and customs that strike them as

strange. Some citizens of the host country feel as if they are under attack in their own territory and on some occasions they react to this in a violent way, and try to drive out the newcomers.

Faced with these problems, we need to do two things:

1. to try to understand that the immigrants have left their native land, and sometimes their family, that they feel isolated among different people, and that they tend to stick together because they feel rejected by the society in which they now find themselves. If they are to bear with this difficult condition, it is necessary to allow them to cultivate their customs, speak their language, and practise their religion: in other words, they have to be able to cultivate their original identity. The citizens of the host country also have to realize that on many occasions immigrants received a distorted idea of the country they intended to move to, and were attracted by illusory promises of happiness: for example, in certain cases, when still living in their own country, immigrants received television broadcasts from richer countries, which presented those same countries as marvellous places in which people could win large sums of money by answering a simple question, while the adverts continually showed fantastic products, urging people to buy them as if everyone could really afford to do so. In this way the host countries seemed to be promising immigrants a happiness that they did not find on their arrival. Go to exercises

2. at the same time the host countries must lead immigrants to understand the values of the host community, allow their children to attend school, and to learn the local language, as all these things will help them to integrate with the new community.

Sometimes living together is difficult. For example some people like to eat lots of garlic while others eat it with extreme moderation because they don’t like the smell. If in a certain country where people do not like garlic there should be a wave of immigration from countries where people love to eat garlic, then people are liable to start saying that the newcomers stink of garlic. Of course it is not very easy to live with smells that we find unpleasant, even though the laws of hospitality recommend that we pay no attention to this. Perhaps immigrants ought to try to modify their eating habits a little, so as not to annoy the people of the host country. Perhaps it would be sufficient if schoolchildren, in those countries that have welcomed children from many different countries, were to talk frankly about this problem and to try to find a solution to it that would satisfy everyone. Go to exercises

The greatest difficulty that immigrants face is that of language. All around them they hear people speaking a different language and so they tend to keep to themselves, associating only with people who speak the language they understand. The hosts are always rather diffident towards those who speak a language that they do not understand and they tend to make fun of people who speak their language badly. As we have said, the state must give the children of immigrants the chance to go to school and to learn the local language. On the other hand, however, the state should not try to oblige them to forget their own language and traditions, while schools ought to include lessons for them in which everyone can learn something about the immigrants’ country of origin. Go to exercises

Frontiers

Frontiers are created to ensure peace but, sometimes, they lead to war

When two groups live together in the same area it may happen that, in order to avoid conflict, they decide to establish a certain boundary line that separates their respective territories.Frontiers are therefore instruments created to guarantee peaceful coexistence between different groups. But when one group, despite the agreements in force, crosses the frontier in order to invade the territory belonging to the other group, then this instrument of peace becomes the cause of war.

What are frontiers? Lots of people live in the countryside where the land is divided into fields delimited by borders: fencing, barbed wire, or merely some stones placed on the ground to mark the limits of the field. In certain cases, borders coincide with natural barriers: two properties may be separated by a stream, a cliff or a precipice, or a row of trees. In other circumstances, borders are drawn up without following any natural barrier: for example, it is possible to build walls or fences to separate two houses or two properties. Just as there are borders between houses and fields, so there are also borders or frontiers between villages, towns or nations.

In ancient times, ceremonies for marking frontiers were a sacred matter. The legend of the founding of Rome says that Romulus marked out the boundaries of the city and, when his brother Remus provoked him by stepping over the boundary, he killed him. Some enormous countries have erected barriers between their own territory and the boundless lands from which foreigners might have arrived. Just think of the Great Wall of China. Thousands of kilometres long, it was built in order to defend the Chinese empire from invaders. Just as we can still see enormous stretches of the Great Wall, so we can still see fortifications built by the Romans in the countries that they conquered, in order to mark and defend the outer limits of the empire from its enemies. For example, Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland.

• Natural barriers The frontiers of a country may be a natural boundary, like a broad river, a mountain chain, the sea or an immense desert. We say therefore that these countries are protected by natural barriers. For example, the Alps separate Italy from France, Switzerland and Austria. The Pyrenees separate France from Spain. The frontiers of island states like Japan, Iceland, and Great Britain are bounded by the sea. But precisely because of the various migrations that have occurred over the centuries, on many occasions peoples who spoke different languages found themselves living in territories in which there were no particularly marked barriers. For example, Great Britain comprises England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. In certain cases, like that of Great Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, and Spain (where there are populations with their own language and traditions such as the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia), peoples whose languages were originally different have been united under the same kingdom or republic. • Political frontiers In other cases, political frontiers have been marked out. If you look at a map of Africa with its many various countries, Sudan, Tanzania, Mali, and so on, you’ll see that the frontiers are almost all geometrical and follow no natural boundaries. It was decided by international agreement that this or that country ended along this or that line, beyond which another one began. Nevertheless, even within these countries defined by political decisions, you will find larger tribes or groups, with different languages and even religions, who are often at war with one another.

Why do frontiers get moved? Over the centuries, some frontiers have been moved continually. A typical country in this sense is Poland. The territory we call Poland today has been conquered many times by warlike foreign peoples and, if you look at a historic atlas, in certain centuries it was bigger than it was in others and sometimes it disappeared from the map altogether. And all this happened despite the existence of millions of people who spoke Polish and who felt themselves to be profoundly Polish. Sometimes political frontiers are drawn up after a war, when the winner takes over some parts of another country. Or, since in a certain area there live communities that speak two different languages, it is decided to assign the area to one country rather than to another. Thus country A may contain linguistic minorities, made up of people that speak the language of the neighbouring country B, but who are - politically speaking - citizens of country A. Linguistic minorities can be a cause of tension. The people who speak language A would like to be citizens of the country that speaks the same language. In any event, misunderstandings and clashes between the two groups may occur. The best way to solve these problems would be for a country to respect those of its inhabitants who belong to a linguistic minority, and to give them the chance to be educated in accordance with the language and traditions of their origins. But the members of the two groups must also collaborate with one another and understand that the vicinity of a different group represents a chance for mutual cultural enrichment, rather than a threat or a disturbance. It is in everybody’s interest to know a second language: by living in a country with two communities present in the same territory you can learn many things. Just as people feel bound to their own village and their own country, so are they also bound to their own region, to the dialect of that region, and to many local traditions. These ties are important, but they must not be seen as contrary to national unity. If in a given country various regions have always lived together, each one giving something to the other, isolation within the region of origin means losing these contacts. In one region, the cities may also be inhabited (perhaps for years and years) by citizens from other regions who, although they belong to the same country, speak different dialects. Exchanges between regions are an asset for the whole country. But in certain cases the desire for regional independence leads to bloody conflicts. In order to find out more, go to the Exercises

What are frontiers for? What is the purpose of a frontier?

1. First of all, defence (drawing a line beyond which foreigners may not penetrate), and in this case on many occasions frontiers have served to isolate a country, which had no contacts with other cultures and other civilizations. Isolation can be harmful because it prevents peoples from receiving new input from other peoples.

2. The second function of a frontier is that of guaranteeing peace: if two peoples mark out their frontiers by common agreement, then it is possible to prevent reciprocal intrusions into other peoples’ territory. However many times frontiers are imposed by a conqueror who wants to claim “I have come thus far and thus far my word is law”, even though such a claim may not be accepted and recognized by neighbouring peoples. At other times, a frontier that is drawn up after a war, let’s say, and is perhaps accepted unwillingly by the losers, is subsequently rejected because the ones who lost the war want to get back some of the winner’s territory, which they still consider to be their own. And so frontiers, originally created to encourage peace, have been the cause of many wars over the centuries, wars that have led to new

frontiers that have in turn paved the way for new wars in the future. Usually, a war between two peoples never leads to definitive peace, but creates the reasons (hatred, resentment, desire for revenge) for other wars. Today many international agreements represent an attempt to stabilize the frontiers of every country, while supranational bodies like the United Nations authorize many countries to intervene when the frontier of a country has been violated without good reason by an aggressive neighbour.

3. A third function of frontiers has always been that of customs duties. Almost all countries want to protect the goods that they produce and to impose taxes on those that arrive from abroad. This is why there are customs posts at frontiers where goods coming into and leaving the country are checked.

Exemples

The lift Sometimes we have to share a cramped space with strangers. In such situations we are obliged to reduce the personal space that normally separates us from the others. One typical case of this is the lift, or elevator (but the description that follows may be applied to other similar contexts, such as a crowded bus during rush hour).

Observe how people behave when they are crammed into a small space. The nearness to others causes embarrassment and, given the absence of any escape route, each person tries to occupy the space farthest away from all the others. In order to neutralize as much as possible the invasion of their own personal space, people bring a variety of strategies to bear. The first of these consists of not facing the others and looking in another direction; for example, feigning interest in some detail of the walls, ceiling or floor. In this way the intimacy created artificially by the limited space is compensated for by the absence of eye contact. Another fairly common defence strategy consists of putting on a suitably vacuous look, as if we were deeply absorbed in our own thoughts: in this case the presence of others is simply denied, as if they were invisible or transparent. There is also a third strategy, considered more polite: given that the others are in fact there, and there is no way of avoiding their presence, we can make an effort to strike up a conversation. But in this case too people are careful to keep their distance, at least with regard to the content of the conversation, which is usually about the weather or some other suitably neutral topic.

Looks

Two passers by who meet in the street may look at each other, which is a first form of contact because in a certain sense such glances “perforate” their respective personal spheres creating a channel of communication between them. Through the exchange of looks it is as if one of the two were saying to the other “I see you (and I know that you see me)” and therefore “I recognize your existence (and I know that you recognize mine)”. No one can do without such recognition: it is by seeing ourselves in another’s gaze that we construct our own personal identity.

Systematically refusing to look at people can be interpreted as a sign of hostility, or of indifference to them. Instinctively, our glance tends to fall on anything that arouses our curiosity, and it is only

culture, with its rules and conventions, that obliges us not to look at certain classes of people, treating them as if they were invisible.

Again, it is culture that prescribes the types of look that are considered acceptable in certain situations. In some cultures, for example, staring insistently at a stranger can be interpreted as a sign of aggression, defiance or rudeness, while in other cultures the same look can be understood as a sign of liking or benevolence. On the other hand, the intensity, duration and the direction of the look are subject to precise rules of behaviour according to the circumstances: we may stare at an actor on the stage for the duration of the show, we can exchange long and knowing looks with the person we love, but, when we see a stranger on the train, we must limit ourselves to a few rapid glances, unless we wish to break the socially accepted rules that oblige us to respect other people’s personal spheres (with all the unpredictable effects that such a breach of the rules may involve).

In any case, within every culture the more or less prolonged exchange of looks is a way to communicate to the other our willingness to engage in a deeper interaction, or to reinforce an interaction that is already underway. During a conversation, for example, we constantly seek the glance of the person we are speaking to in order to assess the effect that our words are having on him or her (it is very hard to fake a look), and to understand their attitude towards us, to see whether they are being sincere, or evasive, and so on. And the person we are speaking to does exactly the same things. Without even realizing that we are doing so, we gather clues regarding the character and the state of mind of the person we are dealing with, and on the other hand we expose ourselves to his or her judgement of us. By so doing, we admit the other into our personal sphere and we commit ourselves to the creation of a social space.

The greeting All cultures have developed specific rituals that accompany the commencement and the termination of a social relationship. Greetings vary from one culture to another, from a nod of the head to rubbing noses, from the open hand to a variety of kisses and hugs, also in accordance with the kind of relationship in force between the persons involved in the interaction.

In Western countries, the handshake is one of the most common forms of greeting, at least between adults. When we meet people, and we offer a handshake, we communicate our willingness to come into contact with them and our preparedness to start up a friendly interaction. In olden times people used to hold out an open hand to show that they were not concealing a weapon and therefore did not wish to attack the person to whom they were holding out their hand. Animals also understand signs of friendship: for example, dogs often roll over onto their backs to show that they want to be petted – an action that also tells us that we enjoy the animal’s trust as it is exposing its most vulnerable part to us.

Let’s pause for a moment to look more closely at the social significance of the handshake. The distance that separates us from the other person is slight enough to allow us to observe his or her face from close up, to smell his/her breath and even his/her body odour. Through hand contact we admit this person into our personal space – and, naturally, the other person does the same thing for us. Skin contact involves an exchange of body fluids, in the form of sweat (there are cultures in which this exchange of fluids is reinforced by the act of spitting on the hand before proffering it).

The strength of the handshake conveys to the other an indication of our own physical energy (and there are cultural rules that associate various nuances of meaning with the various kinds of handshake). The open palm of the hand, a soft and private zone of the body that we normally keep

turned towards ourselves, is offered to the other almost in sign of surrender. In this way we express mutual confidence in the good intentions we harbour in the other’s regard, and it is no accident that a handshake is the way in which we generally seal a promise.

The house

There are many different kinds of houses. In some parts of the world, such as in certain mountainous regions of the Andes, half or even two thirds of houses are sunk in holes excavated in the ground and roofs are made of straw.In tropical climates, in the Amazonian forest for example, there are “roof-houses”, or roofs held up by poles. These are houses “without walls” that offer enormous benefits in terms of cooling. Some architects have studied the effectiveness of air circulation under such roofs, and they have found that it is usually the result of the fact that the roofs are made of palm leaves and set very high.

In other cases, again in South America, when the Spaniards reached the area known today as the Mato Grosso, they found villages made of enormous hemispheres of straw in which it was very difficult to find even the smallest opening through which to enter. Even before they saw the inhabitants of such villages, they called them “chiquitos”, or “little ones” since they thought that people who contented themselves with such tiny “doors” must have been tiny too.

The Spaniards soon discovered that the villagers were human beings like them, but that they went in and out of their homes on hands and knees in order to maintain the cool atmosphere generated by the huge semi-spherical straw roofs The Dorze of Ethiopia construct houses shaped like the lower part of a cone, which they move around in thanks to a system of ladders. These are examples of house-warehouses, in which the people keep supplies of cereals sufficient for many months of survival.The ancient people known as the “Anasazi”, a Navajo word that means “the old ones, the ancestors” lived (until roughly 1200 CE) on the sheer rock faces found between Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. They used a system of ladders to move up and down the rock face.

The large cabins of the Jivaros of the Amazonian jungle (once famed as “head-hunters”) were, and often still are, divided into two parts: one reserved for the menfolk and visitors, called the tankamash; and another part reserved for the women of the house (a Jivaro man can have several wives and at times two or more family units may live under the same roof), for the women accompanying men who are there on a visit and also, especially during the night, for the men of the house. This part is called the ekent, which means “residence”.

Another fundamental difference regards the density of housing. As far as the distance between houses is concerned, every culture has different rules, only partly dictated by environmental conditions, subsistence requirements and population density. In many cultures there are no “villages” but only isolated houses. For example, the Huave Indians of southern Mexico, who live among the dunes on the seashore (between the Pacific Ocean and the Lagoons) lived for a long time in huts roofed with palm fronds scattered about the dunes and sometimes very far from one another. After the arrival of the missionaries, some of the Huave were persuaded to form villages. Some of their villages are conglomerates of huts, each one of which is apparently orientated in its own way (but in reality in accordance with a precise logic), but without straight roads and neatly aligned houses. The rest of the Huave continued to live in scattered huts.

Travellers • Marco Polo The great Italian traveller, Marco Polo, born either in Venice or Curzola in 1254, was fifteen when he accompanied his father Nicolò and his uncle Matteo on a long voyage to Asia. In 1271 they left Venice for the court of the Great Khan. They passed through Anatolia and the Caucasus, the realms of Mosul, Baghdad. Tauris, Persia, Pamir, Kashagor, Kotar, Cherchen, Lop and the great desert of the Tatars. Once they reached the court of the great Khan, after a three-year journey, they were welcomed with all honours.

The young Marco, after having learned the most important languages of the Khan’s vast realm, was encharged by that same sovereign to visit certain regions (completely unknown to Europeans) and he even went as far as the province of Tibet, where he devoted himself to exploration in the purest sense of the term.

The Polos left China in 1292 with fourteen ships and six hundred men, skirting the coasts of China, Indochina, Malaysia, Sumatra, southern India and Persia until they reached Hormuz. After a voyage that had lasted almost three years, Marco Polo went back to Venice. In 1298, when he was on board a Venetian galley at the battle of Curzola, he was made prisoner and taken to Genoa. In prison he dictated the story of his travels to his cellmate, Rusticiano de’ Balsani da Pisa, who wrote it down under the title Livres des Merveilles du Monde. This work, later known as Il Milione, was a great success all over Europe and was for a long time the most important source of information about East Asia. Subsequent to his return home, he died in Venice on 8 January 1324.To know more about this, go to the quotations

• Christopher Columbus A navigator and explorer, probably born in Genoa (but many towns claim to be his birthplace), in 1479 Christopher Columbus began sailing on merchant ships and, in 1486, he settled in Portugal. It was there that he first began to cultivate his dream of reaching India by the fastest possible sea route.

In 1492, after two previous failures, the king and queen of Spain approved his plans, naming him Admiral of the three caravels they had ordered to be prepared for him: the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa Maria. On 3 August they set sail from Palos and on 11 October 1492 they landed on the island of Guanahani (in the archipelago of the Bahamas), which Columbus named San Salvador. Later, he reached Cuba, which he thought was China; then it was on to Haiti, where he established a small colony. When he returned to Spain he organized another expedition with 17 ships, in the course of which he reached the Antilles and Jamaica, but without finding the riches he dreamed of. On his fourth voyage he skirted Central America from Honduras to Colombia, still convinced he was in Asia. Tired by then, he returned to Jamaica, where he stayed for 10 months, only to return to Spain in 1504. He died in 1506, a forgotten man. To know more about this, go to the quotations

• Non European travellers In the west most people believe that it was the Europeans who “discovered” the world and that the great travellers were all Europeans. In reality, things were different. All peoples have produced travellers: travellers driven by necessity, by the desire to trade, and also by the desire to conquer. Before the modern age and the great conquests in America, more Orientals and African travelled than Europeans. New research tell us that the lands we thought were discovered by Europeans were

in reality already known to and visited by many non European travellers. Before Columbus, and even before the Vikings, Japanese fishermen and sailors had ventured as far as the Pacific coast of North America. Australia and New Zealand were well known the Indian and Japanese merchants, who often traded with the Aborigines. Centuries before the Europeans explored it, Africa had been crossed from north to south and from east to west by Arab caravans. Arab, Indian and Chinese merchants traded among themselves and it was their traffic that introduced Europeans to new goods and new navigational techniques.

Unfortunately we know little about these travellers. What little we do know, however, provides us with a fascinating portrait of adventurers and scholars. One of these was the Moroccan Idris who, in the 12th century of the Common Era, compiled the Book of Roger, an authentic guide to Italy and the Mediterranean islands for Islamic travellers. Another extraordinary figure was Ibn Battuta. As a young man he began his travels with a caravan. Like Marco Polo, it was the yearning for discovery that drove him from one city to another. For thirty years, between 1324 and 1354, Ibn visited all the lands of Islam, travelling as far as Persia and the Far East and the Atlantic coasts of Africa. The story of his travels is an incredible account not only of the places he visited, but also of the very personal feelings he had when visiting them.

Farther east we find some great explorers, such as the young Korean traveller Ch’oe Pu, who lived in the 16th century CE. A court official, Ch’oe Pu undertook a series of embassies by land and sea that led him to visit the Chinese coast. After surviving a shipwreck, he set off toward Peking and he left us some of the most beautiful descriptions of the China of his day. But a completely different series of motives lay behind the wanderings of the greatest of Chinese travellers: Hsuan-tsang. A Buddhist monk, Hsuan-tsang was convinced that the holy books that had reached China did not contain the true message of Buddha. So Hsuan went to Tibet and India in search of the Master’s original books. He visited all the Buddhist holy places from Vaisali to Sravasti.

Hsuan-tsang’s journey was an extraordinary mystical adventure, but it was also a journey that enabled him to complete his education and training. After visiting the Bodhi tree, where Gautama Buddha had received illumination, he decided to remain among the Vedas in order to learn their wisdom. On his return to China, he welcomed dozens of young people into his house, where he revealed to them what he had learned. This was in the year 637 of the Common Era.

Migrations

The history of humanity began with an enormous movement. Homo sapiens, starting out from Africa about 100,000 years ago began the long process of homination.

Migrations are events that are difficult to describe in all their complexity. But it is worth bearing in mind that while on the one hand the movement of large groups of people has caused inevitable conflicts and social crises, on the other hand the phenomenon has played a major role in the rebirth and the revival of cultures and countries.

For example, we are accustomed to thinking of the fall of the Roman Empire in the V century CE as a clear cut and traumatic event. This is partly true, there were battles and much pillaging - even Rome was almost destroyed during the Barbarian invasions. But it is also true that, well before the collapse of the Empire, for over two centuries the populations living in the outlying areas of the immense Roman provinces were already involved in a long but inexorable process of assimilation.

The more the centre, Rome, gradually declined, the stronger the outlying regions became, and those who had once been “barbarians” or foreigners from outside the Empire became Roman citizens, thus allowing the entry of new peoples. The more far-sighted emperors (like Constantine) permitted the barbarians to come into and peacefully cultivate parts of the Empire. But the Roman nobility used all its influence in an attempt to ensure that no concessions were made to those who were pressing on the frontiers. The Empire fell precisely because it did not open itself enough. Inevitably, power had begun to shift from the centre to the periphery and thus, in a certain sense, what had been once the periphery became the centre of power. But the newcomers did not destroy everything, as some people often say. On the contrary, they often conserved things and they fell under the influence of Roman culture.

This is an oft-repeated process in History. Just think of the situation in China just after the year 1000 CE. As the old leadership of the centre of the Chinese Empire was falling apart, the provincial areas were getting stronger thanks also to their union with migrant peoples (the Mongols). Collapse and the Mongol invasion were imminent. But this did not spell the end of China. On the contrary, the country emerged stronger than ever after these movements. Frontiers

Sometimes the lines drawn on maps have nothing to do with the people who actually live in the territories involved. So it often happens that populations or groups of people become the subjects or the citizens of other nations without wanting to, or without even knowing this. In the early 16th century, for example, the Portuguese and the Spaniards who were the first to “discover” America (but we now know that these lands had been settled for millennia by native Americans) decided to divide all the territory between themselves.

So they drew a line on their maps: the land on this side of the line is yours, the land on the other side is ours. But no one gave a thought to the millions of natives then living in the Americas. Thus these natives were transformed into subjects (and often into slaves) without even knowing it. Sometimes political frontiers serve to solve complicated questions that could deteriorate into wars. If you look at the map of Europe you can see that Russia (the largest country in the world) is not a compact mass, but has a very small region that is Russian but is not “attached” to the rest of the nation. This is the region of Kaliningrad on the Baltic sea.

This tiny region is detached and far distant from the rest of Russia but it has remained Russian because the people who live there speak and feel themselves to be Russian. If it had become a part of Poland or Lithuania (the two countries bordering on this territory), the people of the region would have felt they were victims of an injustice.

Maps Al-Idrisi’s map of the world (oriented with the south at the top), 13th century CE

It is always a good idea to remember that the images we see in the geographical maps on the walls of our schools or in our atlases do not tell us everything about the countries represented. These maps only tell us how map makers represent a given country or a given territory. The territory is always far more complex and cannot be reduced to this image. Other types of maps take no account of the geographical dimensions of a country, but concentrate on other aspects of it. For example, there are maps in which the size of a country depends upon the number of people who live there.

Thus countries that usually seem to be enormous (like Australia or Canada) become tiny because they are inhabited by very few people. Other maps reconstruct the various countries on the basis of their economies. In these maps, the richest countries (like those of North America or western Europe) are very large even though their territories may be small: for example, Holland and Belgium are shown as big as the Congo.

To know more about this topic, go to the exercises

Exercises

If you think of other exercises, or if you would like to send us an account of your classroom experience, write to the editorial board.

• The invisible man Try the “invisible man” game: during normal recreation activities (for example, during a game of football or any other game), the children take turns at experiencing what it feels like to be completely ignored by their playmates or the teacher. Afterwards, discuss together about how it feels to be “invisible”.

Home Draw a map of your house: how are the spaces divided up? What goes on in each individual space? Are there places where you cannot go? Are there places where you prefer to be alone? How do you “mark” your territory?How do you behave when there is a guest in the house? How should a person on a visit behave? Tell about the times when, after a guest has visited, you have learned new or curious things.

Travel • Travel journal Have you ever gone on a journey, or for a trip outside your town? Tell about the things you saw or about the things that struck you the most. If you have any photos, try to look at them without paying any attention to the main person in the foreground. Check to see if the margins or the background of the photo reveal anything typical of the city or the place you have visited (a curious character, some natural or architectural feature, some local characteristic).

Tell about the things that you didn’t manage to understand: food, customs, and so on; now try to imagine what it would be like if the children from that place were to come to visit you: what do you think they would find hard to understand? • Ethnocentric images These images representing slices of African life and customs were drawn by European artists of the XVI and XVIII century CE who had never been to Africa and who based their work on the accounts of contemporary travellers. It was hard for these artists to portray a world that was unlike their own and that they had not seen with their own eyes. This is why the illustrations contain many errors and distortions. Artists took information from the accounts of travellers and then combined it with false stereotypes, pure imagination, and elements typical of European culture. This exercise is the work of class IIIC of the ITSOS Albe Steiner school in Milan.

Multisud: (edited by Nicola Scognamiglio), Bologna: EMI, 1999

Flags Do you know the flags of the various countries? Draw some of them and hang them up one beside the other. Try to discover what things are symbolized by the colours and the shapes on each flag.What do you feel when you see the flag of your country? Do you think everyone feels the same way about their flag? • Dialects If local dialects are spoken in your territory, collect some typical expressions and add a translation in the mother language. Are there some things that can be expressed better in dialect than in the official language? • Stories Try to remember the stories and legends that underpin the “collective identity” of your community. If the class includes children from other countries, ask them to tell their stories. • Discussion It is normal to be proud of one’s own collective identity. But do you know of cases in which nationalistic sentiments have led to the destruction of other ethnic groups? The teacher may propose historical examples that concern your own geographical area and local history. Find out about massacres of cases of genocide that aimed at wiping out other people’s homelands. When does nationalistic sentiment become a bad thing?

• Migrations

With regard to your country, study the waves of migration of the past. If you can, follow this movement of peoples on a map. Try to discover how many peoples, how many cultures have crossed, occupied, or invaded your nation or your region. Make a list and find out who they were, where they came from and what they left behind them, for good or for ill. Can you still recognize the descendants of the migrants from those of indigenous peoples, in other words those who were living there before migration?

• Immigration

1. Identify the groups of immigrants that live in your territory and say what jobs they do. Try to discover where they come from, what language they speak, what religions they observe, what customs they have, and so on. If there is someone belonging to one of these groups in the class, have him or her tell the story of how their family arrived in your country.

2. What do your people say about immigrants? Have you ever heard anyone say that they are all criminals? Open the newspaper and make a count of the crimes reported in it. Were they all committed by immigrants? Were any of the crimes committed by your fellow citizens? Is it right to say that all immigrants are criminals?

3. Find out if any of the inhabitants of your country have emigrated to foreign countries in the past. Do you know any? If you can, go to visit them and ask them if they were well treated, and if they managed to improve their condition. What would you do if you were dying of hunger and had to emigrate? What would you like to find in the country you thought of going to?

4. Watch the television in your own home, especially variety shows and the adverts, and ask yourself if they do not present your country as if it were a place of total abundance, where everyone can have the most beautiful things. Try to imagine the effect of such programmes on people who have very little money and live in really poor countries where children often die of hunger.

5. Identify situations in which the presence of immigrants arouses tension of conflict inside the territory, not because of the behaviour of single individuals, but because of the customs that immigrants want to observe (you can start with a newspaper article, for example on the question of the Islamic veil or the observance of religious festivities). The children should try to suggest reasonable solutions aimed at reducing the number of situations liable to cause conflict.

6. Teach your dialect or your language to the children of immigrants and ask them to do the same for you. Write down words or phrases in the immigrants’ language: how do they say “hello”, “how are you?”, and so on? It is always useful to compare a few foreign words and you can do this as if it were a game. At the same time, the immigrant children will learn your language better.

• This place is mine! The teacher should try to organize a role playing game involving the whole class. This game, which is intended to simulate a territorial conflict, requires two teams of children (each of which chooses a name, a symbol, etc.), of which one acts the part of the established community, while the other acts that of the migrant community. One possible situation might be that one of the two groups wants to

play football while the other wants to play another game in the same street or square. Or, with older children, the teacher may choose a topic based on the actual local situation. Each of the two groups must argue its case before a jury. Then, after having demonstrated that negotiations would be in the interests of both parties, the teacher must try to persuade the two groups to negotiate the conditions required for co-existence. At this point the various possible solutions (everyone could play the same game, share the time available for play, decide that while one group plays the other acts as spectators-judges etc) must not be suggested. It is up to the children to find the most acceptable solution for everyone.

Another form of debate, which might work with older children, is the one suggested by the school of Novy Sacz (Poland): rather than discussing orally the pros and cons of a given situation, this is done in writing. The class is divided into two and each member of each team sits at a desk or table in front of a member of the opposing team, but there must be no talking. Each pair is given a sheet of paper and one of the two writes a paragraph in which he or she argues his or her case; then the sheet is passed to the other team member, who reads it and writes a reply. Thus the children argue their positions in turn, until the subject has been thoroughly examined. In this way, the students learn to argue in a convincing and reasonable manner, but with all due respect for the point of the view of the other party. (Naturally, the debate may degenerate into invective: but the children will soon understand that such an approach will not take them very far).

• Frontiers Identify the political frontiers of your own country: to what extent do they coincide with natural barriers? Who established these frontiers and when? Have they always been the same or have they ever been changed? Why were they changed?

1. Adapt the exercise to your own particular situation. African children will find it useful to reconstruct the various conflicts within the confines of the same nation. The same holds for children from the Balkans. Children from former Czechoslovakia can discuss the reasons that led to the separation of the Czech and Slovak republics. Children from the Baltic republics can see on a map what their frontiers were like before they were annexed by the Soviet Union and compare these with the modern frontiers. Similar examples can be found for Asiatic children and so on.

2. Hold a discussion to see whether in your country there are cases in which the desire for regional independence has led to bloody conflicts, as for example has happened with the Basque separatists in Spain. How could these conflicts be settled or avoided? Are there any cases where you think that the protesting region really ought to be given independence?

3. If you are citizens of the European Union, try to list the countries that make it up. Identify their flags and try to remember the names of the various local currencies in circulation before the euro.

Consult the site of the European Union and the charter of rights.

• Maps and stereotypes

Geographical maps can generate stereotypes. In fact some projections faithfully show the shape of the continents, while the surface areas are evidently distorted. Others give a faithful representation of dimensions, but distort the shapes. No map can ever be perfectly accurate since the way in which each one represents the world depends on the cartographer’s original intentions and the criteria applied in order to express them.

This exercise, which compares Mercator’s projection (XVI century) with that of Peters (1974), is the work of class IIIC of the ITSOS Albe Steiner school in Milan. Multisud: una classe all’opera tra nuove tecnologie e nuove educazioni (edited by Nicola Scognamiglio), Bologna: EMI, 1999.

Quotations

Territoriality • Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension, New York: Doubleday, 1966 Territoriality offers protection from predators, and also exposes to predation the unfit who are too weak to establish and defend a territory. Thus, it reinforces dominance in selective breeding because the less dominant animals are less likely to establish territories. One the other hand territoriality facilitates breeding by providing a home base that is safe. It aids in protecting the nests and the young in them. In some species it localizes waste disposal and inhibits or prevents parasites. Yet one of the most important functions of territoriality is proper spacing, which protects against overexploitation of that part of the environment on which a species depends for its living.

In addition to preservation of the species and the environment, personal and social functions are associated with territoriality. C.R. Carpenter tested the relative roles of sexual vigor and dominance in a territorial context and found that even a desexed pidgeon will in its own territory regularly win a test encounter with a normal male, even though desexing usually results in loss of position in a social hierarchy. Thus, while dominant animals determine the general direction in which the species develops, the fact that the subordinate can win (and so breed) on his home grounds helps to preserve plasticity in the species by increasing variety and thus preventing the dominant animals from freezing the direction which evolution takes.

Territoriality is also associated with status. A series of experiments by the British ornithologist A. D. Bain on the great tit altered and even reversed dominance relationships by shifting positions of the feeding stations in relation to birds living in adjacent areas. As the feeding station was placed closer and closer to a bird’s home range, the bird would accrue advantages it lacked when away from its home ground.

Man, too, has territoriality and he has invented many ways of defending what he considers his own land, turf, or spread. The removal of boundary markers and trespass upon the property of another man are punishable acts in much of the Western world. A man’s home has been his castle in English common law for centuries, and it is protected by prohibitions on unlawful search and seizure even by officials of his government. The distinction is carefully made between private property, which is the territory of an individual, and public property, which is the territory of the group.

This cursory review of the functions of territoriality should suffice to establish the fact that it is a basic behavioral system characteristic of living organisms including man. Edward T. Hall, the Hidden Dimension, 1966, Milan: Bompiani, pp. 17-18 • Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension Social animals need to stay in touch with each other. Loss of contact with the group can be fatal for a variety of reasons including exposure ti predators. Social distance is not simply the distance at which an animal will lose contact with his group – that is, the distance at which it can no longer see, hear or smell the group – it is rather a psychological distance, one at which the animal apparently begins to feel anxious when he exceeds its limits. We can think of it as a hidden band that contains the group. Social distance varies from species to species. It is quite short – apparently only a few yards – among flamingos, and quite long among some other birds. […]

Social distance is not always rigidly fixed but it is determined in part by the situation. When the young of apes and humans are mobile but not yet under control of the mother’s voice, social distance may be the length of her reach. This is readily observed among baboons in a zoo. When the baby approaches a certain point, the mother reaches out to seize the end of its tail and pull it back to her. When added control is needed because of danger, social distance shrinks. To document this in man, one has only to watch a family with a number of small children holding hands as they cross a busy street. Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension, 1966, Milan: Bompiani, pp. 23-24

Nomadism • Elie Wiesel, “Foreword”, Migrations et errances, Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2000 It is man’s nature to move through space as well as time. Life means leaving one place for another, one moment for the next, abandoning an idea or an image to replace them with others that lead us ever further towards an elsewhere that is, however, indefinite. Immobility, which is not the same as repose in the mystical sense, is not compatible with life.Life is about looking, it is about projecting oneself towards the heights and sometimes towards the depths, it is about infiltrating oneself into the dreams of others, it is about desiring, it is about wanting to reach the heavens by taking a step backwards or forwards on the earth. The wandering of the body, from the cradle to the grave; the wandering of the spirit, craving for eternity. Individual or collective wandering. Wandering in joy, wavering in ecstasy. Wandering in desperation, attached to it as if to a presence.

Why do men and women throw themselves into the adventure that, inevitably, wrests them away from those around them and leads them far away, towards the unknown? Adam and Eve became human when they left Eden. But the first nomad was their eldest son Cain. The first commandment that God transmits to Abraham is “go”.As for Moses, he is not so much famed as the liberator of his people but as the one who led them out of Egypt. Ulysses devoted his life to his search for Ithaca while Oedipus devoted his to delineating his truth. What would world literature, art and philosophy be without their great explorers, expatriates and exiles? The example of Immanuel Kant, who never moved from Koenigsberg, is a rare one. What would religions be if their founders – the great spirits of this world

– had not chosen to live in the solitude of the desert? In the words of a great Hassidic master: the relationship between God and man is like that of two strangers who meet in a foreign city.

Each represents the other’s only support, his only hope. So the best thing for both is to walk together. On the way, we discover invisible worlds and at the same time we discover ourselves, accumulating masks and habits, faces and situations, laws and prohibitions. Without a country, we feel liberated and even free, nothing is familiar anymore, therefore all things are attractive. Faced with the stranger, we become strangers before we find ourselves even more faithful to ourselves. In a certain sense, we are all wanderers, in search of signs, deeds, and points of reference. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2000 • S. Zweig, The Buried Candelabrum Perhaps our destiny is to be eternally on the move, forever regretting and desiring with nostalgia, forever craving repose and forever wandering. In fact blessed is only the journey whose destination is unknown and yet stubbornly pursued notwithstanding, such is our present march through obscurity and peril without knowing what awaits us. • Ugo da San Vittore The man who finds his native land sweet is none other than a raw novice; he for whom all lands are as his own is already a strong man; but the only one who is perfect is he for whom the whole world is only a foreign land. The Journey • Ruggero Ragonese, The Travellers In the West, we are accustomed to knowing only the deeds of the great European travellers to the Orient (Marco Polo) or to the Americas (Columbus, Vespucci). But over the centuries many civilizations have produced great travellers. For centuries Indian and Chinese merchants ventured to lands unknown to Europeans such as Japan and Indochina, even arriving at the shores of the Mediterranean. A great number of erudite Jews and Arabs have left us splendid itineraries of journeys made between India and Spain, covering thousands of kilometres. Even in pre-Columbian America fragmentary information has reached us of great travellers capable of making longitudinal crossings of the entire continent.

In the classical world travel was reserved for only a few people. True, in all periods there have been great mass movements (in ancient Greece, whole communities moved in order to establish their own colonies), but those were more migratory phenomena than travel proper. Travelling was the province of the hero and could only be an individual experience. A man, the hero, left on an extremely long journey, but at the same time he was aware that he had to return to the motherland, laden with the experience that would make of him a wise and venerable man. This idea of the philosophical journey that made the traveller a wise man changed when the role of the traveller was no longer taken on by heroes but by scientists and scholars. Herodotus and Pliny are two emblematic figures in this sense. The new scholar-travellers sought to accumulate knowledge that might help them to understand the other: human, animal or vegetable as the case may be.

What the community required was the instruments with which to gain an improved understanding of the world. The relationship between travelling and the community in the territory weakened during the Middle Ages, when other elements prompted people to travel. People often travelled for religious reasons. Individuals moved and travelled not in the search for knowledge or wisdom, but in order to save their souls. This marked the birth of the great religious pilgrimages to Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca, which were splendidly described in the various mirabilia urbis. Even when the reason for the journey was not religious, but commercial, it was still bound up with the personal interests of the traveller. A perfect example in this sense is constituted by the great Venetian explorer Marco Polo who left his home town to go as far as Cathay (modern China).

Marco Polo, whose recollections of this journey have come down to us in the book known as Il Milione, was forever swithering between his nostalgia for Venice and his amazement at the new worlds, the new places he passed through, the impelling need to make scientific notes on what he saw, and his personal interest in the favourable outcome of his family’s business dealings. Travelling thus diversified into an experience that was sometimes scientific, sometimes formative and sometimes economic. These three ways of conceiving travel, all of which coexisted in the young Marco Polo, have continued to develop over the centuries until the present day. First and foremost, there was the scientific journey, the most direct descendant of the great classical scholars. It was a journey made in order to study and analyse the territories explored. Francis Bacon, the great English philosopher of the XVI century, reminds us how the real traveller is he who records and analyses scientifically the things he sees, touches and collects. Then there is the formative journey, where the route through places and new and unknown peoples helps the individual to “know the world” and to become a good citizen. Starting from the seventeenth century, this kind of journey was initiated by the upper classes and aristocracy of the great European nations. Another great philosopher, John Locke, suggested in his book Some Thoughts Concerning Education that travel ought to be made almost obligatory for all young men of good family.

And in fact, on the journey, whose destination was almost always Italy, wealthy young Englishmen and Frenchmen received their artistic, amorous, sexual and cultural initiation. This was the Grand Tour so masterfully described by Sterne in his Sentimental Journey. The formative spirit of the Grand Tour spread throughout Europe, America and even to some non-western countries (such as Turkey and Japan) and may still be seen, albeit in a somewhat faded version, in that sector of the modern tourist industry that throngs the art cities of Europe. The journey made for trade requires no particular explanations. The trade routes, the need to find new markets, have always driven business people and merchants to cross land and sea in the bid to make new contacts and forge new relations.

But there is another type of journey whose importance is too great to be ignored. This is the voyage of discovery or conquest. This kind of voyage developed in the Europe of the XV and XVI centuries and continued until the end of the XIX century, by which time there was practically nothing left to explore or conquer. We have associated the terms “conquest” and “discovery” in an attempt to take account of the areas of light and shade cast by this important phenomenon. It is necessary to emphasize how the great geographical discoveries lent a powerful impetus to discovery and knowledge. One enormous territory (the Americas) became known to Europeans, others opened their doors to trade.

This made it possible to have a complete vision of the globe, thus definitively gainsaying the theories based on religious beliefs. Especially for Europe, the experience gained from the great voyages produced enormous commercial benefits that were also transformed into the inventions and scientific discoveries that work to our advantage to this day. But the great voyages were also voyages of conquest. The discovery of new communities and new cultures was virtually never

transformed into real curiosity or real exchange. The relation between the “discoverers” and the “discovered” was almost always based on the logic of subordination and exploitation. While, in the Americas, entire populations were destroyed, decimated and deprived of their identity, others, like the African populations, were barbarously deported and reduced to slavery. Of course, tragic experiences such as the Spanish “Conquest” and slavery cannot be laid at the door of explorers like Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Vespucci (even though it is worth remembering that the various expeditions were financed and backed by European nation states).

But it is also true that on reading the journals of Christopher Columbus one can hardly avoid noting the difference with the journals of Marco Polo. Columbus did not believe that the voyage could change his inner self, but thought that the discovery would bring him glory. This is why he made such detailed descriptions of the territories he discovered, describing them already as the property of his most Catholic Majesty the King of Spain. Columbus needed to convince people that he had made a good “discovery” because the new territories held much that was worth taking and exploiting. It is no accident that, in those very years, thanks to the great voyages, the science of modern cartography arose in Europe. The new maps described the terrestrial globe in an accurate, geometrical fashion and territories became geometrical spaces. Underlying the scientific rigour, there is a clear desire to make everything equivalent, homogeneous and therefore easier to exchange and divide. This was the period that witnessed the great division of the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese, the Spanish and the English, and the French and the English.

We have attempted a brief review of the different ways of travelling and the different types of travellers. If we take a closer look, many of these types of travellers can still be recognized in modern mass tourism. The business traveller, the student, or the youngster in search of new formative experiences can all be spotted among the crowds that throng the most popular tourist destinations. There are also “consumer” tourists, who often limit themselves to passing though the territory they visit as simple purchasers of emotions and experiences. They will often accept a superficial vision of the place that they have found in the guidebooks, following a set itinerary in which everything is already organized and planned, after which they return home laden with photographs, but, at bottom, it is as if they had never moved from their armchairs. It would be a good thing, therefore, not to make a minor version of the mistake made by the conquerors, by remembering that behind the charts, the maps of the city, and the tourist guidebooks there lies a territory with its history and its riches. • Camus, Carnet What makes travel worthwhile is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain point, we find ourselves very far from our own country… we are gripped by a vague fear, and by the instinctive desire to turn back, under the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. In that moment we are anxious, but also porous, and even the slightest touch makes us tremble to the core of our being… This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in travelling and I see it as an opportunity to tackle a spiritual test…. Pleasure distances us from ourselves, as diversion in Pascal’s sense distances us from God. That form of travel which is like a greater and more serious science brings us back to ourselves. • Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America. The Question of the Other, 1999, Oklahoma What Cortés wanted most of all was not to take, but to understand; it was signs that interested him first and foremost, not their referents. His expedition began as a search for information, not as a hunt for gold. The first important thing he did – and it was an extremely significant thing – was to

look for an interpreter. He had heard talk of Indians who used Spanish words; from this he deduced that perhaps there were some Spaniards among them, men who had been shipwrecked on previous expeditions; he asked around and his assumptions proved well grounded. So he ordered his two ships to wait for eight days, after having sent a message to those potential interpreters. After many vicissitudes, one of them, Jeronimo de Aguilar, joined Cortés’s troops, who struggled to recognize him as a Spaniard. […] This Aguilar, who became Cortés’s official interpreter, was to render him invaluable service. But Aguilar spoke only the Mayan language, which is not that of the Aztecs. The second fundamental character – in this conquest of information – was a woman, who the Indians called Malintzin and the Spaniards Doña Marina, but we do not know which of these names was a deformation of the other; the most frequently recurring version of this name is “la Malinche”. She was offered to the Spaniards as a present in the course of one of the earliest encounters. Her mother tongue was Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs; but, having been sold as a slave to the Maya, she also knew their language. So, at first, the chain was a rather long one: Cortés spoke to Aguilar; he translated for la Malinche what Cortés had said to him; and in her turn the woman spoke to the Aztecs. Her gift for languages was evident, in a short time she learned Spanish too, and this made her even more useful. It may be supposed that la Malinche harboured some hostility towards her people and some of their representatives; what is certain is that she was strongly on the side of the conquistadors. In fact, she did not limit herself to translating; it is clear that she also adopted the values of the Spaniards and tried with all her might to help them realize their goals. On the one hand, she carried out a kind of cultural conversion, interpreting for Cortés not only words, but also behaviour; on the other, she could – when necessary – take the initiative and say the right words to Moctezuma (especially when he was arrested), without Cortés having said them beforehand. […] Since independence, Mexicans have usually blamed and despised la Malinche, who became a symbol of the betrayal of indigenous values, of servile submission to European culture and power. It is true that the conquest of Mexico would have been impossible without her (or without someone capable of carrying out the same functions), and that she was therefore responsible for what happened. But I see her in a very different light: la Malinche is the first example, and therefore the symbol, of the hybridization of cultures; as such, she was a harbinger of the modern Mexican state and, over and above that, she is a precursor of a condition that is today common to all, since, although we are not always bilingual, we all inevitably participate in two or three cultures. La Malinche enhances the idea of racial intermixture to the detriment of purity (Aztec or Spanish) and highlights the role of the intermediary. She did not submit purely and simply to the other (a case that is, unfortunately, far more common: just think of all the young Indian women, “offered as a gift” or not, who were accepted and enslaved by their Spanish masters); she also adopted the other’s ideology and used it the better to understand her own culture, as is shown by the effectiveness of her behaviour (even though “understanding” served, in this case to “destroy”). 1982, tr. it. Torino: Einaudi

The Travel • Furio Colombo, “I Grandi Viaggi” There are only two ways of organizing human thought if we are to draw enlightenment from it. One is the inner route, from philosophical reflection to mystical vision. It is a delving inside the self, accompanied by a dogged and rigorous organization of intellectual labour, or that febrile jump that enables the passage from one level to another of emotion, perception and awareness. The other is the journey, the narration of the journey. This is at once realization and metaphor of the progress of knowledge, of the broadening of experience, of learning through difference and comparison, of the continuously changing relationship between persons and things, of the passage of time in relation to

distance and space. Even in the colloquialisms present in all languages and in all cultures, the act of travelling represents both life (or the sense of it) and death, or its predestined outcome. We set off in order to arrive, setting off is separation (hence the reference to death) and arrival is always marked by that sense of uncertainty, danger, expectancy, surprise and profound imbalance that it is not out of place to call “the other life”.

***Over the millennia, travelling has always signified adventure, risk, death, and rebirth in the knowledge of the new world. More than anything it has signified difference, a challenge that humanity cannot avoid facing, between the known and the unknown. In the history of humanity, the line of demarcation between modern and pre-modern is marked by a knowledge of the physically reachable and testable world, since certain enormously different experiences – some known, others unknown – begin to flatten out as sounds, colours, persons, animals, the products of nature, and artefacts are exchanged. The yearning for a “somewhere else” not yet reached or reachable or known is so strong that for a long time the world – already modern and already in possession of all the notions and information about itself – has been cultivating the “exotic” in order to keep alive the sense of diversity, distance, and of things that can be communicated only through experience.

***Much farther back, in the story of mankind, another two lines of demarcation in human history and behaviour ought to be noted. One is the epoch of the movement of peoples. This occurred in prehistoric times and thus precedes the human settlements we know about. In this there was conquest but no awareness and no narration, because the point of arrival and settlement was not a “new world”. The other line of demarcation refers to the epoch of life at the centre; in other words the three millennia dominated by the story of the Orient, Greece and Rome. In those millennia the world was large but not infinite. Travelling meant moving radially. The traveller’s mission was to reach the extreme outer periphery in order to go back to the centre and confirm its importance and superiority. The degree of risk and value alike was established by the distance from the centre. The civilization that set all standards was to be found at the centre. In the days of life at the centre travelling was first and foremost about returning, as is illustrated by the story of Ulysses. In those days mercantile movement was above all circular, with the agricultural specialities and craft products from the various places arranged around the centre representing a “division of labour”, in which everyone, in a different way, was a tributary of the centre. Imagination too was circular, as it was based on a sense of the permanence of the centre on the one hand, and on the regular succession of the seasons and of the phases of agricultural life on the other.

***The linear voyage, which consists of movement towards what is distant and uncertain, without knowing how distant or how uncertain, required a profound cultural change that took a long time to spread. In fact it required not only a weakening in the permanence and the gravitational pull of the centre, but also a change in the perception of the real, both in a physical and spiritual sense. For the western world, it was Christianity that opened human minds and will to the idea of voyages that were long and without a return (or at least without the certainty of return). The arrival of the new faith overwhelmed the dominant power of the secular and imperial centres. And even though the Church had its most important establishment in Rome, the spirit of the new religion suggested that the “right” place was wherever there were people to reach and souls to conquer. Consequently, people became strongly motivated to move physically and to travel far away towards the unknown, a motivation nourished by an act of faith, a different conception of the heavens and the earth that, a long time after the great voyages of exploration and discovery, gave rise to new visions of the physical world […]

***This brings us to the XV century and the awareness of an unknown world waiting to be discovered – even if there was a risk of the journey proving to be one with no return – began to spread. Journeying became the laboratory of the new culture, in other words of all that was new in

mathematics, science, astronomical knowledge, in a vision of the world that was non literary and non religious, but scientific and experimental. An exemplary illustration of this is the Voyage to the Orient by Nicolò de’ Conti, an authentic border line between before and after, in the concept of the voyage. In de’ Conti’s work “the outer limits of the world” are at once the ancient, insurmountable frontiers of the classical world, and a mysterious and fascinating corridor that leads far away, to other lives and other worlds. The narration of the voyage reveals a constant preoccupation with the need to measure, refer and compare [things] with things that were already known (especially with regard to the authority of the Church, of the Pope-King, seen as the central point of the Universe). But by that time there had arisen an awareness that other peoples, other visions and other forms of the organization of life, and other unknown yet powerful rulers, constituted other “centres”, which were the established expression of another model of existence, of association, of belief, of command, and of submission. […]

***The voyage of Christopher Columbus and the meaning and perception of the world were at once the seed and the fruit of a new culture. It marked the success of a concept embracing scientific hypothesis, abstract schemas, and theoretical formulation that was applied to problems and the need to verify them in the great laboratory that was the Ocean. All the data and the less important information (indications of length, nations, peoples) were mistaken. But the great theories were confirmed. The world was explorable, immense new spaces that had never been seen before were available. And despite the fact that these voyages are frequently described in terms of military victories, the conquest of riches and the spread of the faith (or the extirpation of other faiths, depending on the extent of the Christian and human charity displayed by the missionaries), what emerges clearly from every book, from every diary and travel journal, is the sense of absolute wonder at all that was new, at the exploration of the unknown seen as the supreme adventure in man’s destiny. […] This attitude is clearly visible in the uncouth but highly interesting prose of Michele de Cuneo, who followed, on 25 September 1493, the same route as taken by Columbus on his first voyage. […] His account tells us of a world that had two extreme characteristics, distance and diversity. Distance is represented above all by diversity. As in fabulous tales, the world was invested with prodigious or terrible aspects that in no way corresponded with common experience. The voyage of Michele de Cuneo – among cannibals who evirated and fattened up males doomed to become food for their community, and their women, described as very young and “most beauteous”, and who were taken by the sailors according to their desires and the Admiral’s decisions – seems every bit as fantastic as the adventures of Robinson Crusoe or the experiences of Gulliver.[…]

***Father Francesco da Bologna, an extremely cultivated priest with the Order of the Observance, before talking of the task of freeing so many thousands of souls from the hands of the Devil, warns: “I shall talk of the climate, of the products of the land, of the animals, of the constitution of men and women, and of customs”. He does this with a precision that cannot conceal a sense of wonder, a wonder that goes well beyond the sense of superiority that he had come to bear witness to. […] In the pages of Father Francesco, the new world has become “our world” and the old one has become “your world”. His adhesion to the extraordinary new reality is intense and impassioned. Here we catch a glimpse of one of the two attitudes destined to leave their mark on modern behaviour towards new, unknown and conquered worlds. It was that of remaining, adopting customs and expressing preferences with regard to conduct and even physical situations such as the climate and the types of people. This was the “mal d’Orient”, the “mal d’Afrique” that was to characterize – in the centuries that followed – the behaviour of many Europeans who had moved to different worlds. The other attitude was a sense of diversity that became superiority, dominion, discrimination and racism. Which was even worse if disguised as a pedagogical duty to improve the situation, life and customs of the “natives”. […]

***

“Some of your money has been lost”, wrote Filippo Sassetti, in reference to a voyage he had made to Goa, in a letter to a certain Francesco Valori of Florence, evidently his financial backer, in the December of 1583. This letter, for the first time, brings us face to face with a completely modern situation, Sassetti did not go to Goa to discover a new world but to engage in profitable trade. […] It is well known and obvious that economic factors were never absent in the discovery of new worlds, and that they were in fact a primary motivation, albeit occasionally camouflaged under reasons of religion or of state. But the entire phase of the race to discover the world was also marked by a genuine and passionate search for the unknown, by real scientific motives and, at an even deeper level, by that irrepressible aspect of human nature that drives us to discover what is hitherto undiscovered. And so all the accounts of voyages, all the accounts of the new worlds are imbued with a sense of real wonder, real amazement and genuine descriptive enthusiasm even when the question of faith ought to have held pride of place. The emergence of quasi exclusively economic interests, in which enterprise was private, adventure was personal and in which risks were seen almost only in terms of costs, and life and death are balanced against the profitability of an investment, tells us that the drive to discover the new world was coming to an end with the arrival of modern capitalism, in which capital, venture, work, profit and loss are separate aspects, a new way of associating and contrasting different human natures and levels of interest.

***“Conjecture” as a way of communicating an imprecise reality from a distant world comes into the report written in 1620 by a certain Father de Angelis to his superior, Father Francesco Pacheco, and it marks a more modern degree of reflection about worlds that were not yet completely known Travelling between Korea, Japan and Indochina, Father de Angelis had to establish whether the “Kingdom of Yezo” was an island or a peninsula. He collected and compared data on the currents, the seas, the local rivers and their swiftness, navigational methods and the varieties of fish, and trying to avoid drawing conclusions that could not be drawn, he offered his superior all the material he had collected in accordance with sound logical method. Even the measurements, both of time and space, were subjected to the same critical approach. Variations in the number of days required for making a journey, and consequently in the distances, are indicated with caution, without every supplying a single number, in order to avoid errors and false information. The things that Father de Angelis did not know from personal experience are scrupulously attributed to the various sources (“the Japanese say that it is eighty leagues by sea”) not so much out of prudence as out of precision. In place of an exact measurement, which was impossible, he offered a certain source and he did so because that source struck him as reliable. Only after all this did the writer draw conclusions, but without depriving the recipient of his report of the opportunity to come to a different opinion about the data and information he had received. All this tells us of a farther gradual change both in the notion of travel in the new worlds, and on the way such travel was described. The encounter was no longer with the unknown. Rather, it was a question of clarifying, interpreting, organizing and representing in the most complete manner possible the reality of a distant place regarding which there was now more a desire to know than to experience a sense of wonder or surprise. Reports were no longer travel journals, no longer the testimony of a subject to a sovereign, no longer a proclamation claiming possession, and no longer a balance sheet, or at least not unless this was strictly necessary. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the writings of people who were far away and who were trying to provide the best documented and most accurate description possible of the place they found themselves in was beginning to become journalism. […] Journalism […] was born when the voyage-of-fable, the voyage-of-conquest and the voyage-of-trade gave way to the voyage of recognition and verification of places that were distant but no longer mysterious or incomprehensible, different but subject to comparison, provided that those who made these comparisons were specialists in both cultures.

***It is within this framework that we should see the mission of Father Matteo Ricci in China, which marks a farther step in the relationship between countries and cultures. The Italian Matteo Ricci

came to Chinese culture as an important personage, just as he became the spokesman and representative of Chinese culture to the western world that had sent him there. This marked the birth of something more than cultural journalism. It was the birth of reciprocal recognition between different cultures, the capacity to have dealings with others in a respectful way and on an equal footing, a capacity that did not diminish the sense of wonder but made extraordinary things happen in places that should have been foreign and incommunicable. Matteo Ricci brought the notion of perspective to Chinese culture. He therefore changed its aesthetic point of view but also its way of perceiving and representing reality. With cultural exchanges like this one, colonialism was outdated even before it materialized. Even though the wars of military and economic power were not to follow this course, Matteo Ricci was the harbinger of multiculturalism, considered to be the great result of the struggle for human and civil rights of the late twentieth century. The authority of the traveller Matteo Ricci persuaded the Chinese of the value and even of the inevitability of his teachings. Ricci studied, knew and deepened his knowledge of Chinese culture while according it equal status with his own because he was instantly aware that its greatness, extent, and origins made it worthy of equal dignity and full worth. The bridge thus constructed across the world is a great isolated example on the way to the discovery of a new world that has not yet been wholly revealed: that of civility, tolerance, reciprocal acceptance and the recognition of the worth of the other.

Travellers • The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela Around the year one thousand CE, Spain was almost completely under Arab dominion. From this frontier zone between two civilizations (Christian and Muslim), which were often in ferocious opposition to each other, sprang one of the most refined cultures of the Middle Ages. This was the birthplace of the splendid Moorish architecture of Cordoba and Granada and it was here that some of the most important schools of philosophy and theology ever produced by the Mediterranean world developed and flourished. The culture of this region arose from its capacity to produce a blend of the Roman, Greek, Arab and Jewish traditions. Great philosophers like Avicebron and Averroes translated and wrote commentaries on the works of Plato and Aristotle. As often happens, the barriers erected between cultures were not enough to bar the way to ideas. Thus even the Christian enemy re-read Greek philosophy filtered by Arab commentaries. The link bonding the diverse cultures was the Jewish community of Spain, which developed and flourished without any form of restriction or persecution (but a few centuries later the Spanish Jews were to be driven out by their “Most Catholic Spanish Majesties”). At the dawn of the new millennium, for a wide variety of reasons, many Jews travelled throughout the known world bringing their experience with them and sharing it not only with other Jews, but also with the Arabs. It was this Spain that witnessed the establishment of one of the most important Jewish schools. There they studied holy writ (the Talmud in particular), which was placed in relation to Greek and Arab philosophy. Scholars like Abulafia, Maimonides and Levi of Toledo were to have an enormous influence on later thinkers both in the East and in the West. An exemplary personage in this sense was Benjamin of Tudela. For reasons that we do not know, Benjamin began his long journey in the second half of the 13th century. What we do know is that he left us one of the finest accounts of life in the medieval Mediterranean. Benjamin was not so much interested in the holy places or in business; what he describes is the way people lived in the great cities he visited. On his way through France and above all through Italy, this tireless traveller went as far as the Middle East, striving mightily to maintain an objective, quasi scientific viewpoint with regard to the places he saw. His itinerary is not inhabited by monsters or by fantastic beings, but represents a vital world in which real people lived with their experiences and their tales. Benjamin wrote down the stories he heard and never exaggerates or “blows things up”. He was not interested in marvels, but in what happened in a

historical sense. This is why Benjamin always starts with an element of the landscape (a palace, a tomb, a mountain) before using the accounts people related to him in order to arrive at the history of a community. The only emphatic passages are reserved for the Jewish communities, which he enumerated and listed with care and pride, recording the holy places and the relics of his people. But in a Christian world torn by the Crusades and heretical movements, we cannot fail to be struck by this fascinating traveller who tried to make an accurate portrait of the known world, to garner information about it without being judgmental, and who saw the western world in the same enquiring spirit that informs Marco Polo’s accounts of the Far East. In the following passage Benjamin of Tudela describes the city of Rome:

“From here it takes a six-day journey to arrive at the great city of Rome, the capital of the kingdom of Edom [the Roman Empire and, by extension, Christendom for Sephardic Jews, ed.]. There are about two hundred Jews, holding positions of honour and exempt from the payment of tribute, and some of their number serve as functionaries of Pope Alexander, the spiritual leader of all the citizens of Edom.Rome is divided into two parts by the river Tiber: on one side there stands the great church known as St Peter’s of Rome. In the city also stands the great palace of Julius Caesar. There are many splendid buildings, different from all others in the world. Considering the inhabited areas and those in ruins, Rome has a circumference of about twenty-four miles.In the centre there are eighty palaces belonging to the eighty kings that lived here, called emperors, starting with King Tarquin and continuing on to Nero and Tiberius, who lived in the days of Jesus of Nazareth, and to the kingdom of Pepin, the father of Charlemagne, who liberated Sepharad from the Ishmaelites.Outside the city there is the palace that apparently belonged to Titus; he did not enjoy the favour of the Consul and of his three hundred senators because it took him three years to conquer Jerusalem, when he had been ordered to do so in two.

***In the church of St John Lateran there are two bronze columns taken from the Temple, the work of Kind Solomon, may peace be with him, and each column bears the engraving “Solomon son of David”. The Jews of Rome have told me that every year, on the ninth day of the month of ‘Ab, the columns exude a humour similar to water.” 1982, tr. it. Torino: Einaudi • Marco Polo “And as we have said above, these peoples are idolaters, and for their gods all men keep a tablet set high on the walls of their rooms, on which is written a name that represents god on high, celestial and sublime: and there it is that every day, with thuribles of incense, they worship him in this way: lifting up their hands, they clack their teeth three times, praying the god to give them good intelligence and health and asking no more than this. After, on the floor, they have a statue called Natigai, who is the god of the earthly things that are born on all the earth, and they worship him in the same way, with the thurible and clacking their teeth and raising up their hands, and of this god they ask for good weather and the fruits of the earth, children and the like. They hold the soul to be immortal, in this way, they proceed from good to better and from ill to worse: that is, if a poor man behaves well and modestly in life, after death he will be reborn in the belly of a gentlewoman and will become a gentleman, and then in the belly of a noble lady and he will be a noble man, and so on higher and higher, until he joins with God: but should a man behave badly, from the son of a gentleman he shall be reborn as a peasant, and from a peasant to a dog, and thus descending to ever lower forms of life. These people have elegant speech and greet one honestly with smiling and

jocund face, and they carry themselves nobly and eat with great cleanliness and propriety. They bear great reverence for the father and the mother, and if it is found that a son has done ill by his parents or has not aided them in their need, there is a special public office whose task is to see to the severe punishment of all ungrateful children who are known to have committed some act of ingratitude towards their parents…” BOOK IIOn the religion of the Tatars, on the opinions they hold about the soul, on their customs. CHAP. 26

• Christopher Columbus, Journal of the first voyage Thursday, 11 October 1492 [Columbus has disembarked on the new land and has made the first contact with the natives]

"I, so that they would welcome us in great friendship, since I had realized that these people would have had trusted in… and converted to our holy faith more easily if treated with love rather than with compulsion, gave some of them coloured caps and glass bead necklaces that they put around their necks and many other things of little value, which made them exceedingly happy and they became so much our friends that it was marvellous. Then they came swimming out to the boats in the canals where we were, and they brought us parrots, balls of cotton yarn, assegais and they exchanged them for other things that we gave to them, like glass beads and rattles. In short, they took everything and gave of what they had with a good will. But none the less they struck me as very poor people.

They all go naked as the day they were born, even the women, although I only saw one woman, who was very young. And all the men I saw were very young, and I never saw one older than thirty years; they all have good physiques, with fine bodies and pleasing faces. They have thick short hair, which looks like the hair of a horse’s tail. They wear it in a fringe over the forehead, save for a few long locks that they throw back, which they never cut. Some paint themselves in dark colours and their skin colour is like that of the Canary Islanders, neither black nor white, other paint themselves white, others red, and others again in whatever colours they may find; some paint their faces, others the whole body, and others again only the eyes or the nose.

They carry no weapons, nor do they know them: for I showed them some swords and they, out of ignorance, on taking them by the blades, cut themselves. They have no iron of any kind. Their assegais are canes without iron while some are tipped with a fish tooth and others again tipped with other things. These people are generally fairly tall, with lithe movements, and well built. I saw some whose bodies bore the marks of wounds, and by dint of gestures I asked them what had happened: and they had me understand that sometimes people from other islands came with the intention of capturing them, and that they defended themselves.

I thought then and think now that people come here from the mainland to take them as slaves. They must be good and ingenious servants, because I observe that they instantly repeat what I say to them and I also believe that they could easily become Christians, since it appeared to me that they did not belong to any religion. If Our Lord should will it, on leaving here I shall take six of these men with me to Your Highnesses, so that they shall learn to speak. On this island I have seen no animals of any species, save parrots.” • Michele de Cuneo: Letter to Girolamo Annari

[from an account of Columbus’s second voyage (1493); the following passage is a description of the natives of Santa Maria di Guadeloupe]

15 October 1495 “…Having talked of the nature and quality of the brute beasts, now it remains to talk of the people. I say therefore that the people of both sexes are of an olive colour, like those of the Canary Islands, they have flat heads and faces like those of the Tatars; they are small in stature; ut plurimum, they have hardly any beard and beautiful legs, and their skin is tough. The females have very round breasts both firm and well formed. Those, ut plurimum, as soon as they give birth, take the child instantly to the water to wash them and to wash themselves, nor does childbirth cause wrinkles in their bellies, which remain taut, as do their breasts. They all go naked, but it is true that the women, once they have known a man, cover themselves in front with a tree frond or a patch of cotton cloth or with breeches of the same cloth. They eat all ugly and poisonous animals, like serpents weighing from 15 to 20 pounds each; and when they come across really big ones, then they are the ones to be eaten; and when they want to eat these serpents they roast them on a spit; and, as we had nothing to eat, we tasted them and found their flesh, whiter than white, to be very good. They also eat dogs, which are not so good. In the same way they eat lizards and spiders the size of chickens…” • Amerigo Vespucci: Letter to Piero di Tommaso Soderini. [Amerigo Vespucci describes the customs of the natives of the “new continent”, which occurred in 1497]

4 September 1504“Their way of life is most barbarous, because they do not eat at set hours but as often as they wish, and it’s just as likely that they will feel like eating at midnight as in the day time, because they eat at all hours. They eat on the ground without a tablecloth or any other kind of cloth, because they keep their victuals either in the earthenware basins they make or in hollowed pumpkins. They sleep in certain extremely large nets made of cotton suspended in the air; and before you think that this way of sleeping is bad, I must say that it is sweet to sleep in these nets, and we slept better in them than we did on our mattresses. They are clean people who wash themselves very often; when they void their bowels they do all they can so as not to be seen; but as clean and fastidious as they are in this, so are they dirty and shameless when they pass water, because, while speaking with us, without turning round and without shame they relieve themselves, because in this they have no shame”.

• Father Girolamo de Angelis [from the letter “To Father Alfonso de Lucena”] July 1618“In my time in Yezo, I spoke much with the natives, with some through an interpreter, with others, who knew the language of Japan, without an interpreter, and I realized that they knew nothing about salvation. They worship the sun and the moon, not for their salvation but because they are advantageous things for human life. They bury their dead exactly like Christians do; the rich ones prepare a coffin in which they lay the person and then they bury him. Poor people put the dead in a sack and bury them in the same way. They hate the Japanese shirts and turbans. They are courageous folk and good workers but inclined to squabble, even though they make peace immediately after, and they never start fights, when they meet their enemies, without first exchanging warnings. They drink wine and never refuse an invitation to drink, but they never get

drunk, a fact that much amazed me. They use the bow, poisoned arrows, short curved daggers and also wooden sticks studded with nails, with which they strike one another, and all are left bloodied by these blows. Once I witnessed a fight, and I saw that after all this there was no need for doctors to heal them, because they cure their wounds with salt and sea water. They are robust, small-bodied hairy men with long beards down to their waists. They shave one half of their heads, while the hair on the other half is worn in the Japanese style. Both men and women wear earrings. Good horsemen, they are ingenuous yet wise.”

Migrations • Luca and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, Chi siamo (Who We Are), Milano, Mondadori, 1995 For over a million years, the theatre of human history was Africa, as was predicted, with clear intuition, by Darwin and Huxley in the 19th century. Their reasoning was simple: the living beings closest to humankind are chimpanzees and gorillas, which live in Africa; and hence it was in Africa that the human species must have arisen. From what we have been able to reconstruct, our human ancestors, and Australopithecus before them, left the forests where the great apes still live to this day to go to live in an environment similar to the modern savannah: tropical grasslands with tall grasses and bushes and scattered clumps of trees, populated by large quadrupeds and a wealth of animal and vegetable species. Then, a little more than a million years ago, homo erectus went on the move, and, over the hundreds of thousands of years that followed, this species spread throughout Asia and Europe to practically all of the Old World. Probably, this expansion was made possible by their capacity to adapt to new environments, by improved hunting techniques and by the greater intelligence associated with a more developed brain (the brain of homo erectus was more than twice as big as that of Australopithecus).

***A date of origin for modern man? The idea is that everything began in Africa. And in fact Homo habilis appeared in Africa. Homo erectus also appeared in Africa, and then spread all over the Old World. Archaeological findings regarding modern man suggest that this species too originated in Africa, or perhaps in Israel, from where that species spread over the whole world. Therefore we are still talking about a beginning in Africa or near Africa. The problem is when. Regarding habilis, scientists talk in terms of two and a half million years ago; erectus left Africa at least one million years ago; regarding sapiens sapiens (modern man), we are thinking in terms of about one hundred thousand years ago or more, since it is from such a date that traces of modern man have been found in Africa and in the Middle East. Milano, Mondadori, 1995 • Umberto Eco, from “Migration, Tolerance and the Intolerable”, New York, Harcourt, 2001 I believe that a distinction must be drawn between the concept of “immigration” and that of “migration”. Immigration occurs when some individuals (even many individuals, but in numbers that are statistically irrelevant with respect to the original stock) move from one country to another (like the Italians and the Irish in America, or the Turks today in Germany). The phenomenon of immigration may be controlled politically, restricted, encouraged, planned, or accepted. This is not the case with migration. Violent or pacific as it may be, it is like a natural phenomenon: it happens, and no one can control it. Migration occurs when an entire people, little by little, moves from one territory to another (the number remaining in the original territory is of no importance: what counts is the extent to which the migrants change the culture of the territory to which they have migrated). There have been great migrations from East to West, in the course of which the peoples of the

Caucasus changed the culture and biological heredity of the natives. Then there were the migrations of the “barbarian” peoples that invaded the Roman Empire and created new kingdoms and new cultures called “Romano-barbarian” or “Romano-Germanic”. There was European migration toward the American continent, from the East coast and then gradually across to California, and also from the Carribean islands and Mexico all the way to Tierra del Fuego. Even though this was in part politically planned, I use the term “migration” because the European whites did not adopt the customs and the culture of the natives, but rather founded a new civilization to which even the natives (those who survived) adapted. There have been interrupted migrations, like those of the Arab peoples who got as far as the Iberian peninsula. There have been forms of migration that were planned and partial, but no less influential for this, like that of Europeans to the East and South (hence the birth of the so-called postcolonial nations), where the migrants nonetheless changed the culture of the autochthonous peoples. I don’t think that anyone has so far described a phenomenology of the different types of migration, but migration is certainly different from immigration. We have only immigration when the immigrants (admitted according to political decisions) accept most of the customs of the country into which they have immigrated, while migration occurs when the migrants (whom no one can stop at the frontiers) radically transform the culture of the territory they have migrated to. Today, after a nineteenth century full of immigrants, we find ourselves faced with unclear phenomena. In a climate marked by pronounced mobility, it is very difficult to say whether a certain movement of people is immigration or migration. There is certainly an unstoppable flow from the south to the north (as Africans and Middle Easterners head for Europe), the Indians have invaded Africa and the Pacific Islands, the Chinese are everywhere, and the Japanese are present with their industrial and economic organizations even though they have not moved physically in any significant numbers. Is it possible to distinguish immigration from migration when the entire planet is becoming the territory of intersecting movements of people? I think it is possible: as I have said, immigration can be controlled politically, but like natural phenomena, migration cannot be. As long as there is immigration, peoples can hope to keep the immigrants in a ghetto, so that they do not mix with the natives. When migration occurs, there are no more ghettos, and intermarriage is uncontrollable. What Europe is still trying to tackle as immigration is instead migration. The Third World is knocking at our doors, and it will come in even if we are not in agreement. The problem is no longer to decide (as politicians pretend) whether students at a Paris university can wear the chador or how many mosques should be built in Rome. The problem is that the next millennium (and since I am not a prophet, I cannot say exactly when) Europe will become a multicultural continent – or a “colored” one, if you prefer. That’s how it will be, whether you like it or not. Milano: Bompiani, 1997

• K. Kavafis, Waiting For The Barbarians, 1908

Why are we waiting here in the market?The Barbarians are coming today.Why such a to-do in the Senate?

Why do the Senators sit and not legislate?Because the barbarians are coming today.

Why should the senators make any more laws?When the barbarians come they will legislate.

Why did our emperor arise so early this morning?To wait on his throne at the city's biggest gate,

all official, wearing his crown?Because the barbarians are coming today

and the emperor is waiting to greet their leader,ready to confer many titles and names upon him.Why have our two consuls and praetors come out

in their red embroidered togas?Why those bracelets with so many amethysts, and those rings

with bright shiny emeralds?Because the barbarians are coming today and such things dazzle the barbarians.

Why do the good rhetoricians not come as always to make their speeches?Because the barbarians are coming today and they soon tire of glib talk and speechifying.

Why this sudden anxiety to leave, why the confusion?(how serious the faces have become!).

Why are the roads and the squares rapidly emptying as all return home thoughtful?Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t

come and men returned from the frontier are saying that the barbarians don't exist.And now what will become of us without barbarians?

At least they were some kind of a solution.

Feedback • The Golden Rule As I understand it the Golden Rule says that you shall not do to others, what you do not want them to do to you. Or "do for others what you want them to do for you". In a sense this is "a strategy".In the book "Evolution of Co-operation" by Robert Axelrod, strategies for co-operation are analyzed. One simple strategy comes out as a winning strategy after many computer simulations. It is a strategy that always starts with cooperation, but if met with non co-operation, decides for non co-operation. It is a tit-for-tat strategy. It is "friendly" since it starts with a co-operation initiative, and it is "educational" since it makes it clear that non co-operation is met with non-co-operation.Though Axelrod is a mathematician, and though his book on co-operation is technical in a sense, it is as if Axelrod's theories are some kind of a foundation for the Golden Rule. I provide You with this little line of thought as it came to my mind when looking at Your web site. The book itself explains the cooperation strategy better than I do. I think that it, in a way, has something to do with the Golden Rule.Hälsningar/Best regards Björn Nilsson

• The dangers of nuclear war We all know that there is a real possibility that we may face a nuclear war in the next few days or weeks. I pray that that does not happen, but I can't ignore the possibility. Some of us are old enough to remember the last time, in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world waited to see if a nuclear war would begin. A few of us are old enough to remember the first and only time (so far) that nuclear weapons have been used in war. It was 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.Too many young people don't understand how terrible a nuclear explosion is. They have never really considered it. Even the oldest among us may have forgotten. We have put up a simple website where all of us can be reminded of why nuclear war cannot be allowed to happen. The old need to remember, the young need to know. Here is simple way that information technology can help that happen.

Bob Adamsbob@globaldevelopment.org

• Interesting sites Dear Sirs,I would like to alert you to a couple of like-minded organisations:http://www.schoolplusnet.org -- a site just started from Nowy Sacz, southern Poland for a network of schools across the Balkans. The idea behind the network is development through education and (through schools) community-building initiatives (including tolerance, but that aspect is not explicitly emphasised -- on purpose). One of the schools in the Eastern Europe schoolplus network just announced its own Nova Scotia-based computer-collection initiative, as advertised on: http://www.belacrkva.co.yu/ifbc/about.htm. This school, in Bela Crkva (Vojvodina) is part of http://www.skolaplus.org.yu/ -- the Yugoslav precursor to the aformentioned schoolplusnet. The schoolplusnet or skola+ initiatives are inspired by Nowy Sacz-based Alicia Derkowska -- her story can be found on: http://www.changemakers.net/journal/99december/babb.cfm

Also, it might perhaps be nice to know about Nil by Mouth in Glasgow -- trying to bride divides between Celtic and Rangers' fans (each belonging to the two different strands of Christianity so characteristic of the Northern Ireland conflict, too): http://www.nilbymouth.org/support.shtml

It might be worth noting that the schoolplus movement has managed, though on a small scale (inevitably, but still) to get Kosovars and Serbs to meet face to face for the first time (to their mutual delight -- although one of the people involved was killed soon afterwards, by a stray bullet or something). The key, apparently, is to take people out of their home environment -- to neutral ground. (Based on that principle, the Japanese once brought Palestinians and Israelis together in Japan.)

Another "technique", that has come about by accident, involves the telephone. The BBC reported recently that an Israeli lady dialled the wrong number and suddenly found herself landed in a conversation with a Palestine lady "across the fence" which lasted ... for some three hours. This chance conversation has apparently resulted in some sort of Israeli-Palestine citizen-to-citizen switchboard. All this based on a BBC World Service broadcast.

Yet other techniques would be history as a community-building (tolerance-promoting) tool. For example: http://www.facinghistory.org/facing/fhao2.nsf In the same vein, the U.K.'s oral history site might provide interesting ideas: http://www.oralhistory.org.uk Finally, ICT as a bridge-covering technique. For this one, please visit www.mssrf.org, a Madras(Chennai)-based research institute which has been experimenting with ICT-centres in some ten rural villages in the former French coastal colony of Pondicherry. The project is exploring what ICT and the internet can do in terms of development -- and apparently, provided local needs and preferences are always given preference, they can help a lot -- for example in terms of attracting fresh sources of income, experimenting with new plant varieties (one of the villages' varieties, I understand, are now traded through one of the Dutch flower auctions), but also providing the locals with intranets, allowing, for example, a lone widow to find a vet just in time to cure her one and only cow (and source of income). One of the computer centres has - for the time being at least -- resulted in a decrease in the divide between "dalits" (untouchables) and (upper) caste villagers, even to the point where both now use the same tea cups at the local tea stall. I repeat -- dalits and non-Dalits using same tea cups. Talk about bridging social divides ... (although the MSSRF spokesman I met recently is quick to stress that this may well be only a temporary effect). If you like, I could send you an 8-minute

documentary on CD, plus some articles. This organisation has also experimented with digital cameras, CD-recorders and computer centres to get illiterate adults to learn to read within four months. They are currently trying to advertise their lessons learned and so on -- for example into Africa. Thank you for your initiative. Grazie!Regards, Raymond Gijsen Heemstede,the Netherlands

• Teaching in China Chinese schools employ thousands of foreign born teachers to teach English as a Foreign Language each year. Most of these are native speakers of English, but a few are from other countries. Wherever they are from they could use a bit of advice before they come here.For example:Free-lance teaching in China can be much more profitable than signing a contract, but you need a contact who either speaks Chinese or has a reliable translator to clarify your deal. “Yes,” in China generally means, “I like you; I would like to help you, sometime,” but it does not mean that help will be forth coming nor that you should embarrass me by asking “When?, Where?, or How?” Nothing is certain in China until the last day or maybe the last hour, so don’t count on it. The key is to “hang loose”, make friends, and don’t panic. Mattie Charlene Dyer, EFL teacher in Beijing for five years.charlie@a-1.net.cn

Establishing contacts The purpose of this manual is extraordinary. There are numerous organizations in the world that could be interested, in México we have LA RONDA CIUDADANA.I want to give some experience:I studied all my life in first class schools geography, history, etc. but I learned what Mexico really was about when in a certain congress in 1968 a gentleman put a challenge to a group of people: " you do not know anything of the real México, unless you accept my challenge" The challenge was to go with him to a small town with mixed population "ladinos" ( whites ) an indians ( nahuatls ) .There I met an indian who invited me a small glass of hot chocolate, and a chair in small hut giving me a demonstration of humanity that overwhelmed me. So only if you dare to take the challenge to meet the real people in person and to be challenged by their hunger, sickness, illiteracy, etc., you really know your real country, but never from the journals or the books.Or even internet. So if you want to teach and learn tolerance you need to establish real contact with real people.

ThanksJorge Gabriel Rodriguez Reyes

Penpal project: from Turkey Hi,

I'm the teacher of English in Turkey. I have students aged 14-18. We are in the west of Turkey, and there are a lot of historical places and natural beauties around us. I would like to set up new projects for the next term with the other schools. Projects can be penpal and keypal projects which will let us have mutual visits too.

Hope to hear from you,Emel PS: Replies should be sent at simin_klc@yahoo.com

• Penpal project: from Poland HelloWe are a middle school from Poland. The school is a state school - it is really two schools in the same building - primary and middle schools. The classes start at 8 o'clock and finish at about 5.30 in the evening. The students come from different backgrounds, some of them live in our town others commute to school every day.

We are waiting for everyone who wants to make contact with our school. We are most interested in pen pal service with other schools. We will do our best to answer all emails. We are looking forward to your replies.

Students from Sobolewsobolew.gimnazjum@interia.pl

• Penpal project: from Gambia Hi Slowomir and Everyone,I'm sure some of our schools will be interested in the Penpal project. Our kids are slightly older (16-18) but that should not be a problem.Best regards, Momodou Njie (The Gambia)

Slaweks23@interia.pl