With December right around the corner (yes, I am sorry to hear it too!), deadlines are looming and it is important for your health and sanity to take time for yourself each day to do something you enjoy. As someone who struggles with procrastination and staying focused, I am all too familiar with the guilt that accompanies avoiding a necessary task or struggling to finish an assignment. A great way that I have learned to cope and self-justify pausing school work is through participating in free online arts and culture related events.
It is the 21st annual Trans Day of Remembrance (TDoR) is being hosted by 519 to commemorate and honour the memories of members of the trans community taken too soon. This event will include speakers, singers, and other artistic components.
Tuesday, November 24th
Zine-Making Workshop + Wellness Discussion with Melina Mehr
Join accomplished MMSt alum, Melina Mehr, for an evening of discussion and creation around wellness and self-care. Guaranteed to be a relaxed and fun evening centered around creativity and support.
Time: 6:00pm EST Where: MMSt Channel (Virtual Inforum) Registration: Email mussa.ischool@gmail.com by November 25 at 11:59 pm (Include your team members - max. 4 - or request to join a team)
You don't want to miss teaming up with fellow MMSt and CDP colleagues for a spirited game of trivia! The winning team will receive a prize (and bragging rights).
An evening of lecture, workshop, and performance is a part of an ongoing program that explores feminist praxis through historical memory, exclusion, and refusal. Meyer and McKinney explore the idea of ruins in relation to sexuality throughout their journey from Vancouver to Disneyland.
Time: 7:30pm EST Location: Livestream Registration: Required
Do you think museums are a little too quiet? Join the music collective INTERFERENCE for their concert that focuses on using instruments and computer technology to create a musical and visual performance within a museum environment.
The 9th annual HRFF is a week long event focusing on sharing stories and experiences regarding international human rights through film and discussion. The keynote address bySyrus Marcus Ware on the last day of the festival will certainly be a highlight.
What arts and culture events are you looking forward to? Leave a comment or drop us a line at musings.mmst@gmail.com!
When you think of Canada’s most well-known artists throughout history, the name Leonard Cohen often comes to mind. It is hard to ignore the impact Cohen left on not only the music industry with masterpieces such as “Suzanne” and “Hallelujah”, but also the influential words and poems he wrote that resonated with a generation that was forced to face tragedies of violence and war.
Leonard Norman Cohen, born in September of 1934 in Westmount, Quebec, demonstrated his talents for music and poetry as a child, learning how to play the guitar at the age of 15 which continued throughout his music career. As a young adult, Cohen attended McGill University where he became further immersed in the poetry scene, impacted by the teaching of Louis Dudek, Hugh MacLennan, and his friend and mentor, Irving Layton.
Leonard Cohen was not afraid to engage with difficult issues and concepts through his music such as war and peace (There Is a War), his battle with depression (Darkness), and the need for change (Democracy). In addition to his music career, Cohen had a fairly extensive literary career, publishing two novels, The Favorite Game and Beautiful Losers, as well as several collections of his poetry.
Aside from his moving work as an artist, Leonard Cohen was a very proud and active member of the Jewish community. His strong connection to his Jewish identity was heavily influenced by his family’s role in the Jewish community. Cohen’s grandfather, Lyon Cohen was a very important and influential person among Montreal’s Jewish community. Lyon Cohen was one of the founders of The Jewish Times, the first English Jewish newspaper in Canada, and was the first President of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
Following in his family’s footsteps, Leonard Cohen often incorporated aspects of his Jewish identity into his work. He took inspiration from all aspects of Jewish life and history, from the prayers told on Yom Kippur in “Who by Fire”, as well as the series of poems and songs reflecting on the impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish people.
In 2017, as a part of Montreal’s 375th anniversary, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM) displayed the exhibition Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything in collaboration with the Jewish Museum in New York. The exhibition presented the impact Cohen’s lyrics and art has on artists both locally and internationally, commemorating Leonard Cohen’s achievements.
Silo #5 illuminated with Leonard Cohen’s lyrics as a part of the Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything exhibition | Source
As part of the exhibition, there were various performances that took place in the gallery, around Montreal, and even online. There was a choreographed piece titled When Even The by Clara Furey inspired by Cohen’s poem of the same name, as well as a series of light projections by Jenny Holzer on Silo #5, an iconic building in Montreal, displaying the lyrics from Cohen’s songs as well as phrases from his poetry. There were also concerts inspired by Cohen’s most iconic albums and an emotional auditory experience called I Heard There Was a Secret Chord that was a room in the exhibition as well as a web experience you could visit here.
Despite the overall exhibition not discussing Cohen’s history and career as an artist, the exhibition paints a very beautiful image of Cohen’s lasting impact on the world through his touching music and thought-provoking words. Leonard Cohen's work inspired many and spoke on difficult subjects that resonated with many generations in the past and those to come. The works of Leonard Cohen are timeless and will continue to be shared and cherished.
This month's post will focus on the varying levels of significance associated with cultural heritage. Now, we could easily write a whole book series on this subject, but I want to give you a light-read for the summer. So... here is another quiz to get you thinking about it!
As mentioned in the last post, this quiz is a little challenging because the significance given to a cultural heritage item will be different for everyone. Often, museum professionals and archivists (my other love) are faced with the problem of limited storage space and resources. As much as we'd like to, we can't keep everything! This quiz will hopefully give you an idea as to why some cultural heritage is worth keeping over others.
An image depicting Holi, the Hindu Festival of Colours. Source.
For the following items, decide whether we should SAVE or TOSS each example of tangible or intangible cultural heritage. Remember: Cultural heritage can be material or immaterial, and it represents the legacy of a group of people, which has been preserved for future generations.
Oral History of Lake Saint Anne: A Métis story about the healing properties and spiritual energy associated with the waters.
"The Entombment": An unfinished painting by Michelangelo, depicting the burial of Jesus Christ after the crucifixion.
"Purple Rain" Cassette Tape: A 1984 song by Prince.
Two thousand pieces of pumice stone: These tiny 3 cm x 3 cm pieces of volcanic debris are from Pompeii.
Mapuche Language: Spoken primarily in parts of Chile and Argentina, there are approximately 100,000 speakers in the world.
The whole purpose of oral histories is to keep telling them to the next generation! We cannot discard an example of intangible heritage that is closely linked to the present-day functions of a culture. Storytelling that is representative of a culture's ideologies and practices can be preserved by talking in-person, or by audio-visual recordings, and should be considered a priority. This is particularly important for indigenous groups, but intangible heritage is generally valuable for every culture.
Now, if an artwork is incomplete and we cannot communicate with the owner, there are all kinds of debates about whether the piece should be sold or displayed at all. However, unfinished work by a famous artist, such as Michelangelo, now that's definitely a keeper. For art historians, it is rare and fascinating to study the creative process of a well-known painter. To add, it is rumored that Michelangelo stopped working on this painting, because he was commissioned to start his best known work, the "David" sculpture. The context of the cultural heritage item is important!
I'm not saying that Prince's music is bad. I'm saying that cassette tapes are not worth keeping. In this technological era, music is digitally preserved. If an archive chooses to keep a cassette tape, this means that they also need a cassette player, and they need to keep it in good condition for a long, long, time. How many cassette tapes should they keep? For how long? There will be a time when these formats are no longer accessible, so we should update these records to their latest versions, before discarding the old ones.
Do you know how many pumice stones exist from the eruption of Vesuvius? Many. I don't have space in my storage closet for all of those rocks. Not only that, but pumice stones are created all the time, and are not unique to just Naples. (You can even buy them at the drug store.) It's true that the ancient site of Pompeii is historically significant, which is why I suggest the local museums keeps a couple of stones from that particular event, if any. No more than that! It's interesting to preserve a piece of history, and perhaps new information can be discovered about the artifact in the future. Most importantly, this piece of natural heritage needs to stay at it's site of origin, preferably in situ.
Real talk: The sad truth is that you don't always have the power to save cultural heritage. The amount of money your institution may have, the number of resources, or the level of expertise of your staff does not matter. Much like oral histories and ceremonies, languages are difficult to preserve because it depends on the participation of the public. You cannot keep having Mapuche speakers, if no one is willing to learn the language. We cannot force people to see the value in preserving cultural heritage. The best we can do is educate others on why it is important to keep, work as a team, and try to save it for as long as possible.
That's it for this month's post! Deciding to save or toss cultural heritage is never easy, because we hope to keep it all. Everyone has their own opinions on what is important to preserve. To help facilitate our choice, we assess the needs of the public, the item's importance to future generations, and our available resources for preservation. See you next time for our final quiz!
Further Reading
- "Lake Saint Anne" as told by Marge Friedel, a Métis Elder from Edmonton
I recently found myself in Winnipeg for a week, and while I was there I dropped into the Winnipeg Art Gallery, (the WAG) to check out their collection, but specifically to see their The 80s Image exhibition, which centered the idea of changing media as it affected art production.
The exhibition title, at the WAG. Photo courtesy of Samantha Kilpatrick.
I explored this exhibition through another changing media, the museum's app, and the in-app audio tour. The audio tour is a mixtape in its own right, a collection of 80s songs related to the artwork on display as curated by CKUW, the University of Winnipeg's university radio station.
A screencap of the app, with both song
and artwork displayed.
Listening to 80s music in an art gallery, while contemplating art, is a fantastic experience I would recommend to just about anyone. Fair warning, it can make you want to bop along to music only you can hear.
As in tours of all kinds, your mileage may vary on how much you get out of it. I definitely found that it had me lingering longer with each work supported by the app- at least long enough to get a sense of the song and to try to understand how it connected to the work on display.
I freely admit I don't know much about 80s music- but I came to the suspicion, walking through the gallery that these songs were chosen for their essential '80s-ness' as much as the works on display were. There's a multisensory effect that's hard to quantify, and having these songs fit to each work and the time period in which both were created was a very striking experience.
I was very interested in how this Mixtape Tour was going to cover the more politically fraught issues of the exhibition- there's a whole room in The 80s Image of huge painted panels and silkscreened wallpaper by Canadian artist collective General Idea made to raise awareness of the AIDS pandemic.
I shouldn't have worried.
In the mixtape, this room is accompanied by an absolutely haunting arrangement of Tainted Love, slowed down and stretched out and distorted from a bop to an absolutely harrowing experience. It was one of the few songs on this tour that I didn't even think of stopping partway through and moving on.
AIDS, by art collective General
Idea, on display at the WAG.
Gif courtesy of Samantha Kilpatrick.
Listening to that song, in the presence of that art, made me wish I knew much more about music. Tainted Love is a song memetic enough that one can assume a general population's knowledge of it, if not all its iterations. The distorted use and the selection of this arrangement (further research would lead me to discover all profits from that single went to AIDS research, years before discussion of the issue was acceptable in the mainstream) honestly blew me away. It made me wonder what other stories I was missing, hiding in the history of the music. The single change I would make to this audio tour would be the inclusion of a story about the music in the app.
The distortion of the music and the use of new media in music- the heavy synth and the techno and the nearly unpleasant audio distortion- all mirror the radical changes occurring in the artworks hung on the gallery walls. (For my Toronto readers who want to replicate the experience- you can find another edition of this work on display at the 4th floor of the AGO as of the writing of this article, and the audio tour is downloadable anywhere.)
This tour felt incredibly interesting and distinctive, weaving together visual and audio art made in a time of social and artistic upheaval in an experience that made a single cohesive whole out of the two parts. I wish all audio tours were so ambitious- rocketing between fun and thoughtful, provoking and reflective. If you find yourself in Winnipeg before this exhibition closes on April 14th, do yourself a favour and get the mixtape too.
Come on in! Mongolian Yurt in the Aga Khan Museum's courtyard. Photo courtesy of Julia Zungri.
That’s how I began my afternoon at the Aga Khan Museum to explore the new Listening to Art, Seeing Music exhibition. The exhibition offers multi-sensory experiences through musical soundscapes and video installations placed throughout the museum’s permanent gallery, the Bellerive Room, and Diwan restaurant. The exhibition features Middle Eastern music, instruments, and related artifacts, and explores how this intangible art has changed over time.
Visitors first encounter an eye-opening and very well-written introductory panel in the lobby of the museum. As the introduction begins, it reminds us that this exhibition challenges the conventional thought of museums dealing with stationary, tangible objects, but that intangible arts are just as important and, even more so, are still alive and forming cultural identities and histories around the globe. It challenges us, as visitors, to form a physical relationship with an immaterial artistic expression.
Challenge accepted.
Listening to Art, Seeing Music reminded me that music is an expression that all humans can relate to, which I certainly got the sense of as I entered the highlight of this exhibition: the Mongolian Yurt. The Mongolian Yurt is placed in the museum’s courtyard, which is in the centre of the museum and immediately visible to visitors. A representative at the front desk informed me of programming that would take place in about five minutes, so we decided to check out the Yurt first (its size, beauty and centrality is also incredibly difficult to ignore). In my conventional understanding of museum programming, I expected to hear music, perhaps see live musicians or a museum employee discussing the development of the exhibition.
I was wrong.
As I entered the Yurt, a large circle of museum visitors – who I take it were all strangers at one point – were holding hands and dancing around the centre of the Yurt to traditional French/Welsh folk music. I automatically joined in and had one of the most incredible museum experiences! There were three live musicians; one was leading the circle with an accordion and later facilitated our singing to the music.
The smell, look, and sound that surrounded the Yurt made me realize that this was not going to be a typical museum visit. If this experience was an object, I lived inside of it.
The centre around which we danced; when stranger-visitors became dance partners. Photos courtesy of Julia Zungri.
The interactives were the second highlight of my exhibition experience, which were tied to the new artistic venture, A Hidden Order. This endeavour examines the relationship between art and music, and between traditional Islamic art and the Western contemporary musical composition.
Images from A Hidden Order. Photos courtesy of Julia Zungri.
In a collaborative effort by Musical Forms, a team consisting of composer Lee Westwood and geometer Sama Mara, this installation invites visitors to explore the relationship between artistic patterns and music. I had the pleasure of visiting with a fellow Museum Studies colleague, Sarah Rolko, who can be seen here enjoying making art through music.
Sarah interacting with the installation created by the Musical Forms artistic team. I guarantee this song will get stuck in your head, as it did in ours. Photo and video (below) courtesy of Julia Zungri.
The installations throughout the rest of the museum are a great
accompaniment to the permanent galleries as they make the material
objects come to life. It is incredibly interesting when we consider how
something immaterial can bring something material to life.
Made my Anwar Kebbeh (oud maker, 1975-2000). Collection of Radwan Al Taleb, Damascus, Syria, 1991.
These artifacts and stories tell visitors of the importance, but also destruction of the oud industry in Syria. Photos courtesy of Julia Zungri.
This exhibition made me proud to know that our city is home to this museum and is producing such wonderful experiences. It has reaffirmed my passion for museums, and if this is where the field is heading, count me in.
Is there a more natural pairing than Drake and Renaissance art? It’s not a typical duo, but late last month the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York City launched an online project that melded the two, combining their digitized collections with hip-hop lyrics.
The Hiphop Project, part of the Met’s media lab, uses the main words from hip-hop songs as key terms to search the museum’s digital collections. The songs were chosen from 13 artists, including the Notorious B.I.G., Missy Elliot, Jay-Z, and Kanye West.
The project was the brainchild of Regina Flores Mir, a grad student at Parsons School of Design in New York. She was inspired
after discovering that students in the Bailey Housing Project in
Jamaica, Queens had never visited the Met despite being a subway ride
away.
The hope is the website will engage nontraditional and younger audiences with the Met's collection. Sure, the search results don’t always match lyrics exactly but, as the website states, it’s getting viewers to explore the collection and view pieces they wouldn’t see otherwise.
Tea service or public service? One of Jay-Z's objects. Source.
I’m sure some would bock at this model – tying Jay-Z’s “Public Service Announcement” to images of tea services doesn’t seem to quite mesh. On top of this, none of the objects have captions to explain the connection to the lyrics, raising some concerns about reducing a single word from a song and attaching it to an un-associated art piece.
But, regardless of the critiques, is the Hiphop Project the new wave of what should be done with collections? We’ve known all along there is no such thing as the “general public”, but this really hits home in reaching out to those nontraditional audiences.
So, perhaps new communities require radical new narratives.
RADICAL ENTRY POINTS
Most of us are familiar with the unorthodox tours run by Museum Hack. As founder Nick Gray describes in his TEDx Talk (everyone should watch it), museums are boring… for most people, anyway. Personalized narratives are needed to engage audiences – a trend echoed in the Centre for the Future of Museums 2015 TrendsWatch guide.
Gray gives the example of delivering tours at the Met to “Finance Bros”. These are usually young guys in finance with a lot of disposable income, often dragged to the museum on unsuspecting dates. For these tours, Gray starts off by showing the art piece the museum paid the most money for.
As Gray states in his TEDx Talk, “Today’s audiences have to be entertained before they can be educated.”
Could hip hop be another entry point for a community to access the museum, providing entertainment before the education begins? Are there other entry points we’re missing out on that we’re just afraid to try? Or are these new narratives inadvertently oversimplifying our collections?
Some anachronistic transplant of a royal fanfare onto another culture?
Keep it in mind as we wind through
these worlds of music.
Music today is readily accessible as
countless many have said already on this topic or in a musing about
the digital age as a whole (ad nauseum).
To listen, we have: iTunes, radio,
YouTube, CDs, LPs, old cassettes and even 8 track tapes (if you're
willing to search). It's played on: news shows, TV shows, films,
theatre, opera, restaurants, bookstores, washrooms, elevators,
greeting cards, and children’s toothbrushes! We listen to it on our
smartphones on the bus, subway, or walking to wherever it is we are
going.
To play: the recorder, tin whistle and
guitar are fairly affordable and available in most places.
Barring a physical instrument, we can
make music on our computers with garage band or synthesizers.
It is everywhere, and there is a
vast variety from which to choose from, unlike our
ancestors.
But all of this is just a tiny bit
of all the music we have ever produced.As many of my
professors in my undergraduate years liked to explain in their
introductions- most of what we know about human history has no text.
The mystery of music in the past goes back tens of thousands of
years ago.
Armand D'Angour used a short analogy
with Verdi, the Beatles and Mozart to explain ancient music, but let
me echo and expand well beyond those ideas (thematically and
geographically) in my own way; including the great pitfalls of this
whole endeavor.
We are not talking of lost songs,
but entire worlds of music. We don't know the tuning, meter, scale or
style.
Imagine being shown a guitar for the
first time in your life without any information at all and trying to
figure it out. Imagine trying to recreate rock without any music that
you could read or hear, but maybe there are only just images of rock
stars on stage; some of them smashing their instruments.
Then, you see a musician playing the
Japanese shamisen, which looks like this “guitar” to you. Are you
going to model your guitar playing after Otemoyan?
Will your idea of rock music revolve around that?
Maybe you get your hands on a blue
grass recording?
They're from different backgrounds
and places, but the instruments look similar after all...
...to you.
How do you know when you're finally
playing this “rock” music?
It seems hopeless. But here you are
with an out of tune guitar and this concept of rock music.
Are you going to just leave it and
not try to play it? Will you think you know all
there is to know about rock based on pictures, types, and social
history? Or, will you ignore it completely, thinking that no matter
what, it will never be accurate, so it is simply a lost cause?
There is much wisdom in not overextending interpretation and making up imaginative histories.
At the very core of it, you are
feeling around in the dark after all.*
What will be your interpretation?
It is a silly analogy and a slightly
false equivalence for effect, but think of all the popular music
and instruments that existed in the prehistoric and ancient world (and any change of styles) that we know little or nothing about now.
We know, from our own world and from
other cultures, past and present that music is found in ritual/
religion, entertainment, festival, ceremony, propaganda, war/ battle,
philosophy, education and art. Not every culture has music in every
context, but just one context is a world of difference.
Most of our music is gone and the
silly dilemma of recreating “rock” with a “guitar” through the mechanisms of images, analogies* and experimentation is a
reality for Palaeolithic and ancient music.
Just think about that.
That is what we have lost. That
is our mystery for this month.
So here are some examples of the
mystery of prehistoric and ancient music, and the attempts that have
been made to rediscover it.
1. Palaeolithic flutes
Flutes are far older than one might
imagine. If not the earliest one (barring the voice or impromptu
sticks), bone flutes are at least the first clearly distinguishable
evidence of music in our history.
Hohle Fels-Former Oldest
Declared the oldest in 2009, the
griffon vulture bone flute from Hohle Fels cave was still the oldest
instrument in the world, alongside the Venus of Hohle Fels; the
oldest human shaped figure in the world the oldest when I was
learning about it in my first year. It was and is a moment of pause.
At 40,000 years old, it was just
within the time frame when humans co-existed with Neanderthals before
they went extinct.
Of course, it should be remembered that
what they played is still unknown.
These reconstructions bear a bias
of using music from a culture that is utterly different
(remember my “rock” analogy?).
However, while playing “modern”
music on replications of old instruments might cause one to be wary
because of its sheer inaccuracy, note the effectiveness of showing what it can do. Flutes like these from the Palaeolithic are another way to
deconstruct the myth of “primitiveness”.
Unlike the flutes above, it is much
smaller, with only two holes and is not as distinguishably as a
flute. The critique now is that it may simply be the result of a
hyena biting into it.
The thing is that despite this reexamination, there's even a reconstruction of what the flute might
have been like now by building around the fragment already.
A case of interpretation taken too far
and turning chewed up bone into a working instrument or is it
actually the remains of a flute?
One researcher even extends an interpretation that that the cave was likened to a "concert hall" and that cave art was affected by this.
Moving on to the next “Stone Age”,
we have Neolithic stone lithophones. Thought to have been used for
grinding grain, Erik Gonthier decided to prop them on foam before
tapping on them, and discovering that they had actually been
painstakingly chipped for another reason.
Much like Gonthier, Archaeologist Billy
Ó Foghlú from the Australian National
University reexamined a Bronze Age spear butt (though unable to see
the original in person) and printed out a 3D copy of it to test out
his theory. As it turns out, it may have actually have been a
mouthpiece when he tested it on a horn.
To add to the “mystery” for both
the reader author here, it seems strange that the actual paper refers
to Iron Age horns unlike the titles of the press release and the bevy
of news organizations that have picked up on the story.
Perhaps someone with the funds to
purchase the journal could find out!
4. Ancient Greece
Though we know much about Ancient
Greece, public perceptions are coloured by clichéd film depictions
and are most likely confused with films on Rome as well. Though
English accents remain the chief anachronism to the ear, the music
that accompanies it also tells you very little about what the music
in the past sounded like with its modern orchestras.
Based on research with notation from
ancient texts (an uncommon advantage), the following is an attempt to recreate something more
like the original according to D'Angour of Oxford University.
I first learned
about Mochemusic and archaeoacoustics a little over a year ago in Peru
during a late night guest lecture and probably wouldn't write this
had I not heard it.
The Moche/ Mochica culture was an Andean civilization
from the north coast of Peru, most famous for the gold from Sipan,
but they are obviously much more varied than that.
As Professor Swenson might tell you
(I'm paraphrasing) if you take his classes in the Archaeology
department, it is one of the most exciting cultures to study right
now as new knowledge of the culture is being discovered and revised.
Earlier than the Moche was another Andean culture (amongst many); the Chavin.
At the moment there is an
archaeoacoustic project going on at the culture’s most famous site:
Chavin de Huantar, headed by Dr. Miriam Kolar. By recreating the context of sound and music, they analyze the acoustics and experience of the site when it was "alive".
There is only a small teaser video for
the project, but it may perhaps be an interesting look for the reader
on archaeoacoustics.
More unknowns:
These are the reconstructions that I've
been able to find with audio and video samples but there are plenty
more instruments from the past out there that have no continuity with
the present and which we have barely a clue about.
In other cases, even when we can easily
recognize relatively ancestors to instruments used today, their songs
are gone. To wax poetic: continuity in form is not continuity in song (see image below).
Even for these reconstructions, there
isn't the space here for their context in society.
Nor is there time to talk about the
fact that music changes frequently within these cultures in time and
space.
Still, I do hope that I've sparked some
interest.
Conclusion: Undeciphered language and over interpretation
Now I ask again...
What do you imagine when I ask you to
imagine “prehistoric”/ ancient music?
Lyres? Flutes? Horns?
What do you imagine when I say a horn
was played at a procession?
We can talk a lot about how we think
they fit in society or its designs, like undeciphered tablets.
And yet, just like undeciphered
languages, we can only interpret them superficially in so many ways.
What they actually mean and all the little nuances are unknown.
But that won't stop the most ardent
experimenters or researchers.
In fact, it can be dangerous as wild theories can throw off our perception. And yet, while they might not be wholly accurate, it is an intriguing exercise that might share with us something of
our ancestors.
* Analogical reasoning is one of the
great problems when using cross cultural comparisons. Every culture
is different and changes differently in no specific direction or
order and a direct analogy between them leads to all sorts of modern
myths.
