Page 263 - Contribution To Phenomenology

256 DON IHDE

III. Cultural Conquests

If histories teach, they do not do so in any simple or straightforward
way. The same applies to cross cultural histories. Insofar as cross cultural
exchanges occur, there is a muliplicity of patterns. In what follows I shall
draw from naval design histories and the often deeply engrained building
traditions which they exemplify—but the same patterns could be found
in many other practices:
A prominent pattern is simple intermixture. The Arabs invented the
lateen sail; Mediterranean and Europeans used simple square rigs. As
the sailing cultures met, the Europeans mixed the two—square rig
forward, lateen sternwards (to help direction). This was to continue for
centures of ship building.
The Vikings invented a new hull design, flat and broad and shoal,
which was very fast, also clinker built, but from an easy to row craft,
they adapted the simple square sail from southern Europe and never
evolved beyond this. New hull/old sail.
There are also simple failures of meshing, or cultural rejections. Early
Europeans sailing the Pacific for the first time encountered multihulls:
catamarans and trimarans of the Pacific Islanders. And even though they
recognized the superior speed and manuverability of these craft, they
never—until recent high technology racing—adapted any multihull design.
One possible explanation lies with the difficulty in transforming an entire
practice of ship building which would have been required.
In technological histories there are also many examples of dominance
leading to extinction or near extinction of alternative types. In naval
history the most widely known example of this might be the virtually total
displacement of commercial sail by powered ships. A less known example
comes closer to the type of cultural transformation I will soon focus
upon—the Eskimo kayak, a more recently adapted white water design,
has virtually eliminated the older open design boats used for the same
purposes.
And the last example also illustrates a subtle form of minor cultural
revenge, better exemplified in the revival and adaptation of Pacific
multihull design to high tech versions which today have exceeded virtually
all sail racing records previously set in traditional monohuU design. And,
recently in Sydney, even the hydrofoils were replaced by high tech
versions of faster catamaran ferries. Here the "conquered" returns in the
repressed as the "conqueror."