McNeil

In McNeil’s work, he looks to explain how homogenous societies of the past had become polyethnic societies that we see around the world today. While homogenous societies still exist on remote islands and in unidentified other cultures around the world, McNeil argues that almost all others have become a multiethnic society for many reasons. One reason he gives is power. For example if a dominant nation would go through a disease period and lose a lot of it’s population, they would go out and bring back those people of whom they’ve conquered, and have them put to work. Through this example we can see how this would create a polyethnic society. Another example is trade. As societies of the past would better than transportation and communication skills, they would go out and seek trade with other foreign nations. Again, it is easy to see how this would lead to poly-ethnic societies. The last one I would like to mention and I feel the most important is the advancement of language. With people beginning to more and more understand each other, surely their ideas and their bodies would spread to differing nations much more so than they had previously been. He mentions much more, but I feel these are the things I ought to highlight.

I thought it was very interesting that he refer to the bible as an example as to how polyethnicity is brought about. While the bible Old Testament was first written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, through the translation of the text, the Bible began to travel into new societies in which it could never before have been understood. As we see, through translation and trade the Bible spread, much in the same way the flow of people began to move from place to place.

One think I had a question of was if other societies were as much multi-ethnicized as us. I would think that they are not, and wonder how truly multiethnic they are. I could easily see how they may be bi-ethnic, but I’m not sure I believe that all societies, besides unfound ones are multi-ethnic.