Taboos and Magic

By: Andrew Sakach

Outside Reading: 3

When it was brought up in class about how the societies environment dictated the kinds of stories they would tell I made note of that.

Later on I read a book, The Rise of Civilization As Shown By The Native Peoples of North America etc. The book described all the levels of society through looking at different NA cultures. It said that the harsher the living conditions of a given society the more taboos and magic they would use. To me this makes a lot of sense because in a place where death is literally right around the corner, such as in the Northern Canadian regions where Inuits lived it would be good to have ways of answering the questions of death and misfortune as well as fortune and prosperity through the use of taboo and magic. The way that the knowledge of these cultures would be passed on would be through their storytelling, which would include these taboos and magical practices.