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The Major Cultures component of the Core explores
the globally influential and historically rooted cultures and
civilizations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. No part of
the Core Curriculum assumes that boundaries between "West"
and "non-West" have ever been clear, impermeable,
or unchanging; or even that a distinction so rough and so simple
is particularly useful for understanding the world. Nor does
the Core assume that one civilization is "ours" and
the rest are "others." Whoever "we" are,
we mistake the ancient Greeks if we think them just like us
or claim them for our own, and we mistake the ancient Chinese
(for example) if we think them alien or can find nothing in
them of significance or interest to us. Indeed, the effect of
the Core as a whole should be to reveal connections, influences,
parallels, and blurry boundaries between cultures as much as
to show their partial distinctness. But the Core requirements
do recognize that cultures and civilizations in different parts
of the world have developed across long periods as partly independent
traditions with histories of their own, and that the wide variety
of important things that have been thought, said, and written
in the world, many of which still help shape human action in
our own time, cannot be adequately understood or appreciated
if torn from those traditions and histories. The Major Cultures
requirement, founded on this recognition, promotes learning
and thought about the variety of civilizations and the diversity
of traditions that have formed the world and continue to interact
in it today.
Major Cultures is divided into three tiers of courses. All are
founded to an important degree on discussion of primary source
materials.
Broadly introductory, interdisciplinary, and temporally extensive
courses on a specific major culture or civilization, List
A courses usually trace the particular civilization across
more than one present-day country or region and usually draw
heavily on readings in primary texts.
More advanced and more specialized, these second-tier courses
on specific major cultures build on and often assume the work
of corresponding List A courses.
These courses address the manifestations in the United States
of the major cultures of Lists A and B. Students should note
that while some Major Cultures List A courses such as AFCV
C1020; HIST W4779; and HIST W4780 are designed for students
who have completed Literature Humanities and Contemporary
Civilization, others such as ASCE V2002; ASCE V2003; AHUM
V3999; and AHUM V4000 are designed to parallel Literature
Humanities or Contemporary Civilization and may be taken simultaneously
with these courses.
[ Approved
Courses at Columbia College ]
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