重新把握命運英語短文閱讀

　　A New Control Of Destiny

　　 重新把握命運

　　Children used to play a game of pointing at someone, suddenly saying, “What are you?” Some people answered by saying, “I am a human being,” or by nationality, or by religion. en this question was put to me by a new generation of children, I answered, “an anthropologist.”

　　Anthropology is the study of whole ways of life, to which one must be completely committed, all the time. So that when I speak of what I believe as a person, I cannot separate this from what I believe as an anthropologist.

　　過去，孩子們通常會玩這樣的遊戲——突然指著一個人說：“你是幹什麼的?”有些人會回答：“我是一個人。”或回答是哪國人，或是哪個宗教的信徒。當新一代的孩子這樣問我時，我答道：“我是一個人類學家。”

　　人類學是對人類所有生活方式的研究，需要一個人將全部的精力與時間都投入其中。所以，在談論信仰時，我無法將自己作為一個人的信仰與作為一個人類學家的信仰區分開來。

　　I believe that to understand human beings it is necessary to think of them as part of the whole living world. Our essential humanity depends not only on the complex biological structure which has been developed through the ages from very simple beginnings, but also upon the great social inventions which have been made by human beings, perpetuated by human beings, and in turn give human beings their stature as builders, thinkers, statesmen, artists, seers, and prophets.

　　I believe that each of these great inventions—language, the family, the use of tools, government, science, art, and philosophy—has the quality of so combining the potentialities of every human temperament, that each can be learned and perpetuated by any group of human beings, regardless of race, and regardless of the type of civilization within which their progenitors lived; so that a newborn infant from the most primitive tribe in New Guinea is as intrinsically capable of graduation from Harvard, or writing a sonnet, or inventing a new form of radar as an infant born on Beacon Hill.