* Part Two          A Wider Comparative View
     
     
          At this point we change the lens of our discussion.
     Instead of comparing sets of selected regions in the Americas,
     we will compare Latin and North America.  The foregoing
     chapters dealt with areas that would fit more or less onto a
     typical oil company road map.  The following chapters are
     accompanied by maps of a scale like that in the air-route
     booklet you might find in the seat pocket ahead of you, next
     to the neatly folded bag.  The first scale is fairly easily
     identified with; it corresponds to routine travel.  The reader
     probably knows one of the regions already discussed quite well
     and feels at home in it.  North and Latin America, on the
     other hand, are probably abstractions.
     
          The sorts of things learned at the two scale are
     different as well.  Chapter 7 sacrifices detail for the
     broader generalization, and generalizations (or one might say
     concepts) subsume a great variety of evidence.  They must be
     made with caution and yet are often controversial.  It is as
     easy to argue that they gloss over specific essentials as it
     may have been to say of the foregoing regional discussions
     that they were too particularistic.  There is no great virtue
     in one or the other, but they are sequential.  The smaller
     scale -- that is, the widen less -- satisfies the need for
     context that builds up during large-scale regional study.
     
          Looking at the natural environment of some slice of the
     long western mountain system, for example, like central
     California or central Chile, makes one want to draw profiles.
     Vertical zonation is highly interesting, certainly to the
     people who live there.  Looking at the whole Cordillera, as we
     will shortly, leads us into a more horizontal discussion,
     including the parallelism of ranges and just a bit about the
     various types of mountain-building evident in the western
     hemisphere.
     
          Or, in terms of man in the Americas, a consideration of
     the peculiar nature of people in Appalachian backcountry makes
     some sense, as it does to draw a cultural profile of the
     sertanejo. But what is a North American or a Latin American?
     We can better understand people at this scale in quantitative
     or demographic than cultural terms.  It is demonstrable that
     Latin America's population is increasing at a faster rate than
     that of North America -- and a great deal must be made of this
     and related points.
     
          The scale of the next several chapters is roughly that of
     all those continental maps in texts and atlases from which the
     student has probably already been required to memorize
     distributions.  This task is difficult -- and dull.
     Comparisons can help notably.  The next chapters are also just
     about at the level where people in the Americas perpetrate
     some of the worst nonsense about each other. Perhaps some well-
     considered and properly qualified comparisons can help there
     too.
       


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