Rubbish in Quest?

Although Quest is as good as anything available for students studying academic English, it does have some consistently annoying faults. One that particularly annoys me is Hartmann's persistent failure to properly cite sources: something that seems to me a bit out of place in a series on academic English.

The latest example of this to come to my attention is in "Dreaming Across Cultures", where Hartmann writes that "the Senoi lived peacefully within ... their society, without psychological problems, crime or violence" (2007, p. 147). This is the first time I've taught this chapter in Quest, since I usually skip it and start level 4 Reading and Writing with the more meaty chapter on abnormal psychology. When I read that sentence about the Senoi my immediate reaction was: "Rubbish! I don't believe it." That any human society, any where on earth has ever managed to live peacefully without violence, without theft, without jealousy and envy, without conflicts about sex, power and the like, and without some members suffering more or less serious psychological problems is so extremely unlikely that no one could believe it without some solid supporting evidence. And Hartmann presents zero evidence to support her extraordinary claim about the Senoi. She hasn't even given a single parenthetic citation to refer us to a supporting source.

Naturally, I did a bit of quick research, so easy these days with Google and the like, and discovered that not only is the claim about the Senoi's peacefulness most likely a romantic fantasy, but the statements about their use of lucid dreaming are also of dubious accuracy ("Senoi", 2012). It's very sloppy work.

It reminded me of a couple of similar examples where people, often most people, get some lovely, romantic belief about another group, usually remote either geographically or historically, and believe if for no good reason except that it sounds nice. In my country, for example, the Native Australian Aborigines are still believed  by many of the descendants of the European invaders to have long lived in harmony with the natural environment and at peace within and between their tribes. But the evidence simply does not support this: the general rule is that the more primitive a people, the more violent they are, and Australian Aborigines were very violent, just as modern Amazon Indians and other less developed peoples are far more bloody and warring than any developed Western people. The evidence strongly suggests that as soon as they arrived, the original human inhabitants of Australia behaved exactly as human beings normally do and wiped out other species as they selfishly changed the environment with no thought or concern for the consequences ("Humans Killed", 2012).

It similarly surprises some people to learn that Thailand is a more violent society than the US - the popular myth is that Thai people are peaceful and happy Buddhists, but the crime statistics for murder and violent crime rates suggest that Thai people and society are about twice as violent as Americans and US society. But as Thailand westernises and develops, the violence is decreasing: society is getting better, not worse (I think that another popular belief in many cultures is that things used to be better in some older time - almost always false).

__________

References

Hartmann, P. (2007). Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd. ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

'Humans killed off Australia's giant beasts'. (2012, March 24). BBC News. Retrieved May 3, 2012 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17488447

Senoi. (2012, February 9). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:32, May 3, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Senoi&oldid=475992936