Constellations and Cultural Influences

I was with the delegation from Thailand as they toured Brainerd High School and Forestview Middle School. One of the stops on the agenda today was to Forestview's planetarium where Brian Wallace lead us through an intergalactic exploration. It was one of my highlights of the day.

The planetarium was really interesting. I'm glad it was such a visual medium though because even with English being my first language, it was complicated material. Before going into the filmed presentation, he started with the night sky as we see it in Minnesota, and then adjusted it to show us what it looks like in Thailand. It was a cool perspective shift. He then talked about some of the mythology behind certain constellations. Like the big dipper, or Ursa Major. He told us about the American Indian story of "the big bear" and the Thai story of the Alligator. It was interesting to hear the cultural perspectives on the stories that become enculturated within the different parts of the world. And I thought that could be a cool assignment: To research the different mythologies to the same constellations and then compare them to each other through Hofstede's cultural vaue theories (individualism vs collectivism, high context vs low context, masculine vs feminine, etc.)

Here's some online resources for stories of constellations from around the world:

http://www.coldwater.k12.mi.us/lms/planetarium/myth/index.html