The first sign of civilization

"Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.

But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

'A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts', Mead said.

Ira Byock

Thanks, Kabir.

Coherence, not disintegration

"I often hear voices. I realize that drops me in the crazy category but I don't much care. If you believe, as I do, that the mind wants to heal itself, and that the psyche seeks coherence not disintegration, then it isn't hard to conclude that the mind will manifest whatever is necessary to work on the job,

We now assume that people who hear voices do terrible things; murderers and psychopaths hear voices, and so do religious fanatics and suicide bombers. But in the past, voices were respectable - desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wise-woman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing,'

Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.

Ronnie Laing, the doctor and psychotherapist who became the trendy 1960s and 70s guru making madness fashionable, understood madness as a process that might lead somewhere. Mostly, though, it is so terrifying for the person inside it, as well as the people outside it, that the only route is drugs or a clinic.

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than in any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.

Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time."

Page 170, 'Why be happy when you could be normal?', Jeanette Winterson

To Dream in Different Cultures

"When Doug Hollan arrived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for his anthropology dissertation fieldwork in a rice farming village, his Toraja neighbors wanted to take turns sleeping with him and his wife.

The rural Toraja almost never sleep alone. They sleep in wood frame houses with little furniture and flimsy room dividers, and they sleep on the floor together in groups, sharing blankets and huddling close for warmth. And so the Toraja have “punctuated” sleep. They wake often as others turn and get up in the night, or when a child calls out or another adult can’t sleep and starts to chat. Mr. Hollan never heard anyone complain about this."

To Dream in Different Cultures
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/opinion/luhrmann-to-dream-in-different-cultures.html?_r=2

Why nothing is really yours in Asia :)

I happened to meet this guy who does research on linguistics and Applied Artificial Intelligence. He posts interesting questions on the evolution of certain language structures, and does intriguing comparisons between Indian languages and others - and would love to hear other viewpoints and observations, since these are all hypotheses.

Linguistic anthropology is such a fascinating subject!!

Funky language features – the mystery of the missing possessive verb

http://aiaioo.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/funky-language-features-the-mystery-of-the-missing-possessive-verb/

Funky language features – the third spatial deictic reference in Japanese, Korean and Tamil

http://aiaioo.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/funky-language-features-the-third-spatial-deictic-reference-in-japanese-korean-and-tamil/

Actions, not words

From 'Don't Sleep, There are Snakes, Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle', by Daniel L.Everett. A fascinating account of his discovery of an intriguing language and the worldview it represents, among the happiest people he has ever met, people who smile, laugh and joke more than any community he has ever seen.
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"One of the things about the Piraha that immediately fascinated me was the lack of what linguists call "phatic" communication - communication that primarily functions to maintain social and interpersonal channels, to recognize or stroke, as some refer to it, one's interlocutor.

Expressions like hello, goodbye, how are you?, I'm sorry, you're welcome, and thank you don't express or elicit new information about the world so much as they maintain goodwill and mutual respect. The Piraha culture does not require this kind of communication. Piraha sentences are either requests for information (questions), assertions of new information (declarations), or commands, by and large. There are no words for thanks,  I'm sorry, and so on.

...The expression of gratitude can come later, with a reciprocal gift, or some unexpected act of kindness, such as helping you carry something. The same goes when someone has done something offensive or hurtful. They have no words for "I'm sorry." They can say "I was bad", or some such, but do so rarely. The way to express penitence is not by words but by actions."

Page 11, 'Discovering the World of the Pirahas'
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This passage also made me think of how I have rarely heard the words for "Thank you" and "Sorry" being used in our Indian languages, among close relatives or friends, especially when I was growing up, in the 70s and 80s. We did indeed believe that we need to reciprocate by actions, not words.

Somewhere along the way, are we substituting that with these easy words, moving on without taking the trouble to re-establish or re-affirm relationships by concrete acts of connection?

The Crowd

From 'The Silence of Animals, On Progress and Other Modern Myths', by John Gray:

"The machine-like condition of modern humans may seem a limitation. In fact it is a condition of their survival. Kayerts and Carlier (the characters from Joseph Conrad's 'An Outpost of Progress' who break down when trapped in the heart of the Belgian Congo jungles) were able to function as individuals only because they had been shaped by society down to their innermost being. They were:

"two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of the police and of its opinion."

When they stepped outside of their normal surroundings, the two men were powerless to act. More than that: they ceased to exist.

Page 2, 'An Old Chaos'

Guardians against Loneliness

From 'The People of the Deer', Farley Mowat's lyrical account of his 2-year stay in the Arctic, with the Ihalmiut people of northern Canada.
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"We looked out over a dead land - but not a deserted one, for our eyes quickly discovered the shapes of men standing in monumental immobility on every side of us.

They were men. But men of stone! Insensate little pillars of flat rocks piled precariously atop each other, they stood on every hill, by every lake and river, as they have stood throughout the long ages of the People who created them and called them Inukok (semblance of men).

...The Inukok have being because they were created as guardians of living men against a loneliness which is immeasurable.

When the first man came this way, restlessly probing into unknown lands, he paused upon some hill before he ventured further into the obscurity ahead, and here he raised the figure of an Inukok. Then, as he went forward into the boundless distances, he retained a fragile link with his familiar world as long as he could still discern the dwindling figure of the man of stone. Before it disappeared behind him, the traveler paused to build another Inukok, and so another and another, until his journey ended and he turned back, or until he no longer needed the stone men to bind him to reality and life.

The Inukok are not signposts, just simple landmarks as most white men have thought. They are - or were - the guardians who stolidly resisted the impalpable menace of space uncircumscribed, which can unhinge the finite minds of men. From the crest of Kinetua we looked out and saw these lifeless beings and were comforted to see them standing there. "

Page 224.

Art

"Strictly, art does not belong to our evolutionary pattern at all. It has no biological necessity. Time taken up with it was time lost to hunting, gathering, mating, exploring, building, thriving. Odd then, that when routine physical threats to ourselves and our kind are no longer a reality, we say we have no time for art.

If we say that art, all art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?'. The usual question, 'What has happened to art?' is too easy an escape route."

Page 20, 'Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery', Jeanette Winterson

Moved

"For we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved...."


From 'The Gift, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World', by Lewis Hyde 

The Gift

The most fascinating book I have probably ever read, recommended by a friend to whom I am indebted now, because of the same - :) - Lewis Hyde's 'The Gift', "the sort of book that you remember where you were, and even what you were wearing, when you first picked it up".
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"It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no unnecessary connection.

...a gift makes a connection. To take the simplest of examples, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss tells of a seemingly trivial ceremony he has often seen accompany a meal in cheap restaurants in the South of France. The patrons sit at a long, communal table, and each finds before his plate a modest bottle of wine. Before the meal begins, a man will pour his wine not into his own glass but into his neighbor's. And his neighbor will return the gesture, filling the first man's empty glass.

In an economic sense nothing has happened. No one has any more wine than he did to begin with. But society has appeared where there was none before. The French customarily tend to ignore people they do not know, but in these little restaurants, strangers find themselves placed in close relationship for an hour or more. 'A conflict exists,' says Lévis-Strauss, 'not very keen to be sure, but real enough and sufficient to create a tension between the norm of privacy and the fact of community...'This is the fleeting but difficult situation resolved by the exchange of wine. It is an assertion of good grace which does away with the mutual uncertainty.'

Spacial proximity becomes social life through an exchange of gifts. Further, the pouring of the wine sanctions another exchange - conversation - and a whole series of trivial social ties unfolds."

Page 58, Chapter 4, 'The Bond', from 'The Gift, How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World', by Lewis Hyde

I found it on Flipkart.

A song-cousin, a counterpart, a reflected image

"...But I got none of these responses from the Ihalmut. The unadorned fact that I, a white man and a stranger, should voluntarily wish to step across the barriers of blood that lay between us, and ask the People to teach me their tongue, instead of expecting them to learn mine - this was the key to their hearts. When they saw that I was anxious to exert myself in trying to understand their way of life, their response was instant, enthusiastic, and almost overwhelming. Both Ootek and Ohoto, who was called in to assist in the task, abruptly ceased to treat me with the usual deference they extend to white strangers. They devoted themselves to the problem I had set them with the strength of fanatics.

To begin with, Ootek taught me the meaning of the word Ihalmut. When I had mastered its meaning by the aid of devious drawings executed in sand, Ootek stood Ohoto in one place, then placed me a few feet away to the south. Now he pointed to Ohoto, and repeated "Ihalmut" over and over again with a remarkable excess of emotion in his voice as he spoke. At last he came over, took me by the arm, and led me to the side of Ohoto. Both men now beamed at me with the anxious expressions of people who hope their acts have been understood, and fortunately I did not disappoint them. I understood. I was no longer a stranger; I was now a man of the Ihalmut, of the People who dwell under the slopes of the Little Hills.

It was an initiation so informal, so lacking in the dramatic gestures, that for a little while its deep significance was not clear to me. It was some time before I discovered that this simple ceremony of Ootek and Ohoto had not only made me an adopted man of the land, but had also given me a relationship with both men. I became their song-cousin, a difficult relationship to define, but one that is only extended on the most complete and comprehensive basis of friendship. If I wished, I might have shared all things that Ootek and Ohoto possessed, even to their wives, though this honor was not thrust upon me. As a song-cousin I was a counterpart of each man who had adopted me. I was his reflected image, yet cloaked in the full flesh of reality.

Of course, under the law, it was assumed that  I would reciprocate to the fullest, and had I been born an Ihalmio I would have given the reciprocity without any thought. Yet as a white man I unconsciously refused it to both Ohoto and Ootek times without number, but never did they feel the need to retaliate by withdrawing any of the privileges of the relationship they had so freely extended to me."

Page 120, 'People of the Deer', Farley Mowat

The Tundra Book

The Tundra Book: A Tale of Vukvukai, the Little Rock

Director: Aleksei Vakhrushev
Russia I 2011 I 105 minutes I Russian and Chukchi with English subtitles

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpQjoFWsoKY

The Tundra Book: A Tale of Vukvukai, the Little Rock presents a rare and stunning documentary about the lives of the Chukchi people who inhabit a remote Russian peninsula in the Arctic Circle, leaving them virtually isolated from modern life.

The story centers on Vukvukai and his community. Vukvukai, the Little Rock, is Chukchi from eastern Russia and lives along the Bering Sea region. He has lived his lifetime as a reindeer herder and thus is known in his community as a true man of the tundra whose life is inseparable from the reindeer. The Chukchi herd more than 14,000 reindeer. Vukvukai lives in one of the harshest climate zones in the world, the Arctic Circle.

His story and that of the Chukchi is one of a nonstop struggle for survival, but the people believe that following the practices of their ancient, nomadic, cultural traditions contributes to the perseverance of their survival in the unyielding, frozen tundra. The film presents a glimpse into a land, culture, and people that few have ever dared to capture, since it is so remote. For now, the nomadic Chukchi culture remains virtually intact away from the influx of modernity.

By the All Roads Film Project: http://events.nationalgeographic.com/events/all-roads/film/

 All Roads Seed Grant

This grant funds film projects by or about indigenous and underrepresented minority cultures from around the world and seeks to support filmmakers who bring their community stories to light through first-person storytelling.

*Photo from Google Images

The Ashaninka, A Threatened Way of Life

"The Ashaninka are one of the largest indigenous groups in South America, their ancestral homelands ranging from Brazil to Peru. Since colonial times, their existence has been difficult -- they have been enslaved, had their lands taken away or destroyed, and were caught up in the bloody internal conflict in Peru during the late 20th century.

Today, a large communal reserve set aside for the Ashaninka is under threat by the proposed Pakitzapango dam, which would displace some 10,000 Ashaninka. The dam is part of a large set of hydroelectric projects planned between the Brazilian and Peruvian governments - without any original consultation with the Ashaninka.

Bowing to recent pressure from indigenous groups, development one other dam in the project, the Tambo-40, has already been halted. The Pakitzapango dam on Peru's Ene River is currently on hold, though the project has not been withdrawn yet. Survival International has collected these images of the Ashaninka and their threatened homeland, and provided the text below, written by Jo Eede."

Photo-story: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/12/the-ashaninka-a-threatened-way-of-life/100208/

Who am I now?

"They [the Piraha tribe of the Amazon] frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are."

from the article 'The Interpreter', John Colapinto

The ethos of Individualism

"Pre-industrial societies have little notion of a person as a separate entity. A Nigerian psychiatrist told me that, when a psychiatric clinic was first set up in a rural district of Nigeria to treat the mentally ill, the family invariably accompanied the sufferer and insisted upon being present at the patient's interview with the psychiatrist. The idea that the patient might exist as an individual apart from the family, or that he might have personal problems which he did not want to share with them, did not occur to Nigerians who were still living a traditional village life.

In his book Social Anthropology, Sir Edmund Leach refers to "the ethos of individualism which is central to the contemporary Western society but which is notably absent from most of the societies which social anthropologists study."

Page 78, 'The Significance of the Individual', from 'Solitude', Anthony Storr

Sacred Time

From Mircea Eliade's 'The Sacred and the Profane, The Nature of Religion':

Profane Duration and Sacred Time

For religious man, time too, like space, is neither homogeneous nor continuous. On the one hand, there are the intervals of a sacred time, the time of the festivals (by far the greater part of which are periodical); on the other there is profane time, ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting. Between these two kinds of time there is, of course, solution of continuity; but by means of rites religious man can pass without danger from ordinary temporal duration to sacred time.

One essential difference between these two qualities of time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, "in the beginning". Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself.

Sukkot, A Celebration

Never knew about this. How beautiful, to keep alive the memory of a journey, this way.

Sukkot, or Feast of Tabernacles, is a Biblical holiday celebrated in late September to late October. The holiday lasts seven days. The Sukkah is a walled structure covered with plant material - built for the celebration - and is intended to be a reminiscence of the type of dwelling in which the Israelites stayed during their 40 years of travel in the desert after the exodus from slavery in Egypt.

Throughout the holiday, meals are eaten inside the Sukkah and many sleep there as well. On each day of the holiday, members of the household recite a blessing over the lulav and etrog (four species). The four species include the lulav (a ripe green, closed frond from a date palm tree), the hadass (boughs with leaves from the myrtle tree), the aravah (branches with leaves from the willow tree) and the etrog (the fruit of a citron tree.) -- Paula Nelson (29 photos total)


http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/10/sukkot_a_celebration.html

By gifts one makes slaves, and by whips one makes dogs

 In most traditional Indian families/communities, people don’t say Thanks to each other. Some people are in fact upset if you say Thank you - “One does not say Thanks to one’s own people, am I a stranger to you?” - is the usual response :)

In this context, I found the following excerpt absolutely fascinating – probably this is where it all originated?
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In today's excerpt - the supposedly virtuous act of giving is often instead an act meant to create an obligation, an act whereby the giver measures himself against the receiver and requires a repayment, even if that repayment is gratitude:

"[Here] are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer - an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat [for him]. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:
 
'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. 'And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.'

"The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar state- ments about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began 'comparing power with power, measuring, calculating' and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt."

Author: David Graeber   
Title: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Publisher: Melville House
Date: Copyright 2011 by David Graeber
Pages: 79

From delanceyplace.com

Pretense

A friend once told me about this African tribe in the film ‘Amistaad’ that did not have a word for "should". How they only do what they want to do.

Came across this fascinating section in this book - 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters', by Julian Barnes. This particular story is a series of letters by this actor Charlie who has gone into the Amazonian jungles as part of a film crew - they're filming along with a group of Indians whom they've convinced to act in the movie, via an interpreter:

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"Monday. Here's a funny thing. While the Indians appear to understand roughly what we're doing - they're happy to do retakes and don't seem at all put out by this great big eye being pointed at them - they don't seem to understand about the idea of acting. I mean sure they're acting their ancestors and they're quite willing to build us a raft and transport us upstream on it and be filmed doing this. But they won't do anything else.

If Vic says could you stand in a different way or use the pole like this and tries to demonstrate they simply won't. Absolutely refuse.

This is how we pole a raft and just because a white man is watching through his funny machine we aren't going to do it any differently.

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And the second one below - set me thinking - why and how we changed into a society that learned to pretend to be somebody else - and how pretense has become a part of our very lives, not just acting. It is in fact a survival skill now, being absolutely truthful would get us into much trouble.

Maybe pretense became necessary as we evolved into a bigger, more complex society? But what about the price we pay for it, being forced to behave in a false way so often? What is it doing to us?

But even if we did start off with absolute honesty, there's no going back now, is there?

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

"The other thing is even more incredible. They actually think that when Matt and I are dressed up as Jesuits, we actually are Jesuits! They think we've gone away and those two blokes in black dresses have turned up! Father Firmin is just as real a person for them as Charlie, though I'm glad to say they like Charlie more.

But you can't persuade them about what's going on. The crew think this is pretty stupid of them but I wonder if it's fantastically mature. The crew think they're such a primitive civilization they haven't even discovered acting yet.

I wonder if it's the opposite and they're a sort of post-acting civilization, maybe the first one on the earth. Like, they don't need it anymore, so they've forgotten about it and don't understand it any longer. Quite a thought!"

Page 243, Upstream

'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters', Julian Barnes

Writing for Divination

 "The earliest specimens of Chinese writing appeared on oracle bones, dating from China's first archaeologically proven dynasty, the Shang (circa 1766 to 1122 BCE). Written on ox scapulae or tortoise shells, the writing was used for divination purposes by shamans who asked questions on behalf of the king.

Only about a thousand or so characters have been identified on oracle bones, but the findings show that the written language had already attained a solid foundation in China by the second millenium, BCE. "

Chinese for Dummies, Revised Edition, Dr.Wendy Abraham