May 2013
35 posts
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Every human language evolved from 'single... →
“Every language in the world - from English to Mandarin - evolved from a prehistoric ‘mother tongue’ first spoken in Africa tens of thousands of years ago, a new study reveals. After analysing more than 500 languages, Dr Quentin Atkinson found compelling evidence that they can be traced back to a long-forgotten dialect spoken by our Stone Age ancestors.”
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An Affluence of Satisfaction
“The visiting sea captain may pay handsomely for a Kula necklace, but because the sale removes it from the circle, it wastes it, no matter the price. Gifts that remain gifts can support an affluence of satisfaction, even without numerical abundance. The mythology of the rich in the overproducing nations that the poor are in on some secret about satisfaction—black ‘soul,’ gypsy duende,...
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The Paradox of Gift Exchange
“When the gift is used, it is not used up. Quite the opposite, in fact: the gift that is not used will be lost, while the one that is passed along remains abundant. In the Scottish tale the girls who hoard their bread are fed only while they eat. The meal finishes in hunger though they took the larger piece. The girl who shares her bread is satisfied. What is given away feeds again and again,...
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The Pick-Up Artists’ Alpha-Male Narrative Myth →
“There is no good reason to believe that humans evolved in hierarchical tribes between tens of thousands to two million years ago. To the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence showing that humans evolved in largely egalitarian bands that punished attempts of dominance with social sanctioning, banishment, and death (Boehm 1999). Yes, that’s basically saying that alpha males got offed by their...
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The Strong Eye
“When you see an old man sitting by himself over here in camp, do not disturb him, for if you do he will growl at you. Do not play near him, because he is sitting down by himself with his thoughts in order ‘to see.’ He is gathering those thoughts so that he can feel and hear. Perhaps he then lies down, getting into a special posture, so that he may ‘see’ when sleeping. He sees indistinct visions,...
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A Condition of Receptivity
“Aborigines spend much time with their own thoughts, reflecting on dreams, and being ready, at any moment, to enter a condition of receptivity. The quietness and silence of so much of their life, the absence of rush and of urgent appointments, and the fewness of their numbers, facilitate this occupation with the psychic. Moreover, their totemistic and animistic view of life predisposes them to...
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Fathers in Forager, Farmer, and Pastoral Cultures →
“This chapter summarizes and evaluates recent research on the roles of fathers in child development in hunting-gathering (also known as foraging), simple farming, and pastoral communities around the world. The author reviews three types of studies conducted on fathers in foraging, farming, and pastoral cultures: (a) evolutionary studies from human behavior ecology, (b) large (i.e., more than...
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Neither Satiation nor Fire
“In commodity exchange it’s as if the buyer and the seller were both in plastic bags; there’s none of the contact of a gift exchange. There is neither motion nor emotion because the whole point is to keep the balance, to make sure the exchange itself doesn’t consume anything or involve one person with another. Consumer goods are consumed by their owners, not by their exchange. The desire to...
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The Indian Giver
“A cardinal property of the gift: whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept. Or, if it is kept, something of similar value should move on in its stead, the way a billiard ball may stop when it sends another scurrying across the felt, its momentum transferred. You may keep your Christmas present, but it ceased to be a gift in the true sense unless you have given...
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Bushmen →
“Pity Southern Africa’s first people. Pity the people with no name. For when you are the only ones, you have no need to distinguish your kind from others. Pity those whose exclusive domain once stretched from the Zambezi to the Cape of Good Hope, from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans. Their Tswana neighbors in the Kalahari, who arrived here 1,200 years ago, call them the Basarwa, the ‘people who...
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Quality, the Simple Expedient
“A generation ago, the state of American beer was deplorable; watery, chemical-induced brews issued from vats of a few corporations that spent most of their money on advertising, not quality. Of course, no one involved in federal policy was likely to do anything about this, even if one could imagine a federal government ready to do battle with the Coors and Busch families. The solution was a lot...
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Insist on Sensuality
“I guard my smoked pheasants, old guitars, and quiet as jealously as any miser guards gold. They can do far more to protect me from what we humans have become: insensate, insensitive, inhuman. For the millions of years of evolution that made us, the ability to fully sense food and sex was the foundation of our humanity and the core determinant of survival. For ten thousand years, those same...
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Introduction to 'Fire-Stick Farming' →
“‘Fire-Stick Farming’ began with a question as simple as it was radical: ‘We imagine that the country seen by the first colonists before they ringbarked their first tree was ‘natural.’ But was it?’ Inspired by the extensive fire management he saw practiced by Aboriginal communities across central Arnhem Land, and appreciating the antiquity of Aboriginal occupation, Rhys Jones answered in the...
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Return
“A little too abstract, a little too wise,
It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.
I will go to the lovely Sur Rivers
And dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.
I will find my accounting where the alder leaf quivers
In the ocean wind over the river boulders.
I will touch things and things...
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For Una
“Tonight, dear,
Let’s forget all that, that and the war,
And enisle ourselves a little beyond time,
You with this Irish whiskey, I with red wine
While the stars go over the sleepless ocean,
And sometime after midnight I’ll pluck you a wreath
Of chosen ones; we’ll talk about love and death,
Rock-solid themes, old and deep as the sea,
Admit nothing more timely, nothing less real
While...
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Storytelling and Wonder: On the Rejuvenation of... →
“Spoken stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge. Oral tales told on special occasions carried the secrets of how to orient in the local cosmos. Hidden in the magic adventures of their characters were precise instructions for the hunting of various animals, and for enacting the appropriate rituals of respect and gratitude...
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My Best Friend in the World
“The response of a man to his question why he had to avoid his mother-in-law: ‘because she is my best friend in the world; she has given me my wife’. Hiatt says this gift ‘imposes an obligation of reciprocity’ on men ‘to provide their mothers-in-law with regular offerings of that most prized of commodities, meat’.”
—Francesca Merlan, “The Mother-in-Law Taboo”
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Marriage Is the Normal Adult State
“For the First People marriage is the normal adult state, and young people are encouraged to marry whenever possible. Considerable premarital sexual freedom is depicted as existing for both girls and boys, and many marriages probably develop from casual liasons. The change in status involved in marriage occurs easily and is primarily an individual matter. Similarly, adultery and the dissolution of...
April 2013
13 posts
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Pacific People, Pacific Salmon: Honoring the Gift... →
“One clear January day I was at our little homemade hatchery checking water temperature and flow, alert for the early hatch that sometimes occurs in a warm winter. I lifted the lid on the incubation barrel to check on the 46,000 eggs, the progeny of 20 wild chum hens, supported by black screened trays and vibrating and rolling delicately in the smooth rhythmic shade of the water flow. It is always...
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Not Everybody Can Be a Human Being
“Whatever else you can say about the white man, it must be admitted that you cannot get rid of him. He is in never-ending supply. There has always been only a limited number of Human Beings, because we are intended to be special and superior. Obviously not everybody can be a Human Being. To make this so, there must be a great many inferior people. To my mind, this is the function of white...
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100 Per Cent Woman
“Buffalo Wallow Woman was sort of my Ma, just a fine soul. I can’t count the times when I was small she hugged me against her fat belly, smiling down that moon-face with a sheen of grease on it; or give me a specially juicy piece of dog meat, tucked me in the robe at night, slipped me some Indian chewing gum, did beading on my clothes, and on and on. She was 100 per cent woman, like...
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Starving Sea Lion Pups Still Washing Up by the... →
“There’s no indication the ocean plans to stop littering Southern California’s shores with the tiny bodies of starving sea lion pups any time soon. For three months, these frail animals have been found stranded along California’s waterfront. As of Apr. 4, roughly 1,100 pups have entered marine mammal rehabilitation centers in the area. They likely represent a fraction of the animals in...
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A Shortcut to Bliss
“Though I’m not much of a climber, I’ve done enough to understand the paradox of deadly serious risks making life sweeter. Existence is a gift; you know that to begin with. Yet it’s human nature to forget and concentrate more on everyday problems and frustrations—on what you’ve lost or what you want rather than on what you have. Taking chances is an antidote for that....
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Go Hard, High, and Steep
“[Wolverines] are smaller than I. Their life span is considerably shorter. Yet whatever they do, they do undaunted. They live life as fiercely and relentlessly as it has ever been lived. If wolverines have a strategy, it’s this: Go hard, and high, and steep, and never back down, not even from the biggest grizzly, and least of all from a mountain. Climb everything: trees, cliffs,...
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March 2013
48 posts
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Where Masturbation and Homosexuality Do Not Exist →
“Barry and Bonnie Hewlett had been studying the Aka and Ngandu people of central Africa for many years before they began to specifically study the groups’ sexuality. As they reported in the journal African Study Monographs, the married couple of anthropologists from Washington State University ‘decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions...
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