SEEING DIFFERENTLY

“We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.”

(Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society")

#Politics #anthropology #random #thoughts #economics

✋🧠 Humans have used finger joints and palms as portable #memory devices for over a millennium to track calendar dates and musical scales.

These manual systems provided both visual and physical ways to store information independently of written manuscripts. Modern examples include tracking the length of months on knuckles or applying #physics rules in the classroom.

👉 https://www.zmescience.com/science/storing-information-using-hands/

#history #mnemonics #science #education #anatomy #math #music #anthropology #learning #biology

Makes us give a big sigh, this one.

We are pretty confident there's a hallmark of 'time-resistant syntax' running through ritual art media, like letters through a stick of rock.

We can make precise predictions drawing on hunter-gatherer parameters. We can trace the constraints applying both to African Palaeolithic rock art and xtian Renaissance religious paintings viz. Sacred blood/animist 'lamb of God'/menstrual wounds of crucifixion...

We can explain why the very oldest stories of humankind involve the motif of 'snake guarding girls at waterhole' (we talked about this on St George's Day).

We can decode folk and fairytales, Classical Greek plays, Shakespeare! Hollywood movies are governed by the same syntactic principles -- if they aren't, they don't work!

This is another example of cultural evolution theory being very abstruse and abstract. We have precise and testable predictions on this. I should mention our Slovak colleague Helena Tuzinska, also a radical anthropologist (wonderful work with folktale and church iconography) and our late colleagues Isabel Cardigos, Max Pearson and Lionel Sims too.

Cultural evolution people, don't wait till we all die off! We don't seem to be able to transmit our brilliant theories too well!

#anthropology #archaeology #myth #ritual #art #evolution

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:46e3r3fp37dl3alwheajaez7/post/3mkhodkedqk2x

 Jayant Bhandari: ‘Understanding India’

Full video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1Mg4nXJ21Y

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I have only watched the short clip above, but approve of what he is saying and so am posting the full video as well. I may comment later after having watched the long version. People everywhere, but especially in the West, must learn cultural, anthropological and religious information as it really is and not see it only through the idealistic lenses of Western fantasy. ABN