NP - All Work and No Play Make the Baining the "Dullest Culture on Earth"

[jochen stremmel]

"Fajans studied the Baining in the late 1970s and again in the early
1990s. Like her predecessors, she found that they lacked the cultural
structures that are the stock-in-trade of anthropology, such as myths,
festivals, religious traditions, and puberty rites, and that the
method of trying to learn about them through interviews produced
little response. They did not tell stories, rarely gossiped, and
exhibited little curiosity or enthusiasm. In Fajans’s words, “Their
conversation is obsessively mundane, concerned primarily with
food-getting and food-processing.”

But they obviously have fire dances: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baining_people



2012/8/2 Diane Caudillo <dianecaudillo at gmail.com>:
> to live amongst the Baining sounds like hell to me. stopping babies from crawling & children from playing: seems like serious restrictions on brain development. I wonder how they got started on that path?
> Diane
>
>
> Diane Caudillo
> pax, amor, et lepos in iocando
>
> On Aug 1, 2012, at 7:21 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201207/all-work-and-no-play-make-the-baining-the-dullest-culture-earth
>>
>> The Baining believe, quite correctly, that play is the natural
>> activity of children, and precisely for that reason they do what they
>> can to discourage or prevent it.