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

[Mark Kohut]

"There you go again"---R. Reagan [to MK via ATD time machine]---
being so 'playful' you MUST go to Time-Out 
[is Time-Out like timelessness or a stop-out from timelessness? Latter, Stop- Time is the former]
 
Notice the use of the word Puritan in describing the Bain culture in this piece. (Who named this culture, a baneful punster?). Remember the importance
of Puritanism as a concept in early TRP and some of his major influences, Hawthorne, Weber's "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"
in "The Recognitions" (if we believe that TRP did read it early and was changed by it) and others. 
 
The 'natural' in TRP, duly undulated and nuanced, is part of TRP's hope-based vision, I sorta keep saying boringly (and sometimes inadequately).
The 'natural" as part of the vision of what we have lost in Western Civ's growth of the unnatural, the inanimate.  Especially rich in V and, most in ATD
imho. 
 
Let's look at these two cultures below through the lens of another influential book for TRP, "Life Against Death". It's been a long time--reread scheduled--
but Brown's trying to push Freud's conception of the biologically natural, repressed by the Western world's cultural structures, he argued,
to a vision of erotic and life-embracing 'naturalness' has some echoes in the hunter-gatherer contrasting society between these two cultures, yes? 
The Bain's know sex is natural and repress thoughts of it. The Hunter-Gatherers master all of their society's necessary survival skills under the
overarching notion of constant playfulness. 
 
Maybe 10 years ago now I read a good long article by an anthropologist arguing for a revised understanding of the consensus opinion that the
typical H--G society was hardscrabble and that 'civilization' only began with agriculture. It may have been the guy below, dunno. 
 
But, if true that TRP doesn't particularize a lost "Garden of Eden"; is no sentimental nostalgist for a Golden Age in the past and drives brilliantly
to the ambiguous pivotal concept of original sin, metaphorically speaking, via the phrase inherent vice (and in other places), I am still arguing that, thru 
Frazer (maybe), thru Eliade, thru McLuhan,  his own genius, TRP did develop a vision of what the human could be (or be more of) in History---The Modern World System [Wallerstein]---therefore he shows the loss in the symbols of fiction. It is there all over the texts like bananas in the tropics.
 
Wikipedia [in Fall of Man article]
"Steve Taylor, in his book The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and the Dawning of A New Era,[18] proposes an "Edenic" period associated with the transition from hunter gathering, followed by a "fall" through the establishment of a selfish, rational calculating ego, as a result of the desiccation of the arid zone during the 5.9 kiloyear event. The "pre-fall" cultures he speaks of had no organised warfare, were partnership not patriarchal cultures and were non hierarchical."
 
 

From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>; "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>; David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: NP - All Work and No Play Make the Baining the "Dullest Culture on Earth"


Fascinating, yes, thanks..
 
I'll bet some Pynchon resonances are circulating in playful minds....

From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org 
Sent: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 10:53 AM
Subject: Re: NP - All Work and No Play Make the Baining the "Dullest Culture on Earth"

Really interesting article.  Thanks!

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
>Sent: Aug 1, 2012 10:22 AM
>To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: NP - All Work and No Play Make the Baining the "Dullest Culture on Earth"
>
>The Baining are small-scale agriculturalists, who subsist on their
>gardens and the few animals they raise. In their style of life and
>attitudes they are in many ways the opposite of hunter-gatherers,
>including those hunter-gatherers to whom they are closely related.
>Hunter-gatherers love the bush, or forest; value freedom and
>individual initiative; and are extraordinarily playful in their daily
>lives and especially value play among children. Hunter-gatherer
>children are allowed to play all day, every day, from dawn to dusk,
>and in that way they acquire the subsistence skills, social skills,
>and personal traits and values that characterize their culture. In
>contrast, the Baining shun the bush, which they view as chaotic and
>dangerous, and they derogate play, especially that among children.