I'm nodding in complete agreement with what you've written here.
Everything we know about human cultures tells us that the people in them have equally complex feelings, and anthropologists are strenuous in telling us that societies that aren't as full of material accoutrements as ours often still have very complex rules of social interaction, etc. etc. We're--theoretically!--in an age when we don't make hierarchies of cultures in which we rank some as advanced and others as primitive, but some of the attitudes that went along with making those rankings seem to have survived in the hunter-gatherer stress situation: a sense that hunter-gatherers were somehow collectively simpler, and that their lives were simpler.
... some people--and, collectively, some peoples, seem to brood more on some things than others do, but that doesn't mean that there no brooders in the groups that by and large seem not to brood much--just that those people aren't the ones creating the cultural record.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-12 08:36 pm (UTC)Everything we know about human cultures tells us that the people in them have equally complex feelings, and anthropologists are strenuous in telling us that societies that aren't as full of material accoutrements as ours often still have very complex rules of social interaction, etc. etc. We're--theoretically!--in an age when we don't make hierarchies of cultures in which we rank some as advanced and others as primitive, but some of the attitudes that went along with making those rankings seem to have survived in the hunter-gatherer stress situation: a sense that hunter-gatherers were somehow collectively simpler, and that their lives were simpler.
... some people--and, collectively, some peoples, seem to brood more on some things than others do, but that doesn't mean that there no brooders in the groups that by and large seem not to brood much--just that those people aren't the ones creating the cultural record.
Anyway. Yeah. I agree with you. Well said.