The Baining—one of the indigenous cultural groups of Papua New Guinea—have the reputation, at least among some researchers, of being the dullest culture on earth. Early in his career, in the 1920s, the famous British anthropologist Gregory Bateson spent 14 months among them, until he finally left in frustration. He called them “unstudiable,” because of their reluctance to say anything interesting about their lives and their failure to exhibit much activity beyond the mundane routines of daily work, and he later wrote that they lived “a drab and colorless existence.” Forty years later, Jeremy Pool, a graduate student in anthropology, spent more than a year living among them in the attempt to develop a doctoral dissertation. He too found almost nothing interesting to say about the Baining, and the experience caused him to leave anthropology and go into computer science.
Agradeço ao Pedro Souza pelo link! (A história depois perde a graça porque os antropólogos descobriram que eles não eram tão malas assim).
Um comentário:
Em Jared Diamond, povos que vivem nas montanhas da papua nova guiné, área geograficamente desfavorecida, dispendem muito tempo na caça e coleta de comida, restando pouco tempo livre para diversificar cultura, ou civilização. Já em sociedades que cresceram nos férteis vales dos grandes rios (nilo, ganges, etc), a oferta vasta de comida liberou o tempo, permitindo florescer avanços civilizatórios.
(tentativa de conclusão: ócio pode não ser bom individualmente, mas coletivamente o é)
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