#primitive

Can you be sure that others have not come before you and destroyed the pristine state of the native myth? Can you be sure that the natives are not humoring you or pulling your leg? Bronislaw Malinowski thought he had discovered a people in the Trobriant Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth. When asked how children were conceived, they supplied him with an elaborate mythic structure prominently featuring celestial intervention. Amazed, Malinowski objected that was not how it was done at all, and supplied them instead with the version so popular in the West today – including a nine-month gestation period. “Impossible,” replied the Melanesians. “Do you not see that woman over there with her six-month-old child? Her husband has been on an extended voyage to another island for two years.” Is it more likely that the Melanesians were ignorant of the begetting of children or that they were gently chiding Malinowski? If some peculiar-looking stranger came into my town and asked ME where babies came from, I’d certainly be tempted to tell him about storks and cabbages. Prescientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#cleverness #myths #people #primitive #humor

France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything. ↗

— Adam Michnik

#anything #both #cowboys #culture #dominating

A primitive artist is an amateur whose work sells. ↗

— Grandma Moses

#artist #primitive #sells #whose #work

Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that. ↗

— Graham Nelson

#adventures #atom #blowing #bubble #computer

People just don't laugh when their family is violated, and you don't shrug it off. You band together and you defend together. It's a funny, primitive instinct. ↗

— Phillip Noyce

#defend #family #funny #instinct #just

St. Peter announced the glad tidings of the Gospel to the people on the day of Pentecost, and converted, by the first Christian sermon, ever preached, three thousand - which formed the primitive Church. ↗

— John Strachan

#christian #church #converted #day #ever

But primitive man had enemies real as well as imaginary, and they were not subject to priestly sorceries. ↗

— Paul Harris

#imaginary #man #priestly #primitive #real

Two of the cruelest, most primitive punishments our town deals out to those who fall from favor are the empty mailbox and the silent telephone. ↗

— Hedda Hopper

#deals #empty #fall #favor #most

The prehistorical and primitive period represents the true infancy of the mind. ↗

— James M. Baldwin

#mind #period #primitive #represents #true

In action be primitive; in foresight, a strategist. ↗