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> What did they think they were? FWIW, that question is itself very modern. You can find the seeds of it in many cultures and histories, and analogize it to ce
by swatcoder 3y ago
> What did they think they were?
FWIW, that question is itself very modern. You can find the seeds of it in many cultures and histories, and analogize it to certain folk stories, but you can very successfully navigate a world that simply "is" without all that "what" and "why" business we get intensely caught up in now.
Having some cultural wisdom that reminds you to move camp under certain season, climate, or weather patterns will get your culture through lifetimes of tornadoes without ever spending much thought on "what" tornadoes are (whatever that even means).
- junofan 3y agoYeah I dunno, the Caddo and Wichita were pretty serious about folk science. They had real villages and farms and stuff. They weren’t just kinda camping out and going with the flow wherever ancestral memory took them.
- swatcoder 3y agoYeah, I'm not saying nobody outside of modernity thinks about "what" but that many cultures didn't/don't. And it's not even a matter of primitivism and in no way suggests some kind of meager culture. It just turns out that sophisticated cultures have gotten by without an exhaustive theory of "what", and that modernity's particular obsession is an idiosyncrasy rather than either an accomplishment or a universal. (Edit: although, re-reading my comment from earlier, I can see what you responded to in it. I could have written it more clearly.)