Erin Remblance's linkedin post follows https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erin-remblance_the-following-passage-from-christopher-ryan-activity-7088587082180268032-M6L_
The following passage from Christopher Ryan’s Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress was referenced in the tweet below and I find it such a valuable insight and so interesting to consider:
“When documentary filmmaker Jonnie Hughes was living with the "Insect Tribe" in a remote part of Papua New Guinea, a few of the tribesmen who had been hosting him asked Jonnie if they could visit him back in the United Kingdom. A few months later, when Jonnie pitched the idea of flying a few foragers to Lon-don, his bosses saw the documentary value and agreed to fund their trip. But Hughes was worried the visit might "pollute their culture with modern ideas, or perhaps make them terminally envious of a world beyond their reach.? After all, these were people who were living in very primitive conditions, with no refrigeration, modern medicine, television, or other marvels of modernity. By the end of the visit, however, Hughes saw things very differently:
‘With every whispered observation, they left us powerless to explain the madness of our own social norms, and when they boarded the plane back to PNG, we were the ones racked with envy-envious of their joyously interdependent community, their clear understanding of what mattered in life, their rock-solid roles, simple pleasures and ample leisure time, their lack of mortgages and debts, their indisputable "goodness." Our work appeared an obscene and dysfunctional manifestation of human existence in comparison.’
If Hughes sounds a bit like one of those silly romantics we're always being warned about, just do the numbers. Hughes says the tribesmen “were fascinated about our work/life balance, because over there, in a week, they'll spend maybe twenty hours in total collecting food, going hunting, ete.-just doing the things they need to do. The rest of their time they spend with their family, social lives . .. leisure time."
No wonder they were confused that Mark, the father in the family they were staying with, left early every morning and didn't return until evening. "Why are you doing this?" Hughes recalls them asking. "Why are you going out every day, not seeing the people that you really care about? It doesn't make any sense at all!" Mark explained that he had to work to pay for the house they were living in. "How long will you be doing this, to pay for your house?" they asked. When Mark told them about his twenty-five year mortgage, they looked at him in astonished pity, explaining that when one of them needed a house, they got together with the other men of the village and built a house in a couple of weeks.
At the end of their visit, the Insect People took just one innovation back to Papa New Guinea: the notion of putting feathers on arrows to stabilize their flight. Apparently, that was the only thing that impressed them very much about the modern world.”
link to tweet: https://twitter.com/dilettanterypod/status/1682559705984696320?s=46&t=eoi37_UjXlyk1Cf-Oei1yQ
book: https://www.amazon.ca/Civilized-Death-What-Lost-Modernity/dp/1451659105