Re: assumptions ?

In a message dated 12/29/2001 9:09:30 AM Central Standard Time, Anne-Marie.Jeay@univ-nancy2.fr writes:

I will intersperse my comments in your previous message.

> I ask you this question : WHAT IS A PRIMITIVE ?
> PLEASE  answer in English and in "Sudanese" langage and because my mother
> tongue is French add also a French version of your answer.

[snip]
I don' t think that indicated that I was capable of speaking or writing in either French or Sudanese.  Although I do have some ancestral French people it was several hundred years ago and I seem to have lost the talent.  I regret my inability for more than one reason.  I am into genealogy and most of the medieval documents are in either French or Latin.  Alas, I can decipher neither.

My copy actually read, "what might be considered a primitive".  Perhaps I can clarify that for you.  A primitive is usually considered to be a member of a people who are not on the cutting edge of world technology.  Usually meant that they have for instance; no scientific knowledge that is current at the time, a religion that is not what is currently thought to be "correct", social mores which are at variance with the "accepted" mores of the predominant society of the time.  In other words they jest ain't as current as "we" is.  In the United States many of the people in the remote parts of the Appalachian region (mountaineers) are considered to have a "primitive" lifestyle.
[snip]

> It is just an exercice, after  you should be able to understand the old
> fashioned "knowledge" of "primitive" colonialists travelling in savage
> countries in second half of the XIX° century.

[snip]
What is "savage"?  The "primitive" colonialists you are speaking of were not considered "primitive" in their time.  They were, indeed, at the very keenest "cutting edge" of technology and society.  They were Europeans and in that time, they, along with the United States citizens were the most advanced technologically.  
[snip]

A
> nd the second part of work could begin : what is a "genius statement"
> written in a book by a colonialist in the 1860s and 1870s ?
> For that you need to study Anthropology Š and not Psychology.
> You will learn much more about yourself than last century travellersŠ And
> you will stop mix CNN LIVE and an academic study when you will watch tv
> because it is what you did with your unknown book.


[snip]

CNN is one of the stations that I fail to watch time after time.  I cannot recall the last time I had CNN on the television.  That's how long it has been.

I still consider that the statement made by Comoro is the most sage definition of how the world operates than any I have ever seen from any of the over-educated savants.

The title of the book is: The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile And Explorations of the Nile Sources, by Sir Samuel W. Baker, M.A., F.R.G.S., Gold Medallist of the Royal Geographical Society.

It is available online from: <http://www.booksonline.com/BookDisplay.cfm?BookNum=17895>

Live long and prosper, and thanks for your response.


Gordon Hale