If I knew how, I would ask for­give­ness, but of whom? Of Aeore? The Sky? Myself?
Who else?
Are you afraid?
Not of death.
Of what?
Of that enor­mous sky.
You’re going to die.
Well, kill me then, says I.
You’re going to die then.
…
Well I said kill me then or else be quiet.

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(This pho­to­graph was taken by Glei­son Miranda of Brazil’s National Indian Foun­da­tion [FUNAI] on a recent fly­over of an uncon­tacted Indian tribe in the Brazil­ian state of Acre. The quo­ta­tion is from Peter Matthiessen’s At Play in the Fields of the Lord.)

I didn’t think it pos­si­ble, but this arti­cle on the work of anthro­pol­o­gist James Dow actu­ally makes Richard Dawkins’s take on reli­gion sound subtle:

God may work in mys­te­ri­ous ways, but a simple com­puter pro­gram may explain how reli­gion evolved.

By dis­till­ing reli­gious belief into a genetic pre­dis­po­si­tion to pass along unver­i­fi­able infor­ma­tion, the pro­gram pre­dicts that reli­gion will flour­ish. How­ever, reli­gion only takes hold if non-​believers help believ­ers out–per­haps because they are impressed by their devotion.

Tracey Rosen for­warded me her very smart response to an arti­cle in last week’s NYT that reports the U.S. Army’s use of anthro­pol­o­gists in Afghanistan. (It should be obvi­ous, but Tracey is not the Tracy of the arti­cle.) Her response was orig­i­nally addressed to her col­leagues (of whom the B. in the last para­graph is one), but she’s agreed to let me post an excerpt below.

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I’d like to bring up a couple of arti­cles that have stuck with me as I begin to encounter my own political/existential dilem­mas that get raised by field­work because I think that they are also rel­e­vant to this discussion.

The first is by one of our (con­tro­ver­sially) activist brethren, David Grae­ber, who wrote a piece in last January’s edi­tion of Harpers. The title: “Army of Altru­ists: on the alien­ated right to do good,” and the link.

His basic point can be gleaned from the title: viz., the “right” for Amer­i­cans to engage them­selves in the socially ori­ented “good” has been alien­ated from most of the pop­u­la­tion.