pumpkinstrokemarrow

Presumably in the US you have Indian villages run on the lines of Chessington World of Adventures. Or perhaps like Outward Bound: you pay them to pretend to be an Indian for a month or two. A lower grade version is those farms on our own celtic fringes which charge holiday makers for the privilege of making their hay for them.

I guess that aboriginal and untouched villages of aborigines in the world generally are as rare as aboriginal and untouched forests are in this part of the world. Rare to the point of non-existence. Which all goes to show that being an anthropologist is a very tricky trade; very hard to discern the aboriginal among all the clutter generated by interaction with the aliens.

Talking of forests, I have been reminded during the sloe harvest of the broad bean harvest in the days when I used to grow far too many broad beans (fava beans to aliens). Of the strange satisfaction to be got from poking around inside the forest of broad bean plants, spying out the pods of swelling broad beans. Very much the same as the satisfaction to be got from poking around inside sloe or hazel bushes. But not blackberries. The difference might be that blackberries mostly grow on the surface of the blackberry bushes, whereas sloes and hazels are often to be found hiding underneath.

The satisfaction might, in part at least, be genetic. We and our monkey forebears were gatherers of fruit and vegetables in the forests for a very long time - millions and millions of years - quite long enough for natural selection to work on the genes to reinforce features which were helpful in that department. Including here the sort of hand, eye and hand-eye coordination needed to be a good gatherer. And the positive feedback in the form of satisfaction to provide a bit of additional incentive.