There are no half-formed languages, no underdeveloped or inferior languages. Everywhere a development has taken place into structures of great complexity. People who have failed to achieve the wheel will not have failed to invent & develop a highly wrought grammar. Hunters & Gatherers innocent of all agriculture will have vocabularies that distinguish the things of their world down to the finest details. The language of snow among the Eskimos is awesome. The aspect system of Hopi verbs can, by a flick of the tongue, make the most subtle kinds of distinction between different types of motion.
Measure everything by the Titan rock & the transistor radio, & the world is full of primitive peoples. But once change the unit of value to the poem or the dance-event or the dream (all clearly artifactual situations) & it becomes apparent what all those people have been doing for years with all that time on their hands.
Technicians of the Sacred: A Range Of Poetries From Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania. by JEROME ROTHENBERG
This passage is quoted from the 1967 Preface section titled ‘Primitive Means Complex’. For anyone interested in ritual, poetry, language, communication, mass media, technology and/or anthropology I highly, HIGHLY (I FEEL HIGH AS F***, THIS WHOLE CITY SMELLS LIKE WEED, REALLY, SAN FRANCISCO, WEED AND PISS) recommend tracking this book down. The ideas explored, especially ‘Primitive Means Complex’ are extremely relevant to our Humanity in the Information Age
