All That is Seen and Unseen

Two fascinating and frightening anecdotes about the nature of reality from Rod Dreher's post today — Vision and conformity.

Thr first is from "linguist Daniel Everett's experience living deep in the Amazon rainforest with a primitive tribe:"

[T]he tribe rac[ed] past the hut where he lived with his family, hurrying down to the riverbank, where the tribe all observed some sort of evil spirit jumping up and down on the opposite bank, making threats. Everett and his daughter could see nothing there; the tribesmen were astonished that the Americans could not see what was plain to them. Everett, who is an atheist, says to this day he is not sure what happened there, and what it means.

The second is from "a paper presented by Prof. John Wilson of the African Institute of London University, in which members of a primitive African tribe were shown a film about sanitation:"

To Wilson's utter surprise, the people literally could not see the film that was being shown to them. It was so far outside their experience that their minds could not make sense of what was being shown them. The only thing they remembered from the film was the brief appearance of a chicken, which was the only thing that corresponded to what they knew as reality.