    18

    The Village of the Sorcerers and the Riddle of Control

      "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons."

                                     St. Augustine

    Why are humans drawn to ideas like filings to a magnet?  Why

    do memes have the power to create, elevate, pacify...and kill?  One

    answer is a Rube Goldberg machine built into the human frame, a

    physiological widget with some rather remarkable tricks.

    In the Nilgiri hills of India, shortly before the Europeans came,

    there lived four tribes.  One tribe, the Badaga, were farmers.  Another,

    the Kota, were craftsmen.  A third, the Toda, were herdsmen.  And the

    fourth, the Kurumba, made and raised almost nothing at all.  The

    Badaga, Kota, Toda and Kurumba lived together in a delicate

    harmony, each supplying a vital something that the other three

    needed, and paying for the indispensable products of its neighbors

    with its own handiwork.  But there was one form of merchandise the

    Badaga, the Kota and the Toda were willing to pay more for than any

    of the others... far more.  Sometimes their need for this single good

    mounted to the level of hysterical panic.  Yet to us this commodity

    might seem the least essential of them all.

    After the yearly harvest, the women of the Kota craftspeople

    fashioned pots and carried them, along with iron hoes, forks and

    plowshares forged by their husbands, to the village of the Badaga

    farmers.  There, the two tribes held a feast.  When the celebration was

    over, the Kota craftspeople left, carrying a gift from their Badaga

    farmer hosts--a year's supply of wheat.

    <<  <  GO  >  >>