Showing posts with label innumerate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label innumerate. Show all posts

Monday, October 31, 2011

The Piraha

Ah, the ambiguous third blog of the unit. Since there's no specific assignment for this one and I already covered two of the assigned topics in my first two blogs, I thought I would do something a little differently and look at how having no written language affects a modern culture. (I know we've been advised to stay in antiquity but this just sounded like too much fun to pass up.) The Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon jungle of only about 350 people, still has no written language or even a real concept of what a written language is to this day. Living in a literate world without even having a word for "literate" presents some challenges for the Piraha people.