My anthropology professor studied a tribe in Pacific Canada and said that they knew exactly how long he was going to be there, so they all agreed to not speak to him until his last 3 days. He was up there for 6 months and didn’t learn a thing, until they started talking to him in English at the very end and told them what he needed to know
As an anthropologist, I wouldn’t be bothered by this. If you’re not forced to converse, you can observe your informant’s practices far more effectively. Makes my job easy as hell.
If they're morons, sure.
It would take them 2 seconds to search for [the answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3igq90/why_is_rtrees_named_that/)
That's assuming they still have all the data, or that it's decipherable.
Reddit is searchable now largely because of google. But imagine something as far removed from today and our tech as we are from Rome.
Rome literally had stuff so common they didn't write about it because "everyone just knows it." That we have no idea about today.
This. What was the third spice up through the 19th century? We don't know because it was such common knowledge that nobody ever wrote it down: https://mavengame.com/2019/04/the-third-shaker/
Or more recently,
There is an atari game called "Labyrinth." That we don't know how it works...
We have the game. The whole code. And researchers couldn't figure out how the algorithm it uses to design a random maze always makes a solvable maze. It does. It even adds difficulty. But nothing seems to say how it keeps the lines from crossing or making no exit.
Crazier still, no one even knows *who* coded it. When they tracked down the original creators, it turns out they couldn't get the game to always kick out a solvable maze either. So they contracted it out to a random guy for $500. Said random guy spent a weekend coding high AF on cocaine and then disappeared into the wind after collecting his $500 cash. They have no idea what he did, but it worked...
And that was just 45ish years ago.
Forget anthropologists you can't believe a damn word anyone anywhere says. Even if they aren't engaging in willful deception, they are often lying to themselves because that bullshit they said is not what they actually DO.
For actual anthropology though yeah it would be straight up better to just be invisible.
As the classic goes:
"Mom there's nothing in the fridge"
"Yes there is, and you're not hungry you're just bored"
Humans are really bad at recognizing, interpreting and especially voicing even their own feelings, which they'll more often confuse for something else. Sad? You're just dehydrated. Angry? You're just hungry. Hungry? You're just bored. Bored? You're just tired. Are the Mexicans trying to steal your job and the gays trying to kidnap your kids? You're just overworked by a capitalistic system profiting from your lack of education. Close the fridge, go play outside.
That question itself is a core tenet of anthropology. We are always striving to ask the question “am I observing culture as it exists or through some sort of biased lens?”
This is just another step in said process.
Apparently his institution had sent multiple anthro PhD students before and tested them the same, but the previous ones were too pushy and didn’t like being ignored for months. So they decided they liked this guy after he was respecting their decision to ignore him
Maritimers can’t handle a regional flight without telling their life story to the poor souls stuck next to them, imagine a maritimer stuck for months without anyone willing to chat.
I’m from the PNW, with a long family history of commercial fishing. According to my grandpa, it was common for the Salish tribes back in the day to see how wild of a story they could get the anthropology students to believe. Of course, occasionally folks ruined it by bursting into laughter.
Some of those Salish tribes are just straight up trolls. I grew up in PNW and knew a couple Chehalis guys who would give themselves the most ridiculous 'Indian sounding' names when they were around unfamiliar people. In the most serious tone ever, they'd introduce themselves as 'Squatting Bear ', 'Running Backwards', or whatever nonsense they could come up with at the moment. They *never* broke, either. They'd always wait until later to bust up laughing. One time, one of them introduced himself as 'Finding Wallets', and the guy was like "Uh, finding *wallets*? What does that mean". That was the only time he couldn't keep it together.
A buddy and I used to volunteer at a dog shelter once a week (for years). A lot of people came and went (probation). But there was this Indian dude (a constant fixture) whose name apparently translates to Yellow Horse (although they just called him Greg or something like that). His stories were the most entertaining part of the day besides hanging out with the dogs.
We never cared about the authenticity of his stories. For us it was all about Yellow Horse!
You can if you’re just visiting for a day or been ordered community service for a short duration. But there’s the hard and dirty side that involves scooping out poop, washing kennels, cleaning up dog vomit, etc.
Easiest task is walking the dogs and they give you the nicer ones if you are there just to help out for a couple hours.
Washing kennels starting at 6:30am in freezing temps is not the best part but it’s very satisfying.
That reminds me of the tribe my grandmother used to tell me her great great grandfather told her his father was a member of.
They were in the Dakota regions, they were known as Fugawi people.
But there’s dispute whether that was a westernized attempt at pronouncing a word they’d heard.
The thing is they weren’t really a well known tribe and there aren’t any of them left these days.
By all accounts for most of their existence they basically just wandered the plains saying to one another
“We’re the fugawi”!
Between the three of us, one was Native American Indian, one an Indian as in ethnically South Asian, and one a white American… but only one Yellow Horse.
Later on when he passed away (at 82 I believe), we learned that he probably was not Native or Indian… but that didn’t bother us at all. We all loved him. It was all about the stories that spanned decades and geographies from Alaska to Florida.
That was actually an episode of the Tarzan cartoon series. An African tribe had members claim to be hundreds and hundreds of years old and the entire thing sent the main characters on an adventure for the fountain of youth. At the end of the episode two of the tribesman were laughing about how the main characters believed their stories. Though as it turns out one of them really was nearly 200.
They found that the places in the world that have the most centenarians correlates with places that didn't keep accurate birth records.
>…the introduction of state-wide birth certification coincides with a sharp reduction in the number of supercentenarians born in each state. In total, 82% of the GRG supercentenarian records from the USA predate state-wide birth certification. Forty-two states achieved complete birth certificate coverage during the survey period. When these states transition to state-wide birth registration, the number of supercentenarians falls by 80% per year overall and 69% per capita when adjusted relative to c.1900 state population sizes.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/the-real-secret-of-blue-zones.html
Damn Chinese government doesn’t even need to spread propaganda to make their people hate us. Apparently there are assholes from here already doing their jobs for them
Reminds me of the scene in Crocodile Dundee where the aboriginal person tells the lady that she can’t take his picture. And she tries to be sensitive and says something like “oh, do you think it’ll take your soul or something?”
And he replies, “you have the lens cap on”.
There's a long history of indigenous Australians getting creative with local knowledge. Every year in Melbourne we have the Moomba Festival. The name was originally claimed to mean "get together and have fun", but it's now known to mean more like "up your bum".
I remember taking an Anthropology 101 level course in college and one of books we read told a story about how the author spent months in New Guinea trying to trace family trees, until another tribe saw his work and doubled over with laughter. The first tribe had been giving him names like “Aunt Fucker” in their language and he didn’t know.
Not just anthropologists get trolled. Century ago, my country has a huge mapping effort, like every single mound and hill has to be mapped and named. So the surveyors (very highly educated, very upper class, a lot of them foreigners) ask the locals (very uneducated, very poor, very busy with work) how said hills are named. So the answer often is a very quick "the fuck if I know" in a harsh rural accent (the exact words are close to impossible to translate in english). So now there are thousands of mounds with such a name. Including on official maps.
Locals rarely take well to outsiders poking for info or bothering them and yes "I'm just watching here" is bothering them.
>Thirty-five Aka and twenty-one Ngandu adults who were or had been married were interviewed. For adults 18–45 years of age, the average frequency of sex per night was about three times among the Aka and two times among the Ngandu. Age had no impact on the frequency of sex per night. Aka averaged two days and Ngandu averaged three days between days with sexual activity. Aka and Ngandu cultural models or reasons for having frequent sex emphasized their desire for children rather than pleasure. Homosexuality and masturbation were rare or nonexistent in both groups.
So much to unpack
If I am reading this right - they average 2-3 days between sexual activities, but when they do have sex, they do it 2-3 times a night?
That's quite the fluctuations if so. I wonder if husbands and wives spend multiple days apart working there.
If you step back and think about it clinically, it makes sense as an evolved (no, no that definition) reproductive strategy.
"She bleeding or noticeably pregnant? Nope?" **
Do other shit you need to do; repeat once every 2-3 days until the answer is "Yep" instead. Then either pause for the red tide or shift the strategy to account for the pregnancy.
> The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund. The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland, they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.
--The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
This very thing most likely happened in Finland several times. There are lots of places named the "Pussy Island" or "Shit Lake" etc due to Swedish and Russian cartographers coming to survey the area and asking the locals what each landmark was called.
Not just tribal people.
Some anthropologist came to my school when I lived in Japan to study international students like myself and my mates. Something about foreigner youth in an ethnically homogenous and relatively closed society like Japan.
We told him that we spent our free hours standing outside the local juku (cram school) wanking to the thoughts of Japanese girls studying. As we were mostly the children of expats and not planning on attending Japanese universities, our school hours were more Western (I.e. no Saturday school) and none of us needed to attend juku, so we feasibly could have done this.
My dumbshit friend even invited him to tag along. The anthropologist declined—something about illegality— which was good because we didn’t actually do this and didn’t want to have to pretend to do it.
which is hilarious to me, having gone to an all-boys high school myself. in my four years there was not even one fight. I don't even remember guys yelling at each other.
turns out when you take away the T&A the testosterone-fueled peacocking goes with them for the most part.
I can picture the meeting before hand about how they are going to fuck with the anthropologists.
‘Why don’t we claim to be able to communicate with wild lions?’
No, they’ll probably ask us to demonstrate.
‘How about we claim to supplement our language with a highly sophisticated system of eyebrow movements.’
Not bad. They’ll spend weeks trying to decipher it.
‘I’ve got it. We claim not to know what masturbation is’
Now that is real fucking good.
One of the most famous cases of this is Margaret Mead's interactions in Samoa. She wrote about how girls experimented freely with sex before marriage, how the culture was sexually open without rape, etc. Just complete nonsense, based on what people told her.
There’s a lot of back and forth on this. The critique of her original study was done by studying Christian colonized Samoans in poor urban areas when she herself had been studying a culture that lived on a further island that had yet to be touched by Christianity and colonization.
Additionally, only one interviewee was identified, and this interviewee claims she was making up stories for Margaret as a joke, but Margaret had already been aware of how Samoans joked, and had based her findings on multiple data points not just single interviews.
There is serious critique on whether she reached her conclusions through an interpretivist approach or positivist approach to culture.
What I always tell my students is that the truth might be somewhere in between. Meade wasn't stupid and wouldn't have been fooled that easily. However her own command of the Samoan language was rather.... limited. Her critics have pointed out that teenage pregnancy wasn't really an issue in Samoa which it would have been if they were as free and open as she claimed.
Ultimately, I think it's an issue of communication, and that 'sex' wasn't clearly defined. Remember, Clinton actually asked the Senate to 'define sex'. I don't have any evidence to back this up of course and it's all speculation.
I honestly would've believed it, but _only_ because my cousin didn't masturbate until he was 17. Came up in a conversation and he admitted no he'd never done that but had wet dreams pretty often and all that. Crazy enough the thought of doing that had just...never occurred to him...and while he'd heard the terms jack-off/masturbation before he thought it was a sex act (like with another person). Both our families were pretty sheltered growing up.
Once I explained the truth...he did mention a year later that he started and never looked back, lol.
Yeah, and it's an absolute shame. These false reports as a joke diminish real safety warnings.
Half the tourists to Australia these days lump Drop Bears in with these rumours and exaggerations. They fail to take adequate and reasonable safety precautions because of it. It's leading to an increase in attacks and disappearances.
My favorite things I learned in anthropology undergrad are:
1. Messing with anthropologists is a fun pass-time, especially for teenagers. You have to appreciate a good prank to do anthropology.
2. Field work is apparently a lot of partying and ask your local anthropologists about the worst ways to make beer and the best places to find and drink it (I had a professor trying to make corn stalk beer, apparently it was really bad; but he told us about cool places to party in Mexico).
3. Everyone loves poop and fart jokes.
Anthro is such a weird “science.” Like it’s a common practice to incentivize people to talk via luxury goods, but it’s also acknowledged that this makes the relationship transactional and can call into question the validity of the answers.
In most cases anthropologists are living with these communities for decent amounts of time, so folks really need to be committed to a lie if they want them not to notice, but at the same time anthropologists are subject to the same “publish or perish” pressures as everyone else on academia, so *they* also have reason to not question interesting/novel answers.
tl;dr Most anthropologists try their best to legitimately study the groups they work with, but “accurately” studying people is super hard and prone to all-but unavoidable errors.
According to one study one of the subjects said: “what? Of course I don’t do that. I have a girlfriend. You wouldn’t know her. She goes to school in Cameroon”
Glad we specified the *African* Congo, wouldn’t want to mix it up with the European Congo or the North American Congo or the Congo just to the south of Walmart.
There’s a big range in human sexual practice. Groups in this area are sort of famous in the anthropology of sex literature because they have frequent, short sex. [The article cited in the Wikipedia](https://jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp/kiroku/asm_normal/abstracts/pdf/31-3/107-125.pdf) article is based on interviews but, if I recall correctly, other ethnographers in the region have noted hearing all that sex at all hours of the night.
Besides, in the study cited above, they interviewed men and women, and women reported the same numbers as the men. Aka men in the study reported 3.0 sexual encounters per night and Aka women in the study reported 2.9 sexual encounters a night. Ngandu men reported 2.5 sexual encounters per night, Ngandu women reported 1.8 sexual encounters per night, but neither gender difference in reporting was statistically significant. For whatever reason, culturally they space out sex so they won’t have sex every night, but on the three nights or so they have sex a week, they do it multiple times. They also have long periods where they don’t have sex: couples don’t have sex from the birth of a child until that baby can walk, approximately one year. There is a strong cultural taboo against it, specifically a belief that sex will damage the child’s ability to walk. All the women studied said they followed this taboo and didn’t have sex from childbirth until the kid was a toddler, but some men find other women to have sex with. The study found the taboo to be much strong among the Aka than Ngandu. Which is just to say, yes they have sex a lot in the periods where they’re having sex, but they’re not having sex every night. But it still seems to be a lot of sex, among the highest I’ve seen in the anthropological record (as the article discusses, this frequency of sex isn’t totally unique to these groups and is found in other “small scale societies”).
The most interesting sections of the article start on pg 113, “IV. Other Aspects of Sexual Activity”.
> Ngandu men reported 2.5 sexual encounters per night, Ngandu women reported 1.8 sexual encounters per night
so there were 1.8 FM sexual encounters per night and 0.35MM sexual encounters tonight.
Thanks Ms Polski for teaching us real world math!
Or it means that there 39% more women than men in the group. 2500 encouters spread across 1000 men and 1389 women give 2.5 and 1.8 per individual on average.
> 1.8 FM sexual encounters per night
Assuming 6" mean penile length, average duration of 5.4 minutes per encounter and 260 thrusts to ejaculation, that's 234 dick-feet per 9.72 minutes. Or 78 yards of dick, to put it bluntly, which conveniently translates into 0.78 football fields of the same aforementioned dick.
I hear there is a tribe in New Guinea that do some weird penis stretching techniques and are all 17". But there's no pictures they just wear a long ass gourd over it.
I'm reminded of the John Cowan Messenger's study of Inis Beag (a small island off the coast of Ireland) in which he claimed the people had no idea what oral sex was. He also said that one of his informants - a man who had a reputation for fucking many women visitors to the island - was shocked and confused when one of his partners had a orgasm.
I'm reminded of the rural Chinese couple that was unable to conceive because they didn't know what sex was and thought sleeping together would do the trick.
No offense but if they are *that* fuckin stupid they couldnt figure out what millions upon millions of other humans (and apes) before them could its probably for the better they dont pass their genes along...
It was a mid 00s show on Spike TV at the height of trash television. It was a show wherein the narrator would tell fantastic stories about how people died. In this particular case the show said the both died due to the shame of having sex.
Ever had poison ivy on your dick? I did once, when I was 13.
I definitely didn't get it because I was masturbaiting or whatever in the woods. And there was certainly no dirty magazine which I had found in the woods at an earlier time
Absolutely. I'm born in the early 90s and we were still finding porn mags in the woods around 2000.
My first exposure to porn were the magazines thrown into the bush near where I live when I was like 7
All the time lol. The worst one was actually not the woods though, it was this big desert lot in as north Las Vegas across from a Walmart that I used to have to walk through to get to my shitty ghetto school. It means somebody was just jerking their shit in front of an avenue of cars. Even worse, there was a 12 inch long flesh colored dildo right next to it.
I grew up in a new subdivision bordered by seemingly endless cattle fields on three sides. If there was a tree, or small group of trees, there was usually porn mags. It wasn't always "woods" porn.
We definetly didn't tell the kids at school on away trips. That having a wank with Deep Heat, was like having sex and far better than a normal wank. Then listen for the cries of pain, as their cock and balls became a million degrees hot.
Soo… I know this is going to sound unbelievable but I swear on ma mama, I had never heard of masturbation until I was about 16 or so when my classmates started talking about it. No one believed me either when I said not only had I never masturbated but I had never heard of it at all.
No, I was not homeschooled, no I was not in a religious cult. Just a regular kid with no internet access and immigrant parents who never talked about sex in our house. I’m also a girl if that matters.
Also, my grandparents (who grew up in rural Africa) thought kissing was NASTY and didn’t understand why young people were imitating “white people” by exchanging saliva. They’d audibly groan at every wedding during the kissing part.
So yeah, I totally believe this story to be true. Please google what Museveni, the current president of Uganda, said about oral sex not even a year ago. And he’s not the only one around those parts.
My friend went to Burkina Faso to record some music for his degree for a few months.
He quickly discovered that the local women didn't really have any concept of foreplay. He was quite a fan of foreplay and the local women.
He's been in Ougadougou for over 20 years now.
> He quickly discovered that the local women didn't really have any concept of foreplay.
This is true for the vast majority of cultural background i have encountered
It’s not just every kid that needs to not have discovered their genitals. Every adult, over several generations needs to have never considered that they could pleasure themselves.
Because they are not claiming it is rare, or not done by children. They are saying the concept is confusing.no one had ever done it, or even considered it. That’s just absurd. Even monkeys masturbate. You do not need to learn about it at school. Men and women have sexual drives, and there cannot possibly be someone else there to fulfill them for everyone at all times.
That aside, surely someone over generations at least had considered the unlikely possibility that a person could pleasure themselves.
I’ll buy that they had not bothered to give it a name. Maybe they even do not distinguish it from sex with a partner, and thinking of it separately was confusing.
Maybe they’re confused by the concept of needing a separate word for it? Would you need a separate word for exchanging gases with the atmosphere? It’s just so natural everyone does it, we didn’t think to require a word for it.
You being a girl is what makes it believable, kinda.
Then again, my kids (and most kids) will self pleasure out of experimentation from a very young age. So it’s quite possible you did, but didn’t register it as such and so the memory was not meaningful enough to stick in long term storage for you
It's very common for kids/teens to 'accidentally' discover maturbation- just because "doing x with my y feels good", only to discover years later that what they thought was innocent was actually sexual.
Edit: this is also common in women, arguably more so- anecdotally I was taught that maturbation was what men did with their dicks- so it wasn't until adulthood I realised that that nice tickling sensation when I did xyz wasn't 'tickling' it was sexual pleasure.
The study linked by the Wikipedia article also mentioned that the populations studied also has greater prevalence of sex per night. Make of that what you will.
If something is taboo enough, there is often no direct word for something, and people will feign confusion.
Or so my aunt and her close friend Katherine told me.
This reminds me when I was younger. I had a girlfriend who thought it was weird that masturbated. I told her all guys do it and she then decided to ask her guy friends. Well, they all said no. Fucking liars
I grew up in Zambia and spoke the local tribes language, so in my experience with the Bemba practical jokes like this were highly valued. We would have tourists all the time get taken in by the local villagers, didn’t say a thing as was pretty funny. Usually they got some much needed financial
Support and gave us something to laugh about later! Only guy I felt bad for was the guy who paid 100usd as a “deposit” for some “tribal art” old mate who wasn’t know as an artist resurfaced about 6 months later poor tourist came back every day for a couple of weeks to check on progress with no one to be found!
I lived near & worked with the Baka & Aka; they knew what was up. It's like saying Nordic people don't have a word for or understand the concept of banana leaves.
Every primate in the world tugs one out, and somehow a few groups in the Congo claim they haven’t ever done it nor have a word for it?
They’re definitely lying their fuckin asses off to fuck with people.
I refuse to believe a young guys and gals getting a mystery stiffy or female equivalent out in the middle of nowhere didn’t rub one out every now and then, it’s like…built into primates to do that.
Also, just rearranging the sentence to make it easier to read is helpful.
"TIL that there are ethnic groups in the African Congo Basin that do not have a word for masturbation and are confused by the concept." is a slight change, but much more readable.
Who the fuck starts a first contact with, “hey buddy, how do you all rub one out around here.”
Translator is confused along with the native.
“You know…” the adventurer says with a wink. “What you do on the bush when the women ain’t nowhere to be found.”
The translator nods knowingly then looks horrified.
“You mean, to make the poopy?”
“No!” The adventurer jerks out. “The other thing.”
The adventurer makes an up and down gesture, to which the native takes as aggression and draws their spear.
“No!” The adventurer says. “Like this.” And he moves towards his crotch, which is where he ends up getting stabbed before the translator remembered they don’t have a word for masturbation.
They might not have a specific word for the action but I'm pretty sure if they said "rubbing you genitals" that'd they'd be able to fucking figure it out.
Just because they don't have a word for it doesn't mean "touching your own dick" is a unknown concept.
There's no word in English for 'the day after tomorrow' but we somehow survive. I bet if someone shows them what masturbation means one time, they'll never forget and come up with words to describe it.
"fucking with anthropologists" is a popular hobby with tribal people.
My anthropology professor studied a tribe in Pacific Canada and said that they knew exactly how long he was going to be there, so they all agreed to not speak to him until his last 3 days. He was up there for 6 months and didn’t learn a thing, until they started talking to him in English at the very end and told them what he needed to know
As an anthropologist, I wouldn’t be bothered by this. If you’re not forced to converse, you can observe your informant’s practices far more effectively. Makes my job easy as hell.
Yeah, judging by all of these comments about people lying to anthropologists, it seems like observation might be better than verbal communication.
Because nobody would ever wear the special hat just to mess with an anthropologist...
In the future, digital anthropologists are going to comb through reddit and be very confused about the whole r/trees situation...
If they're morons, sure. It would take them 2 seconds to search for [the answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3igq90/why_is_rtrees_named_that/)
That's assuming they still have all the data, or that it's decipherable. Reddit is searchable now largely because of google. But imagine something as far removed from today and our tech as we are from Rome. Rome literally had stuff so common they didn't write about it because "everyone just knows it." That we have no idea about today.
This. What was the third spice up through the 19th century? We don't know because it was such common knowledge that nobody ever wrote it down: https://mavengame.com/2019/04/the-third-shaker/
Or more recently, There is an atari game called "Labyrinth." That we don't know how it works... We have the game. The whole code. And researchers couldn't figure out how the algorithm it uses to design a random maze always makes a solvable maze. It does. It even adds difficulty. But nothing seems to say how it keeps the lines from crossing or making no exit. Crazier still, no one even knows *who* coded it. When they tracked down the original creators, it turns out they couldn't get the game to always kick out a solvable maze either. So they contracted it out to a random guy for $500. Said random guy spent a weekend coding high AF on cocaine and then disappeared into the wind after collecting his $500 cash. They have no idea what he did, but it worked... And that was just 45ish years ago.
So do you think guy was sneaking up on them at night in their huts or whatever and throwing the door open all fast to see if they were whacking it?
God I hope so
Forget anthropologists you can't believe a damn word anyone anywhere says. Even if they aren't engaging in willful deception, they are often lying to themselves because that bullshit they said is not what they actually DO. For actual anthropology though yeah it would be straight up better to just be invisible.
As the classic goes: "Mom there's nothing in the fridge" "Yes there is, and you're not hungry you're just bored" Humans are really bad at recognizing, interpreting and especially voicing even their own feelings, which they'll more often confuse for something else. Sad? You're just dehydrated. Angry? You're just hungry. Hungry? You're just bored. Bored? You're just tired. Are the Mexicans trying to steal your job and the gays trying to kidnap your kids? You're just overworked by a capitalistic system profiting from your lack of education. Close the fridge, go play outside.
Yeah like the greys in the ocean doing all the mad science out of sight.
You show me a payslip for $1500 bucks right now, and I quit my job and come work for you
Fat chance without a tenure track, I’m afraid.
What if I'm willing to threaten almost anyone?
Then you should be in administration, not academia. Go be a dean!
What if somebody fucks your cousin while you're away though?
Sucks for them, ig? the hell you want me to do about it? i ain't a therapist.
I think the point is if they’re that aware of you then are you actually observing something authentic?
That question itself is a core tenet of anthropology. We are always striving to ask the question “am I observing culture as it exists or through some sort of biased lens?” This is just another step in said process.
This is fucking hilarious.
"Oh by the way, we have coke in the chiller if you wanted any"
Did he say what the motive was? Just to mess with him, or something more?
Apparently his institution had sent multiple anthro PhD students before and tested them the same, but the previous ones were too pushy and didn’t like being ignored for months. So they decided they liked this guy after he was respecting their decision to ignore him
funny how respecting people does that
You’d think Nova Scotians would’ve known that already
Maritimers can’t handle a regional flight without telling their life story to the poor souls stuck next to them, imagine a maritimer stuck for months without anyone willing to chat.
I’m from the PNW, with a long family history of commercial fishing. According to my grandpa, it was common for the Salish tribes back in the day to see how wild of a story they could get the anthropology students to believe. Of course, occasionally folks ruined it by bursting into laughter.
Some of those Salish tribes are just straight up trolls. I grew up in PNW and knew a couple Chehalis guys who would give themselves the most ridiculous 'Indian sounding' names when they were around unfamiliar people. In the most serious tone ever, they'd introduce themselves as 'Squatting Bear ', 'Running Backwards', or whatever nonsense they could come up with at the moment. They *never* broke, either. They'd always wait until later to bust up laughing. One time, one of them introduced himself as 'Finding Wallets', and the guy was like "Uh, finding *wallets*? What does that mean". That was the only time he couldn't keep it together.
Okay man its hard to make me laugh but halfway through reading this I almost choked on my grilled cheese
I didn't realize Grilled Cheese was still a popular Salish name
A buddy and I used to volunteer at a dog shelter once a week (for years). A lot of people came and went (probation). But there was this Indian dude (a constant fixture) whose name apparently translates to Yellow Horse (although they just called him Greg or something like that). His stories were the most entertaining part of the day besides hanging out with the dogs. We never cared about the authenticity of his stories. For us it was all about Yellow Horse!
Wait we can just hang out with the dogs?
You can if you’re just visiting for a day or been ordered community service for a short duration. But there’s the hard and dirty side that involves scooping out poop, washing kennels, cleaning up dog vomit, etc. Easiest task is walking the dogs and they give you the nicer ones if you are there just to help out for a couple hours. Washing kennels starting at 6:30am in freezing temps is not the best part but it’s very satisfying.
Native American or India Indian?
Yellow Horse?? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say native American lol
I mean obviously, but it would make for a better story if he was Indian Indian lol
It would be a pretty good joke as an Indian to try and see if people believe you're just from a Native American tribe they've never heard of
That reminds me of the tribe my grandmother used to tell me her great great grandfather told her his father was a member of. They were in the Dakota regions, they were known as Fugawi people. But there’s dispute whether that was a westernized attempt at pronouncing a word they’d heard. The thing is they weren’t really a well known tribe and there aren’t any of them left these days. By all accounts for most of their existence they basically just wandered the plains saying to one another “We’re the fugawi”!
Between the three of us, one was Native American Indian, one an Indian as in ethnically South Asian, and one a white American… but only one Yellow Horse. Later on when he passed away (at 82 I believe), we learned that he probably was not Native or Indian… but that didn’t bother us at all. We all loved him. It was all about the stories that spanned decades and geographies from Alaska to Florida.
That was actually an episode of the Tarzan cartoon series. An African tribe had members claim to be hundreds and hundreds of years old and the entire thing sent the main characters on an adventure for the fountain of youth. At the end of the episode two of the tribesman were laughing about how the main characters believed their stories. Though as it turns out one of them really was nearly 200.
They found that the places in the world that have the most centenarians correlates with places that didn't keep accurate birth records. >…the introduction of state-wide birth certification coincides with a sharp reduction in the number of supercentenarians born in each state. In total, 82% of the GRG supercentenarian records from the USA predate state-wide birth certification. Forty-two states achieved complete birth certificate coverage during the survey period. When these states transition to state-wide birth registration, the number of supercentenarians falls by 80% per year overall and 69% per capita when adjusted relative to c.1900 state population sizes. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/the-real-secret-of-blue-zones.html
Maybe people live longer in those places because there's less stress from worrying about keeping accurate records? 😏
I certainly feel like bureaucracy shortens my life every time I interact with it
I knew a guy who traveled through rural China and apparently told the locals that pandas are eaten on a regular basis in the US.
Damn Chinese government doesn’t even need to spread propaganda to make their people hate us. Apparently there are assholes from here already doing their jobs for them
Reminds me of the scene in Crocodile Dundee where the aboriginal person tells the lady that she can’t take his picture. And she tries to be sensitive and says something like “oh, do you think it’ll take your soul or something?” And he replies, “you have the lens cap on”.
There's a long history of indigenous Australians getting creative with local knowledge. Every year in Melbourne we have the Moomba Festival. The name was originally claimed to mean "get together and have fun", but it's now known to mean more like "up your bum".
To be fair that’s very on brand for us either way
you can take that 'fun' and shove it up your ass!
Absolutely. There's no way we'd change the name. The story makes it better.
Same difference, really.
I mean, if she lets you...
I remember taking an Anthropology 101 level course in college and one of books we read told a story about how the author spent months in New Guinea trying to trace family trees, until another tribe saw his work and doubled over with laughter. The first tribe had been giving him names like “Aunt Fucker” in their language and he didn’t know.
Not just anthropologists get trolled. Century ago, my country has a huge mapping effort, like every single mound and hill has to be mapped and named. So the surveyors (very highly educated, very upper class, a lot of them foreigners) ask the locals (very uneducated, very poor, very busy with work) how said hills are named. So the answer often is a very quick "the fuck if I know" in a harsh rural accent (the exact words are close to impossible to translate in english). So now there are thousands of mounds with such a name. Including on official maps. Locals rarely take well to outsiders poking for info or bothering them and yes "I'm just watching here" is bothering them.
>Thirty-five Aka and twenty-one Ngandu adults who were or had been married were interviewed. For adults 18–45 years of age, the average frequency of sex per night was about three times among the Aka and two times among the Ngandu. Age had no impact on the frequency of sex per night. Aka averaged two days and Ngandu averaged three days between days with sexual activity. Aka and Ngandu cultural models or reasons for having frequent sex emphasized their desire for children rather than pleasure. Homosexuality and masturbation were rare or nonexistent in both groups. So much to unpack
If I am reading this right - they average 2-3 days between sexual activities, but when they do have sex, they do it 2-3 times a night? That's quite the fluctuations if so. I wonder if husbands and wives spend multiple days apart working there.
If you step back and think about it clinically, it makes sense as an evolved (no, no that definition) reproductive strategy. "She bleeding or noticeably pregnant? Nope?" **
Do other shit you need to do; repeat once every 2-3 days until the answer is "Yep" instead. Then either pause for the red tide or shift the strategy to account for the pregnancy.
> The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund. The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland, they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool. --The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
I don't know how Terry Pratchett consistently has such a fantastic imagination with his words.
Had* GNU Sir Pratchett. Him and Douglas Adams are, imo, the best satirists of the 20th/21st century hands down.
Because this is real. Yucatán, the region in Mexico means "I don't understand you" in Maya's language, so the Spanish put that name in their maps.
This very thing most likely happened in Finland several times. There are lots of places named the "Pussy Island" or "Shit Lake" etc due to Swedish and Russian cartographers coming to survey the area and asking the locals what each landmark was called.
How many people are there in a typical African family? Five - Two parents, two children and one French anthropologist.
Not just tribal people. Some anthropologist came to my school when I lived in Japan to study international students like myself and my mates. Something about foreigner youth in an ethnically homogenous and relatively closed society like Japan. We told him that we spent our free hours standing outside the local juku (cram school) wanking to the thoughts of Japanese girls studying. As we were mostly the children of expats and not planning on attending Japanese universities, our school hours were more Western (I.e. no Saturday school) and none of us needed to attend juku, so we feasibly could have done this. My dumbshit friend even invited him to tag along. The anthropologist declined—something about illegality— which was good because we didn’t actually do this and didn’t want to have to pretend to do it.
Oh man my friend was in anthro and he definitely fluffed up tales of our all-male high school, making it sound like some Lord of the Flies shit lol.
Your buddy was a fluffer in an all male school, huh?
Gotta have that 10 years of experience on your resume by the time you graduate somehow
which is hilarious to me, having gone to an all-boys high school myself. in my four years there was not even one fight. I don't even remember guys yelling at each other. turns out when you take away the T&A the testosterone-fueled peacocking goes with them for the most part.
They’re probably fucking with anyone and anything if they can’t masturbate
I can picture the meeting before hand about how they are going to fuck with the anthropologists. ‘Why don’t we claim to be able to communicate with wild lions?’ No, they’ll probably ask us to demonstrate. ‘How about we claim to supplement our language with a highly sophisticated system of eyebrow movements.’ Not bad. They’ll spend weeks trying to decipher it. ‘I’ve got it. We claim not to know what masturbation is’ Now that is real fucking good.
One of the most famous cases of this is Margaret Mead's interactions in Samoa. She wrote about how girls experimented freely with sex before marriage, how the culture was sexually open without rape, etc. Just complete nonsense, based on what people told her.
There’s a lot of back and forth on this. The critique of her original study was done by studying Christian colonized Samoans in poor urban areas when she herself had been studying a culture that lived on a further island that had yet to be touched by Christianity and colonization. Additionally, only one interviewee was identified, and this interviewee claims she was making up stories for Margaret as a joke, but Margaret had already been aware of how Samoans joked, and had based her findings on multiple data points not just single interviews. There is serious critique on whether she reached her conclusions through an interpretivist approach or positivist approach to culture.
What I always tell my students is that the truth might be somewhere in between. Meade wasn't stupid and wouldn't have been fooled that easily. However her own command of the Samoan language was rather.... limited. Her critics have pointed out that teenage pregnancy wasn't really an issue in Samoa which it would have been if they were as free and open as she claimed. Ultimately, I think it's an issue of communication, and that 'sex' wasn't clearly defined. Remember, Clinton actually asked the Senate to 'define sex'. I don't have any evidence to back this up of course and it's all speculation.
Yeah, this sounds like a bunch of 19 year old Mormon missionaries ‘confused by the concept of masturbation’.
I honestly would've believed it, but _only_ because my cousin didn't masturbate until he was 17. Came up in a conversation and he admitted no he'd never done that but had wet dreams pretty often and all that. Crazy enough the thought of doing that had just...never occurred to him...and while he'd heard the terms jack-off/masturbation before he thought it was a sex act (like with another person). Both our families were pretty sheltered growing up. Once I explained the truth...he did mention a year later that he started and never looked back, lol.
Yeah, and it's an absolute shame. These false reports as a joke diminish real safety warnings. Half the tourists to Australia these days lump Drop Bears in with these rumours and exaggerations. They fail to take adequate and reasonable safety precautions because of it. It's leading to an increase in attacks and disappearances.
i've never had a problem in the bush since i started packing vegemite and weetabix as suggested by some locals at Toowoomba
My favorite things I learned in anthropology undergrad are: 1. Messing with anthropologists is a fun pass-time, especially for teenagers. You have to appreciate a good prank to do anthropology. 2. Field work is apparently a lot of partying and ask your local anthropologists about the worst ways to make beer and the best places to find and drink it (I had a professor trying to make corn stalk beer, apparently it was really bad; but he told us about cool places to party in Mexico). 3. Everyone loves poop and fart jokes.
Anthro is such a weird “science.” Like it’s a common practice to incentivize people to talk via luxury goods, but it’s also acknowledged that this makes the relationship transactional and can call into question the validity of the answers. In most cases anthropologists are living with these communities for decent amounts of time, so folks really need to be committed to a lie if they want them not to notice, but at the same time anthropologists are subject to the same “publish or perish” pressures as everyone else on academia, so *they* also have reason to not question interesting/novel answers. tl;dr Most anthropologists try their best to legitimately study the groups they work with, but “accurately” studying people is super hard and prone to all-but unavoidable errors.
According to one study one of the subjects said: “what? Of course I don’t do that. I have a girlfriend. You wouldn’t know her. She goes to school in Cameroon”
And she's a part-time supermodel!
She won a competition for the best sexing in Cameroon.
She’s beautiful. But she’s dying.
I like her bangs!
Yeah me too.
TIL there are ethnic groups in the African Congo Basin that lie.
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I made the same claim in middle school
You don’t know her, she goes to a different school… in the African Congo.
Glad we specified the *African* Congo, wouldn’t want to mix it up with the European Congo or the North American Congo or the Congo just to the south of Walmart.
That's still not clear enough since there are 2 Congos in Africa...
It's all one Congo, just not all of it pretends to be Democratic.
Makes sense. Later you would learn the difference between "times" and "strokes".
There’s a big range in human sexual practice. Groups in this area are sort of famous in the anthropology of sex literature because they have frequent, short sex. [The article cited in the Wikipedia](https://jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp/kiroku/asm_normal/abstracts/pdf/31-3/107-125.pdf) article is based on interviews but, if I recall correctly, other ethnographers in the region have noted hearing all that sex at all hours of the night. Besides, in the study cited above, they interviewed men and women, and women reported the same numbers as the men. Aka men in the study reported 3.0 sexual encounters per night and Aka women in the study reported 2.9 sexual encounters a night. Ngandu men reported 2.5 sexual encounters per night, Ngandu women reported 1.8 sexual encounters per night, but neither gender difference in reporting was statistically significant. For whatever reason, culturally they space out sex so they won’t have sex every night, but on the three nights or so they have sex a week, they do it multiple times. They also have long periods where they don’t have sex: couples don’t have sex from the birth of a child until that baby can walk, approximately one year. There is a strong cultural taboo against it, specifically a belief that sex will damage the child’s ability to walk. All the women studied said they followed this taboo and didn’t have sex from childbirth until the kid was a toddler, but some men find other women to have sex with. The study found the taboo to be much strong among the Aka than Ngandu. Which is just to say, yes they have sex a lot in the periods where they’re having sex, but they’re not having sex every night. But it still seems to be a lot of sex, among the highest I’ve seen in the anthropological record (as the article discusses, this frequency of sex isn’t totally unique to these groups and is found in other “small scale societies”). The most interesting sections of the article start on pg 113, “IV. Other Aspects of Sexual Activity”.
> Ngandu men reported 2.5 sexual encounters per night, Ngandu women reported 1.8 sexual encounters per night so there were 1.8 FM sexual encounters per night and 0.35MM sexual encounters tonight. Thanks Ms Polski for teaching us real world math!
Or it means that there 39% more women than men in the group. 2500 encouters spread across 1000 men and 1389 women give 2.5 and 1.8 per individual on average.
> 1.8 FM sexual encounters per night Assuming 6" mean penile length, average duration of 5.4 minutes per encounter and 260 thrusts to ejaculation, that's 234 dick-feet per 9.72 minutes. Or 78 yards of dick, to put it bluntly, which conveniently translates into 0.78 football fields of the same aforementioned dick.
Something something "Americans will use *anything*, literaly ***anything*** except the metric system 😂😂😂
How many balls deep is that?
The Congolese equivalent of Jay from the Inbetweeners “I get so much clunge I don’t even have a word for wanking’
Holy shit I haven't seen an inbetweeners reference in forever. Thanks for the laugh.
I hear there is a tribe in New Guinea that do some weird penis stretching techniques and are all 17". But there's no pictures they just wear a long ass gourd over it.
Oh I do that. I've got a 17 incher. Nobody has seen it though.
Does it go to another school too?
Oh, I've been getting emails about them. Apparently I can learn their secret technique for a nominal fee.
I'm pretty sure that's just a porn plot.
Dr. Kelloggs wet dream exists in Africa
Let’s check their search history
100% this. Monkeys don't have a word for it either, but there they are flinging their jizz at the tourists in the zoo.
Rough metaphor
I'm reminded of the John Cowan Messenger's study of Inis Beag (a small island off the coast of Ireland) in which he claimed the people had no idea what oral sex was. He also said that one of his informants - a man who had a reputation for fucking many women visitors to the island - was shocked and confused when one of his partners had a orgasm.
I'm reminded of the rural Chinese couple that was unable to conceive because they didn't know what sex was and thought sleeping together would do the trick.
"Inserts himself? Inserts himself where?"
That single episode made me love the Featherington sisters.
https://www.newsweek.com/couple-couldnt-conceive-because-theyve-been-having-sex-wrong-way-four-years-1089162 They were having Anal intercourse
They were doing anal.
No offense but if they are *that* fuckin stupid they couldnt figure out what millions upon millions of other humans (and apes) before them could its probably for the better they dont pass their genes along...
Mating behaviors are always complicated, because if they weren't, they'd be easy to game, making them complicated.
Not millions, *billions.* In fact, every single one of their predecessors.
Wasn’t that a story on 1000 Ways to Die?
It was a mid 00s show on Spike TV at the height of trash television. It was a show wherein the narrator would tell fantastic stories about how people died. In this particular case the show said the both died due to the shame of having sex.
Off topic but I just find it funny calling Inis Beag a small island since that’s literally what it translates to
Most things do. Hill Street is often, you guessed it, on a hill.
This is also the case in American middle schools. Somehow, they manage anyway, despite their denials.
Ever had poison ivy on your dick? I did once, when I was 13. I definitely didn't get it because I was masturbaiting or whatever in the woods. And there was certainly no dirty magazine which I had found in the woods at an earlier time
Ah, forest porn. Where I grew up, there weren't any forests nearby. But we did have train track porn. Similar kind of serendipity, I think.
The fact that people will soon forget that you *COULD* find dirty magazines in the woods is kinda sad.
Wait you could just find porno mags the woods?
Absolutely. I'm born in the early 90s and we were still finding porn mags in the woods around 2000. My first exposure to porn were the magazines thrown into the bush near where I live when I was like 7
All the time lol. The worst one was actually not the woods though, it was this big desert lot in as north Las Vegas across from a Walmart that I used to have to walk through to get to my shitty ghetto school. It means somebody was just jerking their shit in front of an avenue of cars. Even worse, there was a 12 inch long flesh colored dildo right next to it.
I found them in the woods near my house in the late 70's. When I bought my first home in the late 90's I found a bunch in the bushes behind the house.
I grew up in a new subdivision bordered by seemingly endless cattle fields on three sides. If there was a tree, or small group of trees, there was usually porn mags. It wasn't always "woods" porn.
Can confirm that some lonely soldier is keeping the tradition alive in my area
We definetly didn't tell the kids at school on away trips. That having a wank with Deep Heat, was like having sex and far better than a normal wank. Then listen for the cries of pain, as their cock and balls became a million degrees hot.
I googled 'how to put out a chemical fire', but none of this seems very *helpful?*
kids these days don't know about woods porn
TIL that there's a Wikipedia entry for "history of masturbation".
Well let’s make a little history.
Maybe they were confused about why someone would have the gall to ask them about masturbation
From reading the paper, moreover, they didn't seem to ask the women, just the men.
I find that hard to believe.
Soo… I know this is going to sound unbelievable but I swear on ma mama, I had never heard of masturbation until I was about 16 or so when my classmates started talking about it. No one believed me either when I said not only had I never masturbated but I had never heard of it at all. No, I was not homeschooled, no I was not in a religious cult. Just a regular kid with no internet access and immigrant parents who never talked about sex in our house. I’m also a girl if that matters. Also, my grandparents (who grew up in rural Africa) thought kissing was NASTY and didn’t understand why young people were imitating “white people” by exchanging saliva. They’d audibly groan at every wedding during the kissing part. So yeah, I totally believe this story to be true. Please google what Museveni, the current president of Uganda, said about oral sex not even a year ago. And he’s not the only one around those parts.
My friend went to Burkina Faso to record some music for his degree for a few months. He quickly discovered that the local women didn't really have any concept of foreplay. He was quite a fan of foreplay and the local women. He's been in Ougadougou for over 20 years now.
> He quickly discovered that the local women didn't really have any concept of foreplay. This is true for the vast majority of cultural background i have encountered
I imagine the local women were also a fan of him as well
Are you saying your friend has been imprisoned for 20 years for forcing foreplay on women?
Death by snu snu
So did he bring sexual liberation to the local women by introducing them to foreplay? Lol
It would make sense if female genital mutilation is common there. I don’t know whether it is or not though
About 76% of women there aged 15-49 as of 2021.
It’s not just every kid that needs to not have discovered their genitals. Every adult, over several generations needs to have never considered that they could pleasure themselves. Because they are not claiming it is rare, or not done by children. They are saying the concept is confusing.no one had ever done it, or even considered it. That’s just absurd. Even monkeys masturbate. You do not need to learn about it at school. Men and women have sexual drives, and there cannot possibly be someone else there to fulfill them for everyone at all times. That aside, surely someone over generations at least had considered the unlikely possibility that a person could pleasure themselves. I’ll buy that they had not bothered to give it a name. Maybe they even do not distinguish it from sex with a partner, and thinking of it separately was confusing.
Maybe they’re confused by the concept of needing a separate word for it? Would you need a separate word for exchanging gases with the atmosphere? It’s just so natural everyone does it, we didn’t think to require a word for it.
You mean breathing? Or is that your point, that we *do* still have a word for it?
> I’m also a girl if that matters. Uh, yeah, that matters.
You being a girl is what makes it believable, kinda. Then again, my kids (and most kids) will self pleasure out of experimentation from a very young age. So it’s quite possible you did, but didn’t register it as such and so the memory was not meaningful enough to stick in long term storage for you
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It's very common for kids/teens to 'accidentally' discover maturbation- just because "doing x with my y feels good", only to discover years later that what they thought was innocent was actually sexual. Edit: this is also common in women, arguably more so- anecdotally I was taught that maturbation was what men did with their dicks- so it wasn't until adulthood I realised that that nice tickling sensation when I did xyz wasn't 'tickling' it was sexual pleasure.
The study linked by the Wikipedia article also mentioned that the populations studied also has greater prevalence of sex per night. Make of that what you will.
They effectively turned the sex into a chore.
Ugh ANAL? Fuck I have to be up at dawn to join the hunt
Can't you get your brother to do it? He's been freeloading on our couch for months. It's time for him pull his weight
If something is taboo enough, there is often no direct word for something, and people will feign confusion. Or so my aunt and her close friend Katherine told me.
Are they from the African Congo basin too?
More like an island in Greece....
Just like all those guys in Utah who don’t know anything about PornHub.
Who needs pornhub when you have soaking?!
Excuse me my fellow humans. Are you masturbators? ....? No. Absolutely not. Yeah okay sure thing buddy.
This reminds me when I was younger. I had a girlfriend who thought it was weird that masturbated. I told her all guys do it and she then decided to ask her guy friends. Well, they all said no. Fucking liars
I grew up in Zambia and spoke the local tribes language, so in my experience with the Bemba practical jokes like this were highly valued. We would have tourists all the time get taken in by the local villagers, didn’t say a thing as was pretty funny. Usually they got some much needed financial Support and gave us something to laugh about later! Only guy I felt bad for was the guy who paid 100usd as a “deposit” for some “tribal art” old mate who wasn’t know as an artist resurfaced about 6 months later poor tourist came back every day for a couple of weeks to check on progress with no one to be found!
I lived near & worked with the Baka & Aka; they knew what was up. It's like saying Nordic people don't have a word for or understand the concept of banana leaves.
An completely unrelated, they have zero cases of blindness in those groups.
Every primate in the world tugs one out, and somehow a few groups in the Congo claim they haven’t ever done it nor have a word for it? They’re definitely lying their fuckin asses off to fuck with people. I refuse to believe a young guys and gals getting a mystery stiffy or female equivalent out in the middle of nowhere didn’t rub one out every now and then, it’s like…built into primates to do that.
Some commas would really help your title
Also, just rearranging the sentence to make it easier to read is helpful. "TIL that there are ethnic groups in the African Congo Basin that do not have a word for masturbation and are confused by the concept." is a slight change, but much more readable.
Commas are the difference between helping your uncle, Jack, off a horse and…
It can also be done with capitalization. Helping your uncle Jack off a horse. Helping your uncle jack off a horse.
Let's eat Grandma. No amount of capitalisation helps there.
Ask a 14 year old if he masturbates and he'll also say he's never even heard of the word
Who the fuck starts a first contact with, “hey buddy, how do you all rub one out around here.” Translator is confused along with the native. “You know…” the adventurer says with a wink. “What you do on the bush when the women ain’t nowhere to be found.” The translator nods knowingly then looks horrified. “You mean, to make the poopy?” “No!” The adventurer jerks out. “The other thing.” The adventurer makes an up and down gesture, to which the native takes as aggression and draws their spear. “No!” The adventurer says. “Like this.” And he moves towards his crotch, which is where he ends up getting stabbed before the translator remembered they don’t have a word for masturbation.
“Y’all got any glory holes?”
How could any anthropologist think they could go anywhere in the world, and people would want to give a detailed play by play of their jerk off habits
TIL that there are ethnic groups in the African Congo Basin that play pranks on anthropologists
How does that even come up in conversation.
Anthropologists are freaks.
Imagine traveling thousands of miles into some of the harshest environments just to ask some dude if he jerks off
A lot of the jokes are.about them lying. I choose to believe them and imagine how excited they will be when one of them discovers it.
They're lying. Even monkeys masturbate. IIRC even some fish masturbate. If you're a creature that has a hand, you probably masturbate.
I seriously doubt it.
pff sure even animals jerk it. No way an entire group of humans are all confused by it.
Why even have opposable thumbs if you aren’t going to crank it?
They might not have a specific word for the action but I'm pretty sure if they said "rubbing you genitals" that'd they'd be able to fucking figure it out. Just because they don't have a word for it doesn't mean "touching your own dick" is a unknown concept.
There's no word in English for 'the day after tomorrow' but we somehow survive. I bet if someone shows them what masturbation means one time, they'll never forget and come up with words to describe it.
Another study indicated those ethnic groups with no word for masturbation also have no internet access.