Rich, Complex, and Sophisticated

We’ve seen it a thousand times—the anthropologist who falls in love with his tribe. Or with some bones he’s dug up. Or even with a completely nondescript stone artefact for which he develops an unaccountable infatuation. For some odd reason they all come to be idealized and glamorized as if they had human feelings, and would be hurt if they weren’t greatly admired.

And the adjectives employed are always the same—Rich, Complex, and Sophisticated. Notwithstanding the fact that the art of culture X consists of mere daubs in primary colors, those will be the epithets of choice. Even if the stone tools of culture Y show no more shape than if they’d accidentally fallen off a shelf, Rich, Complex and Sophisticated that culture will be. And in spite of the fact that the mythology of culture Z consists of an unbelievable farrago of violence and rapine—the kind of stuff which makes you really wonder about the sickness of the human mind—its devotees are bound to say that, well, as these things go, and all things considered, and making due allowance for time and place, it’s a remarkably Rich, Complex, and Sophisticated farrago.

Recently in Indonesia they dug up the skeleton of a small hominid that stood a meter tall and had a brain the size of a tennis ball. But don’t ask! We know what’s going to happen… These Hobbits will be mythologized as wise, gifted, and artistic—living in harmony with nature and deeply religious—and although they had brains that were small, and only the size of a ball, what Rich, Complex, and Sophisticated knots of neurones they will prove to be!

November 2004