If you discuss the beliefs of Christianity with the village diviner, the medicine man, he will say the white man must be extremely stupid. The white man must be profoundly troubled - probably torn by a huge guilt connected to how he treated the ancestors - to think that villagers would buy the idea that someone died on the cross for us. They would say these beliefs are evidence that the white people killed someone of great importance, probably a diviner and a healer. If you kill a healer, you must make amends by appeasing the healer's spirit.
I'll just go guard some villagers or something. Even if they're not in danger.
I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.
The heart of the matter, as I see it, is the stark fact that world poverty is primarily a problem of two million villages, and thus a problem of two thousand million villagers.
The snakes have their place in the agricultural economy of the village, but our villagers do not seem realize it.
The Charkha supplemented the agriculture of the villagers and gave it dignity.
If we want to impart education best suited to the needs of the villagers, we should take the vidyapith to the villages.
The dry knowledge of the three R's is not even now, it can never be, a permanent part of the villagers' life.
It was too difficult. People weren't prepared to put in the hours on the donkey work - you know, dates and facts and so on. I think in retrospect my generation will be seen as a turning point. From now on there'll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in fourteenth-century Iran and modern London, though, is that if with their meager resources the villagers occasionally slipped backward, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.
