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Posted: 20 Apr 2020

Taken: 20 Apr 2020

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Home-made •
Lockdown •
Activity •
Excerpt •
From the Book •
The Naturalness of Religious Ideas •
Author •
Pascal Boyer •
Second Excerpt •
Gulag •
Anne Applebaum •

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Bread / Brot

Bread / Brot
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . An Eighteenth century French aristocrat, dismayed at the difficulty of learning foreign language, once asked why the Germans bothered to call ‘Brot,’ and why the English called ‘bread,’ what they all knew to be ‘du pain’ (bread) after all. We know that, as far as language acquisition and transmission is concerned, whether you call it ‘bread’ or “brot’ is contingent. What is not contingent, on the other hand, is that if you are brought up in an environment where ‘Brot’ is used, you will almost inevitably end up using the same term. This may seem trivial, but it is not. The contingent process underlying the early, effortless acquisition of such simple terms are complex and still not entirely understood. More complex, and not really understood at all, are the processes that underpin cultural transmission. … x Preface

THE NATURALNESS IF RELIGIOUS IDEAS
3 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
In the hunger camps, in the hungrier years, bread took on an almost sacred status, and a special etiquette grew up around its consumption. While camp thieves stole almost everything else with impunity, for example, the theft of bread was considered particularly henious and unforgivable. Valdimir Petrov found on his long train journey to Kalyma that ‘thieving was permitted and could be applied to anything within the thief’s capacity and luck, but there was one exception -- bread. Bread was sacred and inviolable, regardless of any distinction in the population of the car’ Petrov had in fact been chosen as the ‘starosta’ ** of the car, and in that capacity was charged with beating up a petty thief who had stolen bread. He duly did so. Thomas Sgovio also wrote that unwritten law of the camp criminals in Kolyma was “Steal anything -- excepting the holy bread portion.” He too had “seen more than one prisoner beaten to death for violating the sacred tradition. Similarly, Kazimierz Zarod remembered that:

“If a prisoner stole clothes, tobacco, or almost anything else and was discovered, he could expect a beating from his fellow prisoners, but the unwritten law of the camp -- and I have heard from men from other camps that it was the same everywhere -- was that prisoner caught stealing another’s bread earned a death sentence.” ~ Page 213/214

GULAG
2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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