I was listening to this like I usually do, with it running in the background while looking at several other things. It’s about human history and our creativity origins and is a very ‘Wendy’ thing to listen to. However, that isn’t what grabbed my attention.
In this, Donald Johnson says “I was recently with the some Masai people in Southern Tanzania, and it was so interesting because I went to a wedding and they used this red earth to paint their faces, and here I appear, you know, looking very different and really feeling like the other, like the outsider, and one of the elderly women came up to me and started painting my face, and a number of things happened. The first thing that happened was I felt I was included, that I was part of them, that they had accepted me and I felt an intimacy with that person. You know how it is. We keep a distance from one another. We have this personal space around us. Decorating each other has a very interesting byproduct, which is developing social bonds, and the other thing was that I felt like I could participate and not just simply be an outside observer. ….It’s a way of developing and establishing social contact and social connectiveness and cohesivenes” [emphasis mine]
It makes me wonder if we have lost some of the personal-ness in our social overload: Twitter, Facebook, all the ‘social networking’ sites. Do you pay attention that there are people you are talking to there? Do you notice them at all? Are you there for them or are they there for you?
The Masai don’t have mirrors; they paint each others faces because they cannot paint their own.
Whose face are you painting in your quest for social connectedness?
