Obscurum Per Obscurius

Armchair Anthropology in the Digital Age

[i-was-once-a--tortoise]

everything about this is fucking hilarious. i’m sorry, random pompeii man, but your death was some looney tunes bullshit and the framing of this photograph isn’t helping.

[funnytwittertweets]

[lakemermaids-deactivated2018012]

Painting of the Maharaja of Indore by Bernard Boutet De Monvel (1929)

[shikanji]

His name was Yashwant Rao Holkar II! He was the Maharaja of Indore from 1926 to 1948 and commissioned Bernard Boutet De Monvel to paint both him and his wife Sanyogita Bai Holkar, the Maharani of Indore.

There was also a second set of paintings where both wear traditional clothes also painted by Monvel in 1934!

[shaharizade]

can i also share these two specific picture of the two of them that i’m obsessed with

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

amazing lion dance (traditonal chinese folk art 舞狮wushi) in guangxi province

[liverodland]

Folk magic in the Phillipines part 2: The Orasyon protective tattoos.

To understand the mystical orasyon tattoos you have to go back to the folk belief of Anting-anting, which is the term for amulets and talismans. In phillipino folk belief, amulets have a preventive force against evil things, places and events, whereas talismans bring good luck. Anting-anting come in various materials like rocks and minerals, teeth and bone, bark of trees, strange roots of plants, seeds, shrunken animal parts , feathers, miniature icons, images of Jesus Christ and the Saints, oils, cloth, medals, prayers, prayer books, anagrams, codes in pieces of paper and tattoos.

An orasyon written on paper by a tambalan (healer) might be enclosed in a container by the owner and worn around the neck. In order to avoid losing the orasyon some people have it buried under the skin or tattooed on the skin and explains the existence of the orasyon tattoos. The codes and texts are a wild mix of spanish, vernacular tagalog dialect, latin, occult symbolism and sometimes straight up gibberish. Most of these images are taken from the photo blog of Sidney Snook and the info comes from the thesis Yunal: the orasyon tattoo as folk practice and art in Leyte.

[redlipstickresurrected]

Christophe Jacrot (French, b. 1960, Paris, France) - Iceland from the photo book Snjór (snow in Icelandic) , Photography

[archatlas]

The Art of Hiroshi Yoshida

Hiroshi Yoshida was a 20th-century Japanese painter and woodblock printmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the shin-hanga style, and is noted especially for his excellent landscape prints. Yoshida travelled widely, and was particularly known for his images of non-Japanese subjects done in traditional Japanese woodblock style.

[footloosellama]

Chefchaouen, Morocco

[academicssay]

[catradoraism]

[simplypooh]

Happy 100th Birthday to Winnie the Pooh!!

[brattylikestoeat]

White folks can I ask y’all something, respectfully?

Okay cool, what is it with y’all and cooking with soda?

Coke Pot Roast

Dr. Pepper pulled pork

Root beer glazed salmon

Cola wings

Sprite cheese potato

[anais-ninja-bitch]

colas, especially big name brands like coke, are actually really complex flavor-wise. coke is literally engineered to hit all parts of the tongue: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umame. so it’s a solid base for marinades and sauces, especially with dark meats. same goes for a lot of soft drinks, although i don’t see much flavor in sprite, unless it’s mcdonald’s sprite,

the other thing is texture. carbonation adds fluffiness to some preparations, so i could see the potential in a sprite tempura batter.

[ralfmaximus]

THIS! The citric acid in Coke makes for a good meat marinade.

But also... it’s because of clever marketing.

See, once upon a time, soda was considered a desert treat. Something you had instead of cake or pie after a meal. Or maybe a sweet snack similar to an ice cream cone. Few people wanted (or could afford) to drink the stuff every day.

But then (post WWII 1950s) some bright guy decided to market Coca Cola as a beverage you should have with every meal! This was also about the same time McDonald’s and the fast food industry got its start. Suddenly, soda was  available everywhere, not just at drug stores.

After keeping a six pack of ice-cold Cokes in the fridge was normalized, marketing efforts turned to getting people to buy even more soda. And by “people” we mean housewives, since housewives were traditionally the ones who made grocery buying decisions.

Which led to the 1960s meme of cooking with soda.

There were a lot of company-generated ‘cookbooks’ published depicting disgusting fascinating ways to use their products, but as the 1960s turned into the 1970s the fad lost steam and people stopped buying them (although there was a brief coked-up nostalgia fuelled resurgence in the 1990s). 

But the damage had been done; the idea was deeply lodged into the American zeitgeist to the point where people think it’s just something grandma did, same as overcooking the green beans until they turn brown or covering everything with roasted marshmallows.

[toxictiktoks]

[kaelang12]

[an-alarming-number-of-bees]

Obsessed with this

[afloweroutofstone]

It’s always fun to be reminded how recent European national identities are. Peasants in 1860’s Sicily had never heard the term “Italy” before, the majority of people in France didn’t speak French at the time of the French Revolution, etc.

[dostoyevsky-official]

[toastbutteregg]

[alionessespride]

So last Christmas/holiday period I worked at a gift store as a casual holiday assistant.

The number of times I had blokes come in and attempt to purchase a candle for their wife/so/mother/girlfriend etc for Christmas or birthday.

And they’d like walk up and say ‘I need to buy a candle’

We had at least 25 different candle scents.

Some guys knew what they were after- cause they would take a photo of the candle they already had.

Some had literally no clue.

Some say ‘you just pick a good one’ and we say ‘oh but you know what she likes, we’ll just help you decide’.

So we’d go through the entire process of

“Ok so sweet? Or sort of more not sweet or citrusy?”

Some weren’t sure what the difference was so we’d pull our sweetest possible candle tester (caramel sunset- it’s like sticking your face in a candy store) and our most neutral non sweet candle tester (ocean breeze - it’s a neutral sort of salt and lemongrass scent) and make them smell them.

The sweet one either gets ‘oh YES but maybe not that sweet’ or ‘no. no. She likes. Not that’

Once we make a decision on sweet or not, we then can start pulling candle testers.

We slowly narrow down those categories by smelling various test candles.

Some of these blokes have absolutely zero idea what they’re looking for when they come in, but generally we get some sort of ‘oh yeah, her perfume smells like that’ or ‘the candle we have smells a little like that’ or ‘oh I REALLY LIKE THAT’.

Sometimes we have to go through Every. Single. Candle. To get the one they are after.

During Christmas I did this probably 4-5 times a day on average. Sometimes multiple times for the same customer because they had to get a candle for mum and wife and sister and Aunty.

One guy came in on CHRISTMAS EVE about 20min before we closed and said ‘so I need…. Five gifts…. For my mum, for my girlfriend, my sister, my grandma and my girlfriends mum.’

It was….. a long 20 minutes.

It’s lovely to see them get? Not excited, exactly, but sort of enthused that! They! Made! A! Good! Choice! Because they do know their partners. They know the perfume, or what they already have in the house, or what scent she likes. They just weren’t sure how to get to the final option.

Once the candle has been selected, and they purchase it, we offer free gift wrapping.

The look of relief on some of their faces is. Absolutely priceless.

We have like. 40 something different wrapping papers. Sometimes I ask ‘favourite colour?’ And they just look blank, so I pick two nice but different papers so it’s both easy (they’re both pretty!) but they also don’t feel like I did all the choosing for them (then if she comments on it, he can say he picked it).

I live in a small country town, by the way. Some of these fellas are in their dusty work jeans, boots and clearly came in from a long day on the farm because it is Important that they get this gift.

Some seem very awkward about this whole process, some are self deprecating, some are really enthusiastic. Some start super awkward and then get really enthusiastic.

I sold. A LOT of fucking candles this last Christmas. A LOT.

I could smell those fuckers in my sleep.

I’m not making fun of these guys (ok I am just a little) because I appreciate that they a) know that their wife would like a candle, b) are prepared to smell 25 different candles to find the one they think she would like, rather than just picking one based on the colour of the box, and c) acknowledge that they need a hand selecting one and asked for assistance

[everythingfox]

“A baby chimpanzee and his best friend the baby gorilla.”

(Source)

[pipedreamdragon]

some Prime Mates right here

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Damn, missed it again

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Happy Bog Day!

[lapetiteanthropologiste]

I know this isn’t the point but bog day is the 4th Sunday in July so it’s 25 July 2021 this year :) https://bogday.org/

Bog Day

Celebrating the brilliance of bogs

[friendlyfrankenstein]

In the same vein as other ‘things humans do that aliens might be weirded out by’ what if human pattern recognition skills were the thing? Like the ability to see a cloud resolve into a dog, or faces in wall patterns. Stuff that evolved from predators having camouflaging abilities, or let’s face it, bugs that can look basicaly like a leaf to prey ON. 

Imagine an alien being super confounded by a human being like ‘oh, that control board looks like a face’ and it’s just this big grouping of random lights and line but no ALL the humans on board think it looks like a FACE and theyve started NAMING it. And it just seems so confusing- is there anything on this flat painted wall? ‘No of course not’ HOW IS THERE AN OF COURSE NOT. What about in that galaxy? And the human squints and stares at it and says ‘yeah, it looks like a cat.’

And they an draw out what they’re recognizing in the lines but it’s just so strange. 

And then an enemy develops ‘cloaking technology’ that’s based on camouflaging and are so angry that every single human is able to point it out because it’s a completely obvious moving shape to them. 

or: alien species are introduced to leaf insects, tigers, and that one octopus that imitates a coconut and freak the heck out.

[iopele]

god I love this kind of post

[beka-tiddalik]

The Girrami had never known deception until they started expanding into the greater galaxy. They did not like it. The closest word in their home language for deception translated roughly to “speaking before having all the facts”. It had taken time to learn that other races would outright hide information, or worse, speak untruths for their own ends.

It was fortunate, the Girrami thought, that they had resources that the race who called themselves “Humans” desperately needed for medical supplies. The fact that the Girrami had (in line with their overarching philosophy of sharing what was needed) offered these resources freely, without (as the Humans would say) “strings attached”, had made many the Humans quickly warm to the Girrami, and in turn, freely offer the Girrami advice on how to better negotiate.

Human: “Honestly, that was almost embarrassing to watch. Tell you what, you said that you had contact with the Farop?”

Cappa Girrami: “Yes. We have had… difficulties in our dealings with that race.”

Human: “Yeah that must have been like watching puppies walk through a meatgrinder. Those guys are total assholes. Tell you what, your medicine saved my little boy, so I’m willing to do a little quid pro quo. Are you people familiar with the concept of a corporate lawyer? Because I am willing to offer you my services for cheap. No, don’t thank me, this will be my pleasure.”

Humans sometimes had the most odd and upsetting turns of phrase. But once the Girrami started contracting these… lawyers and businesspeople to conduct major negotiations, many of their dealings with other races did  seem to be flowing a lot more smoothly.

It did however make the Girrami wonder just how it was that the humans had become so adept at sensing deception. It seemed natural to them to start learning to “lie” and detect untruths from an early age.

And then the Girrami scientists were invited to observe a collection of specimens kept in a “natural history museum” and suddenly it all made sense.

Girrami Scientist 1: “Wait, what is that!?”

Human: “It’s a stick insect.”

Girrami Scientist 2: “And that?”

Human: “A leaf insect.”

Girrami Scientist 1: “…your insects practice deception?”

Human: “… I guess you could call it that? It’s a form of camouflage.”

Girrami Scientist 2: “What is this…’camouflage’?”

And then the Girrami realised that the Humans came from a planet where deception was so endemic that even plants practiced it. 

No wonder the Humans were so good at detecting it.

[shepwhereartthou]

As well as this “pattern recognition” humans have another trait that is equally, if not more, frightening. They call this trait instinct. The ability to perceive the outcome to a situation with no discernible data input of any kind.

It has been documented on ground missions where humans have been part of the squad, that they have detected ambushes long before sensors pick up readings. The only explanation they have given is “I had a gut feeling”.

Having corresponded with human scholars, in an attempt to understand this wholly bizarre phenomena, it was explained to me like this. The same way humans developed pattern recognition due to their planet being inhabited by species that actively deceive their pray/predator with ‘camouflage’, they have evolved a base system for it that takes no cognitive thought processes. 

It is frightening to think that humans have been the top predator on their planet and still had to develop a system of threat recognition that takes no active thought to use. And that it is now put to a multitude of uses outside of hunter gatherer situations makes them lethal in ways we are still figuring out.

And it’s never really turned off. Even when they sleep, instinct is consistently monitoring their body’s condition. Temperature variation, proximity senses, the highly trained humans can tell when someone is invading their space even when unconscious and wake up alert and ready to engage in combat if need be thanks to instinct telling their system to pump them full of the combat drug ‘adrenaline’ (another frightening thing humans have).

I digress, human instinct is a frightening thing as it goes far beyond a danger detection system. It permeates into the entire social awareness package that humans have. It makes them amazing allies, and horrendous potential enemies.

[newby6320]

And don’t even get the humans started on the “mothers have eyes in the back of their head” phenomenom. They will complain for hours about how it impeded childhood mischief, but never explain how it is possible for these “eyes” to exist when there is no physical evidence of them.

[human-aliens-collection]

“How about we not go in there.”

“Is this one of your human ‘bad feelings?’”

“No. Its just. Look, the last 5 caves we’ve explored I’ve had bad luck. I get eaten, the wall falls on me, the one sturdy looking bridge collapses. I’d rather not, okay? I have bad luck.”

“What is this ‘bad luck?’”

“Uhh. Basically how likely it bad things are to happen to you.”

“That is a silly notion. Statistically, we all have the same probability for something to happen to us.”

“You would think so, wouldn’t you.”