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The Village of the Sorcerers and the Riddle of Control
  "All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons."
                                 St. Augustine
Why are humans drawn to ideas like filings to a magnet?  Why
do memes have the power to create, elevate, pacify...and kill?  One
answer is a Rube Goldberg machine built into the human frame, a
physiological widget with some rather remarkable tricks.
In the Nilgiri hills of India, shortly before the Europeans came,
there lived four tribes.  One tribe, the Badaga, were farmers.  Another,
the Kota, were craftsmen.  A third, the Toda, were herdsmen.  And the
fourth, the Kurumba, made and raised almost nothing at all.  The
Badaga, Kota, Toda and Kurumba lived together in a delicate
harmony, each supplying a vital something that the other three
needed, and paying for the indispensable products of its neighbors
with its own handiwork.  But there was one form of merchandise the
Badaga, the Kota and the Toda were willing to pay more for than any
of the others... far more.  Sometimes their need for this single good
mounted to the level of hysterical panic.  Yet to us this commodity
might seem the least essential of them all.
After the yearly harvest, the women of the Kota craftspeople
fashioned pots and carried them, along with iron hoes, forks and
plowshares forged by their husbands, to the village of the Badaga
farmers.  There, the two tribes held a feast.  When the celebration was
over, the Kota craftspeople left, carrying a gift from their Badaga
farmer hosts--a year's supply of wheat.
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