Long ago, a distant relative served in AmeriCorps VISTA as sole teacher of a one-room school, on a very beautiful ridge in coal country. Many of her stories have entered our lore, especially those contrasting the hypereducated librovore culture of my extended family with the utterly practical, salty and grounded culture of her students.
Haw haw haw (the original anecdote)
As she tells it:
I was working with the kids on classifying different animals. “What does a snake have in common with other snakes, that frogs don’t have?” So we got to birds.
“Feathers!” interrupts my uncle.
Well, no actually! They started with “wings” and they said “beaks” and they said “claws.” But nobody said “feathers.” So I asked them what they thought about feathers, and I got mistrustful silence where I expected agreement. After a moment, [tough boy] erupts with laughter and says “haw haw haw, Mizz LastName, I bet you think chickens is birds!”
Relation to Luria
Luria went to Uzbekistan in 19311 to interview the peasants, and came home with some startling anecdotes of his own. I’m relating the favorite anecdote as the folk process immortalized it. (The original (and his interpretation) are on p. 270-272 in the footnote).
We wanted to understand how the peasants accept logical assumptions and draw conclusions from them. We would ask “In the north where there is snow all year, the bears are white. Severnaya Zemlya is there in the north. What color are the bears in Severnaya Zemlya? ”
but the peasants would only reply
I have not been to Severnaya Zemlya, and I have not seen the bears there.
Another bandied-about conclusion Luria came home with was “the peasants don’t categorize things correctly.” Luria classified animals by phylogeny, and the Uzbeki peasants considered them by functional group. Luria was unable to find common ground.
A lot can be made of these anecdotes. Luria drew his own conclusions, Nell in 19992 drew others. The common opinion in the original days was “Hah, peasants are so dumb.” Modern audiences are apt to say “we drill kids in our culture to ““accept logical assumptions and draw conclusions from them”” in exactly this format. The peasant hasn’t filled in scantron after scantron of these drills, why should we imagine this sentence structure is the only way to accept logical assumptions and draw conclusions?”
And a response I have—who knows whether it’s accurate, but I think about it—steps outside both of these frames: “why should the peasants have believed Luria in the first place?” Here comes a stranger. He wants me to say something, but he hasn’t told me why. He wants me to tell him about white bears, but I’ve never seen a white bear—that’s silly. I’d better plead the fifth til I understand what this guy is all about.
Forty years’ retrospective
When my relative carried this story back home, some people responded “Hah! Dumb hillbillies.” Visiting the ridge lately (for lots of her students became friends-as-close-as-family to us), I was able to hear some of these stories for the first time in their original setting. Sitting on a front porch on the ridge in coal country, the kids (now grown) were proud, helping my relative in her retelling.
I asked “so, what category are they?”
Teacher: I know I didn't convince them. In fact, they thought I was totally ignorant—
“Kid 1” : Oh she’s hopeless to reason with!
Teacher: I think I lost a lot of credibility that day, since I wouldn’t give in, either. But you didn't blindly swallow anything I said, and you’d argue your points to a deadlock. It proved you were listening and thinking, and made me rethink too.
“Kid 2”: You know, I don’t think we named it? I guess farm animals, along with guineas and turkeys, mules, horses, and pigs…
Both sides remain stubborn, but it’s the stubbornness of forty years’ of shared understanding—the mutually uncarveable joint has become a fond remembered joke.
Why blog this one now?
I love this story, and I was going to blog it eventually for its own sake, and maybe I’ll return to it some day for a deeper dive analyzing the contrast with Luria. But it skipped to the top of the queue this morning, when dad sent over a regular news article3, commending it “Why, oh why, are there so few of these types of articles?” And of course in writing about Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, there’s a lot to catch and I don’t think it’s perfect, but it is better-enough-than-average to be worth the read…
And, smack in the middle of this BBC article, the chicken-classifiers are at it again!
So I share “Haw haw haw, Mizz LastName, I bet you think chickens is birds!” today, and you may take from it a reminder that (i) the categories were made for man; (ii) communication involves trust; (iii) what appear to be cleanly carved joints are still a matter of context; (iv) [left as an exercise for the reader]; or any other observation that strikes you.
Luria, A. 1971. TOWARDS THE PROBLEM OF THE HISTORICAL NATURE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES. p 170-172 http://luria.ucsd.edu/Towards-the-Problem_1971.pdf
Nell, V. Luria in Uzbekistan: The Vicissitudes of Cross-Cultural Neuropsychology. Neuropsychol Rev 9, 45–52 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1025643004782
They were kind enough not to paywall their article, and it’s good enough that I don’t want to deprive them of their click counts: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60767454 But here’s the immortal link, just in case: https://web.archive.org/web/20220319050437/https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60767454
Wow I've been looking for the source of this Luria anecdote for ages. Thank you so much for writing this!