millman parry... i wish he stuck more to the phenomenological character of oral cultures, his classical digressions with homer were easily the best part. there are the vaguest glimpses here—people in oral cultures failing to recognize the category of tree as the category of tree, and reaching for embodied experience when asked a question about a tree (“let’s go check if all trees have flowers”)—but a lot of these observations are throwaway and never expanded on. why do they think like this? is it good? nevertheless, good read, if one marred by the fact that the research on this subject still remains prohibitively limited