Word: heider
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...This is my favorite place on earth," declares Carl Heider. The place is 108-sq.-mi. Mount Desert Island, midway up the Maine coast. Heider, a retired New Jersey teacher, helped set up the family "camp" at the island's COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC 10 years ago, and has returned every summer since to help kids and grownups learn about the environment while enjoying Maine's rugged beauty...
...some 25 families who attend one of the six week-long programs, Heider and local naturalists lead geology and ecology hikes around the island's Acadia National Park, the only national park in New England. On participants' free half-days, Heider and staff guide them to remote places on the island. "They know all the nooks and crannies," says Marsha. "What's nice is that when you get to some of the beaches they know about, no one else is there." Each week offers a boat excursion on the ocean to observe humpback whales and a trip to the mainland...
Superhumans? Subhumans? Figments of a science-fiction writer's imagination? In fact, the Dani are living quite nicely, thank you, in the Grand Valley of West Irian (formerly West New Guinea), where they were studied for 2½ years by Karl Heider, an anthropologist from the University of South Carolina. Heider, who has taught at Harvard, Brown and Stanford, describes the abstemious sexual behavior of the 5,000-member tribe in the current issue of Man, the journal of Britain's Royal Anthropological Institute. He reports finding no strong sanctions against sexual activity or any other ready explanation...
Raising Pigs. The Dani simply do not seem to have much drive, sexual or otherwise. There are few intense emotions, little artistic achievement and few fights. Instead of expressing anger, a Dani tribesman usually moves away from an offending situation. Wars, according to Heider, have the emotional content of deer hunts in America. The warriors chat for a long while, fight for an hour, then fall back for more conversation. Revenge and anger rarely play a role-the Dani simply want to placate their ghosts and end the fighting as quickly as possible. Their only real interest seems...
...Heider has no idea why the Dani energy level is so low. The tribe seems to have a low infant-mortality rate, an adequate diet and no serious diseases. While a hidden genetic or biological factor may be responsible, Heider prefers to believe the Dani "low-energy system" is simply cultural. If so, Western theories about the innate power of the sexual drive-mostly derived from Freud-may need some adjustment...