As a sample of how predictable human nature is beyond the cultural format, not far from the boys I find a group of girls. Like among the Kalasha in Pakistan, or the Otavaleños in Ecuador, here are also women who conserve the typical way of dressing. As elsewhere, men end up by adopting a pair of jeans or similar variations of contemporary clothes.
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Mennonite girls seem straight out of Goethe’s novels, elegant blue eyed dolls wearing violet and blue neck-to-toe dresses and stunning hats. It’s in these unknown settlements were Romantic aesthetics have residually survived. What are those dresses, designed some centuries ago in Eastern Prussia, getting dirty with the Pampas soil? Curious collage plotted by history’s turns, migrations and religious persecutions. The girls smile and tell each other secrets in the ear. Saying I feel sad for them unveils my ethnocentrism.
I don’t know why, I feel more sorry for them than for the boys, and I perfectly know I shouldn’t be sorry for anyone but myself. I have travelled 45 countries and learnt to find beauty in each kind of society. Maybe I believe that male soul is the ony capable of building and applying castrating philosophical systems. Obsessions in general, either to build skyscrapers, cities or cults, seem to me a male affair. Women are smarter, and they are the ones showing us the apples. They go always in front, throwing banana skins just ahead of any kind of theological arithmetic planned by ayatollahs, bishops or popes. Parties can be organized by either men or women. Boring scenario, instead, can only have a man behind the master plan. Women’s boycott consists of returning man to reality. And they can achieve this very simply, by the only mean of existing. Some religions have chosen to call this temptation. Behind the grind of resignation, nevertheless, I can guess a winged spirit…
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The only girl of the group to look at me in the eye did so because her boyfriend had told her to behave normally in front of foreigners. Of course, here the ones speaking medieval German are the locals, while we are the exotic!
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