Oaxaca, the city, is a quaint Spanish-colonial town surrounded by a big, ugly, modern city. Oaxaca is also the name of the state, where about half the population is fully modern and half consists of indigenous people whose lives are a mixture of traditional and modern. Many live in remote villages, and a two-digit percent of them don’t even speak Spanish. They instead speak only indigenous languages, the biggest of which are in the Zapotec or Mixtec language families.
The most traditional of these peoples embrace mainly technologies invented centuries or millennia ago. They grow, raise and forage for most of their food, which they grind using ancient stone tools, and cook over wood fires. They make their clothes from scratch on looms they built by hand using fabric they dyed from plants foraged in the mountains. They can identify medicinal plants on sight and navigate by the stars. These are not specialties. I know people there who can individually do all these things. They have way more skills because their low-tech lifestyle demands it.
Our high-tech society is impressive in the collective. But it robs individuals of skills. Most kids now can’t write cursive. And they can’t read it, either. They can’t read an analog clock or a paper map.
This story originally appeared on Computerworld
