The Puzzle of Left-Handedness Read Online Free PDF

by burying its left hand in a hole over which they then poured boiling water. The mutilated child had to use its right hand exclusively for the rest of its life.
    This is a typical case of a story that demands a large dose of scepticism. Quite apart from the fact that its provenance is hazy, a primitive society that treats the few hands available to it as wastefully as this won’t exactly increase its chances of survival. In fact we should be distrustful of much of the information we have about early contact with tribes in inaccessible parts of the world. Its origins often lie with a single missionary, adventurer or anthropologist, so independent confirmation is lacking. Such individuals, especially in colonial times, tended to look through a powerful European-Christian lens and therefore probably misinterpreted much of what they saw. They didn’t necessarily speak the language of the people they were observing. All those lonely seekers after fame and fortune, all those enthusiastic servants of the lord must have guessed, romanticized, exaggerated and even invented a great deal. They undoubtedly sometimes mistook incidental events for customs.
    Now and then researchers have had their legs deliberately pulled by the peoples they were studying, and often with good reason. Strangers brought excitement, amusement and intriguing goods and customs. You want to keep on the right side of people like that, in the hope that they’ll stay and give you more things. So the newcomers sometimes got more than they bargained for when they displayed an interest in something. It was an early form of the tourist industry. All over the world, ‘natives’ eagerly threw themselves into traditional handicrafts, dances and musical performances – many of which had never existed before, in that particular form at least.
    Whatever the precise truth of the matter, the customs on which the explorers reported often seem to have disappeared without trace by the time the deep interior of Africa and other continents was opened up.
    One example of jumping to conclusions is the story of how the Ovimbundu of southern Angola gravely insulted each other with their left arms. It goes like this: you stick your left arm in the air, fist clenched, and with your right hand clasped around your left wrist you shake your left arm back and forth. Observers immediately concluded that the Ovimbundu associated the left with ‘very bad’. But consider what the gesture might represent: if the fist is the head of a person you want to insult, then the wrist is his neck. The other hand squeezes the wrist violently, while shaking it to indicate that the person is struggling. Seen in this way it’s a vivid gesture meaning: I could strangle you! The fact that the left arm takes the role of the victim is hardly surprising. like human beings everywhere, most Ovimbundu are right-handed, so the right hand does the strangling. Only indirectly does this have anything to do with the symbolism of left and right.

5
    Lovers of the Left
    The association of right with good and left with evil can be found all around the globe, but there are occasional exceptions, the main one being China, the oldest of all the world’s political entities.
    It seems at first sight as if things are no different in the venerable Middle Kingdom from how they are elsewhere. On the shores of the Yellow River, around 90 per cent of the population is right-handed and 10 per cent left-handed. As in other parts of the world, Chinese left-handers have been forced to write and eat with their right hands, but in contrast to Europe and America, this has nothing to do with negative attitudes to the left side in general; in fact, in many ways the left side is traditionally seen in a favourable light. In China left-handers are no less valued than right-handers, but there are traditional reasons why certain actions must be performed with the right hand.
    The ancient Chinese world view deals dextrously with the