Speaker 1: Before becoming a musician, I worked as a face painter,
Speaker 1: sometimes dressed as a butterfly, sometimes wearing shiny red boots
Speaker 1: and pigtails, decked out in holographic robbins. I did it
Speaker 1: for roughly ten years. It was pretty good at it.
Speaker 1: I paid well as a freelance gig, mostly company parties,
Speaker 1: and being a face painter is like serving as an
Speaker 1: embedded spy in the republic of childhood. Kids speak freely
Speaker 1: around you, don't even register you're an adult. They're sweet,
Speaker 1: they're weird, they're funny, they're mean, and even though they're
Speaker 1: pint sized, they're already real sensitive to social status and hierarchy.
Speaker 1: I remember this one kid, let's call him Charlemagne, pulling
Speaker 1: ranked on another boy by explaining that his dad worked
Speaker 1: in a corner office. And I kept painting. But it
Speaker 1: occurred to me that this kid would have no idea
Speaker 1: why a corner office was even desirable. He hadn't spent
Speaker 1: any time in his sunless cubicle, yet he just heard
Speaker 1: the boast at home and trotted it out. Here is
Speaker 1: evidence that Charlemagne Sr. Was higher up on the corporate
Speaker 1: ladder than this other kid, who was also waiting in
Speaker 1: line for me to paint a glitter batman on his cheek.
Speaker 1: I'm Dessa. This is deeply human, and we're talking about
Speaker 1: social status, prestige, influence and dominance, and our personal lives
Speaker 1: and our work lives and our societies at large. Why
Speaker 1: do we form social hierarchies. We're born into the many
Speaker 1: hierarchy of our homes. We're parents of the de facto bosses.
Speaker 1: And as a little kid myself, I was very eager
Speaker 1: to level the family organizational chart, constantly campaigning my mom
Speaker 1: for an equal vote in domestic policy decisions. Let's all
Speaker 1: just are your case and trust the best plans will
Speaker 1: rise to the top. And I cannot tell you how
Speaker 1: much I hated her reply, I'm your mother, not your friend.
Speaker 1: I hate that now. I hate saying that now. But
Speaker 1: when I was five and a half years old, Maxie
Speaker 1: was born, promoting me to middle management halfway around the world.
Speaker 1: A few years later, a little girl named Shenyang was
Speaker 1: born into a very different family, and when she was
Speaker 1: about five, she spent a night wrapped in her grandfather's
Speaker 1: coat hiding from a government raid. They came at night,
Speaker 1: and I was really scared because my Grandpa took me
Speaker 1: to the top of the roof and we were hiding there,
Speaker 1: and that was one of the horrible scenes in my childhood.
Speaker 1: They flipped to my grandparents bed. They flipped it because
Speaker 1: they thought I were hiding underneath the bed. Of course
Speaker 1: they don't know my dame. They're just saying, where's the kid?
Speaker 1: Where's the kid? When you hear a kid, of course
Speaker 1: you are scared. Okay, let's get the context that led
Speaker 1: to that scene on the roof. Can I ask you
Speaker 1: where year you were born? January the one I was
Speaker 1: born in Shandong, Jining, a small city, And if somebody
Speaker 1: was picturing China on a map, it's in B two
Speaker 1: in Beijing and Shanghai. And did you have siblings when
Speaker 1: you grew up? Uh? That's usually an innocent, getting to
Speaker 1: know you kind of question, But for Shen Young, it's
Speaker 1: complicated because legally she was not allowed to have siblings.
Speaker 1: By the mid eighties, China had a strict one child policy.
Speaker 1: Each couple was permitted only one kid and would face
Speaker 1: serious fines for any additional births. But Chanyang was the
Speaker 1: second of four girls. My grandma used to say, Guanti
Speaker 1: and Guandi guan. You control the heaven, you control the earth.
Speaker 1: You cannot control people's belly. But the government did try
Speaker 1: to control pregnancies. It launched huge propaganda campaigns to dissuade
Speaker 1: couples from having what we're called excess birth children. And
Speaker 1: the slogans were really really intense. One x as birth
Speaker 1: and the whole village gets their tubs tied. They're not
Speaker 1: just threatening, they're really taking people to get their tubes tied. Literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: some villages really did that. Girls were more likely to
Speaker 1: be aborted, abandoned, or given away during those years. Boys
Speaker 1: who could carry on the family line recorded higher status.
Speaker 1: Boys have to have all the privileges. They are like
Speaker 1: the spoilt light of the family. At dinner table, boys
Speaker 1: always get to eat chicken legs, so you know, the
Speaker 1: meat the boy gets to eat first. There are many
Speaker 1: families in the countryside that the sisters sacrifice themselves not
Speaker 1: to go to school, but they go to work so
Speaker 1: they can pay the tuition for the brother. To enforce
Speaker 1: the one child rule, government officials raided homes if they
Speaker 1: found an excess birth child. They could demolish the house,
Speaker 1: take the family's furniture, food, or even the baby itself.
Speaker 1: Chan Yang's parents, who kept trying for a boy after
Speaker 1: she was born, sent her to live in a village
Speaker 1: with her grandparents to hide. They didn't file any paperwork
Speaker 1: to register her birth, but as we've heard, the authorities
Speaker 1: found her grandparents house and they came looking for her.
Speaker 1: To evade them, n Young was then sent to an aunt,
Speaker 1: far away from any family that she knew. She was
Speaker 1: scrappy and strong willed, but she was essentially a five
Speaker 1: year old fugitive in hiding and undocumented in her own country.
Speaker 1: People used to call me latle black child. Yes, we
Speaker 1: also have black children. It means we illegal children, and
Speaker 1: they mobbed me for all. She's the little black girl
Speaker 1: from Shandong Province. The term black children wasn't associated with
Speaker 1: skin color. It was a comment about Shen Yan's position
Speaker 1: in the social hierarchy. She wasn't only perceived as inferior
Speaker 1: like there wasn't even a proper wrong for her. She
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to exist at all. We were like the
Speaker 1: invisible generation, the ghost child. But like many other excess
Speaker 1: birth children, Shen Young found a way to hack back
Speaker 1: onto the grid and reinserting herself into the social order
Speaker 1: would involve assuming a new identity. Shen young story will
Speaker 1: provide a dramatic example of how status and leverage and
Speaker 1: authority can affect a human life. But all of us
Speaker 1: are sensitive even to the minor differences in power dynamics
Speaker 1: that surround us within the first ten, fifteen, twenty seconds,
Speaker 1: Like people already know what is the status situation in
Speaker 1: this room. That's Dr Joey Cheng, sociologist at RK University
Speaker 1: in Toronto, Canada. When we first enter a room, were
Speaker 1: likely to rely on demographic shorthand guessing who's in control
Speaker 1: based on age and race and gender. Then you start
Speaker 1: paying attention right as people speak, to their body language,
Speaker 1: to their non verbal cues. So you know, is this
Speaker 1: person sitting up right? Are they expanded? Do they look
Speaker 1: like they're taking up a lot of space? Being extroverted
Speaker 1: is big, especially in North American culture. So there's even
Speaker 1: this thing called the Babbler effect where the person who
Speaker 1: speaks the most is the one who's likely to be
Speaker 1: a leader in a room. Joey worked on a study
Speaker 1: that also found we tend to spend more time looking
Speaker 1: at the high status individuals in a group, but we
Speaker 1: may have read our gaze if they look directly back
Speaker 1: at us in a subtle sign of submission. We take
Speaker 1: note of how others speak as well. Are they lowering
Speaker 1: the pitch of their voice as they speak? Then studies
Speaker 1: we find that when you measure the pitch of people's
Speaker 1: voice when they first speak compared to how it changes
Speaker 1: over time, the people who lower their voice they actually
Speaker 1: get seen as more dominant and they end up having
Speaker 1: more influence over a group. So when you think about,
Speaker 1: you know, when we're in trouble, right, how do people
Speaker 1: call our names? This stuff am to more than just
Speaker 1: academic trivia. Judicial researchers have investigated why some jurors seem
Speaker 1: to hold outsized influence on jury deliberations. Former British Prime
Speaker 1: Minister Margaret Thatcher hired a speech coach to help her
Speaker 1: lower her pitch to create a more authoritative presence, and
Speaker 1: Joey herself notes that when hierarchical cues are built into
Speaker 1: the language, they might even affect our intimate relationships. So
Speaker 1: I think of the informal too in Spanish versus the formal.
Speaker 1: THID languages like Thai and Japanese have many complicated levels
Speaker 1: of deference and respect. Apparently even for Japanese speakers, like
Speaker 1: kids growing up in Japan, that is a tricky thing
Speaker 1: they have to learn to as they grow up. Is
Speaker 1: like okay for this person, is this a context where
Speaker 1: I use that hierarchical language or is this not? And
Speaker 1: also it gets complicated after people get married. They kind
Speaker 1: of the figure out like all right, do I start
Speaker 1: using cago, which that hiwardic language with my in laws
Speaker 1: or do I drop it? Like it's tricky. You contributed
Speaker 1: a chapter to this book called Towards a Unified Science
Speaker 1: of Hierarchy, and essentially you wrote that having an organizational
Speaker 1: structure in a hierarchical form was a tool to resolve conflict.
Speaker 1: Whereas I think right now in the modern world, we
Speaker 1: imagine like hierarchies as the source of a lot of conflict.
Speaker 1: Can you explain when you show submission that is a
Speaker 1: way to prevent conflict in the absence of that hierarchy
Speaker 1: while figuring out somebody's going to get hurt. So think
Speaker 1: about like in a workplace meetings. Right when your assistant,
Speaker 1: for instance, knows they're your assistant, you're not going to
Speaker 1: be butting heads with them. It's like if you had
Speaker 1: to remind them that they're your assistant because they've somehow forgotten,
Speaker 1: then that's where you might have issues. Why and how
Speaker 1: does some people land higher than others in the social hierarchy.
Speaker 1: Scholars like Joey identify two classic strategies to achieve or
Speaker 1: maintain a high status position. The first is dominance. Dominance
Speaker 1: refers to the use of threat and intimidation to gain
Speaker 1: influence over others, typically by instilling fear. Does it have
Speaker 1: to be physical? It doesn't. So when your boss says
Speaker 1: to you, you're not getting that raise next time, if
Speaker 1: you're not going to work extra hours this weekend, or
Speaker 1: you might even think of parents who you know when
Speaker 1: you're threatening your kid that you're going to ground them.
Speaker 1: So the implied threat often in humans that tends to
Speaker 1: be verbal, right, but that is nevertheless still a form
Speaker 1: of dominance. The second strategy to achieve status is prestige.
Speaker 1: That's where you earn respect and influence based on your
Speaker 1: skills and talents. So when my mom was sternly reminding
Speaker 1: me I'm your mother, not your friend, she was flexing eminence.
Speaker 1: Whereas when I proposed that we discussed the bedtime protocols.
Speaker 1: I was hoping to be judged on my merit and
Speaker 1: awarded some prestige. All human communities form hierarchies, and on
Speaker 1: this we turned to Dr Zach Garfield, behavioral scientist and
Speaker 1: evolutionary anthropologist at the Institute for Advanced Study and to
Speaker 1: Lose France. He says that even in hunter gatherers societies
Speaker 1: that might not have fixed rules like chieftain people don't
Speaker 1: live together as complete equals, there are still leaders still
Speaker 1: varying levels of status. The hierarchy is just more dynamic.
Speaker 1: Social influence might be more often based on just individual
Speaker 1: capacities and the context. So what are we doing now?
Speaker 1: Are we trying to clear feel? Are we trying to hunt?
Speaker 1: Do we have a problem that needs to be resolved?
Speaker 1: Who can best coordinate this collective action dilemma? And whoever
Speaker 1: it kind of is there and can get the job
Speaker 1: done might be chosen as a leader. Every culture operates
Speaker 1: by its own rules, but there are some patterns to
Speaker 1: how societies organize themselves. Cultures that developed in environments where
Speaker 1: food and resources are plentiful tend to form more rigid
Speaker 1: and stratified hierarchies. This trend can be seen, for example,
Speaker 1: in some of the Native American societies of the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 1: The classic example is the northwest coast of North America,
Speaker 1: where you have salmon runs. Many populations in the Northwest
Speaker 1: coast did practice institutionalized slavery both before and after European colonization.
Speaker 1: Some native tribes enslaved people and forced them into lives
Speaker 1: of labor. Some form of lightered social order is observable
Speaker 1: in every human society, and in non human ones too.
Speaker 1: The term pecking order, for example, This coined just over
Speaker 1: a hundred years ago by a Norwegian researcher studying chickens.
Speaker 1: He noted, there are no two individual birds of any
Speaker 1: given species which, when living together, did not know which
Speaker 1: of the two has precedents and which is subordinate. I
Speaker 1: have a shape in my head for high archy, like
Speaker 1: I'm imagining like a pyramid. Is that what you imagine
Speaker 1: or do you have like a totally different shape. I
Speaker 1: think the pyramid is not a bad way to conceptualize.
Speaker 1: It's just that there's going to be many pyramids, all
Speaker 1: inside of each other at the same time, along different axis. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like a rubics cut pyramid in your head. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a erubics creup pyramid. Yeah, and I've just
Speaker 1: got a child's drawing of a triangle on a white
Speaker 1: sheet of paper. Hierarchies can overlap their complex and though
Speaker 1: they can sometimes be oppressive, they also help us get
Speaker 1: a ton of stuff done. One clear advantage of hierarchies
Speaker 1: is they help us coordinate as a group to achieve
Speaker 1: some what we often call collective action. And humans, like
Speaker 1: many other social species, Like all social species, we need
Speaker 1: to live in a group. We can't survive on our own.
Speaker 1: We can't consume enough calories on our own, we can't
Speaker 1: raise our children on our own. We generally can't be
Speaker 1: happy on our own. So we were bound to this
Speaker 1: group living physiologically and psychologically. Lots of evidence suggests that
Speaker 1: social hierarchies allow us to coordinate groups have been the
Speaker 1: angels with non completely overlapping interests in a more effective way.
Speaker 1: Hierarchies are clutched when a bunch of us try to
Speaker 1: pull off something big. Listening to Zach reminded me of
Speaker 1: a filmmaker friend, Lucian, who directed a music video for
Speaker 1: one of my singles, and it was like this last minute,
Speaker 1: little budget thing elusion wrote in a couple of film
Speaker 1: friends to crew and their girlfriends generously agreed to help,
Speaker 1: and we plan to like right around shopping carts at
Speaker 1: a parking lot while lipstick totally goofy. But as soon
Speaker 1: as the cameras started speeding, Lucian stops using people's names,
Speaker 1: Like when he needs something, he just tails them by
Speaker 1: their role on set p A or I see or gather,
Speaker 1: and to them, this is clearly totally normal. When I
Speaker 1: asked him about it later, he laughed and said he
Speaker 1: forgot how weird that might look from the outside, but
Speaker 1: that the rigid structure was actually part of what attracted
Speaker 1: at him to film in the first place. It provides
Speaker 1: order to this big community of freelance artists and technicians
Speaker 1: that need to perform their jobs essentially interchangeably, and film
Speaker 1: is a relatively new medium, he reminded me, so that
Speaker 1: strict hierarchy just sort of emerged to make it all possible.
Speaker 1: But yes, it was funny when he thought about it,
Speaker 1: that he was shouting PA to get the attention of
Speaker 1: the woman that he'd be going home with later. On
Speaker 1: a proper movie set, people might be hoping to be
Speaker 1: recognized for their skills and then promoted on the next
Speaker 1: shoot the assistant director with an eye on the director's chair.
Speaker 1: All individuals compete for status, pursue some social influence or
Speaker 1: some social rank. We all can't strive to be the
Speaker 1: next Lebron James. We know we all can't strive to
Speaker 1: be the next nuclear physicist. But everyone can find some
Speaker 1: domain in which they can compete for status. And I
Speaker 1: think that is a universal feature of who we are.
Speaker 1: Why just built in, like, what is this appetite for status?
Speaker 1: So by finding some domain in which we can develop
Speaker 1: some expertise, it makes you a valuable social partner. I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna allow you to develop that social capital. And
Speaker 1: if you can do that, then you'll be more likely
Speaker 1: to survive, have greater well being survived, and reproduce. So
Speaker 1: I think that's part of it. The motive to form
Speaker 1: hierarchies maybe universal, but as we've heard, the resultant structures
Speaker 1: look really different around the world. One of the most
Speaker 1: formalized institutional versions of social stratification is the cast system
Speaker 1: of South Asia. I'm aside that many economists and Ashoka University.
Speaker 1: When you meet someone on the street, can you tell
Speaker 1: immediately what cast that prison is from. No, you cannot.
Speaker 1: For example, in urban India, you get into the metro
Speaker 1: commuter train and you would not be able to tell
Speaker 1: looking at people which costs they belong to. Absolutely not.
Speaker 1: A Shweeny lives in Delhi and she wrote a book
Speaker 1: called The Grammar of Cast. There isn't a straightforward counterpart
Speaker 1: for cast in the West. It's not quite like race
Speaker 1: or class, though there are overlaps. Cast is something you're
Speaker 1: born into, something that can't be changed, even if your
Speaker 1: circumstances do like blood type. And there are thousands of
Speaker 1: jetty or individual cast designations, and historically each was linked
Speaker 1: to a particular vocation priest or warrior, builder, farmer. The
Speaker 1: system is ancient, but it's very much survived in modern India,
Speaker 1: even if it functions less visibly than it used to.
Speaker 1: A lot of contemporary modern occupations have no cost counterpart.
Speaker 1: There is no cost of dentists or rocket scientists or
Speaker 1: nuclear scientists, graphic designers, so if you want to encountered
Speaker 1: a graphic designer, you wouldn't know what costs they belonged to.
Speaker 1: But it still matters. Families aim to marry within their
Speaker 1: own cast, and when people apply for jobs, private employers
Speaker 1: try to suss out the cast of the applicants. The
Speaker 1: system is culturally pervasive in South Asia. Some Muslim and
Speaker 1: Christian communities and that part of the world have cast structures.
Speaker 1: But the philosophical roots of the system connect to the
Speaker 1: religious concept of reincarnation. And so what you are today
Speaker 1: it must be because you're either being rewarded for being
Speaker 1: good in the past life of you are being punished
Speaker 1: for being bad in the past life. It's got my
Speaker 1: basically in that world view, it would then follow that
Speaker 1: the people born into the most empoverished and disrespected casts
Speaker 1: somehow deserve it. The most severe consequences of the system
Speaker 1: are born by those that were historically regarded as untouchable.
Speaker 1: Untouchability is a set of practices that deems any interaction
Speaker 1: with a certain group of people polluting. If they had
Speaker 1: to cross the street in the village, they would have
Speaker 1: to take their shoes off if they were wearing any
Speaker 1: shoes at all, so that their footwear doesn't pollute the grounds, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: So it was the most degrading experience of living. What
Speaker 1: is the source of that? It's the occupations that these
Speaker 1: groups were doing so basically everything that deals with dead
Speaker 1: animals or per sins or excreta of any bodily fluid
Speaker 1: things that are literally dirty. All of those occupations were
Speaker 1: considered untouchable because these occupations were considered impure. But India's
Speaker 1: Constitution of nineteen change that untouchability has been deemed illegal
Speaker 1: in independent India. Well on paper itegal, but many, many
Speaker 1: people still practice untouchability. Discrimination is rampant, unapologetic, and totally
Speaker 1: over it. A teacher might send an untouchable boy to
Speaker 1: sit behind in the class and say, what are you
Speaker 1: doing here? You know you're going to grow up and
Speaker 1: become a sweeper. Why do you need to get educated?
Speaker 1: There is documentary evidence where students who belong to untouchable groups,
Speaker 1: boys and girls, are made to clean toilets, a job
Speaker 1: that janitors in school should be doing, not children. Members
Speaker 1: of casts that were considered untouchable often call themselves dallets,
Speaker 1: which means oppressed, and it's a term of pride. But
Speaker 1: evidence of the continued depression is everywhere. Often on roadside
Speaker 1: stalls that sell t you will see that there are
Speaker 1: two kinds of tumblers kept there. There are some inferior tumblers,
Speaker 1: and everybody knows that these tumblers are for the formerly
Speaker 1: untouchable groups, and someone breaking the unstated codes risks violence.
Speaker 1: He could just get beaten up. It happens literally every day.
Speaker 1: So cast based violence is all pervasive for forgetting your
Speaker 1: place in society, and sexual violence against the women by
Speaker 1: upper cast men is also a way of showing the
Speaker 1: lists where they belong. You better not forget your position,
Speaker 1: otherwise will humiliate your women. Today, dalets are organizing campaigning
Speaker 1: for fair treatment, building a dalt middle class, which of
Speaker 1: course comes with its own resentments and complications. Do you
Speaker 1: think the caste system reveals something about out human nature,
Speaker 1: not just about India or South Asia. Yeah, many of
Speaker 1: us benefit from inequality, and whether we are consciously aware
Speaker 1: of that or not, we wouldn't be desperate to change
Speaker 1: the system that would take away many of our benefits.
Speaker 1: It may not happen in my lifetime, but hopefully, you know,
Speaker 1: we will see strives to us day equality. Back to Chenyang,
Speaker 1: the second or four daughters who grew up hidden from
Speaker 1: the authorities, big changes would in fact happen in her lifetime,
Speaker 1: but will rejoin her story where we left it when
Speaker 1: shen Yang was a little girl, so in my family
Speaker 1: household registration, I don't exist. To attend school, however, children
Speaker 1: needed a household registration document, so the aunt and uncle
Speaker 1: that chen Yang was living with I bought the document
Speaker 1: from a distant relative named wun Ying, as she herself
Speaker 1: was buying someone else's a document that would register her
Speaker 1: in a big city, which would give her more opportunities
Speaker 1: in her own education. To use wun Yang's papers, shen
Speaker 1: Yang had to pretend the details written on it were
Speaker 1: her own, including her age and birthday. They changed my
Speaker 1: birthday to night four, so by law and miss Huang's
Speaker 1: niece and I don't have parents, shen Yan's teachers called
Speaker 1: her by the other girl's name in school. When she
Speaker 1: got a driver's license, it was printed with the other
Speaker 1: girl's name, and when she was married, the other girl's
Speaker 1: birthday was read out loud at the wedding. And Shenyong
Speaker 1: started to write a book about what her life has
Speaker 1: been like as an excess child. And none of us
Speaker 1: tell our own life stories with academic terms like elevated
Speaker 1: social rank. But shen Yang's position in the social hierarchy
Speaker 1: does look different now. There were people who used to
Speaker 1: look down upon me. You want to publish a book?
Speaker 1: Who do you think you are? Status is so often
Speaker 1: informed by old forces and actors ideas about class, race, gender.
Speaker 1: But this strange rule that's so defined Shen Young's position
Speaker 1: in society was enacted only a few years before she
Speaker 1: was born, and then it evaporated in the government started
Speaker 1: to relax the one child policy, and then last year
Speaker 1: two thousand twenty one, on May the thirty one, the
Speaker 1: government released the New Potter City allow every couple to
Speaker 1: have three children. How is your status different now the
Speaker 1: one child policy is over. You live in a big city.
Speaker 1: You have published a super rad book that has been
Speaker 1: translated into at least one other language. People think, oh,
Speaker 1: she's a writer now, because before I was nobody. I
Speaker 1: don't want to be famous. I just want to tell
Speaker 1: a story that is worth teddy. But of course, no
Speaker 1: shift in policy can retroactively revise a childhood and a
Speaker 1: comment she read online particularly resonated with Chenille. Once the
Speaker 1: New Potter says out the sky I off Guangjo has
Speaker 1: stuned our som immediately, and it's really havin It's the
Speaker 1: tears of the eighties and Manetes generation. Human hierarchies help
Speaker 1: us collaborate on goals we'd never be able to achieve
Speaker 1: on our own. They can also minimize conflict by establishing
Speaker 1: clear roles and expectations, and of course, sometimes they can
Speaker 1: simply help people in powers stay that way at the
Speaker 1: expense of those without the means to topple the pyramid.
Speaker 1: Our hierarchical rules are sometimes codified boss versus assistant, mother
Speaker 1: versus friend, and sometimes they're fluid. The homie whom majored
Speaker 1: in film studies gets to pick the movie. The foodie
Speaker 1: picks the place to order in. I am technically writing
Speaker 1: this in my own corner office, but only that I
Speaker 1: am sitting in a corner of my apartment, and wherever
Speaker 1: I am working is functionally rendered an office. Now, when
Speaker 1: I think back on that kid bragging about a dad,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit more sympathy. We're all, in some sense,
Speaker 1: little Charlotte Magne's and Charlie Mindy's trying to earn some respect,
Speaker 1: so we've got something to offer. The trick is to
Speaker 1: eke out some space for yourself without pushing someone else overboard.
Speaker 1: Years ago, after the death of a family friend, rocked
Speaker 1: my world pretty hard. I went to India and stood
Speaker 1: for a long time at the burning gods, watching the
Speaker 1: recently dead be incinerated in the open air by carefully
Speaker 1: tended fires. And I loved India. The beauty and the
Speaker 1: drama move me. Staring into the fires, I was brought
Speaker 1: back to myself by a man. I hadn't heard. Approach
Speaker 1: you know cast, he asked. I told him that I did,
Speaker 1: and he explained he was a dom, a member of
Speaker 1: the untouchable cast that for generations and generations lit the
Speaker 1: funeral pyres. The low cast bodies were burned right on
Speaker 1: the sand, he explained, but where the high cast ones
Speaker 1: were burned, they could afford sandalwood. And he gestured for
Speaker 1: me to inhale deep to note how good the high
Speaker 1: cast fires smell. When we parted, we were both covered
Speaker 1: in a fine layer of ash, partly the remains of
Speaker 1: the deceased and status as sandal would perfume still rising
Speaker 1: from the fires. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service
Speaker 1: and American Public media co production with I Heart Media.
Speaker 1: It's hosted by me Jessa. Find me online at Tessa
Speaker 1: on Instagram and Dussa Darling on Twitter Next time, I'm
Speaker 1: deeply human. We're talking about all your stuff, about the
Speaker 1: human impulse to acquire, collect even horde. Is that impulse
Speaker 1: driven by modern marketing or by older, deeper forces. Meet
Speaker 1: me at the junk drawer for our next little chat