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Conventionally one associates the experience of preliterate societies with prehistoric times. Arnold Toynbee has written: Nomadism is essentially a society without a history. Once launched on its annual orbit, the Nomadic horde revolves in it thereafter and might go on revolving for ever if an external force against which Nomadism is defenseless did not eventually bring the hordes ... life to an end. This force is the pressure of the sedentary civilizations round about. Malidoma Somé, an African ritualist living in the United States, has compared the preliterate culture of his native village with the culture he found in the West. Westerners, he observed, are always in a hurry to go somewhere, and, in the process, they lose touch with their spiritual roots. Malidoma noted that the people of his tribe, the Dagara people of West Africa, do not have a conception of history. Their world view is timeless. What happens now is important, not what has happened. If an important event takes place, it quickly passes into the realm of mythology.
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