One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a ‘Western’ town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity.
Destroys the illusion that Western Civilization is superior to all other ways of organizing society. Most of us have never considered how mindnumbingly monotonous European city life must have been - and in many ways still is!
