BOLGATANGA, UPPER EAST REGION, Ghana—The kitten was making noise. It sounded like coughing. The kitten had vomited various parts of what was once a gecko—following its instincts: hunt, kill, and eat. But the results were strange. While he thought he knew how to eat the gecko, it turned out that he needed to learn to chew it a bit more first.
Instincts can be peculiar that way. Market day isn’t just on Saturdays. It’s every third day. Humans rely on sets of routine practices and concepts to get through their daily lives, even when they know they are operating within new contexts where they should expect differences. Just as the kitten was relying on what it thought it knew about hunting, killing, and eating, we rely on an understanding that market day corresponds to a repeating day of the week rather than a repeating number of days. These temporarily confounding...
