FAILURE AND INCOMPLETE TASKS

FUTURE REWARDS  

A noted American anthropologist, Edward Hall, dedicated to cross-cultural research, lived and worked with the Navaho and the Hopi on native American reservations. He noted that the Navaho and the Hopi had no conditioned drive for "closure". Hopi villages were full of unfinished houses, with beautifully built walls and windows but without a roof for years. Dams that should have been finished quickly were still incomplete after a year. Leaving a task uncompleted was not a sign of incompetence and failure.

Hall concluded, "To the Navaho the future was uncertain as well as unreal, and they were neither interested in nor motivated by 'future' rewards".