I read it this morning too, on the way out the door.
There is key passage, where an anthropologist arranges common items in front of his group and asked them to arrange the items that are associated with each other. The respondants put items that are functionally related together like a knife and a potato. Very cool.
Examples very much like the above were used in my anthro courses to illustrate differences in htinking, language, perception and culture, in order to introduce the idea that differences amoung peoples imply a much more relativistic human world than we are acustomed to thinking about. This idea in turn was used to note that our own pre-conceived ideas are not necessarily objectively fabricated, but rather predicated on similar, perhaps misunderstandings about the world and other people.
It took a long time to understand the subtlty and implication of some of these ideas coming out of cultural anthro back in the 60s. This was pretty revolutionary stuff, because it ultimately called into question the nature of scientific and technological truths that we all grew up believing. ...
Of course the article sure didn't delve into these latter possibilities. But if you want to rattle some apparently stubborn minds, you could try an experiment like the above for your friends, then show them a different way to arrange items along functional, or spatial, or even temporal associations, to illustrate their own preconception of arrangement by linguistic based associational categories like potato goes with celery as `vegtable', isn't the only way to creat an associative mapping.
CG