I mean a fight between Bushmen. There are many fierce ones here, and with such a small quantity of meat to distribute, how can you give everybody a fair share?
Someone is sure to accuse another of taking too much or hogging all the choice pieces. Then you will see what happens when some go hungry while others eat. The possibility of at least a serious argument struck me as all too real. I had witnessed the tension that surrounds the distribution of meat from a kudu or gemsbok kill, and had documented many arguments that sprang up from a real or imagined slight in meat distribution.
The owners of a kill may spend up to two hours arranging and rearranging the piles of meat under the gaze of a circle of recipients before handing them out. Convinced now of the gravity of the situation, I went in earnest to search for a second cow; but all my inquiries failed to turn one up. The Christmas feast was evidently going to be a disaster, and the incessant complaints about the meagerness of the ox had already taken the fun out of it for me.
Moreover, I was getting bored with the wisecracks, and after losing my temper a few times, I resolved to serve the beast anyway. If the meat fell short, the hell with it. In the Bushmen idiom, I announced to all who would listen:. If I have chosen one that is too old and too thin, we will eat it anyway and see if there is enough meat there to quiet the rumbling of our stomachs.
On hearing this speech, Ben! At dawn Christmas morning, instinct told me to turn over the butchering and cooking to a friend and take off with Nancy to spend Christmas alone in the bush. But curiosity kept me from retreating. I wanted to see what such a scrawny ox looked like on butchering, and if there was going to be a fight, I wanted to catch every word of it. Anthropologists are incurable that way. The great beast was driven up to our dancing ground, and a shot in the forehead dropped it in its tracks.
Then, freshly cut branches were heaped around the fallen carcass to receive the meat. Ten men volunteered to help with the cutting. This cut, which begins the butchering process for most large game, offers easy access for removal of the viscera.
But it also allows the hunter to spot-check the amount of fat on the animal. A fat game animal carries a white layer up to an inch thick on the chest, while in a thin one, the knife will quickly cut to bone. The first cut opened a pool of solid white in the black skin. The second and third cut widened and deepened the creamy white. Still no bone. It was pure fat; it must have been two inches thick. Are you out of your mind? This wreck is thin, sick, dead! So did everyone else. They rolled on the ground, paralyzed with laughter.
Everybody laughed except me; I was thinking. I ran back to the tent and burst in just as Nancy was getting up. They were kidding about it being too thin to eat. It was a joke or something. A put-on. Everyone is really delighted with it! If it had indeed been a joke, it had been an extraordinarily convincing one, and tinged, I thought, with more than a touch of malice as many jokes are.
Nevertheless, that it was a joke lifted my spirits considerably, and I returned to the butchering site where the shape of the ox was rapidly disappearing under the axes and knives of the butchers. The atmosphere had become festive.
We danced and ate that ox two days and two nights; we cooked and distributed fourteen potfuls of meat and no one went home hungry and no fights broke out. I had a growing feeling that something important had happened in my relationship with the Bushmen and that the clue lay in the meaning of the joke. Several days later, when most of the people had dispersed back to the bush camps, I raised the question with Hakekgose, a Tswana man who had grown up among the! Kung, married a! Kung girl, and who probably knew their culture better than any other non-Bushmen.
The animal was perfectly good and their jokes and wisecracks practically ruined the holiday for me. When I take my rifle and go hunting with them, if I miss, they laugh at me for the rest of the day. To them, the kill is always too small or too old or too thin; and as we sit down on the kill site to cook and eat the liver, they keep grumbling, even with their mouths full of meat. What a worthless animal!
They hate inequality or showing off, and shun formal leadership institutions. Yet politicians inclined to dismiss inequality in this way may do so at their peril. For the evidence of our hunting and gathering ancestors suggests we are hard-wired to respond viscerally to inequality.
But their contribution to our understanding of the human story is far more important than simply making us rethink our past. Until then, it had been widely believed that hunter gatherers endured a near-constant battle against starvation. By then, more than a half-century of land dispossession meant that, other than in a few remote areas, they formed a highly marginalised underclass eking out a living on the dismal fringes of an ever-expanding global economy.
I have been documenting their often traumatic encounters with modernity ever since. The importance of understanding how hunter-gatherers made such a good living has only recently come to light, thanks to a sequence of genomic studies and archaeological discoveries. These show that the broader Bushmen population referred to collectively as Khoisan are far older than we had ever imagined, and have been hunting and gathering continuously in southern Africa for well over , years.
If the success of a civilisation is judged by its endurance over time, this means the Khoisan are by far the most successful, stable and sustainable civilisation in human history. As bewildering as this process has been for them, it offers a unique, if ephemeral, double-perspective — of people who are part of a modern globalised economy yet excluded from full participation in it, and who are engaging with modernity with the hands and minds of hunter-gatherers. Taken together with new archaeological and genomic evidence, this brings fascinating insights into how to respond to some of the most pressing social, economic and environmental sustainability challenges we face today.
Anthropologists were forced to confront these questions as they witnessed the destruction and occupation of native nations. In Lewis Henry Morgan himself bravely raised these questions as he argued publicly that the Sioux had a right to defend themselves against George Custer and the Army of the United States at Little Bighorn. It makes sense that anthropology would be the first academic discipline in which women would occupy leading roles: Consider Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston.
Or consider Erna Gunther, the founding mother of the University of Washington anthropology department. Read her essential monograph on the First Salmon Ceremony, the key ritual that unites native peoples on the entire North Pacific rim from the Sacramento River to Korea. Or consider the important work of northwest science fiction writer Ursula le Guin, daughter of Alfred Kroeber—the anthropologist most responsible for the salvage ethnography of California native peoples.
Her widely published works put Boasian anthropology into dystopian worlds of empire, ethnocentrism, and traditional cultures. Some of my students have gone on to earn advanced degrees in anthropology doing powerful work on vehicle residence in Seattle, Lake Victoria fishing cultures, Muslim identity in the United States, and lactation practices in primates.
However, most of my students did not become anthropologists. Most of the community college students come from the kind of marginalized and oppressed worlds that are often the subjects of ethnography. For these students, the discipline provides tools which can further existential self-reflection.
Their autoethnographies of work, military, prisons and immigration help them realize what they already, in fact, know. This makes it more possible for them to act as historical subjects and to understand their ties with others. In this process, they educate me. Regardless of where you go with your anthropology degree, this field connects you with your species legacy.
That is valuable in itself. Some us will teach anthropology or do field research. All of us will take a more mindful perspective into whatever path we take. Resist that strain of enthusiastic anti-intellectualism so embedded in our American cultural unconscious and so dominant in mainstream mass media and what passes for political discourse.
I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. We cannot simply react to the horrific shootings in Orlando this morning with more surveillance and more weaponry. We need wisdom as well as technology. If you were paying attention when you took Anthropology , you should remember the!
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