March 14, 2013
Anthropology 101
Dr.Tovar
As far back as time goes many old cultures adapted a lifestyle of hunting and gathering food for themselves in order to survive. This was known as a foraging and it is one of the oldest methods of survival for small groups of tribes everywhere. However, this method had its good days and bad days. Sometimes hunters could bring back enough food to last them for a few days at a time, and then sometimes they wouldn’t find anything at all. So, the bond of kinship began to form amongst the tribe. The premise of a kinship bond was to share your goods and food with someone less fortunate. For example, in the San tribe if a group of hunters went out and only some came back with food, the other hunters would share some of their spoils as to help one another out. So as you can see and will find out, this lifestyle and kinship bond has the ability to help the San tribes prosper a long time. The San tribes of southern Africa live in the Kalahari Desert and have so for a long time thriving through foraging. Their concepts and principals of kinship ties are so straightforward and understandable that it is easy to see why they have flourished for centuries. Specific examples of kinship are shown through how this tribe thinks, how they act, and how they live their lives. When it comes to living day by day, the San use their women to gather all sorts of berries, nuts, and fruits to bring to eat while the men go and bring back the meat. Although they only gather what they need, sometimes they have a little excess and usually share this excess with less fortunate hunters as I mentioned earlier.
Now how these tribes think is really unique. Every member in any tribe thinks for themselves and is never forced or has anything forced onto them. Personal autonomy rules the lives of these tribes. So let’s say someone in tribe doesn’t like someone in the tribe, or has family in another tribe elsewhere, that person is free to move about his own way with no interference from anybody else. Another great way these tribes think applies to their hunting techniques. Usually is you kill something, it belongs to you cause you put in the work. However with this tribe, as long as you made the weapon that killed the animal, then everything belongs to you. But if you didn’t, and someone else made the weapon and you are just using it, then whatever is killed by that weapon belongs to the person responsible for making such weapon.
As for how these tribes act is also quite remarkable. As I stated before, these tribes share everything with other people in the tribe. As it is mainly based off of kinship with others, this also is a principal of reciprocation, or “I do for you cause you would do for me” mentality. Basically someone in the tribe is showing a measure of generosity on his own accord knowing that if they were in the same position, someone would do the same for them. Another trait on how these tribes act is the ability for them to just pick up and leave a temporary settlement and make a new one elsewhere. This principal draws back to survival tactics based on the knowledge of the land and where to hunt and where all the sources of water and not using all the resources up at one time.
In modern day society, these principals do not exist anymore. Even though with all the technology and advances in every aspect of life, such easy and understandable ways of life escape the people. Where the San would scour the land and migrate everywhere, modern day people would rather settle in a single place and use up all resources until nothing is left. When it comes to the principals of kinship and reciprocity, the San were amazing at trading and making friends and knew how to be generous at times. In this modern day, there are a few who are avid hunters and can take care of themselves, but majority of people rely on others to grow food and buy from a consumer and are more co-dependent rather than self-dependent. As for generosity, that is a trait that is nonexistent to many. People in the modern day will hardly give away any excess out of generosity or kinship; rather they would try to make a profit from someone else to get what they want.
For ages tribes everywhere around the world have thrived on simple and basic principles that governed how they work, how they hunt, how they coincide with others, and how they survived. However, these concepts are slowly dying out and these tribes are being wiped out by modern day governments. If more people today would value some of these traits that have helped many survive over centuries at a time, then just maybe we wouldn’t have as many problems as we do now.