Kalahari
Emily Holbrook
Ivy Tech Community College Franklin

THE ABSTRACT The !Kung Bushmen tribe was all about working together. The tribe had an anthropologist named Richard Lee come and study their tribe. The tribe did not really like home much because he was wealthy and did not share it with anybody else in the tribe. The Bushmen tribe was an example of an organic solidarity, which means, social cohesion based on the dependence individuals have on each other in societies. The tribe is all dependent on each other, as in the food they hunted became the whole tribes. Richard Lee did not show organic solidarity at all he was independent for just himself and his wife. He shared tobacco and medical supplies but that was about it.

Kalahari In the article, “ Eating Christmas in the Kalahari” by Richard Lee, he shares with us about his experience living with the !Kung Bushmen for three years. Richard Lee is a social anthropologist who was studying the !Kung Bushmen’s hunting-and-gathering society. The !Kung Bushmen worked together to teach Richard lee humility and social interdependence believing that no man is an island. Equality is maintained throughout the Bushmen’s tribe through the enforcement of humility; therefore no one is given a chance to think they are superior to others, which sustains the sharing way of the Bushmen’s. The !Kung Bushmen cultural tradition is for a member to slaughter an ox for the community to share at feast time during Christmas. Richard needed to show his appreciation for the tribes cooperation for the past three years he spent with them, so he offered to furnish the ox for the Christmas feast. He looked all through December then finally ten days before the holiday he found the perfect ox for the feast. The ox was five feet high, with a five-foot span of horns, and weighed about 1,200 pounds. With the astonishing size and mass of the ox, Richard figured there would be at least four pounds of meat for every man, woman, and child. This would be plenty to feed the Bushmen’s tribe for the Christmas feast. Once the tribe saw the ox, Richard became the laughing stock of the community. One woman said’ “Big, yes, but old. And thin. Everybody knows there’s no meat on that old ox. What did you expect us to eat off of it, the horns”(Lee, 1969)? Richards’s sprits dropped rapidly as the day went on. In his article, he expressed his feelings as, “ I went around that day feeling as though I had bought a lemon of a used car”(Lee 1969). Richard searched for a suitable ox as a replacement, however, with no other candidate available he decided to use the big black ox he had bought. He was very curious as to how the ox was going to look when butchered and if there would be plenty of fat. He was also concerned that there might be a fight. U!au stated in the article that, “Someone is sure to accuse another of taking too much or hogging all the choice pieces”(Lee 1969). The ox was butchered and served at the feast. The ox was plenty for the community to have all the meat they desired. He then learned that the tribe had been kidding with him about the ox being too “thin” and “old”. The true meaning of the joke was that the Bushmen would not accept a person who would brag about his hunt and they feared that a person with too much pride might someday kill someone. Even though Lee had lived with the tribe for three years observing what they thought and how they organized their social relationships, he had made no contribution other than the handouts of medical supplies and tobacco. He occasionally withheld tobacco for a day or two when someone did not cooperate. In Richard Lees article, “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari” he stated, “In short I was a perfect target for the charge of arrogance and for the Bushmen tactic of enforcing humility”(1969). Offering one black ox at Christmas did not justify a years worth of liberal handouts of medical supplies and tobacco. The !Kung Bushmen tribe was acutely aware of the disparity of wealth between the anthropologist who maintained a two-month supply of goods, and their meager day-to-day supply of goods. They lived a hunting and gathering lifestyle with the men providing meat, tools, and a supply of poison-tipped arrows and spears. As a hunting-gathering society, they were dependent on each other for survival. Hoarding and stinginess were frowned upon since the !Kung’s emphasis was on shared wealth for the tribe rather than on individual wealth. The Bushmen tribe considered Lee a stingy and hard-hearted miser. Their dependence on each other is an example of organic solidarity. Organic solidarity means social cohesion based on the dependence individuals have on each other in societies. Although Richard Lees journey comes to an end he had been taught an object lesson by the tribe. The lesson was unexpected and had hurt him in a vulnerable area. Something one-person considerers rude and undesirable may be seen as common social behavior to someone else. Enforcing humility ensured status equality among the people, thereby, avoiding arrogance from the hunters bringing in the most meat and expecting a larger cut of the game animal. All game animals where distributed equally to avoid tension among families. When it is all said and done Lee stated, “ I had to admire the Bushmen had played out the farce- collectively straight-faced to the end”(Lee, pg. 4).

References
Lee, R. (1969). The American museum of natural history. Eating Christmas in the Kalahari. Retrieved from http:// www. naturalhistory.html