The Old Way
Dec. 18th, 2008 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alonewiththemoonSometimes you pick up a book that turns out to be not what you thought it was at all, but rather something better. I am reading such a book now, The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. I spotted the book on the remainder shelf at the Harvard Book Store, and knowing that Elizabeth Marshall Thomas had written books about animal behavior (The Hidden Life of Dogs and The Tribe of the Tiger, most famously), I picked it up. It turned out to be about the Bushmen* of the Kalahari, and I was quite surprised to realize that she was one of *the* Marshalls who packed up their family and headed for the Kalahari in the 1950s. Despite the fact that none of them (at that time, at least) were professional anthropologists, they ended up having a profound impact on both the anthropology of the area and the field of anthropology in general. Lorna Marshall's book Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman is a classic introductory text to ethnography--I taught that book as a TA, and even then had no idea Lorna wasn't an anthropologist herself but rather a retired English teacher/housewife/community organizer (fascinating obit about her). Then-teenage son John Marshall became a pioneer of ethnographic film, and his films about !Kung hunting have also become intro to anthro course staples (if you've ever seen a film in which a group of hunters hit a giraffe with a poisoned arrow and then track it for days until it dies, then you've seen one of his films). The father of the family, Lawrence Marshall, did not as far as I know go on to write anything, but he helped the !Kung groups that they worked with maintain their economic independence as much as possible, and became a legal champion of their rights. When they first arrived, it was still quasi-legal for white farmers to kidnap and enslave groups of !Kung and force them to work on their farms, on the rationale that it was civilizing them, and his protests and political connections helped put an emphatic stop to that.
So The Old Way is partly a memoir of Elizabeth's experience as a young woman (about 19, I think--graduated from high school, and her parents considered traveling to Africa to live in the Kalahari more important than going to college, more power to them) in a profoundly new world trying to make sense of it all, and partly a paean to how human beings can fit seamlessly into the natural environment in what she calls the old way, a way dating back to the earliest hominids and beyond. As a memoir, of course it is gripping. The bonds among family members are obvious, but it is more of an account of the time that Elizabeth spent out among the !Kung, facing challenges to her assumptions about how the world works and how human beings adapt to that world. Her accounts of her relationships with various !Kung individuals brings out their personalities in a way that your standard ethnography does not, and one sees the photos reproduced in the book, photos that one has seen countless times before, in a new light, because one is looking at the faces of a woman's friends, not specimens or illustrations. Throughout, Elizabeth emerges as the young person I think we all wish we could be/were, intrepid and open to any experience.
As a paean to the old way, I have to admit that I was at first skeptical about whether the !Kung were being romanticized into some representation of the distant past, and whether Elizabeth** was not making too many assumptions about how early hominids and primates lived based on what she was seeing in front of her. I also wondered whether using the same sorts of observational techniques she used for dogs and cats on people was anthropomorphizing the animals or reducing the humans to something, for lack of a better term, subhuman. As the book goes on, however, I find she has thought of all the criticisms that I can come up with, and addresses them head on. Ultimately I am finding that the book stands very well as a portrait of how human beings are evolved creatures that fit into an environment in a certain way, and how that way does not have to involve technology and the "higher" levels of civilization from horticulturalists on up. She has great respect for the intelligence and observational skills of the !Kung, who must know every detail of their environment, and even seem to know things that they could not possibly know, such as how to extract poison for their arrows from a particular species of grub that is so toxic, the act of extracting the poison is quite dangerous. One can be killed even by smoke from a fire in which grub carcasses are disposed of, yet people know that the flesh of an animal killed by this poison is safe to eat. When asked how they know these things, the hunters reply it is what they have been taught. Although the hunters are men, in most species of animals the young model their behavior on their mother's, as she is the one who stays with them, and so Elizabeth characterizes humanity as a long line of mothers and daughters holding hands, physical form changing over the eons but the one constant the passing on of knowledge. It is a rather beautiful image and one she returns to again and again in the book.
I'm in the middle now of a couple of chapters on the interactions of lions and people in the bush, and here it is very effective that Elizabeth uses the same language to talk about lion behavior and human behavior. She does not at all attribute the same motives to lions and people, apart from basic desire for survival, but she looks at the behavior of each from their own point of view. Why does coming into a camp in the middle of the night, roaring for a couple of hours and then leaving without eating anybody make sense to a lion? One must think about it from a lion's perspective to understand. Elizabeth doesn't claim to know for certain what a lion is thinking, but she makes a good case. It was very interesting that the band of !Kung that her family lived with had experienced only one lion-caused fatality for as long as anybody could remember (and that's a long time back, generations, in a hunter-gatherer society), and that was of a young girl who had lost the use of her legs and had to drag herself around, so that the lion may not have realized she was human. Leopards and hyenas would certainly prey on people if they could, but these !Kung and the lions had a relatively untroubled relationship. The !Kung said it was because they did not trouble the lions; they did not hunt them or otherwise cause trouble for them, apart from occasionally driving them off a kill (by talking to them, amazingly enough, no violence involved). Other bands of !Kung were in more direct conflict with lions, especially those who had domesticated animals such as cattle or donkeys that lions saw as food, and would harm lions if they could, or they lived in areas where other tribes or Europeans would hunt lions and so the local lions saw humans as enemies. Did the lions really understand that there was this balance at Nyae Nyae? Maybe, maybe not. But what the lions did have was a pattern of behavior that involved not eating human beings, and since they had no reason to change that pattern, they did not, lion offspring learning from lion parents so that the pattern extends over generations. I wish I could remotely convey the eloquence and tension of these chapters, the intermixing of reflections on human and animal behavior with recollections of lions in the camp and encounters in the bush that must have been quite terrifying for a 19-year-old from Cambridge, MA. (and as a practical matter, I now know that if you are ever faced by a lion who hasn't made up its mind to eat you, the best thing to do is to talk to it calmly and respectfully, and sidle away at an oblique angle)
Not having finished the book yet, I can't say where it is going. Nowhere good, I would imagine, knowing what bits and pieces that I do about the region's history. But as I say, it is a paean, almost a religious text in certain ways, and unapologetically so. One could call this an anthropologist's Genesis, and one wouldn't be far wrong. I am at least as guilty as Elizabeth might be of any projecting, because I can see myself in this woman, scientific yet in awe of the world around her, an anthropologist who sees human beings in a continuum with animals, a woman who learns to live with lions outside the tent at night. I wish I could have done all this, but since I haven't, I am glad that I can read her account.
*Although Elizabeth Marshall Thomas makes an argument for using the term Bushmen on the basis that the people use it for themselves and see no dishonor in it, I think I've been too indoctrinated against the term to use it, any more than I could say Eskimo when I meant Inuit, hence my use of !Kung.
**Interestingly, as I first typed this, I switched to calling the author by her last name here rather than her first, as I switched from discussion of the memoir to discussion of her science. I decided to change it back to her first name as it is, after all, the same person.
Holiday party today, woohoo!
So The Old Way is partly a memoir of Elizabeth's experience as a young woman (about 19, I think--graduated from high school, and her parents considered traveling to Africa to live in the Kalahari more important than going to college, more power to them) in a profoundly new world trying to make sense of it all, and partly a paean to how human beings can fit seamlessly into the natural environment in what she calls the old way, a way dating back to the earliest hominids and beyond. As a memoir, of course it is gripping. The bonds among family members are obvious, but it is more of an account of the time that Elizabeth spent out among the !Kung, facing challenges to her assumptions about how the world works and how human beings adapt to that world. Her accounts of her relationships with various !Kung individuals brings out their personalities in a way that your standard ethnography does not, and one sees the photos reproduced in the book, photos that one has seen countless times before, in a new light, because one is looking at the faces of a woman's friends, not specimens or illustrations. Throughout, Elizabeth emerges as the young person I think we all wish we could be/were, intrepid and open to any experience.
As a paean to the old way, I have to admit that I was at first skeptical about whether the !Kung were being romanticized into some representation of the distant past, and whether Elizabeth** was not making too many assumptions about how early hominids and primates lived based on what she was seeing in front of her. I also wondered whether using the same sorts of observational techniques she used for dogs and cats on people was anthropomorphizing the animals or reducing the humans to something, for lack of a better term, subhuman. As the book goes on, however, I find she has thought of all the criticisms that I can come up with, and addresses them head on. Ultimately I am finding that the book stands very well as a portrait of how human beings are evolved creatures that fit into an environment in a certain way, and how that way does not have to involve technology and the "higher" levels of civilization from horticulturalists on up. She has great respect for the intelligence and observational skills of the !Kung, who must know every detail of their environment, and even seem to know things that they could not possibly know, such as how to extract poison for their arrows from a particular species of grub that is so toxic, the act of extracting the poison is quite dangerous. One can be killed even by smoke from a fire in which grub carcasses are disposed of, yet people know that the flesh of an animal killed by this poison is safe to eat. When asked how they know these things, the hunters reply it is what they have been taught. Although the hunters are men, in most species of animals the young model their behavior on their mother's, as she is the one who stays with them, and so Elizabeth characterizes humanity as a long line of mothers and daughters holding hands, physical form changing over the eons but the one constant the passing on of knowledge. It is a rather beautiful image and one she returns to again and again in the book.
I'm in the middle now of a couple of chapters on the interactions of lions and people in the bush, and here it is very effective that Elizabeth uses the same language to talk about lion behavior and human behavior. She does not at all attribute the same motives to lions and people, apart from basic desire for survival, but she looks at the behavior of each from their own point of view. Why does coming into a camp in the middle of the night, roaring for a couple of hours and then leaving without eating anybody make sense to a lion? One must think about it from a lion's perspective to understand. Elizabeth doesn't claim to know for certain what a lion is thinking, but she makes a good case. It was very interesting that the band of !Kung that her family lived with had experienced only one lion-caused fatality for as long as anybody could remember (and that's a long time back, generations, in a hunter-gatherer society), and that was of a young girl who had lost the use of her legs and had to drag herself around, so that the lion may not have realized she was human. Leopards and hyenas would certainly prey on people if they could, but these !Kung and the lions had a relatively untroubled relationship. The !Kung said it was because they did not trouble the lions; they did not hunt them or otherwise cause trouble for them, apart from occasionally driving them off a kill (by talking to them, amazingly enough, no violence involved). Other bands of !Kung were in more direct conflict with lions, especially those who had domesticated animals such as cattle or donkeys that lions saw as food, and would harm lions if they could, or they lived in areas where other tribes or Europeans would hunt lions and so the local lions saw humans as enemies. Did the lions really understand that there was this balance at Nyae Nyae? Maybe, maybe not. But what the lions did have was a pattern of behavior that involved not eating human beings, and since they had no reason to change that pattern, they did not, lion offspring learning from lion parents so that the pattern extends over generations. I wish I could remotely convey the eloquence and tension of these chapters, the intermixing of reflections on human and animal behavior with recollections of lions in the camp and encounters in the bush that must have been quite terrifying for a 19-year-old from Cambridge, MA. (and as a practical matter, I now know that if you are ever faced by a lion who hasn't made up its mind to eat you, the best thing to do is to talk to it calmly and respectfully, and sidle away at an oblique angle)
Not having finished the book yet, I can't say where it is going. Nowhere good, I would imagine, knowing what bits and pieces that I do about the region's history. But as I say, it is a paean, almost a religious text in certain ways, and unapologetically so. One could call this an anthropologist's Genesis, and one wouldn't be far wrong. I am at least as guilty as Elizabeth might be of any projecting, because I can see myself in this woman, scientific yet in awe of the world around her, an anthropologist who sees human beings in a continuum with animals, a woman who learns to live with lions outside the tent at night. I wish I could have done all this, but since I haven't, I am glad that I can read her account.
*Although Elizabeth Marshall Thomas makes an argument for using the term Bushmen on the basis that the people use it for themselves and see no dishonor in it, I think I've been too indoctrinated against the term to use it, any more than I could say Eskimo when I meant Inuit, hence my use of !Kung.
**Interestingly, as I first typed this, I switched to calling the author by her last name here rather than her first, as I switched from discussion of the memoir to discussion of her science. I decided to change it back to her first name as it is, after all, the same person.
Holiday party today, woohoo!
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Date: 2008-12-18 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-19 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-19 10:20 pm (UTC)Good to know ;)