Peaceful Societies

The English language edition of Al-Ahram, a prominent Egyptian newspaper, published a brief photo essay last week about Gharb Sohail, a traditional Nubian community near Aswan. The village, with about 3,000 inhabitants, exposes visitors to a smattering of Nubian foods, crafts, culture, arts, and traditions.

The village of Gharb Sohail, on the west bank of the Nile (Photo b Hatem Moushir in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license) — The village of Gharb Sohail, on the west bank of the Nile (Photo by Hatem Moushir in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

To judge by the photos that accompany the article, the community is well-known for its colorfully painted private homes. Al-Ahram expressed enthusiasm for the place: “When visiting the village, you will feel that you are in a calm, natural paradise: the Nile, the mountains, the huge green areas.” The writer praised the cheerfulness, modesty, and generosity of the Nubians toward their visitors.

The traditional houses are constructed out of stone, sand, and clay, with arching roofs that are covered with stalks of reeds and grains. The people decorate the walls with flowers. Because of the ways they are built, the homes are cool naturally so they do not need air conditioning.

Doum fruit on a palm tree near Aswan (Photo by Rachid H on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Visitors to Gharb Sohail can enjoy the Nubian cuisine by tasting some breads that the people bake in their homes. They make dishes such as “fatta ads,” “tagen lahma,” and “Aswanian egg.” They drink a beverage made from the fruits of a palm tree called “doum,” which is quite popular in Egypt and, research shows, is rich in natural polyphenols and thus has many health benefits. Gharb Soheil is about 30 minutes by car from the train station in Aswan or 10 minutes from the Aswan International Airport. But to reach the village, which is on the opposite side of the Nile, visitors must take a motorboat or a felucca across the river.

The journalist for this article in Al-Ahram wrote many of the same things in praise of Gharb Sohail as a different travel piece back in early April. The village is at the edge of the Aswan metropolitan area but suffused enough with Nubian culture to entice tourists, including Egyptians who are interested in learning about their minority non-Arab society.

A project among the Fipa villages along the shores of Lake Tanganyika has improved the health of residents of the region, according to a news report last Wednesday. Although the reporter did not identify the people as being Fipa, most of the villagers along that portion of the lake are, in fact, members of that society.

A woman with her baby washing laundry in Lake Tanganyika (Photo by SuSanA Secreariat on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Dr. Boniphace Kasululu, the Medical Officer for the Rukwa Region of Tanzania, explained at an event last week that the project has supplied lakeshore villages with speedboats to take pregnant women in emergency situations to health centers. The need for such a service was dramatized five years ago. A very ill woman and her unborn fetus died in July 2012 along the lakeshore, in part because a hostile resort had refused to allow the boat she was traveling in to land so she could be taken to a health facility in time to save her life. News stories in August and November that year described the local outrage at the insensitivity of the lodge owners and their arrogant attitudes toward the health needs of the people. Equipping the lakeshore villages with their own speed boats would be a most effective response.

A major focus of the Rukwa Region health project has been to contain the spread of cholera and it seems to be benefiting a lot of people. It is supported by the government of Denmark through the Rukwa Diocese of the Moravian Church. Dr. Kasululu emphasized that the project is providing education to local people on how to control cholera.

Women getting unpolluted water at a village fountain near Lake Tanganyika (Photo by Julien Harneis on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Respice Mbalu, the coordinator of the project, said that the local death rate due to cholera had declined since the project was started in 2006 because health standards in the villages had improved significantly. The news report did not say what the specific improvements consisted of but since cholera is normally spread through drinking polluted water, one can presume that developing piping for clean water from sources away from the lake, which may serve as a reservoir for the cholera bacteria, adding chlorine to drinking water, and similar health measures may have been part of the project.

Mr. Mbalu said that the project had achieved 90 percent of its targets so far and it has reached a total 34 villages. The officials indicated that Phase 3 of the project will begin next year, but the news report did not indicate what they are hoping to improve next.

Kathleen Smythe, who did fieldwork among the Fipa people along the lakeshore, reported in her book Fipa Families (Smythe 2006) that health conditions along the shore of the vast lake were not all that great. “The lakeshore was home to many diseases, particularly malaria and smallpox,” she wrote (p.78-79). She mentioned that missionaries and children at a mission in the lakeshore community of Karema had died due to hepatitis, malaria, typhoid fever, diarrhea, beriberi, and so on. She did not mention cholera in the book, however.

A schoolgirl relaxing on a beach in Karema, Tanzania, part of the traditional Fipa territory (Photo by Dietmar Temps on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

In 1960, she added, all the school children in Karema were sent up onto the Ufipa Plateau to Sumbawanga, which had a healthier environment—the malaria and other diseases of the lakeshore were not a problem on the plateau. Food was easier to access in the larger town as well. Some of the people that Smythe interviewed said that they had been bothered a lot by the foods they had received at the mission in Karema but overall, she concluded, many of the students did find that their health and nutrition were better, in fact, at the mission than they had been in their villages.

The government of Nunavut recently organized a pilot program to train Inuit in a variety of skills that will qualify them as guides for adventurous tourists. The course, which lasted for two weeks and ended November 4, taught 5 men and 5 women such skills as piloting zodiacs from cruise ships, making landings in indigenous communities, and monitoring bears that might threaten visitors at heritage sites and during hiking excursions.

A view of polar bears on an ice flow, Northwest Passage Cruises with One Ocean Expeditions (Photo by Roderick Eime on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Robert Comeau, a 23-year old from Iqaluit, told Nunatsiaq News that he had been employed as a cultural interpreter on a cruise ship sailing through the Northwest Passage this past summer. He was deeply impressed with the historic sites they visited but he ended the voyage with a desire to do more. “As a young Inuit man, you want to be helping drive the boats, you want to be helping watch for bears, stuff you grew up doing, and get paid for it,” he said. He believes that people may come for the icebergs and polar bears, but “they remember the people when they leave.”

Completing the pilot program should allow him to do more guiding. Organized by the Nunavut Department of Economic Development and other government agencies, the program included first aid, marine emergency activities, using a VHF radio, handling firearms, operating small boats, and safety training. Randy Pittman from the Nunavut Fisheries and Marine Training Consortium, one of the sponsoring agencies, told the news service that all the training programs meet accepted industry standards.

A portrait of a young Inuit woman (Photo by tsaiproject on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Mr. Pittman added that the adventure tourism industry has, at present, an estimated 40 to 60 jobs available for young Inuit men and women. He said that while the recent coursework was all done in a classroom environment, in the future they’d like to be able to include more practical training sessions. There are about 50 people enrolled on a waiting list for future sessions of the course.

The Crystal Serenity, a large luxury vessel carrying over 1000 passengers, sailed through the Northwest Passage during the latter half of August last year. It made several stops in Inuit communities along the way and it gave wealthy passengers views of the Arctic coast and lots of ice. The news coverage of the voyage raised awareness of planners in Nunavut as to the realities of hosting mass tourism.

“Are we actually ready for this kind of thing?” asked Andrew Orawiec, a senior adviser for tourism development of the government of Nunavut. He said that it makes a better impression on the tourists when the guide tells them that his or her grandfather was born at the place they are visiting. Parks Canada, the Canadian government agency that manages the national parks, is also concerned about fostering economic development in communities that are near their properties.

A spokesperson for that agency, Munju Ravindra, told the news service that they are concerned with places that are near protected areas, such as Gjoa Haven, the community that is nearest to the sunken ships of the Franklin Expedition. Parks Canada developed an internship program along with Adventure Canada, a cruise operator, to train young Inuit in skills they will need in working with the hospitality industry. The report in Nunatsiaq News made it clear that training young Inuit for jobs in the growing tourist business is a priority for several agencies.

A community learning center in Malaysia serves to integrate, for some Semai children, formal academic classroom subjects with lessons about their traditional culture. A school day might begin with instruction in reading, writing, and math presented by their teacher, but it would be followed by the fun of learning to play the chentong, a musical instrument, or performances of a traditional dance called the sewang.

The town of Raub is fairly near Kampung Tual (Photo by tian yake on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A Malaysian news service last week published a report about the learning center, located in Kampung Tual, near the town of Raub in Pahang State. It focused on the values the staff members are trying to convey to the Semai kids. Called the Cenwaey Penaney, meaning “shoots of ingenuity” in the Semai language, the learning center serves about 100 children from two settlements in Kampung Tual known as A and B. It was opened in April 2014.

The leader of Kampung Tual A, Harun Siden, told the reporter that it was essential for the youths to understand their roots and their Semai identity. “Otherwise, they won’t know or they will forget who they are,” he said. He also serves as one of the teachers at the center most afternoons. He teaches the history, culture, and language of the Semai, along with sharing folk stories. He frequently holds his classes outdoors.

Some Semai children gathered around a big rock (Photo by tian yake on flickr, Creative Commons license)

The week before last, Harun took a group of kids to a riverbank where he told them one of the village folktales about a big rock. He told the journalist that the lessons he presents help instill in the children a stronger sense of self confidence, which he argued they will need when they leave the village. When they attend the local school, which is not in Kampung Tual, they sometimes are bullied and teased. “They don’t know how to defend themselves and they want to run away [from school]. We must teach them to defend themselves. They should not run,” he argued. As a child he was teased about his Orang Asli heritage.

The community center in Kampung Tual was started by a staff member of the Centre for Orang Asli Concerns, a Temuan woman named Jenita Engi, and the current teacher, Miwes Masital. According to Dr. Colin Nicholas, the Coordinator of COAC, Jenita got a diploma in early childhood education and wanted to start a bi-cultural program in an Orang Asli community. They took her idea to the Semai in Kampung Tual and, after several meetings, the people “embraced the idea,” Nicholas said. At first the initiators just proposed a preschool but it has since grown to include children ages 2 to 15.

The Semai use the crushed leaves of Blechnum orientale, a wild native herb, as a medicinal preparation to help heal abscesses (Photo by Lauren Gutierrez on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Nicholas told the reporter that it was important to adapt the academic curriculum to the perspectives and needs of the Semai. He added that similar programs have been started in other Orang Asli communities—the program in Kampung Tual is not the first. Jenita did the work to develop the structure of the school program to suit the perspective of the community. It was her decision, after talking with the villagers, to incorporate units on medicinal plants, folk tales, and traditional crafts in the curriculum.

Nicholas explained that the pedagogy of the Semai is quite different from that of mainstream Malaysia, where a geography teacher teaches geography and a science teacher teaches science. In contrast, in Kampung Tual, the village and the school are one and the same. Everybody teaches—elders, parents, and relatives. Anyone with a particular knowledge or skill will pass it along to all the children of the village.

A large group of Semai children (Photo by tian yake on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The community center was built by the people of Kampung Tual, with quarters for staff, a few classrooms, and a library. The students are given a daily meal in the facility. The center is staffed by three teachers, two assistants, two kitchen helpers, and a gardener. It is not intended as a replacement for the state-supported school but rather as a learning center that supplements it. It serves the needs of students in ways that the general school can’t do.

A nearby schoolteacher visited the learning center three or four months after it opened and she quickly spotted a difference in the children. They were more willing to participate, to talk, and to speak up She was curious as to why the change. After Nicholas analyzed the change, he decided that the major issue was one of trust—the kids trust the staff. “They trust their teachers because the teachers are from their own village or people they know,” he said.

Carrying water to a Semai garden (Screenshot from the video “Orang Asli Struggle for Land Rights, by Malaysiakini TV, Creative Commons license)

And it was the children who suggested the idea of growing vegetables at the center. They came up with the plan when it was explained to them that funds were running low. Miwes told the reporter that the children help the gardener in the vegetable patch. He added that the center is running short of funds since the major funding agency has ended its sponsorship. The Center for Orang Asli Concerns would doubtless appreciate hearing from readers who might have insights into sources of funding for the innovative community center and its school program.

In July 2014 some news stories focused on the opening of the community center in Kampung Tual a few months before. A very prominent sports figure, at the time the world’s foremost woman squash player, Nicol David, visited Kampung Tual.

She was quoted as saying about the community, “The villagers have been so warm and welcoming. They are so open and willing to learn. You can see that they’ve got so much potential and that if we were to just give them a little bit of support, they would then go the extra mile.” It is clear that her prediction was correct—they are going the extra mile for their school and its approach.

Anzara Anjum Khan wrote a piece for an Indian daily newspaper last week in which she emphasized that the situation for women in Ladakh is worse than she had thought. Ladakhi women are widely discriminated against, she found: they are often not given a share of their father’s or their husband’s properties. Furthermore, they are frequently left with nothing if their husbands, even after many years of marriage, decide to divorce them, leaving them with no resources with which to raise their children.

Thinlas Chorol on the right on a trek in Ladakh (Photo by Mrladakh in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Ms. Khan opened her article by interviewing Thinlas Chorol, the well-known founder of a trekking guides company in Ladakh, who expressed strong reservations about the place of women in Ladakhi society. Ms. Chorol, who may have read articles such as one in this website two years ago about her accomplishments and the tradition of gender equality fostered by the Ladakhi, was dismissive of such analyses. “Is it justified to say that women in Ladakh are enjoying liberty and equality only because we are not burnt for dowry or killed in the [womb],” she complained to the author.

The journalist piled on the facts to build her case. The Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, the governing body in the region, has 30 seats, of which only two are held by women. Rinchen Lamo, one of the women councilors, pointed out that the LAHDC has succeeded in addressing numerous important issues but the concerns of women are not among them. Even basic gender amenities such as separate public toilets for women, or separate cells for women in prisons, are not available in Ladakh. In her position on the Council, she is trying to advance the cause of women but is still waiting for results from male authorities.

A Ladakhi woman vendor selling food in a market (Photo by Steve Evans on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Ms. Lamo described her efforts on behalf of women. She has encouraged them to get involved in politics, to become part of the decision-making process, and to help change the situation. She also is working within the LAHDC to improve the security of Ladakhi women. “I need women of different walks to come on to one platform and work together for the empowerment of women,” she said.

Deachen Angmo, a 35-year old councilor in a local village council, complained that women work as hard, or harder, than men do. They take care of their families 24 hours of the day, do all the housework, take charge of community activities, serve on village governing councils as she does, and participate in the discussions—but they are frequently not allowed to make the decisions. Her words reflected her bitterness: “The work load is always on women whether it is in the family or in the village,” she said vehemently.

The SOS-Children’s Village in Choglamsar, a suburb of Leh, Ladakh (Photo by Daniela Hartmann for SOS-Children’s Village on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Another woman, Tsering Dolma, 62, from the village of Choglamsar, said basically the same things. The women organize the meetings of all the adults in the village and do all the work of the village council, but they are not part of the decision-making. She wondered why.

The journalist interviewed both the president and the vice-president of the Women’s Alliance of Ladakh, located in the town of Leh, the capital of the district. Murup Dolma, the president, said that Ladakhi women have tried to compete in elections but so far they have been unsuccessful. The reason is that the voters are reluctant to elect women to decision-making and policy-making positions. She feels a complete lack of support about that issue in the community.

A Ladakhi woman wearing a traditional hat (Photo by Christopher Michel in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Yangchan Dolma, the vice-president of the organization, was even more outspoken about conditions for women in Leh. “Things are changing in this small town—not for the better, but for the worse,” she said. She went on to say that the organization focuses on skill-building for village women in workshops that try to foster useful productive interactions and that seek to develop entrepreneurship skills.

Ms. Khan, the journalist, also interviewed a man, Oztsal Wangdus, the president of the local bar association, who blamed the situation, at least in part, on the women themselves. He cited the fact that three different women’s groups celebrated International Women’s Day with three different events in three different locations. “These groups should come together on one platform; after all, they are all working for the same cause,” he said. Furthermore, he blamed the women for not aggressively fighting to be elected.

But the article concluded with an observation made by Thinlas Chorol that Ladakhi women “need to think what they are going to leave behind for the coming generations.”

A village in the rural Isaan region of Northeast Thailand has been haunted by malevolent ghosts, the villagers believe, but fortunately they’ve been able to get help in exorcising the harmful spirits. An article last week in the South China Morning Post explained how the Rural Thai villagers came to believe their community was haunted—and what they did about it.

A young woman in Kalasin, Thailand (Photo by Larry Oien on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The residents in the 370 households in Ban Na Bong, a village in Nong Kung Si District, Kalasin Province of Isaan, hired a ghost catcher after a series of unexplained deaths alarmed the people that ghosts were causing the evil. The head of the district government, Wirat Tatcharee, on Monday last week got involved, asking health and livestock officials in the province to do health checks on all the humans and animals living in the afflicted community.

Mr. Wirat said that he wanted to boost the morale of the villagers, who were stressed by the perception that malevolent spirits, which they call phi pob, had invaded. The journalist explained that a phi pob is a form of ghost in Thailand that eats raw meat, particularly the internal organs of people and animals that it has invaded, thus killing them.

In the last few weeks, since the end of October, the people of Ban Na Bong have seen two men as well as several animals—buffaloes, dogs, and cats—die mysteriously. The deaths could only have been caused by phi pob. The people paid 124 baht (U.S. $3.74) per household to hire prominent ghost catchers to come into the village and catch the evil spirits.

A monk wards off ghosts (Photo by hewy on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The rite the ghost catchers, plus a monk and 20 aides, performed at the village at the beginning of last week took over two hours to perform. The ghost catchers felt they had caught 30 phi pob and forced them to move into bamboo tubes, which they had then burned. The villagers all felt better after the work of the ghost catchers had been completed. They surrounded their houses with strands of holy threads to scare away any remaining ghosts. District officials and police attended the ritual to make sure it went smoothly. The district chief said afterwards, “Everything went fine. I saw smiles on their faces.”

However, the following day, another man died suddenly in the village. But the district police said that there was no indication on his body of any assault and the district hospital confirmed that analysis. He had died of heart failure. His mother also said that her son had not died of an attack by a phi pob.

A ghost decoy in Thailand, meant to distract a husband from stealing female ghosts (Photo by Dan Weber on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Many scholarly works on rural Thailand discuss the popular Thai beliefs in spirits and ghosts, indicating that the folklore has been important in Rural Thai culture for a long time. John E. DeYoung (1955) wrote in his book Village Life in Modern Thailand that the spirits, which he called pi, were an essential part of the lives of the peasants and were frequently propitiated. Those spirits existed in many different forms, such as the spirits of the dead, the spirits of trees, the spirits of houses, and the spirits of a wide range of natural objects.

If the spirits were not effectively propitiated, he indicated, they could become evil. “Even the spirit of a dead parent can become a thing of evil,” he wrote (p.143). The author said that what he called “spirit doctors,” or spirit practitioners, were found in most rural villages. The villagers, particularly the ones in remote areas, went to them to have evil spirits exorcised out of people who had become ill. DeYoung described in some detail the practices of the spirit doctors in driving the evil pi out of sick people.

But Cornwel-Smith (2005), in his engaging and colorful book Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture, provided one of the best explanations of the place of superstition in Thailand’s society today. He explained that a gap has developed between the frazzled modern Thai people and the dwindling number of Buddhist monks. Contemporary Rural Thai, when faced with serious issues, frequently turn to the spirit world in the belief that that works better than the accepted virtues of Buddhism. The Thai will substitute the proven, practical value of the spirits for the wisdom of the holy monks in the temples.

An amazing 80 percent of the Thai people take the supernatural seriously and accept the stories of those who have experienced visitations. When dogs howl at night, they are seeing ghosts. Even sophisticated Thais, while they may discount superstitions, will still assuage the spirits “just in case.”

Ghosts at a festival in Loei Province, Isaan region of Thailand (Photo by Nachomaans in Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

There are over 40 different types of Thai ghosts, with variations in different regions of the country, and each incorporates a moral message. The evil spirits that possess living beings, which Cornwel-Smith called phii porb rather than phi pob, are the souls of the greedy; they are represented typically by ugly old crones, or witches. They tear apart livestock during the night.

Modern exorcisms are normally nonviolent affairs that are held to compassionately re-balance the energy in a community, to correct wrongs and to begin things again. They are conducted by lay spirit doctors or unorthodox monks. Cornwel-Smith noted that one held in 2003 in a village near Udon Thani, a city in Isaan, attracted 2,000 people. The monk and the teams of ghost catchers absorbed much of the budget of the village but after three hours they had caught 39 ghosts blamed for the premature deaths. The monk told the author, “Nine of them are strong willed phii porb [while] the rest are other ghosts and stray spirits (p.180).”

The Phi Ta Khon, the ghost mask parade in Loei Province of Thailand (Photo by Larry Oien on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

As Thailand has modernized, the Rural Thai people have increasingly sought answers from occult authority figures rather than from members of the social hierarchy. Belief in the phii suggests that social messages are welcome. Ghost stories impart the worth of living a healthy social life, the value in avoiding greed, the benefits of good hygiene—and the importance of not staying outside after dark. Ghosts are still present today in Rural Thailand and their messages have been integrated into the popular Thai culture of movies, television soap operas, and comics.

The Ju/’hoansi cherish their egalitarian traditions so strongly that they have a hard time assuming any leadership roles, yet they have one of the most successful civilizations in history. At least that is one of the central arguments made by James Suzman, an anthropologist who has been studying them for over 20 years. On October 29, The Guardian published an essay by him setting out his observations about the people and their ways.

Gemsbok, an important species of wildlife in the Kalahari Desert (Photo by Hans Stieglitz in Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

Suzman observed that the seemingly universal human trait to become envious of the successes of others is a way of expressing our discontents with a lack of equality. The Ju/’hoansi are opposed to any behavior that suggests such a lack. Their opposition to inequality helps build social cohesion, he argued, and it has been an important factor in strengthening their civilization for over 100,000 years.

Their traditional success has also been based on a mastery of their environment. They use over 150 plant species that they find in the Kalahari Desert and they trap or hunt successfully almost any animal that they encounter. They have a boundless confidence in the bounties available from the land. Because of their successes in living off the land, they developed a pattern of working only to meet their immediate needs, of never harvesting more than is essential, and of not storing surpluses.

Ju/’hoansi children playing in a mixed age group (Photo by Gil Eilam on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

But Suzman’s main point was that envy was the key to the obvious successes of Ju/’hoansi society. The need to mitigate envy resulted in their system of distributing food and other necessities without any mention of successes. A good example of the way it worked was that successful hunters were always insulted and never praised. No matter how impressive a carcass was, the hunter who dragged it into the camp had to expect insults and put-downs.

A Ju/’hoansi man in the village of Xaoba setting a bird trap (Photo by Gil Eilam on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

People who were given their share of the meat would complain that it was a trifle, that it was barely worth taking back into the camp, and that there wouldn’t be enough to go around. The hunter, for his part, had to apologize for the lack of quality of his carcass. Everyone would of course recognize a really successful kill but no one would utter a word of praise, even continuing their insults as they gorged on the food. The reason for all the badinage about the quality of the kill was to ensure that the successful hunter did not get a swelled head, did not think he was especially important. In short, everyone wanted to make sure their precious sense of equality was not in any way overturned by someone with an inflated sense of himself. The people treated anyone, not just hunters, with similar insults if they seemed to be getting too self-important. That sense of equality was essential to their peacefulness—and their evolutionary success for over a hundred millennia.

Everyone noticed what others ate, what they owned, what they gave and received, and how generous they were. No one wanted to be noticed for being self-important; no one was willing to be labeled as selfish. Not surprisingly, these attitudes fostered a generally harmonious, cooperative, peaceful society. Even people who had leadership qualities were hesitant to do any leading.

An elderly San woman in Botswana holding a plant she has gathered (Photo by Dietmar Temps on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

But while those attitudes may have helped keep the peace in the traditional Ju/’hoansi society, as Namibia has developed in recent decades, they have suffered at the margins. They are among the poorest of the nation’s ethnic communities. In part, Suzman argued, this situation is a result of their reluctance to take up leadership positions. They hesitate to assume management responsibilities and they hate to have authority over others. Consequently, they are poorly represented in public agencies, which causes their interests to be overlooked and ignored.

One of the best illustrations of the Ju/’hoansi aversion to expressions of pride and their attempts to put down people who might become proud of their accomplishments was written by the Canadian anthropologist Richard B. Lee and published as an engaging article in the December 1969 issue of Natural History magazine. He wrote that in order to repay the Ju/’hoansi (then known as the !Kung) for their good will during his previous year of fieldwork in their camp, he purchased a huge ox to be slaughtered for a massive Christmas feast.

As the word went out, however, individuals kept coming to him and commenting on how badly he’d been gypped, how thin the beast was, how they’d all go hungry on Christmas, and how the ox was only good for its soup bones. As their constant barbs began to get under Lee’s skin, they started indicating that the thinness of the feast would probably provoke fights. Thoroughly spooked by the unanimous opinions of his colossal error, the author tried to buy another, without success, and considered leaving the camp to spend Christmas day in the bush.

A Ju/’hoansi hunter practicing the use of a bow and arrow at Xaoba village in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy (Photo by Gil Eilam on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Lee was astonished on Christmas morning when the butchering got under way and he observed that the ox was as fat and meaty as he had first judged. Piecing together the circumstances of the joke on him, he learned later that the put-down was standard Ju’hoan technique. Every kill is too small, too old, too thin; no one brags, everyone puts down the successes of others. The reason was to control arrogance. If a person thought of himself as a big man, it might lead to boasting, pride, and perhaps to violence—the same observations that Suzman made last week.

By denigrating the kill, or in this case the Christmas ox, they sought to cool the proud heart and to prompt gentleness on the part of the anthropologist. Prof. Lee realized that the Ju/’hoansi had maintained a healthy skepticism about his intentions—they had been dividing and sharing their meat all year—and they had tried to force a lesson in humility on him. Fortunately, Lee’s article “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari” is available as a PDF on the Internet.

In his book Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands, Robert Levy (1973) explained that relationships in French Polynesia were more egalitarian in some communities than in others. In the small, rural village on Huahine where he did much of his fieldwork, the Tahitians were mostly free of vertical power structures. However, in an urban neighborhood in Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, where people worked in organizations, imbalances of power were more in evidence.

Opunohu Bay on Moorea (Photo by Pablo Fisher on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Levy emphasized that the Tahitians in the small village were mostly egalitarian. They exhibited very little respect toward elders, authority figures, or heads of households. “Where differences of power or authority do exist, they are veiled,” he wrote (p.203). He did make one telling point, however—that pre-Christian Tahiti had a more strongly hierarchical society.

Last week, an article in the student newspaper for the College of William and Mary, The Flat Hat, described a presentation by an anthropology professor at the college named Jennifer Kahn about the archaeological evidence for relationships of power and inequality in the Society Islands 1000 years ago. Dr. Kahn has conducted research on the island of Moorea, where she is trying to tease out how social inequalities were structured among the prehistoric Tahitians.

An archaeological site of a private temple in the Opunohu Valley of Moorea (Photo by Arthur Chapman on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

She told her audience that the structures of houses in pre-Christian Tahiti—such as whether they had rounded or rectangular ends—indicate whether they were used by chiefs or commoners. Also, the nature of the ritual centers preserved in the Opunohu Valley of Moorea, where she has been working, demonstrate how important ideology was in ancient times. The ritual centers, she said, indicate that the elites at that time held political, economic, and spiritual meetings that would help them consolidate their status relations.

Kahn has made a point of including Tahitians in her fieldwork as a way of showing them how their ancestors lived. To overcome the difficulties of making accurate portrayals, she and her Tahitian crew have restored some houses for visitors. “When most people look at a stone outline of a house, it is very hard for them to envision what the house might have looked like, so we use my archaeological data to restore what the house would have looked like,” Kahn said.

A stone carving of an ancient Tahitian man on Moorea (Photo by Arthur Chapman on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

She and her assistants also created trilingual panels, in English, French, and Tahitian, along a trail of the restored houses on Moorea. She involved people from the Ministry of Culture plus other experts to get her information right. According to the journalist, Dr. Kahn gained a “humanized lens” by working with the local crew, which had a traditional knowledge of the area. “They really have a personified narrative in their head of what they are finding, which is important to me as a scientist to keep their human perspective in my mind,” the anthropologist said.

Levy (1973) also described power relationships in the pre-colonial Tahitian villages. He wrote that the chiefs were evidently satirized in theatrical performances; their powers were limited by other high-status people in their districts. Furthermore, the Tahitians appeared to be very fond of their chiefs, who returned the affection with good will. Both scholars, Levy a half century ago and Kahn today, agree that the colonial period completely destroyed the hierarchical systems in the Society Islands.

The journalist writing for the student newspaper quoted the enthusiastic comments of several students about Dr. Kahn’s presentation and for the study of French Polynesia.

An increasing number of G/wi and G//ana residents of New Xade, a resettlement community in western Botswana, say they want to return to their former homes in the Kalahari Desert. Jumanda Gakelebone, a prominent advocate for the rights of the long-suffering San people and now the councilor for New Xade, which is in the Gantsi District of west central Botswana, told the Sunday Standard Reporter last week that he keeps hearing the discontents of his constituents.

A young G/wi boy in New Xade (Photo from Wikipedia, in the public domain)

Gakelebone told the paper, “They were saying that when they were relocated from the [Central Kalahari Game Reserve] to New Xade, the government promise[d] to eradicate their poverty and make them rich. However, they are complaining that instead of those riches they are now getting infected with AIDS. They want to escape the certain death that will come with this AIDS by going back to the CKGR.”

The Sunday Standard continued by summarizing the recent history of the two groups of people. The paper wrote that 1740 G/wi and G//ana were forcibly removed from their homes in the CKGR by the government in 1997 and a second group of 530 people left in 2002 when the government cut off all essential services.

Survival International headquarters in London (Photo by Howard Lake on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A court ruling in 2006 allowed them to return but without compelling the government to provide services such as water. In 2015, after years of pressure by the London-based human rights group Survival International and a local group, First People of the Kalahari, the government finally gave in and agreed to begin restoring essential services to communities in the CKGR.

Mr. Gakelebone told the paper his constituents are telling him that the only reason they had not returned after the 2006 court ruling was the absence of essential services. Now that those services have been restored, they are considering getting out of New Xade. The reason is their disenchantment with life in the resettlement community. The spread of AIDS is particularly frightening to them.

The clinic at New Xade (Photo by Nqarega in Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

For AIDS used to be just a term to them, “a name for something we didn’t know.” But during the time the people were being moved to New Xade, a lot of construction work was going on in the community. New Xade has a particularly large and plush health clinic, for instance. Mr. Gakelebone singled out the presence of the outside construction workers who built such facilities for introducing AIDS into the San communities. It is now a severe problem in the town.

The councilor also singled out the widespread abuse of alcohol as a significant problem. He admitted that the San drank some alcohol in past decades when they lived in the CKGR, but it was only available when it was brought in by visitors. As a result, it was not abused. But in New Xade there are countless shebeens, illegal neighborhood bars, and the ingredients for brewing their own traditional beverages are easily available. The Sunday Standard report concluded that the San people are now also suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes, the result of a sedentary lifestyle in the town and the consumption of processed foods.

Neither Mr. Gakelebone nor the reporter appeared to consider the possibility that the discontent among the G/wi with the generally unsavory conditions in New Xade may be exacerbated by the fact that this is the worst time of year in the Kalahari for human communities. George Silberbauer’s fine book Hunter & Habitat in the Central Kalahari Desert (1981), which predated the problems caused by the forced resettlements, discussed the problems the G/wi had with the season they called !hosa. It is the hot and dry season between the end of winter in August/September and the beginning of the rains in late November. The season was defined by the climatic conditions rather than by the calendar.

As Silberbauer wrote (p.105), “Because of the heat and the scarcity of food, !hosa is the most difficult [season] to bear. People become morose, depressed, and listless, and it is the time of disease, discomfort, and disinterest.” The author went on to say that the problems were aggravated by the fact that band members usually had dispersed into their “separation mode” during this time of the year. He continued for a number of additional paragraphs discussing the stresses of the dry season in the Central Kalahari.

Consulting Silberbauer allows one to wonder if, despite the availability of food and water in New Xade, the problems of the resettlement community that Gakelebone discussed might be particularly upsetting to the residents during this season, !hosa. Perhaps November and the cultural memories of desert hardships prompt a time of discontent that aggravates the very real social problems.

Numerous Batek people living in Kuala Koh say that they still prefer living nomadically in the Malaysian forests rather than in permanent houses. Several were interviewed by Aimuni Tuan Lah for a report published in the Malay-language newspaper Utusan Malaysia last week.

The traditional roof on a Batek home covered with nipah palm leaves, with a shy Batek child in the background (Photo by Cleffairy and posted at a blog titled “Over a Cuppa Tea; Creative Commons license)

Over 60 Batek families move about the forest of Kuala Koh, also known as the Taman Negara National Park, subsisting in traditional ways. They gather forest products such as rattan, roots, and herbal medicines and they hunt for game. JAKOA, the government agency in charge of development for the Orang Asli, the aboriginal people of Malaysia, has provided 13 houses for the Batek. It appears as if the houses are in Gua Musang where the story was bylined. But the Batek don’t want to live in them. They prefer to live in the forest in huts made of traditional woods and leaves, particularly the leaves of the nipah palms which are used to cover the roofs.

The reporter interviewed a 70-year old man, Daun Kepayam, who told her that the people especially appreciated living in huts made from plant materials. He said that most of the Batek didn’t like the government-provided permanent houses because they did not cool off at night the way their forest huts did. In the words of the Google translation, he said, “We prefer to sleep on the floor with bamboo and wood as a place to lie down with family members.” He added that they rarely travel to the city but sometimes city people do visit them to give them clothing and food.

A Batek child in Taman Negara National Park (Photo by Phalinn Ooi on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Salman Daun, a 40-year old man, said that he has lived in Kuala Koh for a year. Before that, he moved about searching for food in a forested area near the town of Jerantut in Pahang. When he returned to the Gua Musang area, it took him three days to walk to Kuala Koh. But then it only took him two days to erect his hut by himself. “We prefer migration to find forest resources to sustain life,” he said.

Aimuni Tuan Lah, the reporter, quoted a third Batek man, Pikas Langsat, 55, who told her that they obtain money by selling roots and herbs and they use the funds to buy rice. He complained that they have to find the minor forest products in remote locations since the forests closer to where they live are threatened by the development of oil palm plantations.

In his book Batek Negrito Religion, Kirk Endicott (1979) explained that the people identified very closely with the environment of the rain forest, sometimes even calling themselves “forest people (p.53).” It was their only preferred home, and to judge by the news story last week, it still is. They believed, Endicott wrote, that living in the forest is part of the natural order as established by the superhumans. While individuals might leave the forest for varying lengths of time, if all the Batek left, the superhumans would destroy the world. The people were not afraid of the forest—they felt secure living in it, comfortable being part of it. Unlike many forest-dwellers, the Batek did not even separate themselves symbolically from the surrounding woods.

A few years later, Endicott (1983) explained part of the reason for the fervent attachment by the Batek to their forests—and, as a corollary, to their peaceful lifestyle. He argued that their peaceful, non-aggressive, passive nature as well as their attachment to the forests can be directly traced to their being the object of violent slave raids by Malays in the 19th century. They learned from those experiences that flight into the forests for the most part provided the only possibility of survival, while fighting against the Malay slave raiders was generally hopeless and brought on injuries or death.

Whatever else the forests provide to the Batek, it is clear from the news story last week that they are still highly important to the people.

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