Harlan's Crops and Man. H. Thomas Stalker

Читать онлайн книгу.

Harlan's Crops and Man - H. Thomas Stalker


Скачать книгу
1968).

      Source: Adapted from Sahlins (1968).

      Other reports at the symposium tended to support these general findings. A picture emerged of leisure, if not affluent societies, where the food supply was assured even under difficult environmental conditions and could be obtained from natural sources with little effort. The picture described did seem to fit the golden age of Hesiod or the Biblical Garden of Eden.

      What do the new studies show? To no one's surprise, they show that the golden age was more golden for some than for others. Even a few examples of famine were found (Johnson & Earle, 1987, p. 374). Brian Hayden (1981) listed a number of tribes showing a continuum of work from “a few minutes per day” (Tanaina in Alaska) or 2 hr per day (Hadza in Tanzania) to “all day every day” or “too busy to visit relatives” (Birhor in India). Well, I have been too busy to visit relatives even when I wasn't doing much of anything. It also comes as no surprise that if processing and cooking time is added to collecting time, it takes longer to get a meal than some figures would suggest. Processing some foods is laborious and time‐consuming. Grinding or pounding seeds into flour has always been drudgery, and boiling toxic foods in several changes of water takes a lot of time. Still, is watching a pot boil hard labor, especially if the kids make a game of picking up sticks to keep the fire going? And, of course, farmers must also process their food, too, so the addition of processing and cooking time does not necessarily change the comparison.

      There are certain aspects of time and work that do not seem to receive due attention. Suppose you like your work? I always have, and have spent far more time at it than necessary for survival. Consider those men of industrial societies who spend endless hours cramped and freezing in a duck blind for little or no reward, or those who huddle in a shelter fishing through the ice in the middle of a Minnesota winter. The social aspects are what matter; after a few nips of whiskey, no one cares if the rod bends or not. I record two ethnographic notes from my own experience, both from farming societies, but the principles apply to anyone. Early one morning on a deserted road in Afghanistan, I came across a line of men dressed in colorful embroidered jackets, balloon pants, and pixie‐toed shoes. They had two drums and were singing and dancing up and down with their sickles in the air. A group of women followed, shrouded in their chadors, but obviously enjoying the occasion. I stopped and asked in broken Farsee: “Is this a wedding celebration or something?” They looked surprised and said: “No, nothing. We are just going out to cut wheat.” Harvest time is a good time of year even if it is hot and the “work” is hard. It is a time for socializing and, if the harvest is good, for celebrating.

      How do hunter‐gatherers spend their leisure? Apparently they sleep a lot, but there are other diversions. Gambling is popular among many tribes; Woodburn (1970, p. 59) states that the Hadza people spend more time in gambling than in obtaining food. The most popular gambling stake is poisoned arrows. There are also music, dances, ritual and ceremony, rites of passage, playing cat's cradle, storytelling, creative arts, making useful and decorative articles, and similar activities. Life appears easy, but generally dull. Perhaps as a consequence there is a great deal of coming and going; the camp population is fluid and camps may be moved on the slightest pretext or for no reason at all. Understandably, there is a tendency to concentrate on the foods most easily obtained at a given time, and these are likely to change from season to season and, to some extent, from year to year. Groups of people in many gathering societies tend to be very fluid for that reason. When food is at maximum abundance, there is a tendency to gather in large bands. This is the season for rejoicing, celebrating, observing ancient tribal rituals, arranging marriages, and having naming ceremonies, coming of age ceremonies, and so on. The tribe is more fully represented at this time. During the most difficult season of the year, the people may break up into microbands to better exploit the gathering range and to avoid exhausting the food supply near the larger camps.

      Many Australian Aborigines remain apart much of the yearly cycle even after becoming dependent on European agricultural–industrial systems. For most of the year they find jobs as ranch hands, laborers, mechanics, and so forth, but they may quit whatever they are doing, take off their store‐bought clothes, and take a three‐month “walkabout” during their traditionally festive season. Gathering is still easier than working at that time of year.

      The geographic distribution of surviving hunters results in a serious bias. By and large, hunters have survived where agriculture is unrewarding. We find them in the Kalahari Desert and adjacent dry savanna in southern Africa, in small pockets of tropical


Скачать книгу