Conformity and conflict readings in cultural anthropology 15th edition pdf

Conformity and Conflict

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FOURTEENTH EDITION

Conformity and Conflict Readings in Cultural Anthropology

JAMES SPRADLEY

DAVID W. MCCURDY Macalester College

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conformity and conflict : readings in cultural anthropology / [edited by]

James Spradley, David W. McCurdy.—14th ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-205-23410-3

ISBN-10: 0-205-23410-0

1. Ethnology. 2. Anthropology. I. Spradley, James P. II. McCurdy, David W.

GN325.C69 2011

306—dc22 2011015812

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Student Edition: ISBN 10: 0-205-23410-0 ISBN 13: 978-0-205-23410-3

Instructor’s Review Edition: ISBN 10: 0-205-06453-1 ISBN 13: 978-0-205-06453-3

á la carte edition: ISBN 10: 0-205-06460-4 ISBN 13: 978-0-205-06460-1

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Contents

World Map and Geographical Placement of Readings inside cover

Preface xiii

ONE Culture and Ethnography 1

1 Ethnography and Culture 6 JAMES P. SPRADLEY

To discover culture, the ethnographer must learn from the informant as a student.

2 Eating Christmas in the Kalahari 13 RICHARD BORSHAY LEE

The “generous” gift of a Christmas ox involves the anthropologist in a classic case of cross-cultural misunderstanding.

3 Fieldwork on Prostitution in the Era of AIDS 20 CLAIRE E. STERK

Fieldwork among urban prostitutes means doing ethnography under difficult but, in the end, manageable circumstances.

4 Nice Girls Don’t Talk to Rastas 31 GEORGE GMELCH

Interaction between a U.S. student and a Rastafarian illustrates the destructive power of naïve realism in the fieldwork setting.

TWO Language and Communication 37

5 Shakespeare in the Bush 41 LAURA BOHANNAN

Cross-cultural communication breaks down when an anthropologist attempts to translate the meaning of Hamlet to the Tiv.

v

vi Contents

6 Whorf Revisited: You Are What You Speak 49 GUY DEUTSCHER

New evidence supports Benjamin Lee Whorf’s contention that peoples’ mother tongue can shape their experience of the world.

7 Manipulating Meaning: The Military Name Game 57 SARAH BOXER

To frame the meaning of its military operations, U.S. armed forces try to name them positively without offending anyone.

8 Conversation Style: Talking on the Job 61 DEBORAH TANNEN

On the job, men and women use distinctive conversation styles to ask for help, leading them to evaluate performance and character differently.

THREE Ecology and Subsistence 69

9 The Hunters: Scarce Resources in the Kalahari 73 RICHARD BORSHAY LEE

!Kung and other foragers traditionally worked less and ate better than many other people with more “advanced” food producing techniques. Today, however, their survival depends more on drilling wells and keeping cattle than on collecting wild foods.

10 Eskimo Science 87 RICHARD NELSON

The knowledge developed by Eskimos to hunt successfully contains the same basic principles that underlie a more formally structured scientific method.

11 Domestication and the Evolution of Disease 93 JARED DIAMOND

Herd animal diseases that evolved to infect humans have ended up killing millions of people in the old and new world.

12 Forest Development the Indian Way 105 RICHARD K. REED

South American governments could learn much about tropical forest development from the Amazonian Indians who live there.

Contents vii

FOUR Economic Systems 115

13 Reciprocity and the Power of Giving 119 LEE CRONK

Gifts not only function to tie people together, they may also be used to “flatten” an opponent and control the behavior of others.

14 Poverty at Work: Office Employment and the Crack Alternative 125 PHILIPPE BOURGOIS

Poor, uneducated Puerto Rican men living in Spanish Harlem feel that the risks they run selling drugs are preferable to the disrespect they encounter as low-wage employees in New York’s financial and service companies.

15 Cocaine and the Economic Deterioration of Bolivia 136 JACK WEATHERFORD

The world market for cocaine robs Bolivian villages of their men and causes problems for health, nutrition, transportation, and family.

16 Malawi versus the World Bank 145 SONIA PATTEN

Malawi government’s successful state subsidized fertilizer program challenges the World Bank and IMF’s insistence on market-driven agricultural programs.

FIVE Kinship and Family 151

17 Mother’s Love: Death without Weeping 155 NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES

Close mother-child bonds suffered in the presence of high infant mortality in a Brazilian shantytown although recent changes have reduced the problem to some degree.

18 Family and Kinship in Village India 165 DAVID W. MCCURDY

Kinship still organizes the lives of Bhil villagers despite economic opportunities that draw people away from the community and dependence on relatives.

viii Contents

19 Polyandry: When Brothers Take a Wife 172 MELVYN C. GOLDSTEIN

By jointly marrying one woman, Tibetan brothers preserve family resources and the “good life.”

20 Uterine Families and the Women’s Community 179 MARGERY WOLF

To succeed in a traditional patrilineal family, a Chinese woman had to create her own informal uterine family inside her husband’s household.

SIX Identity, Roles, and Groups 185

21 You@Work: Jobs, Identity, and the Internet 189 BRENDA MANN

Topday’s U.S. job mobility requires “branding” one’s identity through careful use of the Internet.

22 The Opt-Out Phenomenon: Women, Work, and Identity in America 197 DIANNA SHANDY AND KARINE MOE

Why were young, educated professional women leaving high-paying jobs for a life at home and what difference has today’s tough economy made?

23 Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? 208 LILA ABU-LUGHOD

Americans should work for justice in the world, not save Muslim women from wearing burqas or following their Islamic religion.

24 Mixed Blood 217 JEFFERSON M. FISH

A woman can change her race from black to “brunette” by taking a plane from New York to Brazil.

SEVEN Law and Politics 227

25 Cross-Cultural Law: The Case of the Gypsy Offender 230 ANNE SUTHERLAND

Legal cultures clash when a young Gypsy is convicted of using someone else’s social security number to apply for a car loan.

Contents ix

26 Life without Chiefs 238 MARVIN HARRIS

Small societies based on reciprocal and redistributive economic exchange can do without officials.

27 The Founding Indian Fathers 246 JACK WEATHERFORD

Although their contribution goes unrecognized, Indian, especially Iroquoian, political structure may have served as a model that helped to produce a United States federal government.

EIGHT Religion, Magic, and World View 255

28 Taraka’s Ghost 260 STANLEY A. FREED AND RUTH S. FREED

A woman relieves her anxiety and gains family support when a friend’s ghost possesses her.

29 Baseball Magic 266 GEORGE GMELCH

American baseball players from the game’s introduction to today employ magical practices as they try to deal with the uncertainty of their game.

30 Run for the Wall: An American Pilgrimage 275 JILL DUBISCH

An annual ritual motorcycle pilgrimage from Los Angles to Washington, DC personally transforms the Vietnam veterans and others who ride in it.

31 Body Ritual among the Nacirema 287 HORACE MINER

The Nacirema display a complex array of body rituals aimed at achieving health and beauty.

NINE Globalization 293

32 How Sushi Went Global 296 THEODORE C. BESTOR

International interdependence between tuna fishermen and sushi as a Japanese culinary style becomes popular in a globalized world.

x Contents

33 Village Walks: Tourism and Globalization among the Tharu of Nepal 306 ARJUN GUNERATNE AND KATE BJORK

Advertised as a primitive tribe, Tharu villagers endure tours that falsely treat them as part of the Chitwan National Forest’s natural history and have responded by building a museum to separate their past from the present.

34 The Road to Refugee Resettlement 316 DIANNA SHANDY

Nuer refugees must develop the skill and determination to pass through a series of bureaucratic hurdles to reach and adjust to life in the United States.

35 Global Women in the New Economy 325 BARBARA EHRENREICH AND ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD

Millions of women migrate from poor to wealthy nations serving as nannies, maids, and sex workers. They send money home but find it hard to separate from their countries and families.

TEN Culture Change and Applied Anthropology 335

36 Advice for Developers: Peace Corps Problems in Botswana 340 HOYT S. ALVERSON

An anthropologist discovers why some Peace Corps volunteers fail to complete their assignments in rural Botswana, citing perceptions of their role and naïve realism as the basic problems.

37 Medical Anthropology: Leprosy on the Ganges 351 RON BARRETT

Indians who contract leprosy find themselves stigmatized for life, causing them to delay treatment or amplify symptoms to enhance begging.

38 Public Interest Ethnography: Women’s Prisons and Health Care in California 359 RACHAEL STRYKER

Student ethnographers uncover institutional health care problems at two women’s prisons in California and suggest changes that result in a revision of state policy.

Contents xi

39 Using Anthropology 371 DAVID W. MCCURDY

Professional anthropologists do everything from ethnographies of automobile production lines to famine relief, but even the neophyte may be able to use the ideas of culture and ethnography to succeed in the workplace.

40 Career Advice for Anthropology Undergraduates 382 JOHN T. OMOHUNDRO

The ability to translate useful anthropological skills into “resume speak” is one way for anthropology graduates to find employment.

Glossary 391

Photo Credits 397

Text Credits 399

Index 403

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Preface

Forty-one years ago as we prepared the first edition of this book, Jim Spradley and I sought to make the communication of cultural anthropology more effective for both students and instructors. We looked for useful, engaging articles written by anthropolo- gists for non-anthropologists. We encouraged anthropologists to send us articles that fit our design for Conformity and Conflict . We sought out material that demonstrated the nature of culture and its influence on people’s lives. We included more material on Western, especially North American, cultures so students could make their own cul- tural comparisons and see the relation between anthropology and their own lives. We chose articles that reflected interesting topics and current issues, but we also looked for selections that illustrated important anthropological concepts and theories because we believed that anthropology provides a unique and powerful way to look at human experience. Finally, we organized the book around traditional topics found in many textbooks and courses.

The original features of Conformity and Conflict remain part of its design today, but the book’s content has also altered over the years to reflect changing instructional and disciplinary interests and the needs and suggestions provided by students and instructors. Part introductions now include discussion of many basic anthropological definitions for use by instructors who do not want to assign a standard text but find it helpful to provide students with a terminological foundation. Article introductions seek to tie selections to anthropological concepts and explanations in a coherent and systematic way. Articles and section parts have grown to include environmental, global, medical, and practical anthropological sub fields as well as traditional interests such as language, gender, kinship, economics, politics, law, and religion.

Several student aids are retained in the fourteenth edition. Lists of key terms accompany each part introduction. Each article is followed by several review questions. Maps locating societies discussed in articles accompany each selection. There is also a glossary and subject index at the end of the book.

What’s New to This Edition

The revision of the fourteenth edition includes a number of changes and updates:

• There are eight new articles, and two selections have been brought back from previous editions.

• Five articles found in the thirteenth edition have also been revised and updated. • Four of the eight new articles have been written especially for the fourteenth edi-

tion making fourteen original articles altogether. • Part 2, Language and Communication , has been revised to include definitions

and discussion of two new concepts, metaphor and symbolic framing. It also

xiii

xiv Preface

includes a new article on the resurrection of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis by linguist, Guy Deutscher.

• Part 3, Subsistence and Ecology , contains a new article comparing Eskimo hunting knowledge to the structure of scientific inquiry. It also includes an article by Jared Diamond on the origin and spread of crowd diseases brought back from a previous edition. Richard Reed’s article on Forest Development is updated.

• Part 6, Identity, Roles, and Groups , contains two new articles. The first, an original selection by Brenda Mann, looks at how the Internet is used by employers and job seekers to shape and present work identities. The second, by Lila Abu-Lughod urges American women to work for justice in the world, not saving Muslim women from wearing the burqa. Dianna Shandy and Karine Moe’s article is updated to reflect recent trends in women’s decisions about work and family.

• Part 9 , Globalization , now includes an original selection by Arjun Guneratne and Kate Bjork on tourism from the native viewpoint in Nepal, and another brought back from a previous edition by Theodore Bestor about the world impact of sushi. Dianna Shandy’s article on refugees has also been updated to reflect the recent vote for independence in South Sudan.

• Part 10, Culture Change and Applied Anthropology, begins with an article on Peace Corps problems in Botswanna by Hoyt Alverson. This is followed by a new original article by medical anthropologist, Ron Barrett, about the nature of leprosy and its stigmatization in Banaras (Varanasi) North India, and another original article by Rachael Stryker on public interest anthropology at work in a study of the health services afforded women inmates in two California Prisons.

Support for Instructors and Students

• is an interactive and instructive multimedia site designed to help students and instructors save time and improve results. It offers access to a wealth of resources geared to meet the individual teaching and learning needs of every instructor and student. Combining an ebook, video, audio, multimedia simulations, research support and assessment, MyAnthroLab engages students and gives them the tools they need to enhance their performance in the course. Please see your Pearson sales representative or visit www.myanthrolab.com for more information.

• Instructor’s Manual with Tests (0205064566): For each chapter in the text, this valuable resource provides a detailed outline, list of objectives, discussion ques- tions, and suggested readings. In addition, test questions in multiple-choice, true/ false, fill-in-the-blank, and short answer formats are available for each chapter; the answers are page-referenced to the text. For easy access, this manual is avail- able within the instructor section of MyAnthroLab for Conformity and Conflict, or at www.pearsonhighered.com/irc.

• MyTest (020506454X): This computerized software allows instructors to create their own personalized exams, edit any or all of the existing test questions, and add new questions. Other special features of the program include random generation

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Preface xv

of test questions, creation of alternate versions of the same test, scrambling ques- tion sequence, and test preview before printing. For easy access, this software is available at www.pearsonhighered.com/irc.

• PowerPoint Presentation Slides for Conformity and Conflict (0205064558): These PowerPoint slides help instructors convey anthropology principles in a clear and engaging way. For easy access, they are available within the instructor section of MyAnthroLab for Conformity and Conflict, or at www.pearsonhighered .com/irc.

It has always been my aim to provide a book that meets the needs of students and instructors. To help with this goal, I encourage you to send your comments and ideas for improving Conformity and Conflict to me at dcmccurdy@comcast.net. Ideas for future original selections are also welcome.

Many people have made suggestions that guided this revision of Conformity and Conflict. I am especially grateful to colleagues Dianna Shandy, Arjun Guneratne, Ron Barrett, and Sonia Patten for their advice and help as well as George Gmelch for his many suggestions. Thanks also to reviewers of this edition: Jane Park, Seton Hall Uni- versity; Neill Hadder, The University of Texas—Austin; Autumn Cahoon, California State University—Sacramento; Kurt Reymers, Morrisville State College; K. Jill Fleu- riet, University of Texas—San Antonio; Susan Schalge, Minnesota State University; Kristen Kuehnle, Salem State College; Joy Livergood, Columbus State Community College; Willem Clements, Arkansas State University. I would also like to thank my ed- itors Nancy Roberts and Nicole Conforti for their guidance and work on this volume.

DWM

www.pearsonhighered.com/irc
www.pearsonhighered.com/irc
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READINGS IN THIS SECTION

Ethnography and Culture 6 James P. Spradley

Eating Christmas in the Kalahari 13 Richard Borshay Lee

Fieldwork on Prostitution in the Era of AIDS 20 Claire E. Sterk

Nice Girls Don’t Talk to Rastas 31 George Gmelch

P A R T O N E

CULTURE

AND ETHNOGRAPHY

2 P A R T O N E Culture and Ethnography

Culture, as its name suggests, lies at the heart of cultural anthropology. And the concept of culture, along with ethnography, sets anthropology apart from other so- cial and behavioral sciences. Let us look more closely at these concepts.

To understand what anthropologists mean by culture, imagine yourself in a for- eign setting, such as a market town in India, forgetting what you might already know about that country. You step off a bus onto a dusty street where you are immediately confronted by strange sights, sounds, and smells. Men dress in Western clothes, but of a different style. Some women drape themselves in long shawls that entirely cover their bodies. They peer at you through a small gap in this garment as they walk by. Buildings are one- or two-story affairs, open at the front so you can see inside. Near you some people sit on wicker chairs eating strange foods. Most unusual is how peo- ple talk. They utter vocalizations unlike any you have ever heard, and you wonder how they can possibly understand each other. But obviously they do, since their be- havior seems organized and purposeful.

Scenes such as this confronted early explorers, missionaries, and anthropolo- gists, and from their observations an obvious point emerged. People living in various parts of the world looked and behaved in dramatically different ways. And these dif- ferences correlated with groups. The people of India had customs different from those of the Papuans; the British did not act and dress like the Iroquois.

Two possible explanations for group differences came to mind. Some argued that group behavior was inherited. Dahomeans of the African Gold Coast, for exam- ple, were characterized as particularly “clever and adaptive” by one British colonial official, while, according to the same authority, another African group was “happy-go- lucky and improvident.” Usually implied in such statements was the idea that group members were born that way. Such thinking persists to the present and in its most malignant extreme takes the form of racism.

But a second explanation also emerged. Perhaps, rather than a product of inher- itance, the behavior characteristic of a group was learned. The way people dressed, what they ate, how they talked—all these could more easily be explained as acquisi- tions. Thus a baby born on the African Gold Coast would, if immediately transported to China and raised like other children there, grow up to dress, eat, and talk like a Chinese. Cultural anthropologists focus on the explanation of learned behavior.

The idea of learning, and a need to label the lifestyles associated with particular groups, led to the definition of culture. In 1871, British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor argued that “Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowl- edge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” 1 The definition we present here places more em- phasis on the importance of knowledge than does Tylor’s. We will say that culture is the learned and shared knowledge that people use to generate behavior and interpret experience.

Important to this definition is the idea that culture is a kind of knowledge, not behavior. It is in people’s heads. It reflects the mental categories they learn from oth- ers as they grow up. It helps them generate behavior and interpret what they experi- ence. At the moment of birth, we lack a culture. We don’t yet have a system of beliefs, knowledge, and patterns of customary behavior. But from that moment until we die,

1 Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture (New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Row, 1958; originally published by John Murray, London, 1871), p. 1.

P A R T O N E Culture and Ethnography 3

each of us participates in a kind of universal schooling that teaches us our native cul- ture. Laughing and smiling are genetic responses, but as infants we soon learn when to smile, when to laugh, and even how to laugh. We also inherit the potential to cry, but we must learn our cultural rules for when crying is appropriate.

As we learn our culture, we acquire a way to interpret experience. For example, Americans learn that dogs are like little people in furry suits. Dogs live in our houses, eat our food, share our beds. They hold a place in our hearts; their loss causes us to grieve. Villagers in India, on the other hand, often view dogs as pests that are useful only for hunting (in those few parts of the country where one still can hunt) and as watchdogs. Quiet days in Indian villages are often punctuated by the yelp of a dog that has been threatened or actually hurt by its master or a bystander.

Clearly, it is not the dogs that are different in these two societies. Rather, it is the meaning that dogs have for people that varies. And such meaning is cultural; it is learned as part of growing up in each group.

There are two basic kinds of culture, explicit and tacit. Explicit culture is cul- tural knowledge that people can talk about. As you grow up, for example, you learn that there are words for many things you encounter. There are items such as clothes, actions such as playing, emotional states such as sadness, ways to talk such as yelling, and people such as mother. Recognizing that culture may be explicit is important to the ethnographic process discussed below. If people have words for cultural catego- ries, anthropologists can use interviews or observations of people talking to uncover them. Because so much culture is explicit, words—both spoken and written—become essential to the discovery and understanding of a culture.

Tacit culture is cultural knowledge that people lack words for. For example, as we grow up we learn to recognize and use a limited number of sound categories such as /d/, /e/, and /f/. Although anthropological linguists have given sound categories a name (phonemes), nonlinguists lack such a term. Instead, we learn our sound catego- ries by hearing and replicating them and we use them unconsciously. No parent said, “Now let’s work on our phonemes tonight, dear,” to us when we were little.

Anthropologist Edward Hall pioneered the study of tacit culture. He noted, for example, that middle-class North Americans observe four speaking distances—inti- mate, personal, social, and public—without naming them. (Hall, not his informants, invented the terms above.) Hall also noticed that people from other societies observed different tacit speaking distances, so that a Latin American’s closer (than North Amer- ican) personal speaking distance made North Americans uncomfortable because it seemed intimate. Because it is unspoken, tacit culture can be discovered only through behavioral observation.

Ethnography is the process of discovering and describing a particular culture. It involves anthropologists in an intimate and personal activity as they attempt to learn how the members of a particular group see their worlds.

But which groups qualify as culture-bearing units? How does the anthropolo- gist identify the existence of a culture to study? This was not a difficult question when anthropology was a new science. As Tylor’s definition notes, culture was the whole way of life of a people. To find it, one sought out distinctive ethnic units, such as Bhil tribals in India or Apaches in the American Southwest. Anything one learned from such people would be part of their culture.

But discrete cultures of this sort are becoming more difficult to find. The world is increasingly divided into large national societies, each subdivided into a myriad of subgroups. Anthropologists are finding it increasingly attractive to study such

4 P A R T O N E Culture and Ethnography

subgroups, because they form the arena for most of life in complex society. And this is where the concept of the microculture enters the scene.

Microcultures are systems of cultural knowledge characteristic of subgroups within larger societies. Members of a microculture will usually share much of what they know with everyone in the greater society but will possess a special cultural knowledge that is unique to the subgroup. For example, a college fraternity has a mi- croculture within the context of a university and a nation. Its members have special daily routines, jokes, and meanings for events. It is this shared knowledge that makes up their microculture and that can serve as the basis for ethnographic study. More and more, anthropologists are turning to the study of microcultures, using the same ethnographic techniques they employ when they investigate the broader culture of an ethnic or national group.

More than anything else, it is ethnography that is anthropology’s unique contri- bution to social science. Most scientists, including many who view people in social context, approach their research as detached observers. As social scientists, they ob- serve the human subjects of their study, categorize what they see, and generate theory to account for their findings. They work from the outside, creating a system of knowl- edge to account for other people’s behavior. Although this is a legitimate and often useful way to conduct research, it is not the main task of ethnography.

Ethnographers seek out the insider’s viewpoint. Because culture is the knowl- edge people use to generate behavior and interpret experience, the ethnographer seeks to understand group members’ behavior from the inside, or cultural, perspec- tive. Instead of looking for a subject to observe, ethnographers look for an informant to teach them the culture. Just as children learn their native culture from parents and other people in their social environment, ethnographers learn another culture by inferring folk categories from the observation of behavior and by asking informants what things mean.

Anthropologists employ many strategies during field research to understand another culture better. But all strategies and all research ultimately rest on the co- operation of informants. An informant is neither a subject in a scientific experi- ment nor a respondent who answers the investigator’s questions. An informant is a teacher who has a special kind of pupil: a professional anthropologist. In this unique relationship a transformation occurs in the anthropologist’s understanding of an alien culture. It is the informant who transforms the anthropologist from a tourist into an ethnographer. The informant may be a child who explains how to play hopscotch, a cocktail waitress who teaches the anthropologist to serve drinks and to encourage customers to leave tips, an elderly man who teaches the anthro- pologist to build an igloo, or a grandmother who explains the intricacies of Zapotec kinship. Almost any individual who has acquired a repertoire of cultural behavior can become an informant.

Ethnography is not as easy to do as we might think. For one thing, North Ameri- cans are not taught to be good listeners. We prefer to observe and draw our own conclusions. We like a sense of control in social contexts; passive listening is a sign of weakness in our culture. But listening and learning from others is at the heart of eth- nography, and we must put aside our discomfort with the student role.

It is also not easy for informants to teach us about their cultures. Culture often lies below a conscious level. A major ethnographic task is to help informants remem- ber their culture.

Naive realism may also impede ethnography. Naive realism is the belief that people everywhere see the world in the same way. It may, for example, lead the

unwary ethnographer to assume that beauty is the same for all people everywhere or, to use our previous example, that dogs should mean the same thing in India as they do in the United States. If an ethnographer fails to control his or her own naive real- ism, inside cultural meanings will surely be overlooked.

Culture shock and ethnocentrism may also stand in the way of ethnographers. Culture shock is a state of anxiety that results from cross-cultural misunderstanding. Immersed alone in another society, the ethnographer understands few of the cultur- ally defined rules for behavior and interpretation used by his or her hosts. The result is anxiety about proper action and an inability to interact appropriately in the new context.

Ethnocentrism can be just as much of a liability. Ethnocentrism is the belief and feeling that one’s own culture is best. It reflects our tendency to judge other peo- ple’s beliefs and behavior using values of our own native culture. Thus if we come from a society that abhors painful treatment of animals, we are likely to react with anger when an Indian villager hits a dog with a rock. Our feeling is ethnocentric.

It is impossible to rid ourselves entirely of the cultural values that make us eth- nocentric when we do ethnography. But it is important to control our ethnocentric feeling in the field if we are to learn from informants. Informants resent negative judgment.

Finally, the role assigned to ethnographers by informants affects the quality of what can be learned. Ethnography is a personal enterprise, as all the articles in this section illustrate. Unlike survey research using questionnaires or short interviews, ethnography requires prolonged social contact. Informants will assign the ethnogra- pher some kind of role and what that turns out to be will affect research.

The selections in Part One illustrate several points about culture and ethnogra- phy. The first piece, by the late James Spradley, takes a close look at the concept of culture and its role in ethnographic research. The second, by Richard Lee, illustrates how a simple act of giving can have a dramatically different cultural meaning in two societies, leading to cross-cultural misunderstanding. In the third selection, Claire Sterk describes how she conducted ethnographic field research under difficult cir- cumstances. She sought to learn the culture of prostitutes working in New York City and Atlanta as part of a broader research interest in the spread and control of AIDS. The fourth article, by George Gmelch, explores how naive realism nearly ended a student’s field research in Barbados.

Key Terms

P A R T O N E Culture and Ethnography 5

culture p. 2 culture shock p. 5 detached observers p. 4 ethnocentrism p. 5 ethnography p. 3 explicit culture p. 3

informant p. 4 microcultures p. 4 naive realism p. 4 respondent p. 4 subject p. 4 tacit culture p. 3

6

1 Ethnography and Culture James P. Spradley

Most Americans associate science with detached observation; we learn to observe what- ever we wish to understand, introduce our own classification of what is going on, and ex- plain what we see in our own terms. In this selection, James Spradley argues that cultural anthropologists work differently. Ethnography is the work of discovering and describing a particular culture; culture is the learned, shared knowledge that people use to generate be- havior and interpret experience. To get at culture, ethnographers must learn the meanings of action and experience from the insider’s or informant’s point of view. Many of the exam- ples used by Spradley also show the relevance of anthropology to the study of culture in the United States.*

Listen to the Chapter Audio on myanthrolab.com

Ethnographic fieldwork is the hallmark of cultural anthropology. Whether in a jun- gle village in Peru or on the streets of New York, the anthropologist goes to where peo- ple live and “does fieldwork.” This means participating in activities, asking questions,

* “Ethnography and Culture” from Participant Observation by James P. Spradley. Copyright © 1980 by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Barbara Spradley.

C H A P T E R 1 Ethnography and Culture 7

eating strange foods, learning a new language, watching ceremonies, taking field notes, washing clothes, writing letters home, tracing out genealogies, observing play, interviewing informants, and hundreds of other things. This vast range of ac- tivities often obscures the nature of the most fundamental task of all fieldwork: doing ethnography.

Ethnography is the work of describing a culture. The central aim of ethnography is to understand another way of life from the native point of view. The goal of ethnography, as Malinowski put it, is “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.” 1 Fieldwork, then, involves the disciplined study of what the world is like to people who have learned to see, hear, speak, think, and act in ways that are dif- ferent. Rather than studying people, ethnography means learning from people. Consider the following illustration.

George Hicks set out, in 1965, to learn about another way of life, that of the moun- tain people in an Appalachian valley. 2 His goal was to discover their culture, to learn to see the world from their perspective. With his family he moved into Little Laurel Valley, his daughter attended the local school, and his wife became one of the local Girl Scout leaders. Hicks soon discovered that stores and storekeepers were at the center of the val- ley’s communication system, providing the most important social arena for the entire valley. He learned this by watching what other people did, by following their example, and slowly becoming part of the groups that congregated daily in the stores. He writes:

At least once each day I would visit several stores in the valley, and sit in on the groups of gossiping men or, if the storekeeper happened to be alone, perhaps attempt to clear up puzzling points about kinship obligations. I found these hours, particularly those spent in the presence of the two or three excellent storytellers in the Little Laurel, thoroughly enjoyable. . . . At other times, I helped a number of local men gather corn or hay, build sheds, cut trees, pull and pack galax, and search for rich stands of huckleberries. When I needed aid in, for example, repairing frozen water pipes, it was readily and cheerfully provided. 3

In order to discover the hidden principles of another way of life, the researcher must become a student. Storekeepers and storytellers and local farmers become teach- ers. Instead of studying the “climate,” the “flora,” and the “fauna” that made up the environment of this Appalachian valley, Hicks tried to discover how these mountain people defined and evaluated trees and galax and huckleberries. He did not attempt to describe social life in terms of what most Americans know about “marriage,” “family,” and “friendship”; instead he sought to discover how these mountain people identified relatives and friends. He tried to learn the obligations they felt toward kinsmen and discover how they felt about friends. Discovering the insider’s view is a different spe- cies of knowledge from one that rests mainly on the outsider’s view, even when the outsider is a trained social scientist.

Consider another example, this time from the perspective of a non- Western eth- nographer. Imagine an Inuit woman setting out to learn the culture of Macalester Col- lege. What would she, so well schooled in the rich heritage of Inuit culture, have to do

1 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge, 1922), p. 22.

2 George Hicks, Appalachian Valley (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976).

3 Hicks, p. 3.

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in order to understand the culture of Macalester College students, faculty, and staff? How would she discover the patterns that made up their lives? How would she avoid imposing Inuit ideas, categories, and values on everything she saw?

First, and perhaps most difficult, she would have to set aside her belief in naive realism, the almost universal belief that all people define the real world of objects, events, and living creatures in pretty much the same way. Human languages may differ from one society to the next, but behind the strange words and sentences, all people are talking about the same things. The naive realist assumes that love, snow, marriage, worship, animals, death, food, and hundreds of other things have essen- tially the same meaning to all human beings. Although few of us would admit to such ethnocentrism, the assumption may unconsciously influence our research. Ethnog- raphy starts with a conscious attitude of almost complete ignorance: “I don’t know how the people at Macalester College understand their world. That remains to be discovered.”

This Inuit woman would have to begin by learning the language spoken by stu- dents, faculty, and staff. She could stroll the campus paths, sit in classes, and attend special events, but only if she consciously tried to see things from the native point of view would she grasp their perspective. She would need to observe and listen to first- year students during their week-long orientation program. She would have to stand in line during registration, listen to students discuss the classes they hoped to get, and visit departments to watch faculty advising students on course selection. She would want to observe secretaries typing, janitors sweeping, and maintenance personnel plowing snow from walks. She would watch the more than 1,600 students crowd into the post office area to open their tiny mailboxes, and she would listen to their com- ments about junk mail and letters from home or no mail at all. She would attend fac- ulty meetings to watch what went on, recording what professors and administrators said and how they behaved. She would sample various courses, attend “keggers” on weekends, read the Mac Weekly, and listen by the hour to students discussing things like their “relationships,” the “football team,” and “work study.” She would want to learn the meanings of all these things. She would have to listen to the members of this college community, watch what they did, and participate in their activities to learn such meanings.

The essential core of ethnography is this concern with the meaning of actions and events to the people we seek to understand. Some of these meanings are directly expressed in language; many are taken for granted and communicated only indirectly through word and action. But in every society people make constant use of these com- plex meaning systems to organize their behavior, to understand themselves and oth- ers, and to make sense out of the world in which they live. These systems of meaning constitute their culture; ethnography always implies a theory of culture.

Culture

When ethnographers study other cultures, they must deal with three fundamental aspects of human experience: what people do, what people know, and the things peo- ple make and use. When each of these is learned and shared by members of some group, we speak of them as cultural behavior, cultural knowledge, and cultural arti- facts. Whenever you do ethnographic fieldwork, you will want to distinguish among these three, although in most situations they are usually mixed together. Let’s try to unravel them.

C H A P T E R 1 Ethnography and Culture 9

Recently I took a commuter train from a western suburb to downtown Chicago. It was late in the day, and when I boarded the train, only a handful of people were scattered about the car. Each was engaged in a common form of cultural behavior: reading. Across the aisle a man held the Chicago Tribune out in front of him, looking intently at the small print and every now and then turning the pages noisily. In front of him a young woman held a paperback book about twelve inches from her face. I could see her head shift slightly as her eyes moved from the bottom of one page to the top of the next. Near the front of the car a student was reading a large textbook and using a pen to underline words and sentences. Directly in front of me I noticed a man looking at the ticket he had purchased and reading it. It took me an instant to survey this scene, and then I settled back, looked out the window, and read a billboard advertisement for a plumbing service proclaiming it would open any plugged drains. All of us were engaged in the same kind of cultural behavior: reading.

This common activity depended on a great many cultural artifacts, the things people shape or make from natural resources. I could see artifacts like books and tickets and newspapers and billboards, all of which contained tiny black marks arranged into intricate patterns called “letters.” And these tiny artifacts were ar- ranged into larger patterns of words, sentences, and paragraphs. Those of us on that commuter train could read, in part, because of still other artifacts: the bark of trees made into paper; steel made into printing presses; dyes of various colors made into ink; glue used to hold book pages together; large wooden frames to hold billboards. If an ethnographer wanted to understand the full cultural meaning in our society, it would involve a careful study of these and many other cultural artifacts.

Although we can easily see behavior and artifacts, they represent only the thin surface of a deep lake. Beneath the surface, hidden from view, lies a vast reservoir of cultural knowledge. Think for a moment what the people on that train needed to know in order to read. First, they had to know the grammatical rules for at least one language. Then they had to learn what the little marks on paper represented. They also had to know the meaning of space and lines and pages. They had learned cultural rules like “move your eyes from left to right, from the top of the page to the bottom.” They had to know that a sentence at the bottom of a page continues on the top of the next page. The man reading a newspaper had to know a great deal about columns and the spaces between columns and what headlines mean. All of us needed to know what kinds of messages were intended by whoever wrote what we read. If a person cannot distinguish the importance of a message on a billboard from one that comes in a letter from a spouse or child, problems would develop. I knew how to recognize when other people were reading. We all knew it was impo- lite to read aloud on a train. We all knew how to feel when reading things like jokes or calamitous news in the paper. Our culture has a large body of shared knowledge that people learn and use to engage in this behavior called reading and make proper use of the artifacts connected with it.

Although cultural knowledge is hidden from view, it is of fundamental impor- tance because we all use it constantly to generate behavior and interpret our expe- rience. Cultural knowledge is so important that I will frequently use the broader term culture when speaking about it. Indeed, I will define culture as the acquired knowledge people use to interpret experience and generate behavior. Let’s consider another example to see how people use their culture to interpret experience and do things.

10 P A R T O N E Culture and Ethnography

One afternoon in 1973 I came across the following news item in the Minneapolis Tribune:

Crowd Mistakes Rescue Attempt, Attacks Police Nov. 23, 1973. Hartford, Connecticut. Three policemen giving a heart massage and oxygen to a heart attack victim Friday were attacked by a crowd of 75 to 100 persons who appar- ently did not realize what the policemen were doing.

Other policemen fended off the crowd of mostly Spanish-speaking residents until an ambulance arrived. Police said they tried to explain to the crowd what they were do- ing, but the crowd apparently thought they were beating the woman.

Despite the policemen’s efforts the victim, Evangelica Echevacria, 59, died.

Here we see people using their culture. Members of two different groups ob- served the same event, but their interpretations were drastically different. The crowd used their cultural knowledge (a) to interpret the behavior of the policemen as cruel and (b) to act on the woman’s behalf to put a stop to what they perceived as brutality. They had acquired the cultural principles for acting and interpreting things in this way through a particular shared experience.

The policemen, on the other hand, used their cultural knowledge (a) to interpret the woman’s condition as heart failure and their own behavior as a life-saving effort and (b) to give her cardiac massage and oxygen. They used artifacts like an oxygen mask and an ambulance. Furthermore, they interpreted the actions of the crowd in an entirely different manner from how the crowd saw their own behavior. The two groups of people each had elaborate cultural rules for interpreting their experience and for acting in emergency situations, and the conflict arose, at least in part, because these cultural rules were so different.

We can now diagram this definition of culture and see more clearly the rela- tionships among knowledge, behavior, and artifacts ( Figure 1 ). By identifying cultural knowledge as fundamental, we have merely shifted the emphasis from behavior and artifacts to their meaning. The ethnographer observes behavior but goes beyond it to inquire about the meaning of that behavior. The ethnographer sees artifacts and natu- ral objects but goes beyond them to discover what meanings people assign to these objects. The ethnographer observes and records emotional states but goes beyond them to discover the meaning of fear, anxiety, anger, and other feelings.

As represented in Figure 1, cultural knowledge exists at two levels of conscious- ness. Explicit culture makes up part of what we know, a level of knowledge people can communicate about with relative ease. When George Hicks asked storekeepers and others in Little Laurel Valley about their relatives, he discovered that any adult over fifty could tell him the genealogical connections among large numbers of peo- ple. They knew how to trace kin relationships and the cultural rules for appropriate behavior among kins. All of us have acquired large areas of cultural knowledge such as this, which we can talk about and make explicit.

At the same time, a large portion of our cultural knowledge remains tacit, out- side our awareness. Edward Hall has done much to elucidate the nature of tacit cultural knowledge in his books The Silent Language and The Hidden Dimension. 4 The way each culture defines space often occurs at the level of tacit knowledge. Hall points out that all of us have acquired thousands of spatial cues about how close to

4 Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959); The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).

C H A P T E R 1 Ethnography and Culture 11

stand to others, how to arrange furniture, when to touch others, and when to feel cramped inside a room. Without realizing that our tacit culture is operating, we be- gin to feel uneasy when someone from another culture stands too close, breathes on us when talking, touches us, or when we find furniture arranged in the center of the room rather than around the edges. Ethnography is the study of both explicit and tacit cultural knowledge. . . .

The concept of culture as acquired knowledge has much in common with sym- bolic interactionism, a theory that seeks to explain human behavior in terms of mean- ings. Symbolic interactionism has its roots in the work of sociologists like Cooley, Mead, and Thomas. Blumer has identified three premises on which this theory rests.

The first premise is that “human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them.” 5 The policemen and the crowd in our ear- lier example interacted on the basis of the meanings things had for them. The geo- graphic location, the types of people, the police car, the policemen’s movements, the sick woman’s behavior, and the activities of the onlookers—all were symbols with spe- cial meanings. People did not act toward the things themselves, but to their meanings.

The second premise underlying symbolic interactionism is that the “meaning of such things is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows.” 6 Culture, as a shared system of meanings, is learned, revised, maintained, and defined in the context of people interacting. The crowd came to

Universal Uses

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Physical environment

Behavior and events

Cultural behavior

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FIGURE 1

5 Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 2.

6 Blumer, p. 2.

12 P A R T O N E Culture and Ethnography

share their definitions of police behavior through interacting with one another and through past associations with the police. The police officers acquired the cultural meanings they used through interacting with other officers and members of the community. The culture of each group was inextricably bound up with the social life of their particular communities.

The third premise of symbolic interactionism is that “meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person dealing with the things he encounters.” 7 Neither the crowd nor the policemen were automatons, driven by their culture to act in the way they did. Rather, they used their cultural knowledge to interpret and evaluate the situation. At any moment, a member of the crowd might have interpreted the behavior of the policemen in a slightly different way, leading to a different reaction.

We may see this interpretive aspect more clearly if we think of culture as a cogni- tive map. In the recurrent activities that make up everyday life, we refer to this map. It serves as a guide for acting and for interpreting our experience; it does not compel us to follow a particular course. Like this brief drama between the policemen, a dy- ing woman, and the crowd, much of life is a series of unanticipated social occasions. Although our culture may not include a detailed map for such occasions, it does pro- vide principles for interpreting and responding to them. Rather than a rigid map that people must follow, culture is best thought of as

a set of principles for creating dramas, for writing script, and of course, for recruiting players and audiences. . . . Culture is not simply a cognitive map that people acquire, in whole or in part, more or less accurately, and then learn to read. People are not just map-readers; they are map-makers. People are cast out into imperfectly charted, continu- ally revised sketch maps. Culture does not provide a cognitive map, but rather a set of principles for map making and navigation. Different cultures are like different schools of navigation to cope with different terrains and seas. 8

If we take meaning seriously, as symbolic interactionists argue we must, it be- comes necessary to study meaning carefully. We need a theory of meaning and a spe- cific methodology designed for the investigation of it.

Study and Review on myanthrolab.com

Review Questions

1. What is the definition of culture? How is this definition related to the way an- thropologists do ethnographic fieldwork?

2. What is the relationship among cultural behavior, cultural artifacts, and cultural knowledge?

3. What is the difference between tacit and explicit culture? How can anthropolo- gists discover these two kinds of culture?

4. What are some examples of naive realism in the way Americans think about peo- ple in other societies?

7 Blumer, p. 2.

8 Charles O. Frake, “Plying Frames Can Be Dangerous: Some Reflections on Methodology in Cognitive Anthropology,” Quarterly Newsletter of the Institute for Comparative Human Development 3 (1977): 6–7.

13

2 Eating Christmas in the Kalahari Richard Borshay Lee

What happens when an anthropologist living among the !Kung of Africa decides to be gen- erous and to share a large animal with everyone at Christmastime? This compelling ac- count of the misunderstanding and confusion that resulted takes the reader deeper into the nature of culture. Richard Lee carefully traces how the !Kung perceived his generosity and taught the anthropologist something about his own culture. *

Listen to the Chapter Audio on myanthrolab.com

The !Kung Bushmen’s knowledge of Christmas is thirdhand. The London Missionary Society brought the holiday to the southern Tswana tribes in the early nineteenth cen- tury. Later, native catechists spread the idea far and wide among the Bantu-speaking pas- toralists, even in the remotest corners of the Kalahari Desert. The Bushmen’s idea of the Christmas story, stripped to its essentials, is “praise the birth of white man’s god- chief”; what keeps their interest in the holiday high is the Tswana-Herero custom of slaughtering an ox for his Bushmen neighbors as an annual goodwill gesture. Since the 1930s, part of the Bushmen’s annual round of activities has included a December

* From Richard Borshay Lee, “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari,” Natural History , December 1969, pp. 14–22, 60–64. Reprinted from Natural History December 1969; copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 1969.

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congregation at the cattle posts for trading, marriage brokering, and several days of trance dance feasting at which the local Tswana headman is host.

As a social anthropologist working with !Kung Bushmen, I found that the Christmas ox custom suited my purposes. I had come to the Kalahari to study the hunting and gathering subsistence economy of the !Kung, and to accomplish this it was essential not to provide them with food, share my own food, or interfere in any way with their food-gathering activities. While liberal handouts of tobacco and medical supplies were appreciated, they were scarcely adequate to erase the glar- ing disparity in wealth between the anthropologist, who maintained a two-month inventory of canned goods, and the Bushmen, who rarely had a day’s supply of food on hand. My approach, while paying off in terms of data, left me open to frequent accusations of stinginess and hardheartedness. By their lights, I was a miser.

The Christmas ox was to be my way of saying thank you for the cooperation of the past year; and since it was to be our last Christmas in the field, I was determined to slaughter the largest, meatiest ox that money could buy, insuring that the feast and trance dance would be a success.

Through December I kept my eyes open at the wells as the cattle were brought down for watering. Several animals were offered, but none had quite the grossness that I had in mind. Then, ten days before the holiday, a Herero friend led an ox of astonishing size and mass up to our camp. It was solid black, stood five feet high at the shoulder, had a five-foot span of horns, and must have weighed 1,200 pounds on the hoof. Food consumption calculations are my specialty, and I quickly figured that bones and viscera aside, there was enough meat—at least four pounds—for every man, woman, and child of the 150 Bushmen in the vicinity of /ai/ai who were ex- pected at the feast.

Having found the right animal at last, I paid the Herero £20 ($56) and asked him to keep the beast with his herd until Christmas day. The next morning word spread among the people that the big solid black one was the ox chosen by /ontah (my Bush- man name; it means, roughly, “whitey”) for the Christmas feast. That afternoon I re- ceived the first delegation. Ben!a, an outspoken sixty-year-old mother of five, came to the point slowly.

“Where were you planning to eat Christmas?” “Right here at /ai/ai,” I replied. “Alone or with others?” “I expect to invite all the people to eat Christmas with me.” “Eat what?” “I have purchased Yehave’s black ox, and I am going to slaughter and cook it.” “That’s what we were told at the well but refused to believe it until we heard it

from yourself.” “Well, it’s the black one,” I replied expansively, although wondering what she was

driving at. “Oh, no!” Ben!a groaned, turning to her group. “They were right.” Turning back

to me she asked, “Do you expect us to eat that bag of bones?” “Bag of bones! It’s the biggest ox at /ai/ai.” “Big, yes, but old. And thin. Everybody knows there’s no meat on that old ox.

What did you expect us to eat off it, the horns?” Everybody chuckled at Ben!a’s one-liner as they walked away, but all I could

manage was a weak grin. That evening it was the turn of the young men. They came to sit at our evening

fire. /gaugo, about my age, spoke to me man-to-man.

C H A P T E R 2 Eating Christmas in the Kalahari 15

“/ontah, you have always been square with us,” he lied. “What has happened to change your heart? That sack of guts and bones of Yehave’s will hardly feed one camp, let alone all the Bushmen around /ai/ai.” And he proceeded to enumerate the seven camps in the /ai/ai vicinity, family by family. “Perhaps you have forgotten that we are not few, but many. Or are you too blind to tell the difference between a proper cow and an old wreck? That ox is thin to the point of death.”

“Look, you guys,” I retorted, “that is a beautiful animal, and I’m sure you will eat it with pleasure at Christmas.”

“Of course we will eat it; it’s food. But it won’t fill us up to the point where we will have enough strength to dance. We will eat and go home to bed with stomachs rumbling.”

That night as we turned in, I asked my wife, Nancy, “What did you think of the black ox?”

“It looked enormous to me. Why?” “Well, about eight different people have told me I got gypped; that the ox is noth-

ing but bones.” “What’s the angle?” Nancy asked. “Did they have a better one to sell?” “No, they just said that it was going to be a grim Christmas because there won’t

be enough meat to go around. Maybe I’ll get an independent judge to look at the beast in the morning.”

Bright and early, Halingisi, a Tswana cattle owner, appeared at our camp. But before I could ask him to give me his opinion on Yehave’s black ox, he gave me the eye signal that indicated a confidential chat. We left the camp and sat down.

“/ontah, I’m surprised at you; you’ve lived here for three years and still haven’t learned anything about cattle.”

“But what else can a person do but choose the biggest, strongest animal one can find?” I retorted.

“Look, just because an animal is big doesn’t mean that it has plenty of meat on it. The black one was a beauty when it was younger, but now it is thin to the point of death.”

“Well, I’ve already bought it. What can I do at this stage?” “Bought it already? I thought you were just considering it. Well, you’ll have to

kill it and serve it, I suppose. But don’t expect much of a dance to follow.” My spirits dropped rapidly. I could believe that Ben!a and /gaugo just might

be putting me on about the black ox, but Halingisi seemed to be an impartial critic. I went around that day feeling as though I had bought a lemon of a used car.

In the afternoon it was Tomazo’s turn. Tomazo is a fine hunter, a top trance per- former . . . and one of my most reliable informants. He approached the subject of the Christmas cow as part of my continuing Bushman education.

“My friend, the way it is with us Bushmen,” he began, “is that we love meat. And even more than that, we love fat. When we hunt we always search for the fat ones, the ones dripping with layers of white fat: fat that turns into a clear, thick oil in the cook- ing pot, fat that slides down your gullet, fills your stomach and gives you a roaring diarrhea,” he rhapsodized.

“So, feeling as we do,” he continued, “it gives us pain to be served such a scrawny thing as Yehave’s black ox. It is big, yes, and no doubt its giant bones are good for soup, but fat is what we really crave, and so we will eat Christmas this year with a heavy heart.”

The prospect of a gloomy Christmas now had me worried, so I asked Tomazo what I could do about it.

16 P A R T O N E Culture and Ethnography

“Look for a fat one, a young one . . . smaller, but fat. Fat enough to make us //gom (evacuate the bowels), then we will be happy.”

My suspicions were aroused when Tomazo said that he happened to know a young, fat, barren cow that the owner was willing to part with. Was Tomazo work- ing on commission, I wondered? But I dispelled this unworthy thought when we ap- proached the Herero owner of the cow in question and found that he had decided not to sell.

The scrawny wreck of a Christmas ox now became the talk of the /ai/ai water hole and was the first news told to the outlying groups as they began to come in from the bush for the feast. What finally convinced me that real trouble might be brew- ing was the visit from u!au, an old conservative with a reputation for fierceness. His nickname meant spear and referred to an incident thirty years ago in which he had speared a man to death. He had an intense manner; fixing me with his eyes, he said in clipped tones:

“I have only just heard about the black ox today, or else I would have come here earlier. /ontah, do you honestly think you can serve meat like that to people and avoid a fight?” He paused, letting the implications sink in. “I don’t mean fight you, /ontah; you are a white man. I mean a fight between Bushmen. There are many fierce ones here, and with such a small quantity of meat to distribute, how can you give everybody a fair share? Someone is sure to accuse another of taking too much or hogging all the choice pieces. Then you will see what happens when some go hungry while others eat.”

The possibility of at least a serious argument struck me as all too real. I had wit- nessed the tension that surrounds the distribution of meat from a kudu or gemsbok kill, and had documented many arguments that sprang up from a real or imagined slight in meat distribution. The owners of a kill may spend up to two hours arranging and rearranging the piles of meat under the gaze of a circle of recipients before hand- ing them out. And I knew that the Christmas feast at /ai/ai would be bringing together groups that had feuded in the past.

Convinced now of the gravity of the situation, I went in earnest to search for a second cow; but all my inquiries failed to turn one up.

The Christmas feast was evidently going to be a disaster, and the incessant com- plaints about the meagerness of the ox had already taken the fun out of it for me. Moreover, I was getting bored with the wisecracks, and after losing my temper a few times, I resolved to serve the beast anyway. If the meat fell short, the hell with it. In the Bushmen idiom, I announced to all who would listen:

“I am a poor man and blind. If I have chosen one that is too old and too thin, we will eat it anyway and see if there is enough meat there to quiet the rumbling of our stomachs.”

On hearing this speech, Ben!a offered me a rare word of comfort. “It’s thin,” she said philosophically, “but the bones will make a good soup.”

At dawn Christmas morning, instinct told me to turn over the butchering and cooking to a friend and take off with Nancy to spend Christmas alone in the bush. But curiosity kept me from retreating. I wanted to see what such a scrawny ox looked like on butchering, and if there was going to be a fight, I wanted to catch every word of it. Anthropologists are incurable that way.

The great beast was driven up to our dancing ground, and a shot in the forehead dropped it in its tracks. Then, freshly cut branches were heaped around the fallen car- cass to receive the meat. Ten men volunteered to help with the cutting. I asked /gaugo to make the breast bone cut. This cut, which begins the butchering process for most

C H A P T E R 2 Eating Christmas in the Kalahari 17

large game, offers easy access for removal of the viscera. But it also allows the hunter to spot-check the amount of fat on an animal. A fat game animal carries a white layer up to an inch thick on the chest, while in a thin one, the knife will quickly cut to bone. All eyes fixed on his hand as /gaugo, dwarfed by the great carcass, knelt to the breast. The first cut opened a pool of solid white in the black skin. The second and third cut widened and deepened the creamy white. Still no bone. It was pure fat; it must have been two inches thick.

“Hey /gau,” I burst out, “that ox is loaded with fat. What’s this about the ox being too thin to bother eating? Are you out of your mind?”

“Fat?” /gau shot back. “You call that fat? This wreck is thin, sick, dead!” And he broke out laughing. So did everyone else. They rolled on the ground, paralyzed with laughter. Everybody laughed except me; I was thinking.

I ran back to the tent and burst in just as Nancy was getting up. “Hey, the black ox. It’s fat as hell! They were kidding about it being too thin to eat. It was a joke or something. A put-on. Everyone is really delighted with it.”

“Some joke,” my wife replied. “It was so funny that you were ready to pack up and leave /ai/ai.”

If it had indeed been a joke, it had been an extraordinarily convincing one, and tinged, I thought, with more than a touch of malice, as many jokes are. Nevertheless, that it was a joke lifted my spirits considerably, and I returned to the butchering site where the shape of the ox was rapidly disappearing under the axes and knives of the butchers. The atmosphere had become festive. Grinning broadly, their arms covered with blood well past the elbow, men packed chunks of meat into the big cast-iron cooking pots, fifty pounds to the load, and muttered and chuckled all the while about the thinness and worthlessness of the animal and /ontah’s poor judgment.

We danced and ate that ox two days and two nights; we cooked and distributed fourteen potfuls of meat and no one went home hungry and no fights broke out.

But the “joke” stayed in my mind. I had a growing feeling that something im- portant had happened in my relationship with the Bushmen and that the clue lay in the meaning of the joke. Several days later, when most of the people had dispersed back to the bush camps, I raised the question with Hakekgose, a Tswana man who had grown up among the !Kung, married a !Kung girl, and who probably knew their culture better than any other non-Bushman.

“With us whites,” I began, “Christmas is supposed to be the day of friendship and brotherly love. What I can’t figure out is why the Bushmen went to such lengths to criticize and belittle the ox I had bought for the feast. The animal was perfectly good and their jokes and wisecracks practically ruined the holiday for me.”

“So it really did bother you,” said Hakekgose. “Well, that’s the way they always talk. When I take my rifle and go hunting with them, if I miss, they laugh at me for the rest of the day. But even if I hit and bring one down, it’s no better. To them, the kill is always too small or too old or too thin; and as we sit down on the kill site to cook and eat the liver, they keep grumbling, even with their mouths full of meat. They say things like, ‘Oh, this is awful! What a worthless animal! Whatever made me think that this Tswana rascal could hunt!’ ”

“Is this the way outsiders are treated?” I asked. “No, it is their custom; they talk that way to each other, too. Go and ask them.” /gaugo had been one of the most enthusiastic in making me feel bad about the

merit of the Christmas ox. I sought him out first. “Why did you tell me the black ox was worthless, when you could see that it was

loaded with fat and meat?”

18 P A R T O N E Culture and Ethnography

“It is our way,” he said, smiling. “We always like to fool people about that. Say there is a Bushman who has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all [pause] just a little tiny one.’ Then I smile to myself,” /gaugo continued, “because I know he has killed something big.