Thinking about The Old Way

An editor for Old Roads has got to be interested in a book entitled The Old Way.. so I read the book. It is an admiring account of the !Kung.. a people living according to the ancient lifeway of hunting and gathering. The book acquires an elegiac tone from the fact that this lifeway has passed away:

The hunter-gatherer life of the savannah, which began when our ancestors lost the shelter of the trees, survived until the 1970s or '80s, by which time the First People had been forced to change profoundly. And although today a few individuals may remember the Old Way and keep some of its skills, no human population lives by it anymore. [16]

You will notice the reference to the "First People". The !Kung people—according to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas—were a people living in the way that the earliest humans once did.. So whatever we learn about their lifeway is not just another example of cultural variation, but valuable in understanding who we as human beings fundamentally are. This is similar to the way that R. Dale Guthrie approaches Paleolithic human artifacts.. whatever we learn about the early people who left the earliest traces of art on cave walls can tell us something about who we are as human beings. I believed that when reading Guthrie.. with this book I am not convinced.

I kept thinking about what I have read in the past about the Paiute Indians in the arid American West. The Wikipedia article about them has this to say concerning their lifeway:

The Northern Paiute's pre-contact lifestyle was well adapted to the harsh desert environment in which they lived. Each tribe or band occupied a specific territory, generally centered on a lake or wetland that supplied fish and water-fowl. Rabbits and pronghorn were taken from surrounding areas in communal drives, which often involved neighboring bands. Individuals and families appear to have moved freely between bands. Pinyon nuts gathered in the mountains in the fall provided critical winter food. Grass seeds and roots were also important parts of their diet. The name of each band came from a characteristic food source.

That sounds a lot like the lifeway of the !Kung.. yet we would not refer to the Paiute as the "First People". Like every other traditional human culture they are the product of centuries of development and change. Study of the Paiute Indians would be a fascinating glimpse into human variation, but it would not be an approach to what we might call the universally human.

Thomas' reason for identifying the !Kung as the First People is not quite argued.. but it has to do with their position in Africa, the cradle of human evolutionary development.. with their fundamental and natural lifestyle... and with the ancient language spoken by this people (one of those click languages). The idea is that arriving with this people is like going back in time to the first human beings.. i.e. the First People:

To me, the experience of visiting this place and these people was profoundly important, as if I had voyaged into the deep past through a time machine. [6]

If you buy this idea, then everything she notes about the !Kung tells you something about who you are.. where you come from. On the other hand, if the !Kung are more like the Paiute Indians, then they are just another people group.. like us or like a tribe in Papua New Guinea.. and the book loses some of its urgency.

Clearly, I am a bit of a doubter as to the "First People" status of the !Kung. But I will admit that the picture Thomas develops of their lifestyle is consistent with that of Paleolithic people as imagined by Guthrie.. especially when it comes to the centrality of hunting in the life of the !Kung. Thomas (with the help of notes made by her mother) discusses the excitement of hunting:

...all men and boys were enthralled with hunting. "Ju/wa men talk endlessly about hunting as they sit together repairing their equipment or poisoning their arrows," wrote my mother. "They recount over and over remarkable episodes of past hunts, hear each other's news about recent hunts, and make plans. Little boys play at hunting from the time they can walk and they practice shooting throughout their childhood." [95]

That is exactly the world that Guthrie would like us to believe produced the images of large game animals on the walls of ancient rock shelters.

Thomas earned my respect by her unflinching acknowledgment that human beings are part of the animal world. That goes for modern human beings too.. only we are cut off from that world (perhaps like the dogs in her earlier work The Hidden Life of Dogs?). Her point of view comes out in many ways.. take the following brief passage:

The Bushmen of the interior, by contrast, still had their world—the world that, as an indigenous species, they had helped to form. [53]

Human beings are indigenous species in this African landscape just as the lions, antelopes, and elands. It was interesting to learn that the !Kung referred to different animals as having a territory (n!ore) like them.. seemingly allowing human and animal concepts to overlap. This strikes me as a necessary concept in the study of religion: the realization that human beings.. no matter how far separated from nature by culture.. are animals. We are an indigenous species of the earth.