The Nomadic Alternative – Page 153

Diversity is often stigmatized as incompetence to do one thing properly. Yet specialization is the mother of insufficiency. The hunters' results fully justify their will to diversify. They eat while others starve. By budgeting for the minimum, the minimal society can never feel itself deprived of surplus, nor feel the demon of discontent and inadequacy that plagues every other economic system. Furthermore they actively relish the alternate periods of abundance and want which the annual cycle brings in its train.

Stop-Go economics are not just part of texture of life, they are essential to it.

The Nambikwara of the Brazilian forests are the people Levi-Strauss visited when he wanted to find human society "reduced to its minimal expression". They spend a resigned six months settled in forest clearings - gardening. This universally tedious occupation brings them a measure of security and plentiful regular menus. And they hate it. But Levi-Strauss found that the return of the hunting season was a matter for general rejoicing, for melancholy cast aside, and "excited discussion, with the element of discovery always present" even though they might go without food for several days.

The hunting grounds of the Mbuti Pygmies lie in the heart of the equatorial rain forest, where the climate is constant and the supply of food predictable throughout the year. And what happens? Colin Turnbull found that his Pygmy friends felt themselves cheated of a lean season, and artificially invented "imaginary seasons of plenty and scarcity." Conversely the !K, another group of African hunters he visited, lived in a highly unstable environment, swept by violent extremes of climate, where plenty one moment gave way to famine the next. But the !K made no concessions to the weather or lack of food. Thus they arrived at the same result as the Mbuti.

Hunters know how to survive the coldest, bleakest, leanest, hottest or most arid season, and keep laughing. The earliest European travellers, who shared the pleasures and hardships of simple savages, knew this quite well - a fact which the modern anthropologist has just rediscovered. The marvellous 16th Century narrative of Cabeza