The Nomadic Alternative – Page 155

to put the gaje off the scent. Outsiders may think they have nailed

a responsible authority, but the gipsies nickname him the "Concierge"

- thus taking due measure of the vertical hierarchy and its preten-

sions. Politicians and heads of state are clowns and concierges,

and their comic possibilities provide the only human reason for

their retention. The hereditary monarch is, of course, marginally

preferable to the politician. He or she is likely to provide more

comic relief. And the Throne acts as a constitutional block to

protect the people from the ambitions of statesmen, usually long

demented before they have groped to the pinnacle of power.

If the hunters failed to develop culture, it was not for lack

of time. They spend rather more of their lives on holiday than at

work. Richard Lee timed the working hours of the Dobe Bushmen in

Bechuanaland and concluded that they work three and a half hours

a day at the most - about two and a half days in a working week.

Their work pattern varies from day to day and can never be foretold

with exactitude. Their situation compares favourably with all other

minimal hunters in temperate latitudes. If in some circles the hunt-

ers are the lowest, they are certainly the most leisured class in

the world, apart from being the most contented. Some assume this

contentment to be the fruit of ignorance. Others say they lack the

brain. Neither are correct. Their intelligence is inferior to none,

but they call upon it to solve different situations than ours.

Other observers noticed that, no matter where in the world they

hunted, members of the Society of Equals were almost unanimous in

their attitudes to society, to the external world, to life and to

death. But this unanimity, among people who could not have contacted

each other for well over ten thousand years, contrasts sharply with

the kaleidoscopic range of custom among peoples who nuzzle up to

each other all the time. Some anthropologists explained the similari-

ties, shared by all hunting peoples, to the fact that they all faced

similar problems for survival. But life in the rain forests hardly

resembles that in a waterless desert, a swamp or the Northern Ice.

Each environment poses an entirely different set of problems. Yet

the hunters solve them in much the same way. Another view, propounded