The Nomadic Alternative – Page 157

their definition of a slob. Hunters adapt their equipment to their migrations. Our migrations are often dictated by the need for raw materials to make our equipment.

By common consent the 'Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari are among the gentlest people in the world. This has nothing to do with a gene for gentleness, inherited by them and not by others. At times the Bushmen get quite worked up and explode in fits of anger. But anger is always frowned upon. It lacks malice and usually subsides, since there is no fuel to keep a feud blazing. It is their attitude to property and their evaluation of its proper place that keeps the people harmonious. They have leaders certainly, but this leadership is not enforced. The leader attracts but never commands cooperation. Far from accumulating things, he alone can afford to give away everything he possesses, knowing that his own excellence will attract more. Rank cannot be perpetuated by property.

Mrs. Lorna Marshall, who has visited the 'Kung many times writes with intuitive insight of their attitude to material possessions.

"They lived in a kind of material plenty because they adapted the tools of their living to materials which lay in abundance around them, and which were free for everyone to take ... In their nomadic hunting and gathering life, travelling from one source of food to another through the seasons, always going their own found food and water, they carry their young children and their belongings. With plenty of most materials at hand to replace artifacts as required the 'Kung have not developed means of permanent storage and have not needed or wanted to encumber themselves with surplus or duplicates. Instead of keeping things they use them to express generosity and friendly intent, and put people under obligation to make return tokens of friendship.

"The worst thing", a 'Kung told Mrs. Marshall, "is not giving presents. If people do not like each other but one gives a gift and the other must accept, this brings peace between them. We give to one another always. We give what we have. This is the way we live in peace together."*

This brings us back to Rousseau's intuition that the Society of Equals disappeared when one man had enough for two. Hunters divide all food into equal portions and share them out among all members of the group. "The hunter kills. The people have", goes an Eskimo proverb. The man who kills is de facto the owner of the animal. So

* Lorna Marshall, Sharing, Talking and Giving: Relief of Social Tensions among the !Kung Bushmen, in "Africa", 1961, vol xxxi, p.251.