The Nomadic Alternative – Page 229

But the communal undergoing of the lean season acts as an emotional cement, binding the people together. They mobilize themselves to face an outside menace that may come from a wild beast, hurrican, bush fire, starvation or disease. This annual siege demands self-sacrifice and affirms human solidarity. And the hunters and gatherers, who refuse to accumulate reserves of food on principle, find the lean season incredibly harsh, although, by budgeting for the minimum, they calculate they will not actually die. Now as I mentioned earlier, the Mbuti Pygmies of Equatoria feel themselves deprived of a lean season and artificially create one. Through an accident of geography, they are prevented from living out the Dream (or myth) of the Fat and Lean King. So they ritualize it. Stop-Go economics are not just a feature of human society. They are essential to it.

We introduce periods of chaos from outside to stabilize ourselves within.

The professional detractors of the savage pointed to his inability to count as proof of innate stupidity. But they forgot that he automatically coordinates his annual activities to his biological clock and measures the passage of time by seasonal changes of vegetation, animal movements and the position of the stars. As Cabeza della Vaca noticed of the hunting Yganzes of Texas, "They are all ignorant of time, either by the sun or moon, nor do they reckon by the month of the year; they better understand the differences of the seasons, when the fruit comes to ripen, where the fish resort, and the position of the stars, at which they are ready and practical." But those who protect themselves from the anxiety of the lean season find themselves victims of a temporal anxiety. The calendar fills an emotional vacuum, and the Lenten fasts, the cuttings for Hossein, and other annual purges, followed by festivals of joy, plenty, exercise and laughter, ritualize the lean season and onset of plenty for those who have lost their natural coordination to the seasonal cycle. Body and brain interreact to demand alternate phases of plenty and want, of activity and torpor, of danger and safety. If these are not lived out, they surface in human