The Cause and Affects of the Evolving !Kung Society
...her, !Kung women and men conditioned the girls and boys for their future roles as mothers, hunters, gatherers, medicine men, and community members. Although girls were married off at a young age (N!ai was married when she was eight years old), the women began to initiate the girls into society when they hit puberty and their breasts began to develop. They would praise the girls and exclaim, “That’s what women do”. N!ai described her coming of age and that of her friends to be exciting yet some what frightening because they were then soon expected to sleep with their husbands and have children of their own. Childbirth even involved the most of the tribe. Men surrounded the women giving birth to deliver spiritual chants that cured the babies of any birthing difficulties or sickness. The film shows several men chanting in the direction of a woman’s womb during labor to coax the baby into the world. The filmmakers describe these chants as part of a religious practice. Many !Kung men participate in a religious form of tracing called “Loung”. The trances are facilitated by groups of men who go into what N!ai describes as “the half death”. The trances were said to be so intense that men have died from heart attack before during a trance. The purpose of the trance was for the group of men to slip into the half death in order to summon sickness or evil spirits from a person such as during the child birth in the film. The trances are accompanied by chanting as a way of calling to the sick or evil spirit. Although the trances sometimes fail to cure the ill such the baby who was still born in the film, this practice was a vital part of the !Kung society. Trancing provided the tribal community with a cure (or at least an attempted one) for their sickness and evil spirits. Unlike many Western societies, the !Kung were not bound to personal property and self-sustainability. Rather, they were committed to the survival of the community through group actions and responsibility. The tightly knit interdependence allowed the !Kung to flourish despite of Western commodities and ideals (i.e. agriculture, an economy, or jobs). Upon the arrival of the Dutch-South Africans however (circa 1978), the !Kung were forced onto designated reservations with little resources and obligated to assimilate (at least to an extent) to Western culture. As with all colonized minorities, the !Kung’s traditional society for the most part was destroyed and their standard of living rapidly declined. Over eight hundred !Kung were resettled onto a mere twenty-five square miles. This drastic change as well as the change imposed by the colonist impacted every aspect of !Kung society. The most profound impact brought by the Dutch-South Africans was the integration of a wage-labor driven economy into !Kung society. The !Kung were now required to work for a money driven economic system rather than as nomadic hunters and gatherers. This Westernized system created a shift in ability for the !Kung to support themselves. Previously, the means for survival had rested upon the collective tribal effort to provide for themselves through communal cooperation in hunting, gathering, and child rearing. With the imposed Westernized system, the !Kung were obligated to work for money that would then in turn buy food and supplies. This new system created a rift in the !Kung society. The concept of wage-labor stresses the accumulation of resources on an individual basis (money) through labor that is rewarded with wages rather than the cooperative gain in resources that the !Kung society subsisted on before the colonist arrived. This dramatic shift away from cooperative interdependence destroyed the foundations of the !Kung society. Several scenes in the film depict this conflict exactly. These scenes involve tribe members in the new settlement accusing N!ai of not sharing and hiding things. One old man in particular confronts N!ai in her hut and charges her with going out and drinking beer all day while he sits around and starves. N!ai refutes the charges by claiming that she also sits around all day and that she has not even the money to buy her children shoes. While the filmmakers may have simply left out footage of such quarrels in the earlier, nomadic days, the film does not suggest that theses conflicts concerning cooperation and collective responsibility were particularly prominent during the !Kung’s hunting and gathering era. Since the !Kung were confined to tiny, resourceful less plots of land under the Dutch-South Africans, they were bombarded with problems concerning food. The land was far too barren to provide for the tribe using their traditional hunting and gathering methods. They were, for the most part forced to buy food from the colonist. In one of the interviews with N!ai, she describes the change in diet by comparing their traditional meals of various plants, nuts, and berries with the bland meals that eliminated the balanced nutrients of their previous diet. They were not only limited by the meals that they had to buy, but also by the game warden who restricted or ban (the film did not make clear as to if it was completely illegal or not) the !Kung hunting of giraffe which had been their main staple of meat. With this newly imposed law, the...