[lit-ideas] Re: Theatre of the Absurd -- a work in progress

On 4/28/06, Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
We are of a mind.  The crocodile brain rules.  Still, I think humans, if
not perfectible, can be vastly improved so as to be unrecognizable.  All we
have to do is retool the factories where they're made.  So simple, yet so
impossible.  I read somewhere that Paleolithic man was actually quite happy
(the ones who survived the saber tooths); at the very least, much better
nourished than humans before McDonald's.  Everything changed when hunting
and gathering was replaced by agriculture.  Once humans settled into one
spot, they were much more subject to drought, famine, floods and therefore
scarcity.  I saw the movie Ice Age, so I know this is true.  I also own a
saber toot tiger, a small one, you saw her picture ..


The only problem is, of course, that Mike's premise, the caveman
coming home to a cave with no one there but his wife and kids, is a
fable, a fiction, and very likely utterly false to paleolithic or
mesolithic realities. Far from being the (phallic?) club-wielding
wildman individualists of the fantasy on which Mike draws, actual
hunters and gatherers turn out on the whole to be highly cooperative
and sharing sorts of people. Here, for example, is anthropologist
Sidney Mintz summarizing one account.

"In an early article, Lorna Marshall provided a glowing description of
how sharing food serves to reduce individual and intragroup tension.
the !Kung Bushmen, she reported, always consumed fresh meat
immediately after it became available: 'The fear of hunger is
mitigrated; the person one shares with will share in turn when he gets
meat, and people are sustained by  web of mutual obligation. If there
is hunger, it is commonly shared. There are no distinct haves and
have-nots. One is not alone.... The idea of eating alone and not
sharing is shocking to the !Kung. It makes them shriek with uneasy
laughter. Lions could do that, they say, not men.' Marshall described
in detail how four hunters who killed an eland, following ten days of
hunting and three days of tracking the wounded animal, bestowed the
meat upon others--other hunters, the wife of the arrow's owner, etc.
She recorded sixty-three gifts of raw meat and thought there had been
many more. Small quantitites of meat were rapidly diffiused, passing
on in every-diminishing portions. This swift movement was not random
or quixotic; it actuallyilluminated the interior organization of the
!Kung band, the distribution of kinfolk, divisions of sex, age, and
role. Each occasion to eat meat was hence a natural occasion to
discover who one was, how one was related to others, and what that
entailed."

That several hunters were involved, that the hunt stretched over a
number of days, and that custom required the sharing of the kill in a
way that ensures that everyone gets something are typical features of
ethnograpic descriptions of actual hunter-gathers. The caveman fantasy
is, on closer examination, an artifact of modernity, the separation of
family and workplace, and the lonely figure of the man who goes off to
"bring home the bacon" and normally, if successful, brings home only
the money with which his wife purchases the meat produced by anonymous
others at the end of industrial food chains.

Just thought you ought to know.


John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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