203. Deconstructing the Postmodern Condition 3 -- L'Affaire Turnbull

From the introduction to Alex Liazos' book, The 1950s Mbuti:A Critique of Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People:

When I began this project in November 2007, I did not set out to disprove, dispute, discredit, or disagree with The Forest People. I wanted to see the field notes for a book I admired, loved, learned from, and taught in my courses for four decades. I also hoped to learn more about the lives of women and children than what the book reports. Once I read the field notes, however, I came upon much material that casts a different light on the book. I feel an obligation to communicate with other readers and admirers of the book, and tell them that the Mbuti of the field notes led more complex, difficult, and different lives than did the Mbuti of The Forest People. The Mbuti did not live in the idyllic paradise the book presents.

During the course of his presentation, Liazos points to several discrepancies, some of them apparently serious, between Turnbull's book and his field notes, from which he often quotes extensively. A list of the principal problems is summarized as follows in the Introduction:

•There is the persecution of Sau, an old woman who is accused of being a witch. For five and a half months, she is harassed constantly, often beaten, and shunned, until she is finally forced to leave the group.

•There is Turnbull’s implied and stated claim that the Mbuti are a gathering and hunting people. They are not. They rely as much or more on grown food from village plantations as they do on food they hunt and gather.

•A strong impression in The Forest People is that the Mbuti live primarily in forest hunting camps. They do not. Dates in the field notes show that they live as long or longer in the village next to the forest.

•Turnbull says that the molimo celebration of a beloved old woman who died while he was there lasts for three uninterrupted months. It does not. Turnbull’s dates and descriptions of people coming and going show that on many nights there is no molimo celebration. On many other days and nights many, often most, people, including Turnbull, are in the village, not in the forest.

•Turnbull seriously misrepresents where and how he spends his time with the Mbuti. The Forest People takes place mostly in forest camps, giving the impression that the Mbuti live primarily in the forest. But during his major stay, September 1957 to October 1958, he lives in forest camps with the Mbuti a total of at most three months. While in forest camps, he never stays more than two consecutive weeks in any one of them.

In Chapter One, "Rethinking The Forest People," Liazos presents another list, this time of impressions of Mbuti life suggested by his initial, uncritical, readings of the book:

1. Cooperation and sharing are fundamental to their lives.

2. Their relationship to the forest shapes all their experiences.

3. There are no leaders and no social classes.

4. There is no private ownership of the land, no inheritance of it from parents to children.

5. Thus, at birth, all children begin equal. None of them own any land or other major property and all can learn whatever they wish from any adult in the group.

6. Thus, there is equality, but not sameness - each Mbuti is very much a distinct individual.

7. There is communal raising of children.

8. There are no courts, police, and government, and the community as a whole gets involved in settling disputes.

9. The Molimo and the Elima festivals are important.

10. Women and men have equal status, according to Turnbull. Why does he say this? Do you agree? Why are women excluded from the Molimo? What does it mean that women "tie up" the men at the end?

11. For many years since I first read the book in 1961 [actually 1963], I did not pay much attention to the violence described in later chapters (especially against Kenge's sister by Kenge and their mother). A student in 1990 argued that such violence against women indicates a lower status for women. What do you think?

Liazos makes it clear that his intention is not to totally debunk the book, and he devotes his Third Chapter to quoting a great many passages in the field notes that reinforce his original impression, from reading the book, of the Mbuti as leading a generally carefree and pleasant life:

They do sing, dance, tell stories, joke and laugh, love and are close to the forest, hold a molimo celebration with beautiful music and songs, live as a close community. They enjoy life and are a happy people. These are the realities I present in this chapter. The next two chapters show the problems Turnbull leaves out.

Indeed, Chapter Four is entitled "Persecution, Conflict, and Violence in Mbuti life," and Liazos presents some very disturbing examples from the field notes that in his view were either omitted or played down in The Forest People. The first, and most disturbing instance he cites is the story of the "persecution" of an old Mbuti woman named Sau, who has been accused of witchcraft by the tribal people of the farming village with which the Mbuti have formed what appears to be a symbiotic relationship. The story of Sau, marked by many incidents that seem unjustified and unfair, is told by Turnbull in great and disturbing detail, but only in his field notes. In The Forest People, according to Liazos, there are only 7 brief mentions of her, all of which he quotes, and on this basis he accuses Turnbull of minimizing the degree to which she is persecuted, implying that had he given her story the importance it deserves, it would have undermined the romantic, idealized view of Mbuti life he was so eager to paint.

While the story of Sau is indeed especially disturbing, there are other aspects of Pygmy life reported in the notes but seemingly passed over or minimized in the book that Liazos goes to considerable pains to document. What stood out for me were two things in particular: violence toward women, exemplified by the many wife-beatings described in Turnbull's notes; and violence toward children, who also seem to be beaten with some degree of regularity. There are some other serious problems as well, for example a discrepancy regarding the amount of time Turnbull spends in the forest as opposed to the neighboring farming village and the amount of time the Mbuti themselves spend in either place.

In the next installment I'll attempt to address these issues as best I can, defending Turnbull where I feel he's been unfairly accused (though I must admit that some of the accusations cannot be so easily defended), and re-examining the question that's been raised so often with respect to his work generally, and The Forest People in particular: were the Mbuti of the 1950's for real, did they actually lead the sort of life Turnbull has depicted for them, or has he offered a distorted, idealized and biased picture, based on what he wanted to believe rather than what he actually observed? And more important from my own perspective, what does Turnbull's research tell us about the Mbuti as members of a much larger group of African peoples, popularly known as "Pygmies," with traditions that may or may not transcend their immediate situation, as Turnbull found them, at a particular time and place?

202. Deconstructing the Postmodern Condition 2 -- L'Affaire Turnbull

Colin Turnbull's The Forest People, based on his experiences among the Mbuti Pygmies of the central African Ituri Forest, was written during the 1950's, but in the eyes of many it is typical of the sort of wide-eyed romantic idealism associated with the 60's. A typically 21st Century response can be found in the following reader review, from Amazon.com, by one Dawn Stoker, of Houston:

Colin Turnbull romanticizing of the Mbuti pygmies in "The Forest People" is allowable given the period in which it was written. In some ways, the book really tells us more about the ethnographer than the people he studied. Turnbull found the Mbuti way of life to have a simple, spiritual quality that he admired greatly.... part of this admiration stemmed from his own background in an elitist British social and academic system. Turnbull was simply "in love" with the Mbuti.

Anthropology has (hopefully) advanced to the point where its practitioners allow themselves a greater recognition of their possible biases. Even so, who is to say that an understanding of the ethnographer is not more important than the study group. The book reads pleasantly, if not scientifically.

Reading through so many similarly disdainful comments in the anthropological literature, one has to wonder how so many presume to know so much about a famously elusive people studied by so few, and an even more famously elusive author. In far too many cases, as it's seemed to me at least, the all too predictable "demystifications" are the product of all too predictable agendas, authored by those with axes of their own to grind.

While always skeptical of revisionists with agendas, and usually eager to defend Turnbull and his work, which I still find meaningful, I have to admit I was taken aback by the discovery, on the Internet, of a book on Turnbull unlike any other: The 1950s Mbuti: A Critique of Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People, by Alex Liazos. In contrast to those who have second-guessed Turnbull by attempting, like Kisliuk, to retrace his footsteps or, more typically, "deconstruct" his thinking by speculating on his motives, Liazos has tracked down Turnbull's original field notes, now on deposit at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, of the College of Charleston, in South Carolina. And, according to Liazos, the field notes tell a very different story from that of the book:

In 2007-2008, I read the field notes for The Forest People, and I found a different Mbuti than the people found in the book. The field notes, which Turnbull took in 1957-58 while living with the Mbuti, show a people troubled by conflicts, persecution of an old woman, and other serious problems. The idyllic and egalitarian society presented in The Forest People exists only in part in Turnbull’s own field notes.

In my opinion, this methodical, relentless study of Turnbull's field notes is a document of great importance that should be required reading for every anthropologist, professional and student alike, and indeed anyone with an interest in the study of social structure and human nature generally. Unlike almost everyone who's been critical of Turnbull (or, more typically, simply dismissed his work), Liazos does not appear to have an ax to grind, revisionist or otherwise, but seems honestly and legitimately concerned by some of the disconcerting materials he has uncovered. Although, unfortunately, he's had difficulty finding a publisher for his book, he has, very fortunately for us, made it freely available at his website, Turnbull and the Mbuti. Just scroll down and click on the link labeled MS, THE 1950's MBUTI. (For some reason the book is incomplete when accessed via Mozilla Firefox, at least on my system, so I suggest using MS Explorer.)

Of the many issues raised by Liazos, those of most concern to me are as follows:

1. Fairness to Turnbull. Was he deliberately deceptive? Did he deliberately embellish or distort the truth, or fail to report significant events that should have been reported?

2. Fairness to the picture of Mbuti life presented in The Forest People. Did Turnbull indeed romanticize or idealize the Mbuti? Does the more complete picture presented in the field notes seriously contradict that of the book?

3. To what extent do the revelations Lazios has found in the field notes have a bearing on the "open question" offered in my previous post: "Do all pygmy groups share essentially the same core values; and if so, wouldn't that fact alone tell us there is an African Pygmy culture after all, if not fully persisting into the present moment, then valid at least in the past?"

201. Deconstructing the Postmodern Condition

I am reading an account of Ju/'hoansi Bushmen life by Joachim Friedrich Pfaffe, who lived among them for four years as part of a (failed) development project. He begins with the following description of "Bushmen" in general:

Bushmanland – home of the “Bushmen”, politically correct called the “San”. The San are certainly one of the oldest indigenous populations on our planet. They have been around for more than 20,000 years, with a history of living in small family bands. They never cared about riches or personal possessions, everything was shared among their people. Day-to-day existence was secured through hunting and gathering, although this was never easy in the desert and semi-desert environment of the wider Kalahari.

The story he has to tell is very sad, since the situation of today's Bushmen, especially the Ju/'hoansi, has deteriorated seriously and no one seems able to help. This is typical of the kind of reporting we see over and over nowadays regarding indigenous peoples. Their tragic plight overpowers everything else, with the implication that their current helplessness somehow casts a doubtful light on the meaning of their entire past. No one wants to talk anymore about this past, only to wring their hands helplessly over the "futility" of the current situation -- as though the values of the past had nothing to offer the present. His concluding words are, therefore, all too predictable: "Leaving again after a few weeks, I am beginning to realize that this story will have to contribute towards a better understanding of the over-mythologized San."

Why is it necessary for him to remind us that the San are "over-mythologized"? And what does he mean by that? What is it about the Bushmen that constitutes a myth? He has already informed us that they "have been around for more than 20,000 years", that they "never cared about riches or personal possessions, everything was shared among their people." Is that part of the myth? And if so, why didn't he make that clear in the first place? The phrase "over-mythologized" is simply tossed in as though it were expected, as though he had a duty to reassure us that all the wonderful things we've heard about certain "primitive" tribal peoples are really too good to be true, that losing such traditions doesn't really matter as much as we might think. With the implication that the "myth" is really all "our" doing, that "we" have been projecting our own values onto people totally remote from us, whose real values we couldn't possibly understand or appreciate.

We have seen this attitude already expressed in the writings of Michelle Kisliuk, whose mission from the start was to debunk the "idealized image of African pygmy life" offered by Colin Turnbull, "within a prevailing utopian narrative." Even after her own experiences time after time confirmed Turnbull's view, she could never bring herself to accept the possibility that his "utopian narrative" might have some validity after all. Her difficulty is encapsulated in the introduction to her book, where she explains her approach as follows:

Especially because this ethnography is focused among a population that has been so heavily represented in one way or another as hermetic and quintessential -- as the essence of a thing in its purest form -- to question those reductive representations, it follows that I would move away from a systems approach. The ethnographer Jan van Maanen characterizes this change of focus (sometimes labeled "postmodern"): 'Holistic perspectives of culture . . . have given way to representations of culture in flux, whose natives may have as much difficulty knowing it and living in it as the fieldworker'" (Seize the Dance, p. 12).

There is nothing wrong with such an approach to fieldwork, in fact it makes a great deal of sense. However, there is something wrong when the method determines the outcome beforehand, when the purpose is not to gain a greater understanding, but to "question . . . reductive representations," as though the "reductiveness" of those representations were already a foregone conclusion. It is one thing to express an "incredulity toward metanarratives," to quote the "father" of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard, and another to proceed as though all efforts to attain an holistic perspective of culture are necessarily false or misguided, thus fair game for revisionist "deconstruction."

I won't elaborate again on the misguided revisionism behind the so-called "Great Kalahari Debate," but the puritanical zeal with which postmodernist "incredulity" manifested itself with regard to the status of the Bushmen resulted in arguments that were almost pure ideology, with very little basis in anything resembling responsible research. My views on this matter are expressed very clearly on this blog beginning with post 64.

Postmodern revisionism takes a more subtle form in the work of Barry Hewlett, who has no problem characterizing the Aka, in terms very close to Turnbull's view of the Mbuti, as "fiercely egalitarian and independent," with "core values" that include "sharing, cooperation, and autonomy," "intergenerational equality," and egalitarian male-female relations; among whom "physical violence in general is infrequent and violence against women is especially rare" (see post 184 for references). Yet, in his essay "Cultural Diversity Among African Pygmies," Hewlett all but ignores those same core values, and the striking similarity to the picture painted of the Mbuti by Turnbull (and Kisliuk as well), to base his comparisons on relatively external matters, such as hunting techniques, dependence on neighboring farmers, borrowed kinship systems, borrowed languages, etc., concluding on that basis that "it is difficult if not impossible to refer to an African 'Pygmy' culture." Do all pygmy groups share essentially the same core values; and if so, wouldn't that fact alone tell us there is an African Pygmy culture after all, if not fully persisting into the present moment, then valid at least in the past? Despite Hewlett's well intentioned, but incomplete, effort, this remains an open question.

In an effort to deal with this question, which appears never to have been properly asked, not to mention researched, I want to go further into what has become, in anthropological circles, a notorious issue (I was going to write "controversy," but apparently I'm the only one who sees it as controversial) -- the question of Colin Turnbull's motives and reliability as an objective observer of pygmy life. This will be possible thanks to the discovery, by Alex Liazos, of Turnbull's original field notes, the basis for a projected book, The 1950s Mbuti: A Critique of Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People. This project, now a work in progress, is the subject of a very interesting website, Turnbull and the Mbuti.

(to be continued . . . )

200. Utopia, Then and Now -- part 5

I'd like to return, at this point, to the passage from Thomas More's Utopia that I quoted a couple posts ago, where the narrator questions the wisdom of a society where everyone is treated equally, due to the danger that all incentive to work would be lost:

"On the contrary," answered I, "it seems to me that men cannot live conveniently where all things are [held in] common: how can there be any plenty, where every man will excuse himself from labor? For as the hope of gain doth not excite him, so the confidence that he has in other men's industry may make him slothful: if people come to be pinched with want, and yet cannot dispose of anything as their own; what can follow upon this but perpetual sedition and bloodshed, especially when the reverence and authority due to magistrates fall to the ground? For I cannot imagine how that can be kept up among those that are in all things equal to one another."

The narrator is, of course, stating one of the basic principles of classical economics, that all humans are ultimately, whether we like to admit it or not, motivated by self-interest, which in turn drives competition, the basis for our "free market economy." This is a view now widely, and uncritically, accepted in the post-Soviet, "free market" driven world of today. Here's one particularly clear statement of what was, until very recently, the accepted wisdom of the day, from a 1995 article by Mark Perry, entitled Why Socialism Failed:

In a capitalist economy, incentives are of the utmost importance. Market prices, the profit-and-loss system of accounting, and private property rights provide an efficient, interrelated system of incentives to guide and direct economic behavior. Capitalism is based on the theory that incentives matter!

Why do incentives matter? Human nature, for one thing: "By failing to emphasize incentives, socialism is a theory inconsistent with human nature and is therefore doomed to fail." For another, the need for maximum efficiency due to the scarcity of resources: "In a world of scarcity it is essential for an economic system to be based on a clear incentive structure to promote economic efficiency." Which leads, inevitably, to competition: "Without competition, centrally planned economies do not have an effective incentive structure to coordinate economic activity." Thus, "Without incentives the results are a spiraling cycle of poverty and misery."

The message appears to have remained more or less the same down through the centuries (Saint Thomas More was beheaded in the 16th): "men cannot live conveniently where all things are [held in] common."

Pay attention, however, to the response:

"I do not wonder," said he, "that it appears so to you, since you have no notion, or at least no right one, of such a constitution: but if you had been in Utopia with me [my emphasis], and had seen their laws and rules, as I did, for the space of five years, in which I lived among them; and during which time I was so delighted with them, that indeed I should never have left them, if it had not been to make the discovery of that new world to the Europeans; you would then confess that you had never seen a people so well constituted as they."

In other words, "yes, your objection does appear reasonable, but you are in fact wrong. Because there is another way, and I have witnessed it." Remarkably, the paragraph quoted above, with only a little tweaking, could have been written by any number of anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, etc., who have lived among the peoples I've been focusing on throughout most of this blog, the Pygmies and Bushmen of Africa. With few exceptions, these remarkable societies have, through most of their history, lived collectively, sharing most of their goods on an equal basis, shunning competition, and yet managing to survive peacefully and harmoniously among themselves, for the most part, with little if any trace of regimentation or coercion, for what now appears to be tens of thousands of years!

Here is what Colin Turnbull had to say about the Mbuti Pygmies:

But the BaMbuti are the real people of the forest. Whereas the other tribes are relatively recent arrivals, the Pygmies have been in the forest for many thousands of years. It is their world, and in return for their affection and trust it supplies them with all their needs. . .

The BaMbuti roam the forest at will, in small isolated bands or hunting groups. They have no fear, because for them there is no danger. For them there is little hardship, so they have no need for belief in evil spirits. For them it is a good world. . . (The Forest People, p. 14).

The Pygmies are no more perfect than any other people, and life, though kind to them, is not without hardships. But there was something about the relationship between these simple, unaffected people and their forest home that was captivating. And when the time came that I had to leave, even though we were camped back near the village, the Pygmies gathered around their fire on the eve of my departure and sang their forest songs for me; and for the first time I heard the voice of the molimo. Then I was sure that I could never rest until I had come out again, free of any obligations to stay in the village, free of any limitations of time, free simply to live and roam the forest with the BaMbuti, its people; and free to let them teach me in their own time what it was that made their life so different from that of other people (p. 23).

They were a people who had found in the forest something that made their life more than just worth living, something that made it, with all its hardships and problems and tragedies, a wonderful thing full of joy and happiness and free of care. (p. 26).

Here's what Louis Sarno had to say about his experiences among the BaAka Pygmies:

I don't think the Bayaka are primitive just because they don't have advanced technology. Their technology is successful for their way of life and they've never fought a war. War to me is barbaric and true primitivism. . .

I think their society is very enlightened in many aspects as compared to our lives. We have these technological accomplishments, but it doesn't really tell us how to live. Life is so needlessly complicated in modern society. It's more simple in the rain forest. The Bayaka don't need psychiatrists. They don't need Prozac.

I've already quoted similarly "Utopian" accounts of Pygmy groups, by Michelle Kisliuk (in spite of herself), and Barry Hewlett. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in her book The Old Way, writes with glowing admiration of the !Kung Bushmen's "almost obsessive sense of equality and sharing. . . In daily matters, sharing was the way of life. Everybody shared" (p. 108).

If sharing can be a way of life for societies that have flourished for tens of thousands of years, then a need for personal incentives based on competition cannot be grounded in "human nature."

And if life in the Kalahari desert, where Bushmen groups have thrived, also, apparently, for many thousands of years, is marked by extreme scarcity, of both food and water, then Perry's assertion that "In a world of scarcity it is essential for an economic system to be based on a clear incentive structure to promote economic efficiency," cannot be true.

Why is this important? Because, as we now know, it is not only Soviet style socialism that has collapsed, but also the brand of "free market capitalism" so enthusiastically promoted by Perry -- and so many others.

Perry was able to conclude, with some confidence, back in 1995:

Capitalism will play a major role in the global revival of liberty and prosperity because it nurtures the human spirit, inspires human creativity, and promotes the spirit of enterprise. By providing a powerful system of incentives that promote thrift, hard work, and efficiency, capitalism creates wealth.

The main difference between capitalism and socialism is this: Capitalism works. [My emphases.]

This reminds me of those famous words of Gordon Gekko: "Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works."



As we now know, to our sorrow and grief, Perry was not only wrong about societies "where all things are held in common." He was also wrong about the capitalist "Utopia" he was promoting. "Free market" capitalism does not work. Greed does not work. Despite the continual litany of complaints and rollings of the eyes we've been getting for so long from fashionably revisionist academics, there is something we can learn from those "primitive" hunters and gatherers after all. The only question is: will the message reach us in time?

199. Utopia, Then and Now -- part 4

Recent interdisciplinary work among Darwinian anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists, archaeologists, linguists and geneticists hints that there really was an Urrasse, and there really was an Urkultur . . . Both are represented in the ‘anatomically modern’ Homo sapiens population that gave rise to the ‘Out of Africa’ migration about 80,000 years ago. This migration spread early symbolic culture; let us call it Urkultur. However, the relation between this Urkultur and the cultures of today’s so-called ‘indigenous peoples’ is no greater that that between this Urkultur and the cultures of all peoples (Alan Barnard, "Kalahari revisionism, Vienna and the ‘indigenous peoples’ debate." Social Anthropology 14 (1), p. 13).

The above is almost certainly correct when it comes to the existence of a so-called Urrasse (i.e., "original race" -- Barnard is quoting a now outdated term beloved by the notorious Kulturkreis school of early 20th century anthropology), which must certainly have had a culture of its own, which would, indeed, have been, to stick with the Kulturkreis terminology, an Urkultur ("original culture"). However, as I argued in my paper, New perspectives on the Kalahari debate: a tale of two ‘genomes’, the last sentence of the above paragraph is almost certainly wrong. In the article, I demonstrated that at least one aspect of this Urkultur, its music, has in all likelihood come down to us essentially intact, most completely among the Pygmies and Bushmen of our own time. And now, on this blog, I have demonstrated, to my satisfaction at least, that what we can call the "core culture" of the ancestral group has also come down to us essentially intact -- also among certain Pygmy and Bushmen groups.

Barnard is a bit careless regarding an important point: "the ‘anatomically modern’ Homo sapiens population that gave rise to the ‘Out of Africa’ migration" was not really an Urrasse, if by that we mean the original group of modern humans that arose with the speciation of our "race" (the human race, that is). The ancestral group whose culture matters to us was not some apocryphal founding band of "anatomically modern" humans, but the very real and specific group of common ancestors prior to the earliest divergence of the ancestors of the Pygmies and Bushmen (who were "our" ancestors as well). It is this group whose core culture appears to have been maintained among the various Pygmy and Bushmen groups.

It's important to realize that the ancestral group to whom I refer was not all that special in its day, since there must have been other bands living in more or less the same region at the same time, and we have no way of telling what their cultures were like, because, according to the genetic research, only that one lineage (the root of L0 and L1) managed to survive to our own time. The culture of the ancestral group can be regarded as an Urkultur only in retrospect, because this appears to be the culture that forms the baseline for the entire evolution of culture from that time to this, among all their descendants, the members of their lineage, from that time to this. I'll repeat the key phrase from the previous sentence, and highlight it: this appears to be the culture that forms the baseline for the entire evolution of culture from that time to this.

Meaning that any future attempt to trace the evolution of culture from its earliest beginnings must seriously consider the core cultural values of the aforementioned Pygmy and Bushmen groups, since it is their core culture, and that of no other people, which appears to have survived essentially intact from that of the ancestral group. Whatever we can learn about our ancestors will necessarily be based on what we can learn about them. (It's important to remember that I am not talking about "hunter-gatherers" or "indigenous peoples" in general, because, as we've already learned, many such groups have very different sorts of culture, often far more violent and far less egalitarian. Far too many anthropologists and cultural commentators tend to lump all these groups together, a huge mistake.)

So. If we can put aside that difficult and divisive word "Utopian," and simply consider the Urkultur of our early ancestors as mirrored in the culture of certain forest and desert foragers of today, we can hopefully agree that, in all likelihood, while by no means perfect or "ideal," it did apparently, more or less, conform to at least some of those idealist "stereotypes" so many love to roll their eyes over.

For me, there are at least two aspects that stand out as especially important for us, their "sophisticated," "globalized" descendants, to note: first, the avoidance of war, conflict, or any other type of violence; second, the "setting of all upon a level," to quote More, the imperative toward social equality in terms of individual liberty, indifference to personal property, and the equal sharing of goods. The fact that so much in the "common wisdom of the day" so confidently contradicts this view, on the basis of completely unsubstantiated assumptions is especially disturbing. Here, for example is a recent interview with economist Paul Seabright, from The American Scientist, which begins as follows:

Economist Paul Seabright is fascinated by human cooperation. Mistrust and violence are in our genes, he says, but abstract, symbolic thought permits us to accept one another as "honorary relatives"—a remarkable arrangement that ultimately underlies every aspect of modern civilization.

Everyone's favorite pundit, Steven Pinker, is particularly grating on this topic. In a recent talk, entitled A History of Violence, he ludicrously asserts that humans have, contrary to popular opinion, been getting progressively less violent through history:

Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion. . .

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own.

Once again, as with so many others, Pinker indifferently lumps all "contemporary foragers" together into one category of "inherently" violent representatives of humanity at its earliest stages. He continues, digging an even deeper hole for himself:

At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man's rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset ("War is not an instinct but an invention"), Stephen Jay Gould ("Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species"), and Ashley Montagu ("Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood"). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

Aside from this being utter nonsense on its face, a perfect example of the revisionist impulse at its most ignorant and embarrassing, it also reflects what has become an all too common article of faith, that humans are inherently violent, something determined, no doubt, by their genetic makeup, as has been "proven" evidently by our close affiliation with all those violent chimps (see earlier post). In full, self-satisfied, Victorian mode, Pinker is determined to set us straight on the value of the "improvements" civilization has provided in our battle against our own deepest and direst instincts. There is more. If Pinker can't convince us that violence is in our genes, maybe it's there because, after all, it's "only logical":

. . . Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don't strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta.

While the above "logic" may hold for certain societies, past and present, in truth there is neither a "primal thirst for blood" nor an "inescapable logic of anarchy," mistrust, fear, and violent self-defense. We know this because there are peoples in the world who have lived in peace and harmony with their neighbors and one another for many thousands of years. And, indeed, there is strong evidence that our "pre-state ancestors" shared the same values. We in all likelihood did not begin as mistrustful, selfish, fearful and violent barbarians. And it is not necessary for any society to behave in such a manner in order to survive. The line from our early ancestors to the Pygmies and Bushmen of today is as long as any in history, and throughout the length of that line we see, in generation after generation, essentially the same picture: an image of survival through cooperation, equality, sharing, independence, mutual respect and non-violence, all the values we so cherish today, but have such a difficult time achieving.

198. Utopia, Then and Now -- part 3

So, was our ancestral society a Utopia? Not exactly. For one thing, Thomas More's Utopia was an agricultural society, while early homo sapiens were almost certainly hunter-gatherers. Utopia had towns, but there's no evidence of towns during the Old Stone Age. Utopia had fortifications, but there's no evidence of Old Stone Age fortifications either. Perhaps they weren't needed. Utopia was a hierarchical society, with magistrates of varying degrees of power, and also a prince, but, as seems likely, our ancestors, like today's Pygmies and Bushmen, were non-hierarchical and acephalus. Also, the Utopians, believe it or not, had slaves.

More's remarkable book notwithstanding, the word "Utopia" has come to imply some kind of ideal society -- too ideal, perhaps, to actually exist. So did our ancestors live in an ideal society? A paradise? Was theirs a Golden Age? A "Utopia"?

For an answer, you can read any number of books and articles on the Pygmies and Bushmen, listen to their recorded music, watch the films -- and decide for yourself. You'll find opinions pro and con, and you can make up your own mind. Sadly -- tragically -- you may not be able to find any of these societies actually functioning in the world of today, since most have been hobbled or destroyed by forces beyond their control -- from the inroads of farmers or logging camps, the social pressures exerted by missionary groups, or, more recently, the forces of what is known as "market reform" or "the global economy," the same forces that are currently tearing our own world apart.

I personally find it difficult to see Pygmy or Bushmen societies as Utopias, either in the literal sense, as more primitive replicas of the community fantasized by Thomas More, or in the generic sense of an ideal society, where everyone gets along perfectly, disputes are rare, and always settled fairly and without violence. On the contrary, what we learn from those who've spent time with them in the field is that individuals can be quick to speak their mind if something bothers them, which means that disputes, especially marital disputes (with the wife often the aggressor, according to Kisliuk (p. 141)) are not unusual and serious violence, though rare, is not unheard of. This is only to be expected. In any society that values both group integration and individual autonomy, tensions are going to emerge, people are going to assert themselves, and there is always the possibility of violence.

What especially troubles me, to be honest, is the tendency by many of our intellectuals and public pundits to make exactly the sort of "romantic," idealizing statements descried by Kisliuk and ridiculed by the revisionists. While I've been defending my own findings against their dismissive attacks, their attitude is understandable given the widespread tendency for laymen and even professional anthropologists to make unwarranted assumptions when writing about hunter-gatherers. A case in point is a book I'm currently leafing through, entitled After Eden, by Kirkpatrick Sale, who decides, on the basis of very little evidence indeed, that homo erectus must have lived in much the same manner as contemporary hunter-gatherer groups, or what he calls "immediate-return" societies. Quoting some of Colin Turnbull's more enthusiastic descriptions of the Mbuti, he concludes, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, as follows:

Thus the ethnographic record provides a striking picture of the coherence and concord of immediate-return societies, who are after all managing for the most part . . . to carry on traditions that in many respects date back more than a million years. Back to the Erectus, who, if we accept the premise that all immediate-return societies must look pretty much alike, can be regarded as having lived in some generally similar way.

The worldview of the Mbutis: that is what I take to be the worldview of Erectus (p. 118).

Far too much of this sort of rubbish has been written and uncritically accepted by far too many. So much so, that it's not surprising when we find serious professionals responding with dismissive and insulting knee-jerk reactions in the opposite direction. What too often gets lost in all the posturing and rhetoric is exactly what was neglected in the first place: the evidence. As someone who prides himself on following the evidence, I find myself caught in the middle, where it's all too easy to be mis-perceived as yet another one of those hopeless "romantics," drawing extravagant conclusions on the basis of unwarranted assumptions.

As far as the evidence is concerned, it's important to emphasize the fact that all "immediate-return societies" do not look alike. For one thing, a great many such societies around the world, whether strictly hunter-gatherers or nearly so (e.g., part-time swidden gardeners), can be extremely violent, waging continual warfare with their neighbors and in some cases, until recently at least, engaging in head-hunting and cannibalism. While a great many such groups worldwide do tend to be egalitarian and non-hierarchical, strong leaders do emerge, in the form of so-called "big men," and what may well have begun as pygmy/bushmen-like customs of communal sharing have sometimes morphed into elaborate and occasionally destructive systems of extravagant gift-exchange, not too different from what we would call conspicuous consumption.

It's also important to understand that we have very few means of uncovering any aspects whatever of the non-material culture of either homo erectus or neanderthals, known to us only through a sparse and incomplete fossil and archaeological record. While, in my view, it is possible to extrapolate backwards into our deep past, on the basis of comparative studies of the culture and genetic makeup of living peoples, sifting the evidence and drawing inferences, there is nothing in the culture or genes of living people that can tell us anything at all regarding what amounts to a completely different species, either homo erectus or neanderthal, with what are in all likelihood completely different histories. We cannot even say very much about the earliest homo sapiens, because, for all we know, they may have been very different from the Pygmies and Bushmen of today. I've been very careful on this blog and elsewhere to draw conclusions only where they are warranted by the evidence and reasonable inference therefrom. On such a basis I've concluded, as you know, that it is acceptable to draw certain conclusions regarding the common ancestors of the Pygmies and Bushmen as of the period of earliest divergence. Prior to that cutoff, we are no longer in a position to draw meaningful inferences -- though we are certainly free to speculate.

Returning to the question of "Utopia," I want to make one additional point before concluding this post. Regardless of all the many differences between More's original vision and the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherers we've been focusing on, we do in fact find some striking similarities when we, once again, pay special attention to the "core premises and embedded values" highlighted by Cornelia van der Sluys. Note, in the excerpt from More's Utopia at the outset of the previous post, the references to the elimination of private property, the elimination of money as a "standard of all things," the praise of a society "with so few laws; where virtue hath its due reward, and yet there is such an equality, that every man lives in plenty . . .," and the praise of Plato for advocating "a community of all things," and "setting all upon a level." In this statement, More encapsulates what could be called the "core premises and embedded values" of his Utopia, which, as should be obvious, are all but identical to those of the Pygmy and Bushmen groups we've been discussing. Which tells us that the same premises and values may well have been shared by the ancestral group -- their, and our, ancestors. Which would, in that sense at least, have made their society, if not a Utopia, then at least: Utopian.

197. Utopia, Then and Now -- part 2

"Though to speak plainly my real sentiments, I must freely own that as long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily . . . Therefore when I reflect on the wise and good constitution of the Utopians--among whom all things are so well governed, and with so few laws; where virtue hath its due reward, and yet there is such an equality, that every man lives in plenty . . . I grow more favorable to Plato, and do not wonder that he resolved not to make any laws for such as would not submit to a community of all things: for so wise a man could not but foresee that the setting all upon a level was the only way to make a nation happy, which cannot be obtained so long as there is property: for when every man draws to himself all that he can compass, by one title or another, it must needs follow, that how plentiful soever a nation may be, yet a few dividing the wealth of it among themselves, the rest must fall into indigence. . ." [emphasis mine]

"On the contrary," answered I, "it seems to me that men cannot live conveniently where all things are common: how can there be any plenty, where every man will excuse himself from labor? For as the hope of gain doth not excite him, so the confidence that he has in other men's industry may make him slothful: if people come to be pinched with want, and yet cannot dispose of anything as their own; what can follow upon this but perpetual sedition and bloodshed, especially when the reverence and authority due to magistrates fall to the ground? For I cannot imagine how that can be kept up among those that are in all things equal to one another."

"I do not wonder," said he, "that it appears so to you, since you have no notion, or at least no right one, of such a constitution: but if you had been in Utopia with me, and had seen their laws and rules, as I did, for the space of five years, in which I lived among them; and during which time I was so delighted with them, that indeed I should never have left them, if it had not been to make the discovery of that new world to the Europeans; you would then confess that you had never seen a people so well constituted as they."

St. Thomas More, Utopia

In their book, Demonic Males, evolutionary biologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson ask the question, "Where does human violence come from, and why?" Their answer? It is imprinted in us as part of our pre-human heritage. How do they know this? From studying chimpanzees:

The social world of chimpanzees is a set of individuals who share a communal range; males live forever in the groups where they are born, while females move to neighboring groups at adolescence; and the range is defended, and sometimes extended with aggressive and potentially lethal violence, by groups of males related in a genetically patrilineal kin group.

What makes this social world so extraordinary is comparison. Very few animals live in patrilineal, male-bonded communities wherein females routinely reduce the risks of inbreeding by moving to neighboring groups to mate. And only two animal species are known to do so with a system of intense, male-initiated territorial aggression, including lethal raiding into neighboring communities in search of vulnerable enemies to attack and kill. Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more other animal species, this suite of behaviors is known only among chimpanzees and humans. . .

. . . [A]re the similarities there, as we believe, because in spite of first appearances, similar evolutionary forces continue to be at work in chimpanzee and human lineages, maintaining and refining a system of intergroup hostility and personal violence that has existed since even before the ancestors of chimpanzees and humans mated for the last time in a drying forest of eastern Africa around 5 million years ago? If so, one must ask, what forces are they: What bred male bonding and lethal raiding in our forebears and keeps it now in chimpanzees and humans? What marks have those ancient evolutionary forces forged onto our twentieth-century psyches? And what do they say about our hopes and fears for the future?

The message encapsulated in the above excerpt has been widely disseminated and its premise widely accepted (though it's hardly the first of its kind -- viz. Robert Ardrey's equally influential The Territorial Imperative). Witness the response of Washington Post literary critic Daniel Pinchbeck, who is clearly convinced:

Such male aggression has structured the lives of humans as well as chimpanzees for thousands of generations. Every human society has been patriarchal, with men retaining most of the dominant spots in the hierarchy and using their power to control women and annihilate their enemies.

Actually, there are matriarchal as well as patriarchal societies, but you get the point. He continues, echoing an all too familiar refrain:

The authors regretfully dismiss the possibility of some paradisiacal society that existed in a Golden Era or on a South Seas island, whether matriarchal or truly non-hierarchical and peaceful. Yet they do not believe that this means the future is a closed book. Evolution means continual adaptation and change, and the authors hold a rational faith that "to find a better world we must look not to a romanticized and dishonest dream forever receding into the primitive past, but to a future that rests on a proper understanding of ourselves."

Hope for humankind can be found, however, since there exists a close cousin of the Chimp whose social behavior does indeed suggest "some paradisiacal society that existed in a Golden Era or on a South Seas island, whether matriarchal or truly non-hierarchical and peaceful": the Bonobo. According to the authors, "Chimpanzees and bonobos both evolved from the same ancestor that gave rise to humans, and yet the bonobo is one of the most peaceful, unaggressive species of mammals living on the earth today." On that point, we can agree.

As far as chimps and humans are concerned, however, thanks to the tedious argument I've been developing on this blog, over a great many hopefully not too boring posts, we know that Wrangham and Peterson are almost certainly wrong. As evolutionary biologists, they have done their job, granted. Their assumptions regarding chimp behavior may well be accurate. And their conclusions regarding human behavior would appear to follow quite logically from the evidence they present. Only they don't know what we know.

Almost all the Pygmy and at least some of the Bushmen groups whose music and culture we've been considering have time after time been described as non-hierarchical, egalitarian, (roughly) gender-equal, individualistic, non-violent, non-aggressive, socially integrated, with a socio-economic system characterized by lack of permanent leaders and the equal sharing of most property, including food. Their music can be understood, and has been enthusiastically described as, a perfect reflection of their social structure. And, for all the many reasons I've provided here and elsewhere (I won't bore you by repeating them), it's possible to conclude that the same musical and core-cultural traditions were most likely being practiced by their common ancestors, tens of thousands of years ago, prior to the branching that produced everyone else.

Does that mean our ancestors once practiced exactly the same social, cultural and musical traditions as the Pygmies and Bushmen of today? Musically, as it seems to me, the answer must be yes. Because all the groups I've studied share essentially the same highly distinctive musical style and their singing and accompanying percussion (clapping, beating on sticks or other simple idiophones) are organized according to essentially the same remarkably intricate musical structures, which makes it all but impossible to believe such striking commonalities could have been produced independently by each group -- they must be survivals from prior to the time of earliest divergence. As for the social and cultural aspect, the picture is more complex, because, as both Barry Hewlett and George Silberbauer have reminded us, there are significant cultural differences between the various Pygmy and Bushmen groups.

Did our ancestors hunt with bows and arrows, spears, or nets -- or something else entirely, maybe just by tossing stones? We have no way of knowing, because there is no uniform hunting method among all the Pygmies and Bushmen of today, so we have no way of extrapolating backward to a common practice. (My best guess would be poisoned arrows, but it's not much more than an educated guess.) Did our ancestors speak using click consonants? We don't know, because the Pygmies now speak the languages of their Bantu neighbors, not the click language of the Bushmen. What sort of kinship system did our ancestors have? We can't tell, because Pygmies have kinship systems very different from those of the Bushmen. Were our male ancestors especially devoted fathers, as are the Aka Pygmies, as described by Hewlett? We can't be sure, because, as Hewlett informs us, Efe Pygmy males tend to be indifferent fathers.

If such questions provide no basis for comparison, then doesn't that tell us that such comparisons are futile? In relatively superficial terms, the answer must be yes. However, when we move away from relatively surface issues to consider what Cornelia van der Sluys refers to as a culture's "core premises and embedded values," then, despite the protestations of Hewlett and Silberbauer, reinforced by armies of determined revisionists, we must insist that the answer is no. Such comparisons are not futile, because when it comes to the very aspects of Pygmy and Bushmen culture corresponding most closely with Pygmy and Bushmen music, we find, in the many commonalities already noted, what can only be considered "core premises and embedded values." Here indeed, in those traditions shared among almost all Pygmy and Bushmen groups, traditions promoting close cooperation and free interaction, sharing, equal treatment for all, relative indifference to property rights, individual autonomy and freedom, non-violence, the independence of women and the loving indulgence of children, we approach a social structure remarkably similar to the one described above -- not in Demonic Males -- above that, in the excerpt I've quoted from Thomas More's noted volume.

It looks, in fact, as though our ancestors were closer to bonobos than chimps. And if so, then maybe it isn't so easy to "dismiss the possibility of some paradisiacal society that existed in a Golden Era." Nor should we be so quick to dismiss the possibility that our dreams of "utopian human potentials" could themselves be rooted in the enduring, but too often belittled and denigrated, traditions of our forgotten ancestors.

196. Parenthetical Post: On the "Digital" Transmission of Culture

Most anthropologists see the perpetuation of a tradition from one generation to the next as something like the reproduction of a tape recording, which loses a certain amount of information each time it's dubbed. From one generation to the next, hardly anything appears to have been lost. But over the course of several dubbings, the original may no longer be recognizable. A favorite analogy is with the well known game of "Rumor," where someone whispers something to his nearest neighbor, who repeats the message to the next in line, until, after several repetitions of the same process, the original message has usually been distorted beyond recognition.

Both the dubbing of an analogue recording and the "Rumor" game are linear processes, based on the transmission of a signal from a sender to a receiver through an “analogue” process. But cultural transmission operates in a very different manner. For one thing it is not linear. Culture is not simply passed on from a sender to a receiver, because culture is not so much a message as a multivalent field, a complex web of social constructs determining the nature of reality itself. Each new generation is immersed in this field, this "reality," from birth, and its effects accumulate very rapidly to the point that most children are thoroughly conditioned by the time their first words are spoken -- or their first tune sung.

Nor can tradition be compared to the dubbing of an analogue recording, but more closely resembles the replication of digitally encoded information. Unlike analogue recordings (or archaeological artifacts), culturally transmitted information won't diminish or get distorted over time, because, as with digital recordings, what is preserved is not only the information itself, but the process by which the information is stored and retrieved. Transmission errors can certainly occur during digital encoding, but most can be caught and corrected through the use of a process called a checksum, which I won't bother to describe here as you can easily enough look it up on the Internet. The cultural equivalent of the checksum is the process by which the entire community is continually available to assist and correct the novice whenever a "transmission error" occurs. What we have, therefore, is not a simple communication from generation to generation but an integrated and continually reinforced network, not a chain held together link by link, but a chain-mail web of tightly interwoven connections.

In light of the above, it's not that difficult to understand how a particular tradition can be "handed down" from "generation to generation" over thousands, or tens of thousands, of years. Because, for one thing, it is not really "handed down," but established as part of a cultural field that permeates the awareness of everyone in it. And secondly, the generational aspect is almost irrrelevant, since there is never a point in time separating one generation from another, but, again, a temporal field within which individuals of all ages are engulfed. Consequently, there is never a moment of transmission when something is "handed down" but a continual process of cultural imprinting, enforcement and re-enforcement.

And if such a process can suffice to maintain a certain tradition for a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred, or a thousand years, there is no reason to assume the same process can't continue for two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand or, indeed, one hundred thousand years, or more. Once such a process gets going there is no intrinsic reason for it to stop or even change. There is in fact no provision for significant change in such systems, which are designed in such a way as to make such changes all but impossible.

This is not to say that a certain amount of "cultural drift" is out of the question. We know very well that variants can be and are being produced on a regular basis. But such variants are almost always produced through localized linear transmissions that are always subsumed within the overall field. Thus the innumerable variants of particular folk songs have no effect on the overall form and style of all such songs, which remain essentially fixed.

Traditions change only when confronted by powerful forces capable of altering or destroying the cultural fields that maintain them. If such forces are never encountered, then both the fields and the traditions will persist.

195. Utopia, Then and Now

Utopia? Really? I'm not sure. The whole point of my "tedious argument, of insidious intent" (pace, T. S. Eliot) was to establish myself as a hard-nosed realist, bent on distilling the most rigorous possible inferences from careful and critical examination of the evidence, NOT a romantic idealist with fantasies based on outmoded notions of (to coin a phrase) "utopian human potentials" and "quintessential origins," not to mention "Noble Savages" or "Living Fossils." So, if the word "Utopia" is up there in the heading of this post, and if we really have to have a reason for doing what we do, then what I'd give as my reason for using that word is to insert a bit of irony into the proceedings. Nothing more. Well, almost nothing.

If we are now in a position to say something specific about the culture of our most distant ancestors, and I believe that to be the case, then what can we say? The word "egalitarian" keeps coming up. Just about every pygmy and bushmen group has been so described -- and not only egalitarian in some general sense, but specifically characterized by both generational and gender equality. Which is truly remarkable. If it could be demonstrated beyond a doubt that most pygmy and bushmen societies in Africa were truly and completely egalitarian, does that mean their common ancestors, of say 70,000 years ago, would have been egalitarian as well? That seems like a reasonable inference, yes, but the opposition to that sort of thinking has been fierce. Without actually being able to return to that period in a time machine, the skeptics insist, we have no way of knowing for sure.

But we do have a time machine, remember?

It is very hard for me to believe that, listening to a typical performance of Pygmy or Bushmen vocal polyphony, I am not, in an almost terrifyingly literal way, hearing "echoes of our forgotten ancestors." And believe me, I am no Romantic. Faithful transmission of this remarkably joyous and beautiful musical tradition down countless generations from their world to ours is the only logical explanation I can imagine that accounts for its distribution in the world of today, among three different populations (Eastern Pygmies, Western Pygmies, Bushmen), in three completely separate parts of Africa, whose lineages just happen to occupy the three deepest branches of the human family tree.

Transported tens of thousands of years into the past by the distinctive, unmistakable sound of this music, we can take its hand, so to speak, to be led inexorably from the aesthetic to the social, from musical style to cultural style, from the distinctive organization of sound to the equally distinctive social structure appropriate to the production of that sound.

Does a non-hierarchic, highly integrated, group-oriented, harmonious music, characterized by an equal interplay among all parts, with any participant free to vary his or her part at will, or enter or drop out at will, necessarily reflect a non-hierarchic, highly integrated, group-oriented, harmonious, egalitarian, non-violent society, characterized by individual autonomy? There is no way to tell for sure. Can such a music be produced only by such a society and no other? There is no way to tell for sure.

But when we exercise our own autonomy to step back and think objectively and independently about the matter, with no cynical, neo-puritanical, post-modern ideologue breathing down our neck to warn us of the dire consequences of even considering such outrageously outdated possibilities, then, it seems to me, it becomes very hard to deny the persuasiveness of such a remarkable conjunction of mutually reinforcing evidence.

If the Pygmies and Bushmen of today do indeed consist of non-hierarchical, highly integrated, group- oriented yet unregimented, bands, living harmoniously with one another on an equal basis, with a high degree of individual autonomy, no leaders to coerce and control, sharing all their possessions on an equal basis, with no expectation of reimbursement, then everything we know about their music reinforces what we know about their culture, making it especially difficult to deny that their, and our, ancestors also shared the same values, the same ethos, when the ancestral traditions were being established.

Was the world of the Pygmies and Bushmen indeed a Utopia? Was the world of our ancestors? If not, then what was it? And what can our newly discovered understanding of their world mean for us?

194. An Overwhelming Question -- Part 13

Just about all Pygmy groups (until recently at least) are situated "geopolitically" in very similar ways, as forest dwellers who have for many years spent varying amounts of time in symbiotic association with farming people whose villages are typically based at the forest edge. The situation with Bushmen (or if you prefer, Basarwa, San, Khoisan, etc.) is much more complicated. The various so-called "Bushmen" groups are thought to have once dominated the entirety of southern Africa, surviving as hunter-gatherers (aka "foragers") and possibly also as herders, prior to the Bantu expansion. As a result of encroachments on their territory, first on the part of Bantu farmers and then much later with the coming of the European colonialists, certain Bushmen groups were displaced, dominated and/or exploited, forced to become farm laborers or herders, or induced to take up farming or herding on their own, while others retreated into the Kalahari desert, where they were able to take refuge and maintain their traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Complicating the picture was the presence of a closely related herding people, also khoisan speakers, known popularly as the "Hottentots," almost all of whom were tragically either wiped out or almost totally assimilated, along with many Bushmen, into a "racially" mixed group now known as the "Cape Coloreds."

It's no wonder, in view of the complexity of the above history, that anthropologists have had difficulty characterizing "Bushmen," and that disputes have arisen in that regard. What does seem strange, and even -- to an outsider -- almost comical, are the extreme nature of these disputes and the excessive degree of personal animosity they have generated.

To get a better handle on the similarities and differences among the various Bushmen groups from a reasonably balanced perspective, I'll return once more to the very useful volume, Cultural Diversity Among African Foragers, beginning with a chapter entitled "Neither are your ways my ways," by George Silberbauer. Silberbauer defines "cultural diversity" as follows: "the variation in time, space, and ethnicity of patterns of social and cultural behavior, and the products and meanings of that behavior. What is selected as significant variation depends on the purpose of the analysis" (p. 26 -- my emphasis).

To judge by much in the literature these days, the purpose of many anthropologists is to "debunk" the "romantic" views of the past by emphasizing the effects of "modernity," minimizing or even ignoring the more fundamental issue of long-term forager traditions and identity. What is often forgotten, and this is a theme especially important as far as I am concerned, is the highly significant difference between groups that allowed themselves, or were coerced, to compromise with or accept the forces of modernity and those who refused to be assimilated, retreating to the relative safety of refuge areas, such as, in the case of the Bushmen, the Kalahari desert.

Silberbauer notes that

Ample archaeological evidence links ancient cultural and physical remains in the southern third of Africa to modern Basarwa sufficiently closely to suggest their ancestry. Combined with the genetic evidence this appears to justify formation of a category of people whose ancestors, or who themselves, lived as hunters and gatherers in the southern third of Africa, including the Kalahari in what is now Botswana. There is a long history of the use of bows and arrows; of digging sticks; ostrich eggs . . . ; game hides for blankets, skirts and breechclouts; and of brush windbreaks and roughly thatched huts for shelter by all groups (p. 51).

Even in the Kalahari, however, what Silberbauer mostly sees is diversity:

That is about the extent of shared characteristics beyond which cultural generalizations about Kalahari Basarwa are of dubious or no validity. As Barry Hewlett shows in his chapter, the extent of characteristics common to forest foragers is comparably narrow (ibid.).

Comparing two groups of Kalahari Bushmen, the !Kung (or Ju/'hoansi) and the G/wi (who also vocalize in P/B style), he finds that "!Kung beliefs differed in many respects" from those of the G/wi. For example,

Both peoples had trance dances which were medicinally and socially therapeutic but G/wi dancers gathered their power from the other participants. . . . Outwardly both peoples' dance performances were alike -- women sat in a circle, singing and clapping, while men danced round them until one or more fell into trance. !Kung dancers did their curing while in trance; G/wi men fell into trance once they had gathered the ill from others and then had to be revived by their fellows, an act which dispelled it harmlessly into the night (p. 54).

There are clearly many points of similarity in the above, especially with respect to behavior, but for Silberbauer what counts most appear to be relatively minor differences reflecting nuances of interpretation. With respect to the handling of conflict he finds that "antagonistic sentiments were more freely and intensely expressed [among the !Kung] than within G/wi bands. . . !Kung also had devices for resolving conflicts, but appear as well to have been fairly ready to come to blows" (p. 55), a conclusion that contrasts strongly with just about every other characterization of !Kung attitudes toward violence I've ever read. As far as kinship is concerned, both had "universalistic" kinship systems, but there were significant differences, since !Kung terminology was of an "Eskimo" type and G/wi terminology was "Iroquois."

For Silberbauer, overall, "The social, ideational, and mystical contents of G/wi and !Kung life were clearly very different, allowing very limited direct generalizations from one people to the other" (p. 57). He continues, however, with a long digression regarding the dangers involved in any attempt by an outsider to compare these two groups in this manner. Responding to the extreme skepticism of the Kalahari revisionists in his conclusion, he states:

It is clear that hunting and gathering did not persist because foragers were forced into it by their inability to do anything else. [For a great many] their customary social, political, and economic arrangements that constituted independent band life were more attractive and rewarding than were the alternatives that ranch or cattle-post offered (p. 64).

In the following chapter, "Diversity and Flexibility:The Case of the Bushmen of Southern Africa," Mathias Guenther approaches the same problem in a very different manner. Acknowledging that "diversity is evident in all systems of Bushmen society and culture, from subsistence patterns to religious beliefs," his explanation for that diversity is in sharp contrast to that of Silberbauer:

The diversity of Bushman society and culture is a function, I would argue, of two basic dynamic factors, one internal, pertaining to social organization, the other external, pertaining to the ecological and historical settings within which the diverse Bushmen groups have been situated and to which they have had to adapt. The first factor is the institutional, structural, and personal flexibility of the Bushman society, culture and individual; the second is the variability of the . . . contexts in which Bushmen have lived . . . However, within these ecologically or politically engendered changes, Bushman society appears generally to have retained its cultural integrity and its capacity for social reproduction. . . .

Flexibility is all-pervasive within Bushman social organization. . . It is loosely corporate with respect to ownership of land or other resources . . ; it is slack in its political organization . . . Interpersonal and gender relations are not structured by any hierarchical order but are egalitarian . . . and there is a virtual absence of craft specialization, except for a basic division of labor by sex. . .

Individual men and women enjoy a high degree of personal autonomy within Bushman society . . . Each individual in this small-scale egalitarian society is self-assured and self-directing . . .

Thus we see Bushman men and women living their lives within a culture that contains beliefs and values that are variable, flexible, and undogmatic. . .

The supremely flexible and adaptable quality of Bushman band society, ethos, and personality explains, I suggest, the rich diversity of such societies and, at the same time, why so many of these people have basically retained their cultural integrity and their social autonomy throughout centuries and even millennia of contact with encroaching and encircling settler groups (pp. 77-82 -- emphases mine).

While Silberbauer produces an inventory of very real, but relatively superficial practices and beliefs that are, indeed, different, Guenther insists on commonalities and continuities that appear more fundamental with respect to the most basic values, indeed the ethos, of the Bushmen understood "as a regional totality, over space and time" (p. 86). Significantly, many of the characteristics he emphasizes might best be understood as aspects of cultural style, as opposed to so many of the content-oriented descriptions we find in the literature.

193. An Overwhelming Question -- Part 12

Barry Hewlett's essay, Cultural Diversity Among African Pygmies, was published in 1996, in the book Cultural Diversity Among Twentieth Century Foragers (ed. Susan Kent, Cambridge U. Press). If my theory is going to be put to the test, this book will be a good place to begin, as chapter after chapter is devoted to the search for cultural differences within and among various hunter-gatherer groups worldwide, differences that, according to the editor and most of the contributors, have been for too long overlooked or minimized. Although the Great Kalahari Debate looms in the background, and cannot be completely ignored, all the articles appear grounded in solid evidence rather than ideology.

As Susan Kent's Introduction makes clear, past assumptions that all hunter-gatherer groups must share a common culture pattern cannot be maintained. Pointing specifically to superficial comparisons between, for example, Northwest Coast Indians and African "Basarwa" (her preferred term for Bushmen), she points out that "though they have similar food procurement strategies . . . these two groups differ in almost every other way possible -- from the environment they occupy to their stratification, hierarchies, and gender relations, as well as the organization of their economics" (p. 1). As I can attest, her position on this matter is fully consistent with the musical evidence. Despite past efforts to treat musical evolution as somehow moving in parallel with sociocultural "development," there is no evidence whatsoever for a typically hunter-gatherer musical style. I must add that I part company in this respect with Alan Lomax, who devoted a great deal of time and energy to promoting an evolutionary scheme of this sort, focused primarily on production type -- a theory that, in my view, makes little sense, in part because it assumes similarities in the music of hunter-gatherers worldwide that do not exist.

Narrowing her focus to Africa, Kent points with disapproval to the common tendency to treat all "Basarwa" groups as though they were identical with the much-studied Ju/'hoansi (aka !Kung). She strongly objects to the common tendency to lump all such groups "together as 'Bushmen' or 'Basarwa,' as if there were only one typical group that such a designation appropriately describes" (p. 3). Since my theory is not dependent on the uniformity of such groups, but focuses primarily on the Ju/'hoansi (the bushmen group whose culture and music I've been most consistently referencing in my discussions of this topic), and also because I have already dealt at length with some of the same issues elsewhere in this blog (see the Kalahari link, above), as well as in my paper, "New Perspectives on the Kalahari Debate," I won't get into this matter here.

Hewlett's chapter does require my attention, however, as he directly compares four pygmy groups, three of which have played an important role in my own research, and all four of which vocalize in Pygmy/Bushmen style: the Aka (aka BaAka) and Baka, representing the Western pygmies, and the Mbuti and Efe of the Eastern group. According to Hewlett, the cultural differences he has found, not only among these four, but the various pygmy groups generally, "are dramatic and striking" (p. 216).

He proceeds to discuss the various differences he's found under the following headings: Linguistic Diversity; Diversity in Subsistence and Settlement Patterns; Kinship, Marriage and Descent; Infant Care and Demography.
While I can't do justice to the full extent of his argument in this blog, I'll quote some of the points under each heading that seem most important, and respond briefly to each:

Linguistic Diversity:

The Efe are the most distinct linguistically as their language comes from a totally different language phylum than the other three. The Aka and Mbuti are the most similar, even though they are hundreds of miles apart, in that they both speak Bantu languages. . . The Baka, who live just across the Sangha River from the Bantu-speaking Aka, speak a language from a completely different linguistic family (i.e., Oubanguian) (pp. 217-219).

The linguistic differences among all pygmy groups reflect relatively recent contacts with various farming groups, with whom all pygmies have, since the Bantu expansion of roughly 3,000 years ago, formed more or less close bonds without losing their own cultural identity.

Diversity in Subsistence and Settlement Patterns:

The primary hunting techniques reflect important distinctions in the sexual division of labor between the foraging groups: men, women and children participate in the Mbuti and Aka net hunts, whereas generally only men participate in the Efe bow and Baka spear hunts.

It's difficult to assess the cultural significance of the different hunting methods employed by different pygmy groups, especially since the role of women is influenced by the hunting method employed, and the variation in hunting methods is probably due to outside influence. It is generally believed that Mbuti net hunting was introduced by Bantu neighbors. Given the universality of the use of poisoned arrows and spear tips among almost all pygmy groups, and bushmen groups as well, plus the discovery alluded to in an earlier blog post, of what appears to be a very similar type of bone arrow, dated ca. 60,000 years ago, it seems reasonable to assume that, despite present differences, the ancestral group also hunted with poisoned arrows and spears, and not nets. While this implies that women and children did not originally participate in hunting, as is now the case with net hunting, it has no bearing on the notion of a complementary relationship across sexual and generational borders, based on a fundamentally egalitarian outlook, as has been reported for all pygmy groups.

Efe and Baka camp closer to villages, spend more time in the village and eat more village food than Mbuti and Aka, but does this mean that they are more 'dependent' on villagers? . . . This propinquity and 'dependence' has lead to similarities between the villagers and Efe social-political organization: a lineage system, greater hierarchy, less egalitarianism and more formalized exchange relations (p. 223).

Hewlett himself recognizes that the differences he's found due to different settlement and dependency patterns are relatively superficial:

However, outward appearances of similarity [between pygmies and villagers] can be misleading and some confusion may have been compounded by a lack of data; . . . Actually, there is currently no evidence to suggest that Efe or Baka social life (e.g., egalitarianism, autonomy, leadership, dispute resolution, child rearing), forest life, or ethnic identity is closer to that of farmers than that of Mbuti or Aka. Efe and Baka have simply developed different strategies for dealing with their farming neighbors (p. 225 -- my emphasis).

During the course of this discussion, Hewlett makes a point well worth quoting here -- and emphasizing: "If cultural traits are not under selective pressures then they persist" (230). While Hewlett is referring in this instance to hunting practices, I'd like to think he'd agree that the same could be said of musical traditions, which, unlike hunting, don't seem to offer much in the way of selective advantage.

Kinship, Marriage and Descent: "These four groups are remarkably similar; all have Hawaiian kin terms, patrilineal descent and patrilocal post-marital residence." This is not as helpful to my cause as it might seem, since the Ju/'hoansi and other bushmen groups appear, at least on the surface, to have very different kinship systems. Moreover, Hewlett points out that the same general kinship terminology is common to most of their non-pygmy neighbors. However,

beyond the surface patterns the difference between foragers and farmers are striking. Foragers' versions of Hawaiian kinship terminologies are more classificatory or generalized than are farmers; adult foragers ideology about patrilineages is not strong and utilization of patrilineages is more flexible (e.g, mother's relatives are important often recognized with a specific term) and less precise than that of farmers (e.g., adult farmers often identify 5-6 generations of patrilineal links while foragers generally identify only 2-3 generations of patrilineal links); post-marital residence is more flexible among foragers than farmers as foragers frequently visit in-laws and distant relatives for long periods (pp. 231-232).

The above may be compared with the description of Bushmen kinship offered by Mathias Guenther in the same volume:

A number of social institutions are flexible sui generis, a result of . . . the 'organizational lability' of society. Neo-locality and highly classificatory (indeed universalistic) kinship systems are both social patterns that obscure genealogical detail . . . Absence of status differentiation and vaguely defined leadership and ritual specialization, unstable, tenuous marriages in early to mid-adulthood, and loose and informal child-rearing practices . . . allow for a wide margin of individual action as none is an institution or practice based on cut-and-dried jural rules but, instead, all are tentative and open-ended (p. 78).

The following from Hewlett in the same section is also worth quoting here, despite the mixed message conveyed, if we pay special attention to the passage I've highlighted:

The comparative data also indicate that several of the earlier characterizations (Turnbull 1965b) of forest forager descent as bilateral and post-marital pattern as bilocal are incorrect. The African forest forager bands are not organized for warfare nor do they have a strong patrilinal ideology as Service suggests. Nonetheless, though patterns are flexible, they do tend to practice patrilocal residence where related men hunt together (pp. 232-233).

Infant Care and Demography: While "Aka fathers do more infant caregiving than fathers in any known culture . . . Efe fathers do significantly less caregiving than Aka fathers . . . [and] Efe fathers do not appear to be intimately familiar or affectionate with their infants or be especially attached to them" (pp. 236 and 241). On the other hand, "While Efe multiple care is distinctive in some ways, multiple caregiving does appear to be a common feature of tropical forest forager socialization" (p. 238).

In sum, while Hewlett presents both similarities and differences, the differences he seems particularly interested in, and goes to the most trouble to analyze, are in almost every case due to interaction between the various pygmy groups and the Bantu villagers with whom they have formed relatively recent symbiotic relationships (and by "recent" I mean within no more than 3 or 4 thousand years). The similarities, on the other hand, in almost every case, appear to reflect deeper affinities associated with the sort of values he emphasized in the study of Aka pygmy culture I've already quoted in post 184:

no chief in the sense of a person commanding ultimate authority; fiercely egalitarian and independent; high value placed on sharing, cooperation, and autonomy; intergenerational equality; infancy lacking negation and violence; male-female relations extremely egalitarian by cross-cultural standards; physical violence in general infrequent and violence against women especially rare; probably as egalitarian as human societies get.

While not every single one of the above characteristics necessarily appears on the "similarity" side of Hewlett's ledger, none appears on the "difference" side either. Which makes it difficult to accept his rather extreme conclusion:

While there are commonalities between African tropical forest foragers, this chapter has emphasized the patterns of diversity. In doing so, it has perhaps contributed to a better understanding of those diversities and also made it clear that it is difficult if not impossible to refer to an African "Pygmy" culture (p. 244 -- my emphasis).

Due perhaps to the prevailing "revisionist" ideology of the 90's (which in many ways continues to this day), Hewlett has concentrated almost exclusively on the current state of pygmy life, characterized by varying degrees of external influence, dependency and change, with little or no attention paid to those aspects of pygmy culture most likely to be survivals from a common past. Since any attempt to speculate on the forbidden topic of "survivals" or the hypothetical recreation of deep history, prior to the Bantu expansion, would certainly be met with howls of indignant derision, Hewlett's narrow focus is not necessarily surprising.

I'd like to conclude with some excerpts from another study, centering on the Jahai indigenes of Malaysia, published a few years later, "Gifts from Immortal Ancestors," by Cornelia M. I. van der Sluys:

During the last decades of hunter-gatherer studies, we witnessed the so-called "forager controversy debates," which center mainly on the genesis of the Bushman cultures. Both groups of protagonists focus almost exclusively on ecological-economic issues and pay little attention to the forces inside these cultures that tend to perpetuate their reproduction from generation to generation. . .

An instance demonstrating that long-time contacts with "outsiders" do not necessarily imply a profound change in a hunter-gatherer culture's core premises and embedded values can be found in Turnbull's (1965) description of the Mbutis, hunter-gatherers in Zaire. Despite relationships with their agriculturalist Bantu neighbors, the Mbutis safeguard the reproduction of the core of their own culture by adopting certain Bantu customs and taking part in Bantu rituals. Similar strategies are also used by other hunter-gatherers . . . (in Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World, ed. Biesele and Hitchcock, Berghahn Books, 2000, p. 427-428 -- my emphases).

Der Sluys continues, describing characteristics of the Jahai "observed also to be present in other 'non-complex society' hunter-gatherer cultures":

generalized sharing, trust in the environment, egalitarianism, individual autonomy, and dynamics that preserve peacefulness, such as the prevention of conflict escalation through processes of fission and fusion . . . (p. 429).

What der Sluys refers to as "core premises and embedded values," as exemplified in the above list (remarkably close to the list I've distilled from Hewlett's Aka article) are what we should be focusing on, as I see it, rather than the changes wrought by "long-time contacts with 'outsiders," as she puts it. In this light I do think it possible, despite Hewlett's verdict, to refer not only to "an African 'pygmy' culture," but an ancestral culture still alive in the core values of the pygmies and bushmen (and perhaps also the Jahai) of today.

192. An Overwhelming Question -- Part 11

“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”

T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

So, finally. On the basis of all the genetic and cultural evidence covered since post 163, plus all the musical evidence I've already covered, throughout this blog and in various publications, it would seem reasonable to conclude that both a musical style and a nexus of sociocultural attributes strongly associated with that style can be traced, as astonishing as that may seem, to the common ancestors, not only of the pygmies and bushmen, but the entire human race -- at a time prior to that of the split we see in the following phylogenetic map, between the two earliest branches of the homo sapiens mtDNA tree, Lo and L1:

And the most compelling version, for me personally, of the "overwhelming question" I've been returning to so tediously can be stated thus: is this actually possible -- can we actually know something that specific, not only about the music, but also the culture of our earliest ancestors?

My answer: I don't really know, but I believe that I have clearly formulated a reasonably convincing hypothesis that can -- and should -- be more fully explored and, of course, subject to rigorous testing.

With this in mind, I think it important to deal as soon as possible with two very different interpretations of the evidence, one musical and the other cultural, since both come from authoritative sources and either one, if taken at face value, might well cause many to reject my hypothesis out of hand.

I've already referred on this blog to an interpretation by two leading authorities, on pygmy and bushmen music respectively, Susanne Fürniss and Emmanuelle Olivier, which has unfortunately been widely quoted: “although many musical and extramusical features converge and though the acoustic results are very close, the conception that the Ju|’hoansi [a bushmen group] have of their music is radically opposite to the Aka’s [a pygmy group].” In other words, the strong similarities that so many have found between the music of certain pygmy and bushmen groups are, in their view, some sort of illusion based on a misunderstanding of the "basic concepts" behind two completely different traditions.

The gist of their thinking is that Aka pygmy music is basically polyphonic while that of the Ju|’hoansi bushmen is basically melodic. As far as I've been able to determine, however, they never actually present an argument in support of this theory, which is simply stated as a fact; nor do they ever, anywhere in the course of their treatment of the subject, present the comparative musical analysis promised at the outset of their essay. The distinction they raise is based on a genuine insight, but one that is, in my view, misapplied -- because, as can easily be demonstrated through the analysis of specific examples, both polyphonic and linear characteristics are conflated, and in very similar ways, in the music of both groups.

I cannot, of course, formulate a fully adequate response in a necessarily brief blog post. But I can refer you to my upcoming paper, written, at least in part, as a response to the challenge posed by their ideas, and scheduled for publication in the forthcoming issue of the journal, Ethnomusicology: "Concept, Style and Structure in the Music of the African Pygmies and Bushmen: A Study in Cross-Cultural Analysis." Since so many have been influenced by Fürniss and Olivier on this matter (I recently, to my horror, noticed their views quoted uncritically in the new Grove's Dictionary of Music), I am hoping my paper is not appearing too late to serve as a necessary corrective.

A research report that might appear to challenge my view of the cultural evidence has been presented by Professor Barry Hewlett, of the University of Washington in Vancouver, in the form of an essay titled Cultural Diversity Among African Pygmies. I am especially interested in Hewlett's views, first, because I have already quoted him on the Aka pygmies, and secondly because he's done research on the topic of cultural transmission that I find quite sensible and interesting. I've been corresponding with him on these matters recently, and am hoping he'll be reading here and offering his comments on what I'll be saying about his work. Unfortunately, I'm running out of time, so will have to continue with my discussion of his essay in the following post.

(to be continued . . .)