Alexander Cockburn writes:
Nazi leaders were noted for love of their pets and for certain animals, notably apex predators like the wolf and the lion. Hitler, a vegetarian and hater of hunting, adored dogs and spent some of his final hours in the company of Blondi, whom he would take for walks outside the bunker at some danger to himself. He had a particular enthusiasm for birds and most of all for wolves. [...] Goebbels said, famously, ‘The only real friend one has in the end is the dog. . . The more I get to know the human species, the more I care for my Benno.’ Goebbels also agreed with Hitler that ‘meat eating is a perversion in our human nature,’ and that Christianity was a ‘symptom of decay’, since it did not urge vegetarianism. [...] On the one hand, monsters of cruelty towards their fellow humans; on the other, kind to animals and zealous in their interest. In their very fine essay on such contradictions, Arnold Arluke and Boria Sax offer three observations. One, as just noted, many Nazi leaders harboured affection towards animals but antipathy to humans. Hitler was given films by a maharaja which displayed animals killing people. The Führer watched with equanimity. Another film showed humans killing animals. Hitler covered his eyes and begged to be told when the slaughter was over."
"How do children learn to be human? Adults model behaviour and instruct morals by examples, with the help of the stories. These can be original myths, biblical and folktales, or sometimes parables, coming-of-age adventures, and legends, that illustrate good as well as bad outcomes. Here one such tale is recounted, as told to an anthropologist by a Kua storyteller in the southeastern Kalahari four decades ago. This features the Creator, a termite mound, a Buffalo wife, foolish humans, and poisonous farts. Enjoy."by Helga Vierech, April 22, 2022.
People underestimate the amount of indignant rage a child experiences. They also do not often realize that children as young as three and four will be almost uncontrollable and even dangerous if they have a history of severe neglect or abuse. For example, as reported by the Washington Post last year, an adopted 4 year old girl who had been abused as a baby and was very violent had to be kept in her room under guard after she had threatened to kill the other children in the family. The adoptive family couldn’t manage the child. This is not an isolated case.
Helga Vierich lived with Kua hunter-gatherers of Botswana for the better part of two and a half years and then went on to do a further six months in a drought consultancy that included them while Botswana went through the worst drought of its history in 1979. Richard Lee was her thesis supervisor.
Creating an imaginary past has got to stop. Which imaginary past are we talking about? Well, to begin with, it is the fantasy of a past when humans are characterized as "big-game hunters" - mostly men, who are the main ones responsible for feeding their families. The discovery that at least some of the hunters of the distant past were female was seen by some as a blow to this original "Man the Hunter" narrative. Women were also hunters!! There has even been a suggestion, taken seriously enough to be published, that humans evolved as carnivorous predators, and that it was only after the megafauna became scarce or extinct that people turned to a more omnivorous diet in an economy that combined hunting and gathering with division of labour. In this discussion, I hope to relate some conversations about hunting, among recent Kua San hunter-gatherers, that I hope might help us to reimagine the human story.
ON SPIRITS AND GHOSTS:
While I was in the Kalahari with a group of hunter-gatherers called the Kua, a woman died. I did not witness this, I arrived at the camp after she was buried under the sandy floor of her hut. The people (four families, plus the new widower and his two children) were in the process of abandoning the camp. They told me to follow them to the site of their new campground, which I did.
I asked about why she was buried that way, since this seemed to automatically mean the whole camp and all the huts recently constructed there, were abandoned. I was told it was so that her spirit would not feel lost. However, since this spirit would linger until her body was consumed by the earth, it would be dangerously disturbed by the presence of other people, who could not see it, could not respond to it, and would walk right through it.
I was confused by this, since I had previously been told that the
spirit of every living thing is re-united with the “Creator” after
death. I asked, but apparently people saw no contradiction. I was told
that Creator had provided many helpers to consume dead flesh and carry
away the spirit that animates the living…predators, scavengers, and even
the flies who lay their eggs so that their young can hatch and eat the
dead and carry the fragmented spirit back into the living world. The
spiritual was said to be the manifestation of the “Creator” — it is what
literally animates the material world — it causes rivers to run, rain
to fall, lightening and winds, and life.
Photo credit: Becky Sigmon
I was even told that fire is a
direct intrusion of this animating force into the material world.
Therefore fire was the sacred intersection of the spiritual and the
material: given into our human keeping — a sacred trust and tool to help
us take care of the world. Making fire directly accesses the spirit
world and brings it into the “real” world, where it can only exist as
long as it “consumes” matter.
This casts an different light on the idea of “burning energy” — even fossil fuels, rather differently, at least to me.
One evening I had a visitor by my tent: Be/e – a older healer
(what some might call a “shaman”). I asked him all these questions about
spirits and the Creator. He looked down, and shook his head. “Stories
for children; these are stories for children” he said.
Then he added, and looked me right in the eye: “most people are always children. Death is too frightening, so we think life can go on outside of the world we can see and feel..” – and he reached out and gently pinched my forearm. Then he shook his head.
I was shocked; I blurted out: “So there is no Creator?”
He huffed a laugh. Put up a hand to stop my question, and asked if I
had a cigarette. So we had a quiet smoke together before he left. I
think he did not want to go any further with this subject: he left the
mystery in case I needed it. But I am pretty sure I had met a lonely,
fellow agnostic…
How common is this? One of my mentors, Becky
Sigmon, a palaeontologist, wrote a book with a physicist, William
Dowden, entitled “Physics, Evolution, God”… and, in a section on the
origin of religion and the “discovery” of God, they suggest that dreams,
trance states, and even hallucinatory experiences, combined with the
recognition of death, produced beliefs in the existence of a reality
beyond the material world. The incorporation of stories and fantasy then
gave rise to shared traditions about the possibility of spiritual life
after a material death, as well as an interest in inducing altered
states of consciousness through exertion (as in hours of dancing),
fasting, or use of psycho-active plants.
https://anthroecologycom.wordpress.com/
https://independent.academia.edu/HelgaVierich
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Helga-Vierich-2
Before farming and after globalization: the future of hunter-gatherers may be brighter than you think
Four years field anthropologist with fieldwork in all areas. Three years study in Botswana, seconded to the ministry of Local Government and lands to survey all “remove area dwellers. mostly hunter-gatherer peoples but also a scattering of Bakgalahadi villages in the rural Kweneng District. Ph.D. Toronto 1982. on detailed examination of economic relationships between former and local farmer economies. Hired directly after Ph.D as Principal Anthropologist for the Africa research Station of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, stationed as part of a team including economists, geneticists, agronomy soil scientists at Kambonsi Station in Burkina Faso. Studied four farming cultures cultures and one pastoral culture in six villages locate din three agro-climatic zones.
‘Hunting is boring and unreliable. Let the men do it!’ by Helga Vierich
https://helgavierich.medium.com/
Among the Kua, for example, social control is often undertaken, not by strong
young men, by an older and physically weak persons. High moral rank trumps
physical force. Incidents of social control are often played for a laugh, as when
the old granny broke up the fight in my camp. It is not the only incident of its
kind to be witnessed by fieldworkers among various forager groups in the
Kalahari. I assume the language and gestures I saw represent common “put-
downs”.
Furthermore, among mobile hunter-gatherers, there is very little evidence of
any on-going hostility between these larger communities and their neighbors.
Territories, of communities speaking different dialect or languages tend to
overlap somewhat at important resource junctions, and in these places
camping parties can be a mix of families from both communities.
There is some intermarriage between these communities as well. On a
smaller scale than within each community, therefore, there is flow of
personnel, information, and goods among neighboring communities.
Sedentism itself was a human adaptation to the ecological
conditions that were characterized by massive pulses of energy-dense
foods (salmon runs, wild annual cereal all ripening at once, massive
game migrations funneling through a limited route, etc) followed by
a dry or cold season of food scarcity. Even in the Kalahari, I found
the hunter-gatherers caching stores of wild nuts after an especially
bountiful harvest and they also stored dried meat.
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