The anthropologist Richard Lee lived and worked with the !Kung, or Ju/’hoansi, of the Kalahari from 1963, when many of them still lived mainly by hunting and gathering. He found that “The essence of this way of life is sharing”, and that the !Kung kept it that way on purpose, with constant teasing and put-downs that cut down anyone who grew boastful, and with no chiefs at all. Lee described the !Kung as “fiercely egalitarian”, a view close to the heart of Therapeutic Shamanism.
What is Richard Lee known for? #
An anthropologist and professor at the University of Toronto, whose fieldwork among the !Kung of the Dobe area of Botswana ran through 1963 to 1964, 1967 to 1969, 1973 and 1980.1 With Irven DeVore he organised the famous Man the Hunter conference of 1966, which the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers calls “the starting point of a new era of systematic research on hunting and gathering peoples”.2 His books include The !Kung San (1979) and The Dobe Ju/’hoansi, and with Richard Daly he edited the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers (1999).
The !Kung are now usually called the Ju/’hoansi, their own name for themselves. Most had lived alongside Black and white herders and farmers since at least 1900, but in the Dobe area a good number chose to keep their foraging way of life into the 1950s and 1960s, when Lee came to know them.3
What did he find about sharing? #
That it is the centre of everything. In his words: “The essence of this way of life is sharing, a practice that is extended more widely in the foraging mode of production than in any other.” Food was shared out widely, as within a family, and longer-lasting things such as tools were exchanged as gifts that would one day be returned.4 The Ju/’hoansi still call this gift-giving hxaro, and through it, “an individual can still rely on the community’s resources.”5
He did not pretend this came easily. “Sharing, for example, is not automatic; it has to be learned and reinforced by culture.” He recorded the grumbles, too, such as an elderly man who asked Lee for a blanket and, when Lee said he would only give it away, replied: “All my life I’ve been giving, giving; today I am old and want something for myself.” And he warned against romanticising: “it would be a mistake to idealise the foraging peoples as noble savages who have solved all the basic problems of living.” But his conclusion was clear: “A sharing way of life is not only possible but has actually existed in many parts of the world and over long periods of time.”6
How did the !Kung keep things equal? #
By refusing to let anyone get above themselves. Lee wrote that “The most serious accusations that one !Kung can level against another are the charge of stinginess and the charge of arrogance.” A hunter who came back boasting of a big kill was being arrogant, and so, Lee wrote, was even an anthropologist who claimed to have chosen the biggest ox of the year for a Christmas feast. Against this, the !Kung “have evolved elaborate devices for puncturing the bubble of conceit and enforcing humility. These levelling devices are in constant daily use, minimising the size of others’ kills, downplaying the value of others’ gifts, and treating one’s own efforts in a self-deprecating way.”7
The same went for leadership. Some older people were listened to more than others, but “Whatever their skills, !Kung leaders have no formal authority. They can only persuade but never enforce their will on others.” When Lee asked who the headman was at each waterhole, the answers were almost all no. One man, K!au, told him, “We had no one we set apart like a chief; we all lived on the land”, and another said, “each one of us is headman over himself!” Lee concluded that headmen came later, with contact with the Tswana herders and with colonial rule.8
Lee also saw that the two kinds of equality went together: “sharing of food and sharing of power seem to go hand in hand.”9 His own phrase for them has often been quoted since. As one chapter of the Encyclopedia puts it, “Lee describes the !Kung (now known as Ju/’hoansi) as ‘fiercely egalitarian’”.10
What was the “original affluent society”? #
A phrase that grew out of Lee’s work on how long the !Kung spent getting food. He found that men put in “about 2.7 days of work” a week on hunting and gathering, and women about 2.1.11 The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins took figures like these and, in a famous essay, called hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society”: rich not because they had a lot, but because they needed little.12 As the Encyclopedia adds, “They were affluent, however, only when they controlled their environment and way of life.”13
The figures have since been revised. The anthropologist Vivek Venkataraman reports that later work, including a recalculation by Lee himself, puts the whole working week, once all the other tasks are included, nearer forty hours.14 See Who was Marshall Sahlins, and what is “the original affluent society”?
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Very closely. Our animist, hunter-gatherer ancestors were so egalitarian “that anthropologists like Richard Lee and Christopher Boehm described these cultures as being ‘fiercely egalitarian.’” “Hunter-gatherers did not just practise and embody genuine equality, they fiercely protected it, too.” The same kind of levelling that Lee saw is described in the work of the anthropologist Christopher Boehm: “Usually, these include the group teasing any individual who tries to dominate or who becomes too egotistical.”15
Therapeutic Shamanism draws the same lesson about leadership: “There were no permanent leaders or followers in hunter-gatherer communities. Instead, people temporarily took the initiative, or were temporarily assigned authority, by consensus and according to the task at hand.” And “The inconvenient fact for the Taker cult is that, for the vast majority of human history, we got on fine without having leaders and were better for it.”16 See How does animism understand power and hierarchy?
On sharing, Therapeutic Shamanism sees it as a mark of a true Adult. A hunter-gatherer tribe had to be a team where people trusted each other, so “sharing resources fairly, so that there was no resentment and so that everyone got what they needed, were not just desirable traits, but essential traits of being an Adult.” “Keeping surplus for oneself was to behave like a child.”17 Many of these cultures took only what they needed, and “have the concept of leaving a share for the other creatures.”18 See What is the Adult, and what does healthy inner leadership look like?
Does everyone agree with him? #
Not entirely. In what became known as “the Kalahari Debate”, some writers said that the !Kung’s simple way of life and food-sharing were the result of poverty imposed by their more powerful neighbours, not a way of life of their own. Lee and Daly reply that “Autonomy and dependency are a continuum, not an either/or proposition”, and the Ju/’hoansi themselves insist that before the Europeans came they lived as hunters on their own, though they traded with the wider world.19
More recently the anthropologist Manvir Singh has written that hunter-gatherers were not simply communist. He uses Lee’s own record of a hunter, N!eisi, who passed over his sister’s husband when sharing out warthog meat, saying, “This one I want to eat with my friends.” For Singh, “Hunter-gatherers shared because they had to”, and most “balanced sharing with special rights.”20 Lee, for his part, had written that sharing “is not automatic”, and had also called the foraging way of life “a form of primitive communism”.21 See Why does Manvir Singh think shamanism is universal?
Life has changed for the Ju/’hoansi since Lee’s first visits. Many now live in settled villages, and “The growth of inequality, domination by neighbours, and land loss have made life less and less secure.” Yet even so, “much of the reliable sharing system remains.”22
