The Culture of Hunting The “circle of life” is what we call it even though others think it’s wrong. Sports like hunting and fishing are truly a good thing to have because without them, there would be no humans on earth. Hunting has kept us alive for generations so why stop now when people are beginning to question it? The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story details the hunting practices of the !Kung San, a tribe of Bushman that live in the Kalahari Desert. In the tribe, the women and children would stay behind at the camp while the men would go out in small hunting parties to find meat that they could bring back to the camp. I found it quite interesting how they didn’t always make their own kill, oftentimes finding an animal which had been killed by hyenas or lions and taking that meat for themselves. They mentioned in the film how, even though the meat might be partially rotten, they could still eat it because they had grown up eating meat like that. I thought this was rather gross, but then again when you live in the desert and you may only get the chance to eat every few days, you can’t be too picky about what you find.
The film followed a band of young men as they hunted various creatures, from a small antelope type animal, to porcupines, and finally to the much larger Gemsbok. The hunters used spears as their primary weapon, however, bow and arrow was also used on occasion. The hunters also used Beetle poison on the tips of the arrows to kill the animals. This poison could take up to a day to kill the animal, during which time the hunter would have to constantly track the animal to ensure that a hyena or lion didn’t find and eat it first. The amount of running the Bushman do in the extreme temperatures of the desert was truly astounding to me.
The main technique for hunting the large Gemsbok is to chase them for hours on hot days in order to tire them out. The film documented one of these chases, in which the chase lasted four hours until one of the female Gemsbok became exhausted and refused to run anymore. The hunter then speared her and proceeded to help give her a quick death in the most humane way possible. There is a very deep connection between the Bushman and the animals which they hunt. While watching the film, the !Kung San reminded me essentialism, the belief that was derived from Plato whom believed in fixed ideas that exist perfect and unchanging in eternity (Fazzino 2018, 4), because after finding an animal which had already been killed by another animal, the hunters would retrace the tracks and reenact the sequence of events that led to the animal’s death.
These practices have been pasted down for tens of thousands of years through their ancestors and are still taught and practiced today as part of the Bushman culture. One of the most controversial parts of the film for me was when the hunters chased a heard of Gemsbok for six hours, only to watch them pass into a wildlife preserve, where, if the hunters killed one, they would be put in jail for violating laws. Later in the film it talked about how today the Bushman have had their individual hunting licenses revoked, preventing them from hunting on the land which their ancestors had hunted for the past 30,000 years. I don’t think this is a fair move for the indigenous tribes who rely on their hunting practices to survive and to preserve their culture.
This is a pretty good representation of globalization, or the “reshaping of local conditions by the powerful global forces on an ever-intensifying scale” (Lavenda and Schultz 2008, 456). Globalization is opposed to human rights and is a threat to local identities (Eriksen 2007). I take this to mean that the government and other activist groups, such as animal preservation groups, have taken actions to “preserve” nature and the wildlife in a natural reservation, but at the same time they are effectively helping to kill off a culture and the way of life of the Bushman tribes. While this intervention may have good intentions behind it, effects are detrimental to a culture which has existed for thousands of years before any form of organized government rose to power. In conclusion, there needs to be a balance found which allows for preservation of the natural environment and the animals which live in it, while still allowing the cultures which have developed in the area to survive as well. Without the two sides working together to find a happy medium, The Great Dance will be lost forever in the great winds of change.
Works Cited
- Lavenda, Robert H. and Emily A. Schultz. Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human? New York: Oxford University Press. Pg. 456.
- Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. Globalization: The Key Concepts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
- Fazzino, David. 2018 Our Past – Human Ancestors and Early Humans. Essentialism slide 4.
