culture2

Unveiling the Hijab - A Scientific, scriptural and legal unravelling of the Muslim requirement for veiling and sequestering, for violent punishments for adultery, and women being allowed to see only through one eye, for fear that two female eyes will be so attractive they will turn men into beasts.

When the gods gave people sex, they gave us a wonderful thing.
Sex is food: just as people cannot survive without eating,
hunger for sex can cause people to die.
!Kung saying - Nisa.

A consistent and powerful hypothesis about human emergence is that the complementary reproductive strategies of females and males led to evolutionary gender paradox in early human societies and hence cultural complexity based on sexual relationships driven to a considerable extent by female reproductive choice. The males, to achieve reproductive success needed to compromise their competition to fit with the cooperative nature of the human group, centered on the family and gathering and social relationships with the females. Selection among males reinforces not just the traditional hunting prowess and toughness ('he-man') but diverse social skills ('domestic bliss') - "a mosaic of qualities that reflect the necessities of compromise ... good with the children, relaxed, eloquent, knowledgeable". Women in turn are the immediate progenitors of offspring, nurturing an articulate and cooperative group culture as well as being societal family-builders and resourceful gatherers of diverse plant species. In this way human culture evolved in a social setting where male reproductive success was mediated through the social awareness of the female gatherers, upon whom the child rearing and basic food resource of the society depended.

Our early human record speaks of a 100,000 year period of gatherer-hunter emergence in which women and men enjoyed a degree of reproductive autonomy and choice regained by our own societies only in part in the last century. Homo sapiens has spent the vast majority of this time leaving only flaked tools with only minor changes of design, the social aspects of culture, which are not so easily left in artifacts may have become highly attuned to complex and subtle interactions. Although so-called "primitive" cultures are diverse and parallels, between modern gatherer-hunters and our ancestral origins remain speculative, among the few primitive hunter-gatherers still existent, egalitarian societies such as the !Kung-san 'bushmen' of the Kalahari, the Sandawe and Hadzabe of Tanzania and the Biaka and Mbuti 'pygmies' of the Congo Basin have much to teach us both genetically and culturally.

Chromosomes contain a variety of markers that can be used to compare diverse populations and infer an evolutionary relationship between them. These include the slowly varying protein polymorphisms of coding regions which are useful for long-term trends, single nucleotide polymorphisms, and non-coding region changes (mutation rates about 2.5 x 10^-8 per base pair per generation and useful for reconstructing evolutionary history only over millions of years) insertion and deletion events (about 8% of polymorphisms, extending from one to millions of nucleotides), particularly those driven by transposable elements such as the LINEs and even more frequent SINEs (p 332), non-coding micro-satellites (mutation rate 10^-5 - 10^-2 due to repeat slippage) and mini-satellite regions of repeating DNA (mutation rates as high as 2 x 10^-1 due to meiotic recombination in sperm) that both evolve rapidly and are not subject to the strong selection of coding regions which can differentiate changes over the much shorter time scales of modern human migration.

The insertions and deletions of the million or so Alu elements in the human genome (p 332) are particularly useful, as the most active sub-population of about 1000 Alu is actively transcribing and undergoing rapid change. A subpopulation of Alu are capable of generating new coding regions (exons), when inserted into non-coding introns between spliced sections of a translated mRNA, because one base-pair change within Alu leads to formation of a new exon reading into the surrounding DNA. This is not necessarily deleterious because alternative splicing still allows the original protein to be made as well. We have the highest number of introns per gene of any organism, and thus have to have gained an advantage from this costly error-prone process. Alus may have given rise, through alternative splicing, to new proteins that drove primates' divergence from other mammals. Recent studies have shown that the nearly identical genes of humans and chimps produce essentially the same proteins in most tissues, except in parts of the brain, where certain human genes are more active and others generate significantly different proteins through alternative splicing of gene transcripts. Our divergence from other primates may thus be due in part to alternative splicing.

If we consider the likely effects of the out of Africa hypothesis, we would expect that founding African populations not subject to active expansion and migration would have greater genetic diversity and that the genetic makeup of other world populations would come from a subset of the African diversity, consisting of those subgroups who migrated.

In the case of mitochondrial mtDNA (mutation rate about 2.5 x 10^-7) and its hyper-variable D-loop (mutations rates as high as 4 x 10^-3), which is transmitted only down the maternal line (see Tishkoff and Verrelli R692 for caveat) and the non-recombining majority of the Y-chromosome which is transmitted only down the paternal line, each with no recombination, we would expect greater diversity going deeper into the historical tree of divergence, with certain existing groups who have retained the founding patterns of survival and have not undergone rapid population expansions to retain an increasingly diverse source variation. All these features are broadly observed in the genetic data to date.

(a) MtDNA tree for African groups showing haplotypes of !Kung, Mbuti and Biaka as well as the line coming out of Africa (Chen et. al. R116). (b) Diagram of world migration and regional differentiation of successive mtDNA haplotypes (Gilbert R240). (c) mtDNA distances between founding African groups including Hadza (clicks) Khwe is from (Knight et. al R382). Recent mtDNA evidence suggests a first wave of migration down the coast of Asia all the way to Australia (Forster et. al. R217).

Most studies of non-coding regions of autosomal, X-chromosome, and mitochondrial mtDNA genetic variation (which are desirable markers because they are not so subject to selection and thus have relatively neutral drift) show higher levels of genetic variation in African populations compared to non-African populations, using many types of markers. Although some studies of Y-chromosome variation have observed higher heterozygosity levels in non-African populations, the African populations have higher levels of pairwise sequence differences, consistent with these populations being ancestral. High levels of diversity in African populations alone do not prove that African populations are ancestral. A recent bottleneck event and/or colonization and extinction events among non-African populations, or a more recent onset of population growth in non-Africans, could also cause a decrease in genetic diversity (Tishkoff and Verrelli R692). In fact the complete inter-fertility of all human populations and the relative lack of genetic divergence by comparison with the few remaining chimp colonies in the wild (Hrdy R330 183) does indicate a significant bottleneck. The genetic data is consistent with a human emergence from a population of only 10,000 around 100,000 years ago. This is also consistent with the delayed maturation, long birth spacings as a result of prolonged lactation and high infant mortality seen in gather-hunter populations such as the !Kung. At such low growth rates a population of 100 would take 50,000 years to reach 10,000 (Hrdy R330 183).

Patterns of male migration. The Genographic Project - a partnership between National Geographic and IBM - will collect DNA samples from over 100,000 people worldwide to provide a high-resolution genetic map of human migration.

However studies of protein polymorphisms as well as mtDNA haplotypes, X-chromosome and Y-chromosome haplotypes, autosomal microsatellites and minisatellites, Alu elements, and autosomal haplotypes indicate that the roots of the population trees constructed from these data are composed of African populations and/or that Africans have the most divergent lineages, as expected under a recent African origin rather than a multi-regional emergence model. Additionally, studies of autosomal, X-chromosomal haplotype and mtDNA variation indicate that Africans have the largest number of population-specific alleles and that non-African populations harbor a subset of the genetic diversity that is present in Africa, as expected if there was a genetic bottleneck when modern humans migrated out of Africa. Analysis of genetic variation among ethnically diverse human populations indicates that populations cluster by geographic region (i.e., Africa, Europe/Middle East, Asia, Oceania, New World) and that African populations are highly divergent. The mtDNA studies hypothesize a primal female ancestor - the African Eve - around 150,000 years ago (Chen et. al. R116) while the Y-chromosome Adam is more recent, at around 90,000 years ago (Underhill et. al. R711) consistent with the greater reproductive variance of males than females. Differences between the Y- and mtDNA distributions indicate how migration, intermarriage and female exogamy have affected the gene pool. The genetic patterns of both these and autosomal microsatellites (Zhivotovsky et. al. R780) are consistent with founding African diversity with migratory radiations to form other world populations, with deep founding radiations to the forest people such as the Biaka and Mbuti, Khoisan click-language speaking !Kung-san bushmen of Botswana and the Sandawe of Tanzania, and possibly the Hadzabe, as well as the forest people such as the Mbuti and Biaka 'pygmies' who have adopted the Bantu languages of the farming neighbours with which they now share semi-symbiotic relationships. Along with some Ethiopian and Sudanese sub-populations, these groups may represent some of the oldest and deeply diversified branches of modern humans.

(Right) Genographic project study of mitochondiral origins shows a deep split separating Khoisan mitochondrial inheritance from other groups, including those migrating out of Africa, suggesting a separation of some 100,000 years possibly caused by long term drought in Africa Behar et al. 2008 (R787).
Such recent genetic evidence has laid bare the relationships between some of the founding human groups spread across Africa from the 'Cushite' horn of Ethiopia to the southern Kalahari. Mitochondrial DNA studies have highlighted the ancient origin of the !Kung San and of pygmy peoples of the Congo Basin such as the Mbuti and the Biaka.

Y-chromosome studies have shown the !Kung share a most ancient haplotype with sub-populations from Ethiopia and the Sudan. According to an overall survey of genetic research by Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland, the most deeply ancestral known human DNA lineages may be those of East Africans, such as the Sandawe, who share many phenotypic features and a click language with the !Kung. This suggests southern Khoisan-speaking peoples originated in East Africa. The most ancient populations are now believed to also include the Sandawe, Burunge, Gorowaa and Datog people of Tanzania. The Burunge and Gorowaa migrated to Tanzania from Ethiopia within the last 5,000 years consistent with an ancient founding population in this area. Echoes of the earliest language spoken by ancient humans tens of thousands of years ago may have been preserved in the distinctive clicking sounds still spoken by some existing African tribes.

Highlighting unique features of human genetic evolution, are two key genes whose mutations cause microcephaly, consistent with increased brain size, whose rapid spread through the human population may coincide with spurts in human culture. Microcephalin (R198) appeared ~37,000 years ago coinciding with the birth of culture and ASPM spread from the Near East around 5000 years ago (R466). However studies linking these variants have failed to find differences in intelligence and results remain highly controversial (DOI:10.1126/science.314.5807.1872). Nevertheless, these results are consistent with an overall examination of linkage disequilibrium in single nucleotide polymorphisms (Moyzis et. al. R493) which indicate that about 7% of our genes have been subject to selection in the last 50,000 years, a figure similar to domestication of maize, including genes for protein metabolism, disease resistance and brain function.

(a) Non-recombining Y-chromosome evolutionary tree (Underhill et. al. R711) (b) Geographical distribution showing the ancient haplotype shared by the San and Ethiopian and Sudanese sub-populations. (c) Genetic distances between Khoisan and forest peoples sharing M112 a Y-chromosome allele common only in these groups showing great genetic distance between Hadzabe and San peoples (Knight et. al. R382) . (d) Autosome satellite analysis confirming ancient divergence of San and forest peoples leading to migration from Africa (Zhivotovsky et. al. R780).
In a counterpoint to these studies, Rohde and coworkers (R590, R305) estimate that the repeated spreading of family trees by sexually recombining mobile populations and differences in reproductive rates leads to an estimate of the most recent common ancestor of our global populations existing just 3,500 years ago, excepting these most isolated groups.

The clicks made by the San people of southern Africa and the Hadzabe of East Africa may thus be the linguistic equivalent of living fossils, preserved from a much older and more primitive tongue. A study by geneticists and linguists has found that people who use click sounds as part of their vocabulary have almost certainly inherited them from a common ancestor who spoke one of the earliest proto-languages. The investigation, led by Joanna Mountain and Alec Knight of Stanford University in California (R382), centered on the genetic relationship between the Hadzabe of north-central Tanzania and the Ju'hoansi San (!Kung) who live on the Namibia-Botswana border. Although separated by thousands of miles, both groups use the same sort of click sounds and accompanying consonants to communicate, yet their DNA shows they are only very distantly related and must have been geographically separated for at least 40,000 years.

There is continuing historical and mythological evidence that these peoples were widespread across the African continent before the Bantu expansion about 2000 years ago. Kikuyu myths tells of the 'ground people' or Athi, from whom they 'bought' their land. The Egyptians referred to the Mbuti as 'the people of the trees' renowned for their singing and dancing. Pharaoh Phiops II (about 2300 B.C.) mentions a Pygmy dancer brought back from an expedition to the forest, while Homer, Herodotus, and Aristotle are but a few others to mention Pygmies or small African people, often called Aka a name still used today for the Biaka. The earliest humans in Gabon were believed to be the Babinga, or 'Pygmies', dating back to 7000 B.C. The Bantu name 'Twa' for the pygmies is the same word the Zulus use for the Khoisan click-language speakers they found in their early migrations into what is now Natal province of South Africa. One San tribe there today is still called Twa.

Hadzabe men and Datog women two diverse groups with ancient genetic and cultural roots (Tishkoff).

There is continuing debate between anthropologists, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists about whether any group can be regarded as more 'primal' than another in cultural terms or used to infer any universal foundations for emergent human nature (Marks R440 169). Although in a sense all humans alive today are 'equally evolved', the !Kung, Sandawe, Mbuti, Biaka and related groups share both a 'founding' genetic 'footprint' at the base of modern human diversity, indicating long periods of conserved population, and cultural practices which reflect long periods of time in which they have had a low-impact, low-change pattern of survival, despite some contact with other groups and changes in their habitat and life-style, for example imposed by other migrating peoples. These cultural and genetic reasons combine to give validity to their capacity to teach us about human origins.

Human divergence trees calculated by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) top left Li et. al. (R788) bottom right Jakobsson et. al. (R789). Trees for haplotypes and copy number variation between populatons (R788).

The !Kung San of the Kalahari provide a unique perspective on our possible hunter-gatherer origins. As we have noted, they stand close to the root of both the mitochondrial Eve tree and the Y-chromosome Adam tree. There is more variation in the mitochondrial DNA of such ancient groups than between diverse world peoples, because their population has been relatively stable over long periods, so the original pool of diversity has increased over time without one woman's genes growing to swamp the others in number of offspring.

The !Kung San camp in groups of perhaps 20 to 40 people, always ready to move on - within the constraints of access to water holes - when the food supply looks better elsewhere. Group composition changes as the more stable units that are nuclear families come and go somewhat independently of one another, banding together with one set of relatives for awhile, perhaps, and then with another.

In a !Kung San population studied by Nancy Howell of the University of Toronto, women experience their first menstruation at an average age of 16.6 years, and it is at about that age that they first marry (Daly and Wilson R144 40). The husband is likely to be at least 5 years older than his wife, and may not be the man she would have chosen for herself. Adolescent fertility is low, and the first child is born at an average maternal age of 19.5 Nursing commonly continues until age 4 and exceptionally until age 6. The child is typically weaned only when the mother discovers that she is again pregnant and informs her disgruntled toddler that her milk and energy are henceforth required by a younger sibling-to-be. Well-nourished but thin, !Kung San women seldom conceive within the first couple of years of nursing due to the frequency of suckling on demand.

!Kung San mothers carry their babies in slings, allowing them to suckle essentially at will throughout the day and night. Timothy Taylor has suggested (R683 44) this is a key cultural invention of women leading to culture. The baby nurses for a couple of minutes about once every quarter hour throughout the daylight hours. This demanding nursing schedule does not seem to vary much for at least the first 2-3 years of the baby's life. Such frequent suckling day and night has hormonal consequences for the mother that tend to inhibit ovulation and hence delay her next conception.

In the rare event that a baby is born before the mother feels she can safely wean its older sibling, or it has a birth defect, then she may feel compelled to abandon the newborn. Howell reported 6 infanticides in 500 live births, but there is probably some under-reporting, since !Kung San women, consider infanticide a major personal tragedy and would sooner not dwell on such painful memories. By custom, a !Kung mother goes into the bush alone to give birth. If she comes back with the baby, it is recognized and protected as a group member. However if she abandons the baby before returning, she is not regarded as someone who has killed a person (Hrdy R639 468).

Although neither contraception nor abortion was evidently practiced, a healthy fertile !Kung San woman - if she had the good fortune to survive until menopause - was likely to produce only about five children. Despite her best efforts, one of these five, on average, would die before its first birthday, of malaria, perhaps, or some other disease. Even more heartbreaking would be the deaths of two older children, nurtured through several years only to succumb to disease or accident or violence while still unmarried and childless. A girl who lived to reproduce - and only 48% of female babies did so - could expect to raise successfully one son and one daughter who would marry and produce children of their own (Daly and Wilson R144 40). The eloquent !Kung San 'autobiographer' Nisa, for example, lost all of her children, at various ages and in various ways, and thus suffered the grief of a middle age without descendants (Shostak, R639). Other women were luckier. All available evidence suggests that the general features of a !Kung San woman's reproductive career as described above - the wide birth spacing, the prolonged demand nursing, low fertility, high childhood mortality, and the other demographic details-are indeed representative of hunter-gatherers, and of the life history that has characterized Homo for thousands of millennia . Raising 2 or 3 children to competent maturity-the life's work of a successful woman-has typically required hard decisions about priorities, attentive management of social relations, ingenuity, luck, and decades of hard labor.

Children always accompany their mothers so they don't get lost in the wilderness. The carrying sling represents a major technological invention which makes it possible for woman gatherers to both look after their children and also bring back enough food for the groups to survive well without a regular kill. Carrying young children can become back-breaking when food is gathered miles away and has to be carried back as well. The !Kung have a proverb 'Women who have one birth after another like an animal have a permanent backache!' and the back-load hypothesis has been advanced as an explanation of birth spacing. (Hrdy R639 197). !Kung mothers may be thus balancing the optimum survival of the children they do have partly by the mother's endocrine system making sure the mothers also replace their reserves. By contrast with a !Kung mother who may carry an infant nearly 5,000 miles overall by the age of 4, Hadza women who travel shorter distances to forage and can thus also more often leave a child in camp have a shorter inter-birth span.

In such societies the gathering of the females provides up to 85% of the diet and the meat of hunting only 15%. One estimate of time spent is 12 hours a week, on about two days, gathering and 21 hours hunting (Ruether R598 160) leaving substantial leisure time for intense social life: trance dancing, story telling, exchange of gifts, rites of passage. As a social activity done largely independently from the men, gathering provides a social concourse and opportunity for reproductive freedom lying largely beyond male control. Hunting's intermittent spectacular success, is symbolic of sexual prowess and is often engaged in a spirit of social altruism through sharing the proceeds, by contrast with gathering, which is performed for the benefit of immediate families. Boasting is discouraged among hunters and may result in jeering insults about one's genitals. Male hunters often prefer to seek large prey, which in turn encourages a pattern of sharing both because the bounty is great and because success is intermittent. There is evidence that at least some Bushmen may have also previously learned to herd cattle (Robbins et al R588).

Kristen Hawkes' 'show off' hypothesis suggests that the prime motive of hunting is not the food resource itself, but the social status among neighbours (Hawkes et. al. R301), and sexual favours it elicits from the women (Hawkes R300). Large game like the eland represent 'prowess' rather than protein which could be gained more easily from hunting small game. That "women like meat" was the standard explanation for why a poor hunter remains a celibate bachelor. (ibid). Helen Fisher (R208) gave expression to this idea in 'The Sex Contract', which Chris Knight (R383) extended to the idea of a fully fledged sex strike in 'Blood Relations', involving lunar-menstrual synchrony (p 354). Polly Wiessner has a more Machiavellian version of this theory from studying the !Kung and foragers of New Guinea, in which "the hunters are sharing meat in order to influence the political composition of the group, since kin and others helpful for rearing their offspring tend to gather around successful hunters" (Hrdy R330). This is a natural counterpoint in which parenting and sexual choice are complementary facets of the reproductive imperative. Both contrast markedly with the earlier "man the hunter" theories of De Vore and Washburn (R729), in which the driver for cultural diversity is male prowess in hunting and tool-making to provide for their very dependent offspring and 'captive' one-man wives.

Marjorie Shostak (R639) notes: "Here in a society of ancient traditions, men and women live together in a non-exploitative manner, displaying a striking equality between the sexes. Other contemporary gathering and hunting societies have a similar high level of equality - higher at least than that of most agricultural or herding societies. This observation has led to the suggestion that the relations between the sexes that prevailed during the majority of human prehistory were comparable to those seen in the !Kung today." The !Kung are likewise described by Patricia Draper (R174, Sanday R609 124-5), as sexually egalitarian. Draper says that !Kung females are autonomous and participate in group decisions because they do not need the assistance of men at any stage in the production of gathered foods. Nor do they need the permission of men to use any natural resources entering into this production. !Kung men and women live in a public world, sleeping and eating in a small circular clearing, within which all activities are visible. Lorna Marshall (R444) notes: "There is no privacy in a !Kung encampment, and the vast veld is not a cover. The very life of these people depends on their being trained from childhood to look sharply at things ... They register every person's footprints in their minds ... and read in the sand who walked there and how long ago. There are inherited positions, such as the 'headman', but these are said to be essentially empty of behavioral content" (Sanday R609 125). There are many similar examples of self-sufficiency and autonomy of women in foraging societies.

Even when fathers are obviously devoted to their offspring, fatherly love is rarely translated into direct care of infants. Hrdy (R330 211) states that during the first six months of his daughter's life, this doting !Kung San father will hold her less than 2 percent of the time, although this may neglect night times spent sleeping together.

!Kung fathers are affectionate, indulgent and devoted and form intense mutual attachments with their children. Although they do not spend as much time with their children as the mothers and often hand them back for the less pleasant task of child care, fathers, like mothers are not viewed as figures of awesome authority and their relationships with their children are intimate, nurturant and physically close (Shostak R639 45-6).

Bushmen fit into the Kalahari ecosystem at more than one level; they compete with all the animals for water, share the prey of the smaller carnivores, rival the lions and other big predators for the larger game and contest the claims of the scavengers to fresh carrion. Their hunting is not so intensive as to disturb the natural balance. Because they are few and their subsistence comes from so many different points in the food-web, no single animal species is endangered. They kill only to consume, and their usual method of hunting using poisoned arrows and waiting for the animal to fall, they create less disturbance than a lion or leopard, and do not frighten the animals from the hunting grounds. When Bushmen still inhabited the more hospitable parts of the subcontinent, they often trapped the hippopotamus and other large animals by digging holes, disguised with branches, in busy game paths, with upward pointed stakes coated with poison. Early travellers walked in constant danger of a fatal accident, because there were so many of these cunningly concealed pitfalls.

In the central Kalahari, the Big Rains reunite the small groups of Bushmen who dispersed during the dry season (Johnson et al R344, R714). Everywhere they usher in a time of plenty for the Bushmen. Game becomes more numerous and, within a few weeks of the first rains, the ripening of the ochna and grewia berries heralds the richest season. In this season, men and women are continually on the look-out for hives. As the sun sets they may pause to see in which direction a bee flies, because they know that at this time they fly straight back to their hives. When Bushmen find a hive they smoke out the bees and remove the honey, but if the hive is not yet ready for opening, the finder will mark it and return later for the honey. This is truly a case of 'finders keepers' for if another comes and removes the honey from a marked hive his crime is regarded as being worthy of death. Long after the Bushmen had disappeared from the southern areas, the sharpened hardwood pegs they had driven into the faces of precipices to reach the hives and the small heaps of stones with which they had sealed their ownership remained as evidence that this land had once been theirs.

Draper, who accompanied foraging !Kung women of the Kalahari on gathering expeditions, notes that the male hunters depend on the information women bring back about the "state of the bush." If on a gathering expedition women discover fresh tracks, they send an older child to deliver the report to the men in camp. Since women are skilled in reading the signs of the bush, upon their return to camp, men query them about evidence of game movements, the age of animal tracks they may have encountered, and the location of water.

Although all !Kung agree that meat is the most desirable and prestigious food, the hunters cannot always provide it, and the vegetable food gathered by women is the staple, contributing about three quarters of the daily food intake by weight. Draper challenges the view that gathering is a monotonous routine requiring no particular intelligence. Successful gathering among the !Kung involves the ability to discriminate among hundreds of edible, inedible, medicinal and toxic species of plants at various stages of growth. This kind of intelligence is fully as important to !Kung survival as the physical strength, dexterity, and endurance required for success in hunting. It also appears to be an evolutionary trait which still displays itself in studies of the sexual brain in Western subjects.

In !Kung society, all manner of sexual liaisons occur, from partnership and serial monogamy, through open polygyny, to a variety of affairs pursued with passion by some members of both sexes, although extramarital sex is 'forbidden' by the male elders unless to entertain an age mate of the husband. There is at least begrudging respect for a woman's determination to love whom she will, with some intermittent male violence, often mediated by the group. Wife sharing has also been reported. The infrequent custom of /kamberi allows men to exchanges wives for a while if the women agree. 'If you want to sleep with another man's wife first let him sleep with yours'( R83 335). However a husband may be enraged if he finds his wife has been unfaithful and may kill one or both with poison arrows (R83 275).

Although adult !Kung disapprove of child sex games, they only discourage something if they see it mildely saying "Go play nicer games!". Child sex games are common. Boys solicit sex games with the girls and girls also play sex games together (R640 ). Nisa had a complex love life involving husbands she loved and others who tried to possess her as well as many secret and not-so-secret affairs, proceeding from diffident childhood sex games with both sexes (R640 31) to the passionate enjoyment of sexual love (p 102):

[Nisa] began telling me about her own childhood; her [childhood] homosexual loves, her initial refusal to have sex with boys [for fear of the sexual act], the boyfriend she loved, who taught her to play "house" and her eventual enjoyment of sex.

Trial marriages are common, especially when they involve young girls. A father or mother may take their daughter back if she is not treated adequately. Nisa had several trial marriages before having to begin making love in marriage before her first menstruation. On her first trial wedding night she had to endure her first trial husband sleeping with another man's wife who was there to chaperone to ally her fears of being a child bride. She also had to endure adult married sexual relationship before she had had begun to menstruate. !Kung are modest and cover their genitals and a woman's buttocks, but breasts are left bare for nursing.

Shostak (R639 267) notes that infidelity is frequent in !Kung oral history and myth and it was acknowledged and talked about in the 1950s ... it is therefore not likely to be of recent origin. From Nisa's dialogue she says:

"The best insurance against complications arising from love affairs is not to be found out. Great care must be taken to arrange meetings at safe times and places, away from the eyes of others. ... . Those who tell what they know may become central figures in fights that ensue or even be held responsible for the outcome. ... To succeed at and to benefit from extra-marital affairs, one must accept that one's feeling for one's husband 'the important one from inside the hut' and one's lover 'the little one from the bush' are necessarily different. One is rich, warm and secure. The other is passionate and exciting, though often fleeting and undependable. Since such affairs are not openly condoned, it is most important that a lover have 'sense' that he be discrete and play by the rules. He should also show his affection - by arranging rendezvous, by being faithful and by giving gifts. I have told you about my lovers, but I haven't finished telling you about all of them, because they are as many as my fingers and toes."

"Nisa's biography provides a !Kung San forager's perspective on the tensions underlying human pair-bonds. Nisa marries four times, always monogamously. When her first husband, Tashay, brings home a second wife, Nisa recalls, "I chased her away and she went back to her parents." Several of Nisa's marriages dissolved under the strain of infidelities, either her husband's or her own. In addition to her four husbands, eight lovers pass in and out of her life. Nisa is quite obviously in love with several of them. 'Pair-bonds' were formed, but the relationships did not last. Two of Nisa's pregnancies probably derive from affairs with men other than her husband at the time. As Nisa's daughter Twi grows up to look more and more like her husband's brother, with whom Nisa was having an affair when the child was conceived, her husband reminds her that his younger brother is the likely progenitor and therefore "will help take care of her." Whenever Nisa finds herself between husbands, when she is widowed or divorced, she sets out across the Kalahari to find her brother and live with him" .

"Hunter-gatherer societies like the !Kung San are as egalitarian as traditional societies ever get. Nisa's husbands were physically stronger than she, able to dominate her, but if she was unhappy enough, Nisa could always vote with her feet and leave. Even when Nisa was caught by her husband in flagrante delicto with a lover and beaten and threatened with murder, others stood up for her, and life went on. In more patriarchal societies, her perpetual adulteries would have been lethal. Since none of Nisa's children survived to adulthood, the life of this spunky woman can scarcely be said to typify success in evolutionary terms. Yet the tensions that characterized her marriages are the same ones that Nisa's mother mentions. Again and again, her predicaments crop up in women's life stories. Nisa cherished her freedom of movement, her freedom to choose mates, and, if her husband did not provide sufficient food, her freedom to negotiate with lovers. Each husband, on the other hand, wanted multiple wives for himself but also to maintain exclusive sexual access to Nisa. There is a dynamic tug-of-war in these relationships that is at odds with conventional pipe dreams about humans having an innate tendency to form long-lasting pair-bonds, unions in which both sexes have a powerful commitment from within to adhere. Such cases make it hard to sustain the illusion that lifelong monogamous families are the natural human condition. Monogamy in Nisa's case is more nearly a compromise than a species-typical universal. Monogamy is the most harmonious common ground she and her husband of the moment can arrive at. And when it works, children benefit. Monogamy reduces inherent conflicts of interest between the sexes. Her reproductive success becomes his, and vice versa, promoting harmonious relations between genetically distinct individuals striving toward common goals. Sociobiology is not a field known for the encouraging news it offers either sex".

Although initial marriages are often arranged by families, subsequent partnerships and their dissolution can come at the initiative of either sex. Women such as Nisa speak of a woman having lovers as a blessing - she can on her travels gain many tributes of food, affection, bonding and possessions that make life good. Domestic disputes which could become violent are often settled by protestations of concern from neighbouring families in their close-knit shelters. When a man does not help his partner she may scold and curse him publicly until the grumbling of the other forces him to take responsibility. When a major dispute threatens to burst into violence, it is confronted by the entire band in frank and forthright discussion, which leaves the offender in no doubt about the consensus of opinion concerning his behaviour and where it is likely to lead him. When their leisure is not beset with pressing problems, they exchange banter and merriment by the firelight, often talking about their relationship long into the night.

Bushmen and Forest Peoples show remarkable balance between the sexes and reverence for women, particularly for the menarche, as a sacred force, which rather than being a defilement, is regarded as a time of psychic power, having vast influence on hunting and the existential flow. Although the !Kung name offspring down the paternal line, they recognize that a husband should first live with the wife's family to aid in hunting. Sarah Hrdy (R330 192) points out that this measure is also a key to the success of !Kung motherhood through grandmotherly allo-parenting of the daughter through her first offspring, providing the key know-how to give the child the best chance of survival and the mother first-hand experience to benefit future children.

The !Kung myth of the striped mouse contains a specific warning that rampant patriarchy nearly led to the destruction of society and recounts how mutuality between the sexes was rescued. An attractive young beetle woman was imprisoned by her father, the lizard, in a house in the earth. The lizard is an image of awareness bound too closely to the earth and its rocks to be good for the future. Hence the beetle woman, its future self, though also intimately of the earth, was winged, capable and desirous of taking to that other great opposite of creation, the sky. But the father, as so many fathers throughout the masculine-dominated past and present, denies the daughter, the soul in him, the right to raise life towards the heavens and so fulfil the end to which it had been born. At this point the Praying Mantis, who has appeared on Bushman earth as the instrument of ultimate meaning, has a dream and sees how life itself would be denied and arrested if the tyranny of the lizard were allowed to continue. He, therefore, sends the long-nosed mouse into battle against the lizard. We already know the reason for a mouse, but why a long-nosed mouse? Because the nose which informs life of things not seen in the night or hidden by distance and other forms of concealment, is one of the earliest of our many images of intuition. But like all intuition, wise and sensitive as it may be, it lacks the cunning of the serpent which is necessary to overcome the lizard. Inevitably the long-nosed mouse is killed by the lizard and, though followed by countless gallant long-nosed kinsmen, all are killed and the lizard remains an adamant and triumphant impediment to becoming' a new being. Happily, Mantis is informed of the disaster in a dream and decides to send the striped mouse into battle instead. The striped mouse, of course, has a sensitive nose but it is not too long, there is no hubris of intuition, and its stripes are of even greater significance. They are the outward signs that it is a more differentiated form of being and consciousness. He kills the lizard, calling out as he does so, 'I am killing by myself to save friends', and hastens to free the beetle woman, the feminine in life. All the dead forces of intuition, the long-nosed mice, are resurrected and this army of tiny visionary creatures are led back to the palace of the Praying Mantis. Jubilant they follow the striped mouse and the beetle woman marching at his side, feeling herself 'to be utterly his woman'. As they march, they wave high above their heads like flags the fly whisks which the Bushmen of the great plains of the south alone had made out of animal tails (van der Post R714 148).

Under the harsh conditions of the desert it will be several years after puberty before a girl reaches menarche (Hrdy R330 187). A girl's first menstruation is a reverent occasion, danced over for several days and nights by women, old men watched by young male onlookers - it is spoken of in awe by the !Kung in the same terms as a young warrior shooting his first big game animal - 'she shot an eland!' The first menstruation is believed to give the girl supernatural potency (nlum), powerful enough to disturb the fate of the village in the hunt, if a man sets eyes on the girl during the 'period'. Consistent with the 'wrong sex, wrong speices' signal (p 77) is the fact that the women expose their buttocks to the girl and whoever may be playing the bull (Power and Watts R551 323). This reverance, accompanied by 'awe' and 'silence' on the part of the girl lasts through to the second menstrual period.

This is in stark contrast to the negative connotations of menstruation as 'unclean' in many cultures and religions. The most ancient of all !Kung music is the 'eland music' that is sung only by women and only when the dance the eland dance in celebration of a young girl's first menstruation (Johnson et. al. R344). Although not matrilineal, they are 'matrifocal' in respect for menarche and mothering (Ruether R598 160).

Chris Knight (R383) sees these rites as founding human motifs in a 'sex-for-meat' exchange phased with the lunar cycle which Camilla Power has highlighted as a 'wrong sex, wrong species' signal (p 77). Evidence of the ancient use of ochre (p 94) and its use among San groups to adorn the 'new maiden' and/or the women of the band and to protect adolescent boys in the hunt is consistent with this interpretation. Consistent with the idea of a sex strike is the nineteenth century anecdote from Smith's notebook (R551 322):

The Bushmen when they will not go out to steal cattle, are by the women deprived of intercourse sexual by them and from this mode of proceeding the men are often driven to steal in opposition to their better inclination. When they have possessed themselves by thieving a quantity of cattle, the women as long as they exist appear perfectly naked without the kind of covering they at other times employ.

Also consistent with the sex strike concept is the 'normative belief associating menstrual with lunar periodicities' among San peoples. The /Xam, !Xu, G/wi and/or G//ana would not release a girl from seclusion until the appearance of the new moon. Shostak (R639 68) also notes belief in menstrrual synchrony among !Kung women. Also consistent is the fact that the most productive hunting by many San groups and the Hadza consists of night-stand hunts over game trail leading to water holes, optimally during the second quarter of the waxing moon and thereafter. The use of spears rather than poisoned arrows in this context attests to its ancient roots, extending back to the last interglacial (Power and Watts R551 321).

Fulton cave drawing (R714) 1000 BC (BBC 'New light shed on SA cave art' 7 -2-03) celebrating the first menstrual rite, Drakensberg Mountains, Natal (van der Post). The central figure is a young enrobed woman undergoing her first menstruation ceremony in a special shelter. Circling her are clapping women, female dancers and (in the outer ring) men with their hunting equipment. Two figures hold sticks; the women bend over and display 'tails' as they imitate the mating behaviour of elands. Among living San, such rituals are intimately connected with success in hunting. Each male figure has a bar across his penis. This may be the artist marking the marital abstinence associated with menstruation and valued as a condition of hunting luck. The other figures may represent the few men who join in the dance, some holding sticks. The surrounding figures, are all bending over, their buttocks playfully thrust in the direction of the menstruating girl. These details match those of hunt-linked menstrual rituals still practised by San and related groups in recent times (Knight R383, Lewis-Williams R411).

Peggy Reeves Sanday (R609) perceives the evolution of abhorrence of menstruation as a counterpoint between the blood of life and the blood of death wrought by the male hunter, explaining the subsequent fear and 'taboo' associated with the period in terms of avoidance of sex, restrictions on dress, movement and contact with food, ritual equipment, rivers and being secluded in huts, both as a reflection of the male fear of the danger of the female as life-giver, and the life and death counterpoint blood implies. The !Kung no longer practice male circumcision as initiation to adulthood. Female circumcision is not practiced.

The San have been immortalized by anthropologists as 'the gentle people', and indeed they have fought no wars that anyone can still recall, but this does not mean that retaliatory violence is alien to them (Wilson and Daly R144 224). Richard Lee collected the accounts of 22 homicides which had taken place among the traditional foraging !Kung San during a 50-year period, or about 29.3 homicides per million persons per annum, a figure common to large Western cities. Bearing in mind that the men are lethally armed with poisoned arrows, and there is no central authority, this is hardly surprising. Although the Bushmen are profoundly less homicidal than the Yanomamo, they have one thing in common: Each has a societally acknowledged right ultimately to use lethal force to resolve disputes between them. Anyone can literally 'take the law into his own hands' because in such societies that is where justice and judgment ultimately reside. There is no 'government' to keep men in awe, no impersonal authority to decide who is right and who is wrong. As one of the !Kung men in an argument about a marriage put it to his adversary, their dispute could be quickly settled with an arrow. Just one little arrow (Chagnon R111 212). Like their more warlike counterparts on other continents, they avenged slain kinsmen. If a killing occurred it was more likely than not to be followed by a retaliatory killing; 15 of the 22 homicides were parts of blood feuds. A group of the San had also recently avenged a murder by sneaking into the killer's group and executing every man, woman, and child as they slept (Pinker R544 56). Although !Kung society is by no means completely non-violent, people manage to resolve virtually all their disputes through personal dialogue and remonstration, without recourse to a tribal police or vigilante justice. Neither do male elders have definitive authority, particularly over women, although they strive to impose their decisions in resolving disputes. Close-knit neighbours also mediate domestic violence. There is a noticeable ebb and flow of the incidence of wife beating with less in the dry months when people congregate in extended-families than in the wet season of more nuclear families (Broude R83 313).

Bushmen believe in the existence of two gods: a greater god manifesting the creative force and a lesser god invoking the malevolent forces of uncertainty and misfortune, each with a shadowy consort (Johnson et al R344,van der Post R714). They have many names, but the !Kung Bushmen most commonly call them ≠Gao!na and //Gauwa, while to the /Gwi they are N!odima and G//awama. The Bushmen do not see these as a good and bad god. When a missionary inquired into a Bushman's ideas of good and bad he was told it was 'good' to sleep with another man's wife, but 'bad' if he slept with yours. Still lamenting the Bushman's ignorance of absolute morality, he later asked the man, whom meanwhile he had discovered 'was in the habit of smoking wild hemp', what he thought was the most wonderful thing he had seen. The reply he was given, that no one thing was more wonderful than any other and that all the animals were the same.

≠Gao!na, the !Kung Great God, using one of his seven divine names, created himself:

"I am Hishe. I am unknown, a stranger.
No one can command me.
I am a bad thing. I follow my own path."

Then he created a Lesser God who lives in the western sky where the sun sets; and after this two wives for himself and for the Lesser God. ≠Gao!na, tallest of the Bushmen, was in his earthly existence a great magician and trickster with supernatural powers, capable of assuming the form of an animal, a stone or anything else he wished, and who changed people into animals and brought the dead back to life. But as the Great God who lives beside a huge tree in the eastern sky, he is the source and custodian of all things. He created the earth with holes in it where water could collect and water, the sky and rain both the gentle 'female' rain and the fierce 'male' rain thunder and lightning, the sun, moon, stars and wind. He created all the plants that grow on the earth. He created the animals and painted their individual colours and markings, and gave them all names. Then came human beings, and he put life into them; and gave to them all the weapons and implements they now have, and he implanted in them the knowledge of how to take all these things for themselves. Thus their hunting and gathering way of life was ordained from the very beginning and ≠Gao!na ordained that when they died they should become spirits, //Gerais, who would live in the sky with him and serve him. He set the pattern of life for all things, each in accordance with its own rules.

The !Kung include among their herbs traditional use of cannabis as a mind-altering substance. Dagga is consumed in traditional underground water 'pipes' (Johnson et al R344)

The !Kung pray to ≠Gao!na not as a remote being, but as intimately involved with their lives, sometimes calling him father. They pray for rain, for success in hunting, for healing both of physical and social ills. Only a really great medicine man might see ≠Gao!na face to face, but this is said to be very rare; much more frequently ≠Gao!na may appear to anyone in a dream to encourage or advise. ≠Gao!na does not reveal himself to ordinary humans, for so great is his power that, were he to come too close, he would destroy them unintentionally. But he nevertheless retains an interest in them. He is in no way concerned with their, but is aware of them, and if their behaviour offends him he will deal with them appropriately. But he is not truly a god of vengeance. When he deals harshly with someone, it is not an act of retribution but a demonstration of his power. This is the power of the unknown, the 'stranger', which explains why lightning strikes one man dead, and not the other standing beside him. The dead man, it is reasoned, must have offended ≠Gao!na by referring to him by one of his divine names, or perhaps he abused food. But he is not continually on the look-out for offenders. It is only when they happen to come to his attention that he demonstrates his power, and so sometimes people do offensive things and get away with it. Chiefly he acts for the benefit of mankind, for he supplies rain, food, children and poison for the arrows.

//Gauwa, the lesser god, who lives between two great trees in the western sky, also performs deeds that may be either beneficial or harmful to humans, but most are harmful. He is pictured as a very small Bushman, an incompetent who, even when well-intentioned, may bring misfortune by mistake. Although he is supposed to be subservient to ≠Gao!na and to act at his behest, he also sometimes acts on his own initiative while travelling about in a whirlwind, causing sickness and death to those he touches in passing. The people say that at certain times they catch glimpses of //Gauwa among the shadows of the trees.

≠Gao!na is said to live in the sacred Tsodilo Hills whose sexual story is a legendary comment on !Kung sexual relations. A man had two wives, but he loved one wife more than the other, and this caused a big quarrel. The one he didn't love hit him on the head, causing a deep wound. Then she ran off into the desert. But the Great God, ≠Gao!na, decided that because there was no peace among them, he must turn them all into a stone. The man became the largest of the hills; the unloved wife became the smallest hill that stands alone; and the loved wife, with her children, became the cluster of hills in the middle. But they believe there are supernatural powers in the Hills because ≠Gao!na himself lives there. It was there that he created and kept his cattle, sheep, goats, and all sorts of different animals. The !Kung claim you can see footprints in the rocks. But ≠Gao!na also played ribald tricks on his wives before he ascended into the heavens (Shostak R639 325).

Bushmen of the Orange believed that people and all animals had originated together in a hole in the ground, from which they came speaking the same language. Throughout a day they issued in a continuous stream from this hole between the roots of a giant tree that spread its branches over a vast territory. When the still of evening set in, they all gathered beneath the tree for the night, people and animals together. The Creator warned the people that, no matter how cold it became during the night, they were not to light a fire. But it grew steadily, colder, Until just before dawn, when the people could no longer endure the cold, they lit one. Immediately the animals took fright at the blaze and stampeded, losing, their powers of speech in their panic. And ever, since that time they have fled from man.

The !Kung cosmos is also inhabited by trickster heroes, such as Mantis, who has a key mythic role in the creation process. For the Bushmen of Lesotho, Mantis or, /Kaggen, the first being, made all things by ordering them to appear. He created the Sun, Moon, Stars, wind, mountains and animals. A quarrel began between /Kaggen and his wife over a knife she made blunt by using it to sharpen her digging stick. As a result of his anger, she gives birth to an eland calf in the fields. /Kaggen leaves the calf in the bush while be goes away for three days to obtain arrow poison, his two sons find the calf and kill it for food. /Kaggen accuses his sons of 'spoiling' the eland. He instructs his sons to put the blood of the calf in a pot and churn it with a stick. The blood splatters and becomes snakes. They try again, and the blood that is spilled turns into hartebeest. /Kaggen is still not satisfied. He orders his wife to clean out the pot and to bring fresh blood from the paunch of the little eland. To this he adds fat from the heart, and when the blood spatters this time, each drop becomes an eland bull, and all the bulls surround /Kaggen and his sons and menace them with their horns. 'See how you have spoilt the elands,' says /Kaggen, and he chases them away. The next time the blood is churned it produces eland cows, in such numbers that the earth is covered with them. 'Now go and hunt them and try to kill one', says /Kaggen. 'That is now your work, for it was you who spoilt them.' But they fail, and so /Kaggen himself goes out and spears three bulls. Thereafter, with his blessing, his sons are also successful. Some myths speak of regeneration. The mythical Mantis, in his human person as one of the 'early race', finds that his grandson has been killed by baboons, who are playing a ball game with the child's eye. Mantis joins in the game and, gaining possession of the eye, places it in a pond, where it once more becomes the complete child, the grandson whom the baboons had killed.

The Bushmen of the Cape directed some of their prayers to the Moon, which they believed controlled the rain. And Rain they considered to be a supernatural personage, who sometimes appeared as a black bull. In terms of their conception of nature, Rain was to be shown respect, because he came armed with thunderbolts to chastise those who offend him, and girls were the objects of his special attention. Thus women did not walk about in the rain, lest the lightning seek out their scent. If a shower caught them in the open, they took care whenever the lightning flashed to look immediately at the place where it had struck, believing that in this way they were able to turn back the thunderbolts aimed at them and that Rain would then pass them harmlessly by. It is said that girls killed by lightning were taken away to become stars, or be the wives of Water as the flowers that grow in pools.

Natural and supernatural forces also have a power of their own (Johnson et al R344, van der Post R714). Trance dancing leads the participants to a place where they experience the mystery beyond directly for themselves in personal vigil, not indirectly through intercession of a priest. What Westerners would call 'supernatural' forces are so active in the natural world of the Bushmen that the distinction between them is blurred. In so far as a duality does exist, it is transcended frequently by 'medicine men'. But the state of transcendence is not the exclusive preserve of the 'medicine men', although they are more accomplished at attaining it. It is achieved by everyone who goes into a trance during the 'healing dance'. Someone who achieves this state is said by the !Kung to !kia. This is a condition which is experienced rather than conceptualized, and it seems to correspond to the transcendental experiences of mystics. Among the Bushmen, the medium is the dance, but the description they give of the inner physical process that produces the !kia state is strikingly similar to the way in which the kundalini form of yoga practised in India is said to operate. The !Kung say that !kia occurs when a subtle energy, called nlum, is heated in the lower stomach region by the dance and rises up the spine as a vapor until it touches the base of the skull, at which point the energy is diffused throughout the body, like an electric current, causing the flesh to tingle and all conscious thought to cease.

People in this state are able to cross into the province of the supernatural and engage the spirits of the dead in battle on their own ground A person charged with nlum repulses the spirits and is cured of his physical and metaphysical ailments, actual and potential. Those who attain it use it to cure other members of the community who fall victim to the arrows of misfortune. It would be a misuse of this power to keep its benefits for themselves. Nlum energy is the universal 'medicine' that was given originally to man by ≠Gao!na and has been passed on from man to man ever since. All who can !kia are thus in this sense 'medicine men' and participate in the religious experience. But some 'medicine men' are more accomplished than others. Those who have absorbed a lot of nlum leave their bodies during the trance and ascend the invisible thread to visit //Gauwa in the western sky, and the greatest of the 'medicine men' sometimes even catch glimpses of ≠Gao!na himself.

Many Bushman groups today tell a story concerning the origin of death which is essentially the same as the account given by the Cape Bushmen in historical times. According to this tale, man may blame his mortality on an ancient argument between the moon and the hare. It is said that, in the days when the earth was inhabited by the 'early race', Moon declared that, just as he was dying and being reborn repeatedly in the cycle of his phases, so too would people die and be reborn. But Hare, who was mourning the death of his mother, denied this, saying that his mother was truly dead and would not return. They argued for some time about this, but Hare insisted that when someone died he remained dead. Eventually, Moon offered to demonstrate his own cycle of death and rebirth, but Hare refused to watch. This so enraged Moon that he struck Hare in the face and split his lip. Hare retaliated by scratching Moon's face, leaving permanent scars. Losing his patience, Moon withdrew the offer of immortality and decreed that Hare was no longer a person but an animal, to be hunted, savaged and eaten by wild dogs. Henceforth, said Moon, all men would die and not return. From that time the hare has been an animal with a split lip, and men have been mortal.

The spirits of people who have died in old age are not so much feared, because death is natural for the aged and they have had time to come to terms with it gradually. In fact, old people accept that in times of great thirst and famine, when their band is perpetually on the move in search of food, it may become necessary for the other members of the band to leave them behind, with no more than a fire to warm them and a circle of dry thorn bush to protect them from the hyenas during what will probably be their last hours. But it is not as if they were abandoned utterly to their fate. Whether they stay behind or continue with the band, the choice is unlikely to alter their fate, except that, if they continue, their presence could be the cause of the whole band having to share it. If the others find food and water before it is too late to save them, some of the men return with supplies to fetch them. If not, the old people know how their end will come. The others, knowing it too, never return to that spot, and neither will their descendants, until its deathly associations have been expunged from collective memory.

All places associated with death are left strictly alone. A body is buried in a squatting posture facing the Great God's home in the eastern sky, and all the personal possessions of the deceased are broken over the grave, so that people passing that way will recognize it as a grave and keep away from it. The campsite is then abandoned, and the band moves to another place and does not camp there again for at least two generations.

Left: Hunting eland Kamberg (Mohen R478) Right: San painting of the healing or trance dance Lonyana Rock Kwazulu-Natal. Figures dance around a seated figure apparently healing another reclining person enveloped in a kaross, a short skin-cloak. (Rock Art Res. Inst., Univ. of the Witwatersrand, SA)

The !Kung believe in an afterlife, in which their spirits become //gauwasi, who live in the eastern sky as servants of ≠Gao!na. Life dies in the body and does not leave it, but the spirit survives, and the //gauwasi come to fetch it when someone dies, removing it through the head of the corpse and taking it to ≠Gao!na, together with the heart and blood of the deceased. These he hangs on a branch over a fire, and in the smoke, the heart, blood and spirit are reconstituted. As //gauwasi, they have eternal life. They age, but do not die, because //Gauwa renews them with a special medicine before they become too old. They have bodies, as they had on earth, and they have their own supplies of the same types of food they ate formerly. They also retain their former spouses, but eternity is a long time for even the best of marriages to endure, and so if any of them tires of a partner, he or she may cause a mortal woman or man to die in order to provide a replacement in the spirit world. This explains why a beautiful woman or eligible hunter sometimes dies without apparent cause.

The !Kung have elaborate processes to deal with nature carefully which serve to ensure the land can still provide wildlife and plants. These help ensure nature is respected and the fragile ecosystems they depend on to eke a living are not compromised for their future offspring. A wide range of edible roots, bulbs, berries, fruits, melons, nuts and wild leaf vegetables are available, but as several are usually in season at the same time, some may be eaten only occasionally. The Bushmen naturally indulge their preferences when they can and concentrate on the more appetizing of the plant foods that may be gathered in any given season.

San peoples have in December 2006 won the most expensive court battle in Botswana's history to avoid being driven off the Kalahari to secure the wildlife reserve, giving the world a second chance to preserve the most valuable ancient gatherer-hunter archetype of human survival over evolutionary time, a way of life which is running the risk of becoming lost, losing for us all our most robust strategy for planetary survival.

The Sandawe people are a small group living in north central Tanzania. They are a remnant of the earlier inhabitants of the area, thought to have once covered all of eastern and southern Africa. Southern Cushites then Eastern Cushites were followed by the Highland Nilotes (Kalenjin Cluster), then the early Bantu. Oral traditions of the Kikuyu of Kenya refer to the Athi (the ground people), whom the Kikuyu paid for the right to move into their land. The Athi are thought to be the original San people of the area.

Kolo Rock painting Tanzania Believed to have been painted by ancestors of the Sandawe 4000 BP. Left: May be a healing ceremony. Originally thought by Mary Leakey to represent an abduction.

The Sandawe are racially different from the surrounding tribes. Whereas most of the tribes in Tanzania are Bantu people, the Sandawe are San. They have lighter skin and are smaller, with knotty hair like that of the Bushmen, commonly referred to as peppercorn hair. They have the epicanthic fold of the eyelid (like East Asian peoples) common to the Bushmen.

Much of Sandawe life focuses on a series of fertility rites known as phekumo. The dances of phekumo are held after sunset, the only illumination allowed being the benign, 'cool' light of the moon. Linking the phekumo with the eland-bull dance of girls' puberty rites among the north-western Bushmen is the native claim that such dances were organized in the past by men who had daughters who had begun to menstruate (Ten Raa R685 36). Menstruation as such is associated with the darkness of new moon; but the nocturnal dances get under way only as the moon approaches fullness at around the beginning of the moon's second quarter.

They carry their arms high in a stance which is said to represent the horns of the moon, and at the same time also the horns of game animals and cattle. The women select their partners from among the opposing row of men by dancing in front of them with suggestive motions. The selected partners then come forward and begin to dance in the same manner as the women do, facing them all the time (Ten Raa R685 38). As the dance warms up, the movements become more and more erotic; some of the women turn round and gather up their garments to expose their buttocks to the men (rather than to the newly menstruating girl as in the !Kung): Finally the men embrace the women while emitting hoarse grunts which sound like those of animals on heat. The men and women lift one another up in turn, embracing tightly and mimicking the act of fertilization; those who are not dancing shout encouragements at them ... What the women are in fact doing, writes Ten Raa (ibid), is to re-enact the role of the moon in the basic creation myth, according to which the moon entices the sun into the sky for the first celestial copulation. The women are the moon; the men, the sun. The whole rite is held under the aegis of the moon, and has the explicit purpose of 'making the country fertile'.

The Mbuti Forest People share significant ancient characteristics with the bushmen and form the largest single group of pygmy hunters and gatherers in Africa (Sanday R609 93). Around 2500 BC the Egyptians referred to the Mbuti as 'the people of the trees' renowned for their singing and dancing. These records support the Mbuti remaining stably in this habitat for 4000 years. Because of fission into small isolated groups they have lost their original language and adopt those of neighbouring Bantu tribes with whom they share a semi-symbiotic relationship and more features than the !Kung.

Like the !Kung, the Mbuti have a minimal differentiation of sex roles. Mary Douglas says of the Mbuti (R173) 'Neither sex, age nor kinship order their behavior in strictly ordained categories'. They have no concept of pollution 'of death nor of birth nor of menstruation'. Forced marriages and divorces are very rare. Eligible men and women are free to chose their spouses, but the approval of both sets of parents is usually sought. As a gesture of appreciation to the family of the women, the man usually offers an antelope to the father of the bride. Arobo, or free love, is practiced by youth. The Mbuti consider youth to be a period of experimentation and exploration and adolescents are free to satisfy their sexual curiosities. Despite their premarital permissiveness, children outside of marriage are rare. There is no social prohibtion on married men having affairs but they are discrete to avoid angering their wives (R83 276). A Mbuti girl is ritually deflowered by her boyfriend. The girl remains in a hut surrounded by armed women and the boy must fight the whips and missiles aimed at him to get in. If he succeeds he pays an axe as price and spends the night with her (R83 64). There are no prohibitions on sex during menstruation among the Mbuti (R83 226).

A Mbuti camp (daryl@nevadasurveyor.com). Pygmy representatives have asked the United Nations to set up a court to try government and rebel fighters from DR Congo for acts of cannibalism against their people. Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti pygmies, told the UN's Indigenous People's Forum that during the civil war his people had been hunted down and eaten. 'In living memory, we have seen cruelty, massacres, and genocide, but we have never seen human beings hunted down as though they were game animals,' he said. 'People have been eaten. This is nothing more, nothing less, than a crime against humanity.' More than 600,000 pygmies are believed to live in the DR Congo's forests. Both sides in the war regard them as 'subhuman'. Some say their flesh can confer magical powers (BBC). The Biaka are also threatened by logging, which damages the forest, drives cris-crossing roads into their territory and frightens away the game as well as poaching of the game animals they hunt.

Their habitat and their heaven is the Ituri Forest. The forest is their godhead, and different individuals address it as 'father', 'mother', 'lover', and/or 'friend'. They say that the forest is everything: the provider of food, shelter, warmth, clothing, and affection. Each person and animal is endowed with a spiritual power that "derives from a single source of power whose physical manifestation is the forest itself". Disembodied spirits deriving from this same source are also considered to be independent manifestations of the forest. The forest lives for the Mbuti. It is both natural and supernatural, something that is depended upon, respected, trusted, obeyed, and loved. The forest is a good provider. At all times of the year men and women can gather an abundant supply of mushrooms, roots, berries, nuts, herbs, fruits, and leafy vegetables. The forest also provides animal food.

There is little sexual division of labor. The hunt is frequently a joint effort. A man is not ashamed to pick mushrooms and nuts if he finds them, or to wash and clean a baby. In general, leadership is minimal and there is no attempt to control or dominate either the geographical, or human environment. Decision making is by common consent: Men and women have equal say because hunting and gathering are both important to the economy. The forest is the ultimate authority. It expresses its feelings through storms, falling trees, poor hunting all of which are taken as signs of its displeasure. But often the forest remains silent, and this is when the people must sound out its feelings through discussion. Diversity of opinion may be expressed, but prolonged disagreement is considered to be 'noise' and offensive to the forest. Certain individuals may be recognized as having the right and the ability to interpret the pleasure of the forest. In this sense there is individual authority, which simply means effective participation in discussions. The three major areas for discussion are economic, ritual, and legal matters having to do with dispute settlement. Participation in discussions is evenly divided between the sexes and among all adult age levels. The avoidance of differentiation between the sexes is consistent with the principle of egalitarianism that rules Mbuti life in the forest.

Some sexual differentiation, occurs in the emotional connotations associated with mother and father and is acted out in one of the most important Mbuti ceremonies. Motherhood is associated with food and love, and fatherhood with authority, although fathers physically nurture their children. The mother is regarded as the source of food; all food that is collected or hunted is cooked and distributed by women. Hungry children look to their mothers for food, not to their fathers. Sexual differentiation is acted out in the molimo ceremony, which is held irregularly, when someone dies or when conditions of life are generally poor. Its goal is to awaken and 'to rejoice the forest.' The festival symbolizes the triumph of life over death. The central ceremonial symbols are the molimo fire and the molimo trumpets. Both are associated with life, regeneration, and fertility. Both are believed to have been once owned by women and stolen from them by the men. The trumpet is sometimes referred to as an animal of the forest: It is symbolically fed, it is passed through the fire, and during a dance it is used by a young man to imitate the male and female parts in the sexual act. The trumpet is the only sign of the presence of a supernatural power during the molimo festival.

The trumpet is supposed to sing and to pass on the song of the Mbuti into the forest. It is kept out of the sight of women and children, who are supposedly forbidden to see it. The Mbuti do not consider the trumpet to be sacred in itself - it is simply a vehicle for transferring power between the Mbuti and the forest. The molimo festival includes two rituals that separate male from female. Both focus on an old woman who symbolically kills and scatters the molimo fire (the symbol of life) and later ties all the men together with a roll of twine. The old woman dances the fire dance led by a chorus of women singing molimo songs (supposedly known only by men). The men follow in obedient chorus. The high point of the dance comes when the old woman jumps into the flames, whirls around, and scatters the molimo fire in all directions within the circle of men surrounding her. The men, still singing, gather the scattered embers, throw them back onto the coals, and dance while the flames begin to rise again as if they had brought the fire back to life. The old woman repeats her dance, each time seeming to stamp the fire out of existence, after which the dance of the men gives it new life. Finally the old woman and the women leave the scene. A little later the old woman comes back alone. The men continue singing while she ties them all together, looping a roll of twine around their necks. Once all are tied they stop singing. The men then admit to having been bound and to the necessity of giving the woman something as a token of their defeat, so that she'll let them go. After a certain quantity of food has been agreed upon, the old woman unties each man. No one attempts to untie himself, but as each man is untied he begins to sing once more. This signifies that the molimo is free. The old woman receives her gifts, and before leaving several weeks later, she goes to every man, giving him her hand to touch as though it were some kind of blessing.

Colin Turnbull (R707, R708), the major ethnographer of the Mbuti, suggests that in the fire dance women assert their prior claim to the fire of life and their ability to destroy and extinguish life. However, he asks, was the old woman really destroying the fire? Perhaps when she kicked the fire in all directions among the men she was giving it to them, to gather, rebuild, and revitalize the fire with the dance of life. In discussing these ceremonies, Turnbull suggested to me the possibility that they symbolized the transference of power from women to men. As he put it, "Women have the power which they give to men for them to control" (personal communication). If this is indeed the case, and it is difficult to be sure, then whereas in some societies men take power from women, Mbuti women give power to men (Sanday R609 23).

Explaining to Colin Turnbull the reason for the molimo ceremonies, held when the Mbuti feel that all is not well between themselves and the forest, upon which they depend for everything, an old Mbuti man said: "The forest is a father and mother to us and like a father or mother it gives us everything we need food, clothing, shelter, warmth . . . and affection". Normally everything goes well because the forest is good to its children, but when things go wrong there must be a reason. Things go wrong, the old man said, at night when the people are asleep, when no one is awake to protect humans from harm. At night army ants may invade the camp or leopards may come in and steal a hunting dog or even a child. The old man said that such things would not happen when people are awake. Thus, he reasoned, "When something big goes wrong, like illness or bad hunting or death, it must be because the forest is sleeping and not looking after its children." Because things go wrong when the forest is 'asleep,' the forest must be 'awakened' so that it looks after the interests of the people. The old man said: "We wake it up by singing to it, and we do this because we want it to awaken happy. Then everything will be well and good again. So when our world is going well then also we sing to the forest because we want to share our happiness. One way the Mbuti 'awaken' the forest is to sound the molimo trumpets. These trumpets are referred to as 'the animal of the forest' and are kept from the sight of women, who are supposed to believe that the sound of the trumpet is made by an animal and that to see the trumpet would bring death. It is also believed that the women used to possess the molimo trumpets and that they were stolen from them by the men. This is the main reason why the women must be barred from viewing the trumpets. Were they to have access to the trumpets, it is thought, the women might try to seize them from the men (Sanday R609 187).

A ceremony called the 'lesser' molimo is held when hunting is bad. This ceremony involves men alone. After supper the women and children are bundled away safely in the huts and the men prepare for a night of eating and singing to the forest. When the men sing in the camp, the sound of the trumpets echoes the men's song from the depths of the forest. Sometimes the sound of the trumpet is that of an angry animal who will endanger the lives of women and children. Other times the trumpet's sound is mournful and pleads with the forest and men for food. The trumpets are fed food and water and passed through the flames of the molimo fire in an act that signifies the male role in copulation . These acts suggest that men are responsible for the well-being and fertility of animals. The 'lesser' molimo ceremony is one of the few times when men and women are separated and men imitate a dominant role. This ceremony signifies the responsibility of men in connection with animals and the hunt. Women and children are bundled off into the huts in order to protect them from the dangerous forces emanating from the forest world during the night. The animal nature of men is expressed in the association of the trumpets with masculinity and animality. The manipulation of the trumpets during the ceremony, however, indicates also that with the aid of their forest, men are meant to control animal nature for the good of the community.

The idea that the trumpets were stolen from women suggests that it was from women men believe they found the means to control the destructive forces that stalk the forest at night and that it was from women they received their animal nature. Stealing the trumpets implies also that masculinity must be aggressively separated from femininity, that men in order to be powerful and to have control must take these rights from women by force.

The whole community participates in the 'greater' molimo, a ceremony held when hunting is bad, someone has died, there is widespread sickness, and death seems to rule life. In this ceremony the Mbuti conception of male and female is thrown into sharp relief. While the 'lesser' molimo is spoken of as 'waking' the forest, the 'greater' molimo ideally is a festival of joy. The purpose of this ceremony, Turnbull says, is to symbolically establish the triumph of life over death. The focal role in this ceremony is played by an old woman This woman, together with the nubile girl with whom she dances, symbolizes the forces of life and of death. The old woman is referred to as 'mother,' the same term used to address the forest in its capacity as giver of life and death. In her ceremonial acts the old woman symbolizes these two forces. When she stamps out the fire, the symbol of life, she enacts the meaning of death. When she scatters the embers and allows the fire to be revitalized and rebuilt by the men, she enacts the transference to men of the role they are to play in connection with life. The men revitalize and rebuild the fire with a dance that simulates copulation. Turnbull says that fire is primarily connected with women; the hearth is often referred to as the vagina. When the men rebuild the fire and sing to the forest, they are serving as agents for restoring order. Women, on the other hand, appear to be placed in the role of either giving or taking life. They do not, at least within the framework of the molimo ceremonies, act as mediators between positive and negative forces. The symbolism of the old woman tying the men with a roll of twine suggests that in their role as life takers women have ultimate control but that this control is inimical to the survival of the group. When the old woman ties the men, they stop singing, which means that the male capacity to rejuvenate the forest has been bound. The men say: "This woman has tied us up. She has bound the men, bound the hunt, and bound the molimo. We can do nothing." By untying the men the old woman gives them control once again. But in order to be freed the men must admit that they have been bound and they must give the woman something as a token of their defeat. Once she has been given an agreed-upon quantity of food and cigarettes, the old woman unties each man. As each is untied, each begins to sing again. Once more the molimo is free.

Turnbull says that the molimo festival serves as an integrating factor in Mbuti life. It also expresses the latent antagonisms that exist between the sexes while uniting the band in a common expression of their dependence upon the forest. The molimo forces "an acknowledgment of the most basic dependency of all, that of life and death". The molimo is also an enactment of the interdependence between male and female. The latent antagonism between the sexes to which Turnbull refers could be viewed as an expression of the basic antithesis between forces meant to give as well as take life (associated with females) and forces meant to regenerate the forces of life from those of death (associated with males). The molimo expresses the double nature of women as well as of men. Men and women stand for life and death in different ways, women more directly than men. Men regenerate life in the 'greater' molimo and enact the role of destructive animality in the 'lesser' molimo. Though the old woman's superior position is assured by the deferential behavior of the men, it is the ceremonial give-and-take between male and female and between men and the forest that controls and harmonizes opposing forces in the Mbuti forest world.

Blood symbolizes both life and death. As noted previously, menstrual blood in particular symbolizes life. The blood that comes for the first time to the young girl comes as a gift, received with gratitude and rejoicing, because she is now a potential mother and can proudly take a husband. The girl enters seclusion, taking with her all of her friends. Here they celebrate the happy event and are taught the arts and crafts of motherhood by an old and respected relative. They learn to live like adults and to sing the songs of adult women. Pygmies from all around come to pay their respects, because for them this occasion is one of the happiest, most joyful occasions in their lives.

"The onset of a girl's first flow is marked by a joyful ritual known as the elima, this word denoting in the first instance a large hut in which one or more pubescent girls are joined by female relatives for a period of singing and celebration. During this, the girls are taught to be proud of their bodies both sexually and in terms of reproductive potential (Turnbull 1976: 167-81). The elima forges strong bonds of solidarity between girls who together 'have seen the blood'; it simultaneously achieves 'at least a temporary obliteration of the bonds of the nuclear family' (Turnbull 1966: 136). A girl who has begun to menstruate for the first time is said to be 'blessed by the moon' and becomes the focus of rejoicing as everyone is told the good news: 'The girl enters seclusion, but not the seclusion of the village girl. She takes with her all her young friends, those who have not yet reached maturity, and some older ones.' They enter a single communal 'women's house' (the elima) where the girls celebrate the happy event collectively. During the ethnographer Colin Turnbull's fieldwork visit, two young women experienced their first menstruation at the same time, and entered the house together, along with their female friends. Turnbull's (1976: 169) description is enough to refute the view that such 'seclusion' must always and everywhere be a degrading experience: Together they are taught the arts and crafts of motherhood by an old and respected relative. They learn not only how to live like adults, but how to sing the songs of adult women. Day after day, night after night, the elima house resounds with the throaty contralto of the older women and the high, piping voices of the youngest. It is a time of gladness, Turnbull continues, not for the women alone but for the whole community. People from all around come to pay their respects, the young men standing or sitting about outside the elima house in the hopes of a glimpse of the young beauties inside. And there are special elima songs which they sing to each other, the girls singing a light, cascading melody in intricate harmony, the men replying with a rich, vital chorus. For the pygmies the elima is one of the happiest, most joyful occasions in their lives.

Mbuti boys sometimes sleep together in one hut and, during these occasions, are likely to be in close physical contact, with legs entwined, or thrown around one another's waist or hips. But no homosexual activity occurs, and the idea of something of the sort horrifies the Mbuti, who only refer to homosexuality when they are extremely provoked and wish to level an enourmous insult at a man (Broude R83 298).

Male circumcision represents a 'pass through age' ritual, and for them makes a difference not only between boys and men, but between the Village and the jungle. When a group of boys reaches the age of 8 to 12 years take place the 'encoumby' (the name given by this people to the ceremony). Each boy is prepared by their own mother and aunts. Their body and face are painted with white and black colors. The body is dressed with some kind of skirt made with fibers from palm tree. The group is taken to the center of village and begins a dance, meanwhile women and girls leave the village announcing the beginning of the party. The origin of the custom is explained by the following legend: "The tradition of circumcision was made an institution by a woman ('amiana'), come from west, and her husband ('tocool'). They saw the monkeys making a circumcision and adopted the practice. The season for the ceremony is announced by a bird, who flies high and which cry is very recognizable. 'Monkey' may the nickname given by them for other human groups). The high flying bird is to distract the subject so the cut can be made "See the birdie!"

The earliest humans in Gabon were believed to be the Babinga, or Pygmies, dating back to 7000 B.C., who were later followed by Bantu groups from southern and eastern Africa.

Like the Mbuti, the Biaka, Ba'Aka, or Aka Forest Pygmies of the Central African Republic and Gabon do not have formally defined sex roles. The sexual division of tasks is never rigid and compulsory. Biaka life is characterized by gatherer-hunting with an emphasis on hunting in a semi-symbiotic relationship with neighbouring farming villagers. Sexual relations are extremely egalitarian and cooperative. Violence by men against women is extremely rare. Women share autonomous power although men hold symbolic roles and men play an exceptional role in infant care.

Unlike the Mbuti Pygmies in the Ituri who speak the same language as their village neighbors, the Biaka speak their own language (diaka), as well as the language of their neighbors

All women get married, generally by age sixteen to seventeen years of age. Men first marry two to four years later than women. Aka prefer to marry far away, and clan exogamy is practiced. About 17 percent of Aka men have more than one wife, and about one of four marriages ends in divorce. Most of the divorces come at an early age before children are born. Most of the early divorces are initiated by women, whereas most divorces after age thirty-five (when women have completed fertility) are initiated by men.

Fertility is high and infertility infrequent. Female infertility is rare among the Aka; only one women was reported infertile. Birth intervals are about 3.6 years shorter than the 4.0 year interval found among the !Kung San , but substantially higher than the 2.9 year interval estimated for the Yanomamo. The completed fertility of Aka females is about 5.6 lying between the 4.7 live births found with !Kung San females and the 7.9 live births found with Yanomamo women (Hewlett R312).

The camp generally consists of groups of three to four adult males (about half the males) from the same patriclan (usually brothers or first cousins), their wives and children, an elderly mother of some of the adult males, an older divorced sister of the patriclan and her children, a daughter of one of the adult males and her spouse who is performing bride service (about a fifth of the males), and one or two visiting families (about two fifths of the males).

The Aka are patrilineal, having shallow patriclans (dikanda), and are generally patrilocal except for a few years after marriage when the male provides bride service in the camp of his wife's family. While the core of the camp usually consists of about thirty five people consisting of adult males belonging to the same patriclan (dikanda) -that is, individuals tracing their ancestry patrilineally to a mythical plant or animal. Clan identity is weak. Few Aka know the mythology associated with their clan and Aka rarely invoke clan obligations if family members do not help out in subsistence activities. Aka adults can seldom remember patrilineal links back more than two generations and matrilineal relatives are visited frequently. Female lines are also recognized by the term mobila. This term refers to the lines of mother, mother's mother, father's mother, and father's mother's mother.

Two to four clans gather together for net hunting which is pursued in the dry season. Aka tend to travel in a 50 km radius area from their place of birth, and get to know about 700 Aka in this area. Aka males generally have a greater exploration range than females. The 'exploration range' is where subsistence activities take place, a spouse is encountered, and other aspects of geographical as well as social knowledge are acquired and transmitted.

Aka know hundreds of forest plants and animals, but subsist primarily on 63 plant species, 20 insect species, honey from 8 species of bees, and 28 species of game. The Aka collect roots from 6 species of plants, leaves from 11 species, nuts from 17 species, and fruits from 17 species. They collect 12 species of mushrooms, 4 types of termites, crickets, 3 types of grubs, and 12 species of caterpillars. The Aka hunt for 7 species of large game with the spear (primarily hog and elephant), 6 species of duiker with the net (primarily the blue duiker), 8 species of monkeys with the crossbow, and 7 species of rat, mongoose, and porcupine with a variety of small snare and net traps. The Aka clearly identify forest zones rich in particular plant or animal species.

Tamassi, head of a pygmy family with eboka. Myths tell of the discovery of the hallucinogen iboga (p 477). The wife of a pygmy finds the plant and uses it to communicate with the spirits of the dea in the form of her husband who has become scattered as the plant. Suggesting discovery of the sacrament by women (D. Lieberman dan@iafrica.com).

Zame last of the creator gods gave us Eboka. One day he saw the pygmy Bitamu high in the Atanga tree gathering fruit He made him fall. He died and Zame brought his spirit. He took the fingers and the little toes and planted them in various parts of the forest. They grew into the Eboka bush (Furst R229 245).

During the year the Aka spend about 56% of their time in hunting, 27% of their time in gathering, and 17% of their time in village work for the Ngandu. The Aka spend up to 90 percent of their time net hunting in the drier season (January to May), while during part of the rainy season (August to September) 60% of their time is spent collecting food, especially caterpillars. Much of the vegetable food in the Aka diet is obtained by trading meat to farmers for manioc and other cultigens. Researchers suggest the forest does not yield enough carbohydrates (specifically, wild yams) for people there to live independently. They hypothesize that Pygmies originally lived on the margins of the forest exploiting both forest and savannah habitats and did not move into the forest until forest farmers moved in with them. The forest is sanctuary to the Aka while the village is a place of doubt and suspicion. In the forest, Aka sing, dance, play, and are very active and conversant. In the village, their demeanor changes dramatically - they walk slowly, say little, seldom smile, and try to avoid eye contact with others. Although both men and women collect leaves, fruits, nuts, mushrooms, and termites, women do the majority of the collecting. They may do this as a conjugal unit or individually. Men do the majority of the honey collecting, especially if it involves climbing a tree large in diameter. Both men and women net hunt, usually together, but sometimes individually, and men and women both use small traps to hunt, often together, but again, sometimes individually. Only men use the spear and crossbow to hunt.

As with the Mbuti, most camp members - male and female, young and old - participate in the net hunt . Unusual for the sexual division of hunting generally, women net-hunt more frequently than men. From the time Aka leave the village and return to the forest (February-March) until caterpillar season (July-August), they often net hunt six days a week, four to nine hours per day. Net hunts decrease in frequency during the caterpillar season and the major rainy season (August-October); individual and small group foraging techniques (e.g., spears, crossbows, traps) are utilized more frequently during these seasons. There is no stalking of game, once the nets are set the object of the "beaters" is to make as much noise as possible in order to wake up the nocturnal duikers, the primary targets of the net hunt. It is one of the few hunting techniques where ears are just as important as eyes and where women carrying infants and older children can contribute to the success of the hunt.

There are few Aka status positions. There is no chief in the sense of a person commanding ultimate authority, yet there is the kombeti, who is generally more influential in subsistence and camp movement discussions. The nganga is the traditional healer and provides a wide range of services to the community--such as divination on hunts, curing of witchcraft, and herbal healing. Most Aka camps have an nganga. Ngangas can cure all forms of illness (e.g., malaria, worms, bad luck, attack by witchcraft), see into the future to help one make decisions about travel, marriage or friendships, and can see game animals deep in the forest while on the net hunt. Women are also skilled in plant healing as traditional doctors. Specific remedies include those to help a girl find a husband, or for a woman who is having problems desiring her husband. Witches or sorcerers (the Aka make no distinction) practice secretly and are unknown to the general population, although ngangas are highly suspect. The tuma is the great hunter who has often killed several elephants on his own. He leads spear hunts and important hunting and seasonal rituals, and organizes the training of young boys in the men's secret society. The status positions are usually held by males.

Aka who believe in bembe, the creator of all living things, believe also that bembe retired soon after creation. The most consistently mentioned divinity or spirit is that of dzengi, a forest spirit. All Aka adolescent boys are taken on an elephant hunt by a tuma to learn how to hunt elephant as well as to learn about the secret lore of dzengi. While women are kept peripheral to powers and secrets of dzengi, most women I spoke to about dzengi were not mystified or fearful of dzengi or the mens' secrets, and in fact, sometimes laughed and said it was just a way the men tried to keep knowledge and power from them.

The Aka are fiercely egalitarian and independent. No individual has the right to coerce or order another individual to perform an activity against his/her will. Even when parents give instructions to their children to collect water or firewood, there are no sanctions if they do not do so. Aka have a number of informal non-institutional methods for maintaining their egalitarianism. First, they practice prestige avoidance; one does not draw attention to his or her activities. There are certainly exceptional hunters, dancers and drummers, but individuals do not brag to others about their abilities. Second, they practice the rough joking described among the !Kung San. For instance, if a man is boasts about the amount of honey he collected, others will joke about the size and shape of his genitals. And third, they practice demand sharing. This simply means that whatever one has will be given up if requested.

Sharing, cooperation, and autonomy are but a few other of the Aka core values. The community cooperates daily in the net hunt, food hunted is shared with members of the camp, and decision- making is the reserved prerogative of the individual; if one is not content with living conditions, for instance, one moves to another camp. As a result, camp composition changes daily.

Aka infant mortality at 20 percent is indistinguishable from the infant mortality rates of the !Kung (20.2 percent) and the Yanomamo (21.8 percent). The Aka are more peaceful than many other hunter-gatherers and horticulturists. Accidental and violent deaths were relatively infrequent especially in comparison with the Yanomamo and !Kung San. The causes of death study also indicated that males at every age were at greater risk of death than were females. Young adult males (18-25 years) were at especially high risk relative to female risk of death at the same age. This pattern is consistent with that found among the Yanomamo and !Kung San. Aka infancy has the following characteristics: constant holding and skin-to-skin contact, high father involvement, multiple care giving, indulgent care, lack of negation, early training for autonomy and subsistence skills, parents as primary transmitters of culture, and precocious motor and cognitive development. Infants are held almost constantly, and have skin-to-skin contact most of the day as Aka seldom wear shirts or blouses. They are nursed on demand and attended to immediately if they fuss or cry. Aka parents interact with and stimulate their infants throughout the day.

Aka fathers do more infant care giving than fathers in any known culture. There are various aspects of Aka infancy that contribute to and reflect the intimate nature of the father's role. Aka fathers hold or are within an arms reach of their infant about half of a twenty four hour period and perform 22 percent of the care giving of 4-month-old infants in the camp. They are the second most active care givers after the mother and their style of caretaking is characterized by its intimate, affectionate, and helping-out nature, rather than by its playfulness. Numerous others help out with infant care. While in the camp setting, Aka one-to-four month-old infants are held by mothers less than 40 percent of the time, are transferred to other care givers an average of 7.3 times per hour, and have seven different care givers on average that hold the infant during the day. The multiple care giving decreases as the group moves out of camp to travel or go net hunting. Like the !Kung, Aka infants are carried vertically most of the day. Infants will sleep for hours in their side sling as parents set up nets and chase after game. The increased vestibular stimulation may contribute to the Aka infants' precocious motor and cognitive development.

Generally, it is difficult for parents to get their older children to do much for them. The parents may yell at their children, but more often than not, they just go and get what they need by themselves. Children are independent and autonomous at an early age. Infants are allowed to crawl or walk to wherever they want in camp, and allowed to use knives, machetes, digging sticks, and clay pots. By three or four years of age children can cook themselves a meal on the fire, and by ten years of age Aka children know enough subsistence skills to live in forest alone if need be. Respect for an individual's autonomy is a core value among the Aka, and it is demonstrated and encouraged in their patterns of infant care. The great respect for autonomy is consistent with another Aka value - inter-generational equality. This is a positive description of what villagers would call lack of respect for elders. Violence or corporal punishment for an infant that misbehaves seldom occurs. In fact, if one parent hits an infant, this is reason enough for the other parent to ask for a divorce.

While fathers are very active in infant care, they do not usually participate in the birth of their infants. Unlike some other forest people the mother is first to suckle her newborn. Usually only women and young children attend births. If a father attended and helped in the delivery of his infant because his wife gave birth while they were walking together in the forest he is not teased or stigmatized for his participation. Both mother and father observe food taboos during the pregnancy and until the infant can walk well. There is also a postpartum sex taboo until the child can walk very well. Most Aka know about the postpartum sex taboo, but limited interview data and impressions indicate it is not observed. Even if one does break the rule there are indigenous medications to remedy of the transgression.

Aka male-female relations are extremely egalitarian by cross-cultural standards. What is especially remarkable about the Aka is the amount of time husband and wife spend in cooperative subsistence activity. Husband and wife are together on a regular basis to net hunt, collect caterpillars, termites, honey, fruit, and sometimes fish. On net hunting days husband and wife are within view of each other 47 percent of the time. They are not only in association with each other, but actively cooperating in subsistence activity. On days when there is no net hunt, it is not unusual to see a husband and wife going out together to collect plants or honey. Wives are less likely to participate in cross-bow hunting for monkeys and trap-line hunting for medium size game, and never participate in spear hunts for wild pig and elephants. Aka husbands and wives are together often and cooperate in a wide variety of subsistence tasks throughout the year; they clearly care for one another, but it is also clear that Aka men and women like to be with members of the same sex at least as much as being with their spouses.

Men contribute slightly more to the diet while in the forest camps because in addition to the net hunting, men hunt for monkeys, pigs, elephants, and most of the honey. In the village camps females are the primary providers, contributing at least 70 percent of the calories. Women not only contribute substantially to the diet, but have considerable control over the distribution and exchange of food. Both women and men butcher and distribute game captured on the net hunt, and if it has been a reasonably good hunt women will prepare pots of food for other camp households. Women also distribute gathered food--mushrooms, fruit, nuts, tubers. Besides having a central role in the distribution of food, women are primarily responsible for exchange with villagers.

The political power and social prestige of Aka women is pronounced, but is not as structurally salient as that of Aka men. Aka men hold all the named positions of status - kombeti, tuma , and nganga--but as mentioned already, these men hold no absolute power. They influence people through their hospitality, persuasiveness, humor, and knowledge, not by their position. Aka women challenge men's authority on a regular basis and are influential actors in all kinds of decision-making. There is something of a queendom in many camps as the mother of the men who form the core of the camp is often the eldest patriclan member. Since men marry younger women, Aka women usually outlive their husbands by many years. These grandmothers eventually move back to the camp of their patriclan. Women in this position are vivacious characters and become respected patriclan spokespersons. The men in the named status positions are usually her sons.

Husbands and wives cooperate in a wide range of activities, but there is respect for each other's feelings and peculiarities. Husbands cannot force their wives to come on the hunt, and the wives cannot force their husbands to look for honey. Spouses can and do ridicule each other with rather crude joking (e.g., uncomplimentary remarks about the size and shape of their partner's genitals), but for the most part the partner does not pay much attention to the ridicule. If the couple does not get along, divorce is a matter of one partner simply moving out of the house.

Physical violence in general is infrequent and violence against women is especially rare. The lack of violence enhances female autonomy and encourages husband-wife cooperation and trust. Husband-wife conflicts do of course occur but they are usually resolved through talking, rough joking , leaving camp for awhile, or mediated assistance from other camp members. Female violence can occur against men, such as cutting their husband's face with a knife or hitting their husbands with logs from the fire for sleeping with other women. Women, however, are more likely to show their anger and displeasure with their husband by tearing down the family house. Aka women make the houses, and Aka men are not very good at it (they usually make lean-tos). Female autonomy and the lack of violence against women is also demonstrated by the frequent travel of women, alone or in small groups, throughout the forest.

Husband and wife are together often, know each other exceptionally well, and cooperate on a regular basis in a diversity of tasks. Men and women have distinct tasks, but there are few underlying beliefs that one sex is naturally inclined to perform certain tasks. Aka men are similar to men cross-culturally in that men predominate in the named status positions, only men hunt large game, and polygyny is relatively common. Aka male-female relations have commonalties with male-female relations cross-culturally, but the Aka are probably as egalitarian as human societies get.

Like the San and Mbuti, the Hadza are gatherers and hunters. They hunt game, gather edible plants and honey, and move from place to place whenever the weather changes, or the wild herds migrate, or they just feel like moving. In small groups of about eighteen adults and their children, they pitch camps among the rocks and trees of the dry savanna.

It takes less than two hours for Hadza women to build a new camp. They make huts by bending and weaving branches into round structures about six feet high, then covering them with thick clumps of long, golden grass. Or, if the weather is very wet, the women may skip the hut building and choose a dry cave to set up a camp that includes a hearth, cooking vessels, sleeping mats made of animal skins, and tools for sharpening stones and scraping skins. Some rock caves have been used intermittently over thousands of years and are decorated with ancient rock paintings.

Men and boys hunt with bows and arrows, almost always alone. Women and girls do not hunt. By the age of 10, an Eastern Hadza boy will have made himself a sturdy bow and a set of arrows to kill hyrax, rabbits, squirrels and birds. Men tend to make long bows, about six feet in length, which are exceptionally powerful and heavy to pull. Hadza hunt from very close range to shoot impala, zebra, eland or giraffe. Some Hadza also eat predators, including lion, leopard, and other wild cats, or perhaps scavengers like jackal, hyena and vulture, but they draw the line at reptiles like monitors, snakes and lizards. Like the !Kung, they use poisoned arrow tips to hunt large animals. Once a beast has been wounded, the hunter waits a few hours for the poison to act and then tracks the wounded animal until it dies.

Most meat is eaten where it falls. Hunters take each day as it comes and generally hunt alone to feed themselves, however they occasionally go out at night, encircle a troop of baboons, and kill them. They take meat back to camp only if there is a surplus and they feel like making the effort. Most men content themselves with vegetable foods and small animals. The men frequently gamble their few possessions in a game of chance throwing wooden discs until one matches the large one. Far from resenting these non-hunters, the few big-game hunters readily share meat with them as well as with women and children. A good hunter will be favored by women and will tend to be welcome, perhaps even pampered, when he joins a camp. Like the !Kung, the interactions of Hadza people are relatively free of jealousy, resentment, elitism, tyranny, or any concept of private property.

Gathering begins early in Hadza childhood, when babes help their mothers, big brothers and sisters pick berries, dig edible roots, and gather seeds and pulp from baobab trees. Like the San this food supplies 80 percent of the normal diet by weight. Hadza people obtain the remaining 20 percent of their food from meat brought back to camp and wild bee honey taken from hives in the bush.

Hadza women make skirts from the skins of female impala, sometimes decorated with beads, shells and bells. A second garment, made of cloth and beads for a married woman, or strings and beads for an unmarried woman, hangs in front. The upper garment, also made from impala hide, can be used for warmth or to carry berries, babies, firewood or meat. Men and boys of the Hadza tribe wear the skin of a small animal as a loincloth, its tail hanging down between their legs. They wear sandals to protect them from the thorns on the savanna.

Hadza people generally come and go as they like. They may travel alone, join a camp, move to a different camp, or gravitate to a small area and live there with any group that happens to come along. The major exception is demonstrated by married couples, who may stay together for twenty years and tend to live with the wife's mother. If husband and wife live apart for two weeks or more, they are likely to be considered unmarried. Spouses of either gender may abandon the marriage and seek a new partner by reverting to the dress of unmarried members of the tribe.

In the rock-strewn hillsides of Tanzania, Hadza foragers collect all the tubers and baobab pods they need without having to travel more than two miles from camp. Mothers are rarely gone longer than an hour. Infants are left behind at around two rather than the four characteristic among the !Kung, often with subadult caretakers. Because they have the option to leave babies with an allo-mother, Hadza mothers can produce infants after shorter intervals than !Kung mothers without compromising survival. As a consequence, the Hadza population is growing by 1% a year rather than holding steady (Hrdy R330 197).

A camp has no organized leadership and no sense of itself as a permanent group. They are far more likely to move on than create conflict. Dissidents are more likely to leave a camp than face a conflict. Conflict is often concealed behind ecological excuses, such as an claiming the berries are better or the game more plentiful somewhere else.

Hadza women depend on their female kin to act as buffers against a husband's violence. The mother of a beaten woman may threaten to take her daughter back, and a wooman's relative may band together to beat the husband with their digging sticks if his abuse of his wife becomes too severe (Broude R83 313). Hazda men who have a grudge against another camp may attack, or rape, the women without repercussions (R83 252). On the other hand if a Hadza man leaves his family for more than a few weeks they say "his house has died". Marriage last only as long as the two live together on a regular basis. The man no longer has rights over the woman and any children they share and it is up to the woman whether to take him back or not if he returns (R83 76).

"In the Hadza matriarchy myth of Mambedaka, the original owner of the sacred epeme meat is an old woman who dresses as a man, hunts zebra and wears a zebra penis which she uses to have sex with her 'wives'. She demands that men bring the epeme meat to her cooking pot which she distributes to the 'wives'. Men have no share in the sacred meat until the violent overthrow of Mambedaka's rule" (Power and Watts R551 323). This is again a depiction of the logic of women procuring fatty meat from men by signalling 'wrong sex, wrong species (p 77). This interpretation, like many others in more patriarchal societies speaks of an overthrow of female power over sexuality by the men. Consistent with this trend, among the Hadza there is an extraordinarily intense consciousness of sexual difference, which divides the sexes into "two hostile classes, each of which is capable of organizing itself for defense or virulent attack against the other" (Sanday R609):

This opposition between the Hadza sexes is more pronounced during the dry season, when camps are bigger and large animals and humans congregate near the few available sources of water. During the wet season, however, food becomes both abundant and evenly dispersed, and the sexes live together relatively harmoniously in small, widely scattered camps, subsisting on roots and small game. In these small wet-season camps, men and women are not segregated greatly. Only the large camps of the dry season seem to stimulate sexual segregation and mutual hostility between the sexes. It is common for the relationship between the sexes among the same group of foragers to change, depending on seasonal activities or a switch from nomadic to sedentary life. In foraging societies, when food is abundant and dispersed, small family groups wander with relative ease in their environment and the sexes are integrated in most activities.

This ease disappears during the dry season, when the food supply fluctuates, or is concentrated in certain areas, bringing animals and people into competition for the same water resources. Hadza men hunt large game, which implies danger, and they gamble in camp, which conveys a concern with chance. In the concentrated settlements of the dry season, the Hadza believe that contact with menstrual blood is dangerous. This is the wedge that drives the sexes apart - as is the case in most societies in which sexual separation is rigid. When a Hadza women menstruates, she avoids certain activities, which would be polluted by her contact. In addition, her husband of the moment, whoever he may be, must abstain from his ordinary activities lest he endanger the rest of the camp's chance of success in hunting. Just as the !Kung say a menstruating girl at menarche has 'shot her first eland' the Hadza say 'she has shot her first zebra', consistent with the link between menstruation and hunting.

For the Hadza, the dry season marks the phase of social aggregation when their most sacred rituals are held - The epeme dances held on each night of the dark moon for the duration of the aggregation. All camp fires are extinguished and the women call upon each man in turn to dance, referring to him exlusively in consanguineal kinship terms [therefore, as borthers and sisters rather than lovers]. In Hadza belief women synchronize their menstruation with the dark moon, hence at the time of epeme rites. The dance emphasizes gender segregation cross-cut by kinship solidarity. As well as being a healing dance, it is believed to ensure success in forthcoming hunts, when portions of the fattiest meat will be offered in birdeservice. A coherent pattern emerges: First, men should not hunt nor have sex while their wives are bleeding; second, the most successful hunting in the dry season occurs around full moon; and third, menstruation normatively occurs at dark moon, at the same time as the most sacred ritual. (Power and Watts R551 322).

The most important Hadza ritual, the Epeme Dance, is a solemn affair carried out in total darkness on moonless nights. The men become sacred beings and dance, one by one, communicating with the women, who sing sacred accompaniment in a special whistling language reserved for this context. The men are secretive about what is going on and sit apart from the women and children. Despite this, the ritual emphasizes the shared interests of men and women, especially as parents of children. This ritual is considered indispensable for Hadza well-being. It may be interpreted as a recurring ceremonial reconciliation of men and women, and indeed all Hadza. Attendance is obligatory for all the camp's dwellers (Lee and Daly R404).

Adding to sexual tensions, the Hadza also appear to have partially adopted both male and female circumcision from neighbouring tribes on their periphery although this is disputed:

Bagshawe (1925) said the old men and women circumcised boys and girls but no ritual was involved and he felt the practice had only recently been adopted from neighboring tribes. Based on my interviews, I suspect he was right. Linguist Dorothea Bleek (1931) visited the Hadza in 1930 and said that unlike other tribes, circumcision was unknown to the Hadza. Hadza men are not circumcised today and only a certain unknown fraction of women are. Given all these differences, it appears there may have been more influence from Isanzu then than now, at least along the margins of Hadza country. (Marlowe R441)

Hadza men and women are differentiated in religious contexts. Men are initiated into an egalitarian community of men which has privileged rights over certain portions of the best meat or most game animals. Initiated men meet on their own and have secrets from women and children. Men are liable to respond violently to perceived encroachment on their secret activities. Women too have secrets from men. Female circumcision, in which the men have little interest, is organized by the women alone, and is seen as a matter entirely for women. After the operation, the newly circumcised young women chase after and violently attack the men, especially their potential husbands, with specially deco- rated staves. There are at present some indications that Hadza women may, on their own initiative, soon decide to give up circumcision (R404).

"The sexual segregation and taboos restricting the activities of Hadza men and women during the dry season may well be the means by which the Hadza handle their perception that the odds are stacked against them, that their lives are at the mercy of random blows inflicted by nature. We can only speculate why people handle their fear at such times by separating the sexes and deeming menstrual blood powerful and dangerous. To many peoples, blood means the source of life and the signal of death. A people's experience with blood must be more negative than positive when their lives are threatened by starvation, thirst, or by the hungry animals they hunt. Little information exists on the mortality rate of hunters. If, as in warfare, hunters risk death, then they must be extraordinarily cautious. A hunter who has had recent contact with a menstruating woman possibly carries the smell with him, warning the animals of his presence. Unfortunately, we have little information on how hunted animals are affected by the smell of menstrual blood. Restrictions separating the sexes are more elaborate in concentrated settlements. When humans congregate in larger settlements, the smell of menstrual blood must be more obvious. It is a frightening smell because it is reminiscent of death. Being a fluid that flows from the body, menstrual blood is like the fluid that drains from the newly dead. Both types of fluids represent the loss of a vital essence. The more people experience death in nature, the more likely they are to view menstrual blood as dangerous. Such a response to menstrual blood is illogical, because blood in women signals their readiness to bear life, whereas the blood drawn by hunters signals death. However, by killing animals, men also bring life in the form of animal protein - a food with a high prestige value wherever men hunt. If the blood that flows from women can only be equated with life, then why is it so often equated with danger? Perhaps the answer lies in a rather simple proposition. If blood is associated with life and death in the experience of males, a balance is achieved by associating female blood with life and danger. If humans do strive to achieve such a balance, we would expect, to the extent that men have more experience with blood and death, that the blood of women would be endowed with corresponding connotations."

Ashanti carved box (www).

Mawu, the female principle, is fertility,
motherhood, gentleness, forgiveness;
while Lisa is power,
war-like or otherwise,
strength and toughness.
Moreover, they assure the rhythm
of day and night.
Mawu is the night, the moon,
freshness, rest, joy;
Lisa is the day, the sun,
heat, labour, all hard things.
By presenting their two natures
alternately to men,
the divine pair impress on man
the rhythm of life and the two series
of complementary elements
of which its fabric is woven.
The notion of twin beings . . .
expresses the equilibrium between opposites,
which is the very nature of the world.
Dahomean Mawu-Lisa cult.

In many societies male leadership is balanced by female authority. Among the Ashanti, Iroquois, and Dahomeans, though women were not as visible as men in external public affairs, their right to veto male actions formed checks and balances in which neither sex would dominate the other. We thus have defined sex roles and separate spheres of influence and power, but these do not automatically result in male dominance.

The Ashanti, one of the great West African Kingdoms, convey the essential outlines of the segregated-but-equal sex-role plan (Sanday R609 27). The Ashanti were polygynous, matrilineal and avunclocal or virilocal, that is daughters move in with their husbands family, but this actually means the family of the husband's maternal uncle, because sons are expected to live in the household of their mother's brother. This is a common pattern in matrilineal societies, as it brings the adult male members of a matrilineage into a single residential unit. Both men and women could own land but a women could inherit only from a woman and a man from a man (Low R427 203). Ashanti wives occupied separate quarters.

Ashanti society was divided into a number of chiefdoms composed of eight dispersed matriclans, recognizing a remote common ancestress. At the apex is the king, the Asantehene, with his court. Clustered around are a group of Ashanti chiefdoms, each a largely autonomous unit that, in major outline, reproduced the higher jurisdiction of the king but owed allegiance to the unity of the state. Each chief had a council of hereditary advisers or elders, and succession to chiefly office (like succession to the title of king) was inherited through the female line. The unity of the new empire was symbolized in the Golden Stool which, being without past, was regarded as having descended from the sky and contains the soul of the Ashanti nation, the people's power, health, bravery, and welfare (Sanday R609 28).

Everyday life was organized around the group of related men and women lining in village or township wards. These groups, called localized lineages, trace their descent through females. Each has a male head, who is often one of the chiefs councillors. He is chosen by the consensus of the older men and women and with their assistance is responsible for the welfare of the entire group. In lineage affairs there is a "high degree of equality between male and female members." The lineage head is assisted by a senior woman informally chosen by him and his elders. This is extended to the kingdom as a whole and to each chiefdom. The senior woman of the royal lineage is the Queen Mother. She has her own stool, which is senior to the chief's stool. Traditionally, the Queen Mother has had the most to say in selecting a new chief or king. No one can be put upon the stool who is vetoed by the queen and her veto cannot be overruled. After the chief or king is 'enstooled,' he sits down on the right of Queen Mother to receive the homage and oaths of allegiance of the assembled subchiefs or chiefs. As long as he is in power, Queen Mother's place is on his left hand. Pre-menopausal women were barred from war, but Ashanti queens might accompany an army to war if they were post-menopausal (Sanday). Others assumed responsibility for civil government in the absence of the king on a military campaign. Each queen mother had the right to choose the king's senior wife, or replace her if she died. The queen mother thus had direct political power, and influence over coalition formation. The classic study of the Ashanti states the recognized seniority of the woman's stool is no empty courtesy title. But for two causes, [the physical inferiority of women, menstruation and ritual avoidance] the stool occupied by the male night not be in existence at all" (Low R427 203).

Today, in addition to her power to select a king when the stool is vacant, the senior Queen Mother controls all the Queen Mothers of Asante. The Ashanti regard for women comes from their idea that the lineage - and the clan that incorporates several lineages - is synonymous with blood, and that only women can transmit blood to descendants. A man cannot transmit blood, and so no Ashanti can have a drop of the male parent's blood in his or her veins. Males transmit ntoro, meaning soul or spirit. The Ashanti trace blood through the female line alone, because of the blood observed at menstruation and child-birth. It is agreed that a male has blood in his body, but he does not transmit it to his offspring. People say that if a male transmitted his blood through his penis he could not beget a child. The word ntoro is sometimes used to mean semen.

Ashanti women are definite about their own importance. They say: "I am the mother of the man ... I alone can transmit the blood to a king ... If my sex die in the clan then that very clan becomes extinct, for be there one, or one thousand male members left, not one can transmit the blood, and the life of the clan becomes measured on this earth by the span of a man's life". As the Queen put it: "We in Ashanti here have a law which decrees that it is the daughters of a Queen who alone can transmit royal blood, and that the children of a king cannot be heirs to that stool. This law has given us women a power in this land so that we have a saying which runs: 'It is the woman who bears the man' (i.e., the king)".

The importance of women is also seen in Ashanti religion and ritual. Priestesses participate with priests in all major rituals. Sky and Earth are the two great deities. The Ashanti creation story emphasizes the complementarity of male and female and of sky and earth: It is said that a very long time ago one man and one woman came down from the sky and one man and one woman came up from the earth. From the sky also came a python who made its home in a river. The first men and women did not bear children, they had no desire, and conception and birth were not known at that time. The python, on learning that the couples had no offspring, bade them to stand face to face and plunging into the river he rose up and sprayed water on their bellies and then ordered them to return home and lie together. The women then conceived and brought forth the first children into the world. These children took the spirit of the river where the Python lived as their clan spirit. Members of that clan hold the python as taboo; they must never kill it, and if they find a python that has died or been killed by someone else, they put white clay on it and bury it human fashion.

Asase Ya, the name of the Earth Goddess, means 'the soil, the earth', but not what grows or stands on it. People say: 'We got everything from Asase Ya, food, water; we rest upon her when we die . . . every one must pass into the earth's wallet'. Just as the sky is believed to be the source of the Golden Stool, the symbol of the Ashanti confederacy, the earth is believed to have been the source of the aristocracy of the Ashanti clans. On Thursdays, the day set aside for the observance of 'Old Mother Earth', the Ashanti farmer will not break soil. In the past, infringement of this rule was punishable by death (Sanday R609 31).

Female power among the Ashanti, as among the Iroquois, is associated with a ritual orientation to plants, the earth, and fertility. Like the !Kung, the Ashanti also equate menstruation and childbirth with hunting and warfare, emphasizing the complementarity of female reproductive functions and male activities considered vital to social survival. This kind of orientation, together with the belief that the child is formed from the mother's blood, gives Ashanti women power and authority in everyday affairs. Like the !Kung, it is said that some Ashanti originated from the earth. The earth is believed to be filled with the spirits of the departed forbearers of the clan. These spirits are thought to be the real landowners, who still continue to take a lively interest in the land from which they had their origin or that they once owned.

The Golden Stool (the male symbol of leadership), which is believed to have originated from the sky, cannot come into direct contact with the earth; it is always placed upon an elephant's skin. The feet of the king of Ashanti can never touch the ground, "lest a great famine should come upon the nation."

There is a sacred grove in a forest that is marked as the most hallowed spot in all Ashanti territory. At this spot, it is said, some clan forbearers belonging to certain ruling clans came forth from the ground, and settling near by, increased and multiplied, learned to use fire and other arts, till eventually, compelled by increasing numbers, they scattered and became the clan or 'blood' from which the rulers of the united nation later chose their kings and queens (Sanday R609 116). This is notably similar to the !Kung myth and it has been suggested that the Ashanti adopted the beliefs of a more ancient people when they migrated into the area which is also littered with ancient remains. Again like the !Kung they specifically equate menstruation with hunting the prize animal - "the Bara state has stricken her. She has killed an elephant." and childbearing with being a warrior. This is an occasion for elaborate ceremonials and exchange of gifts. A mother's first act, upon learning the news from her daughter, is to inform the villagers, the Sky God, the Earth Goddess, and the ancestors. Taking some wine and spilling it on the ground, the mother says:

This girl child whom God has given to me, to-day the Bara state has come upon her.

Although the blood denotes the possibility of life, it also reminds people of death. The advent of puberty means that the child of a departed ancestor will soon die in order to be reborn into the world of the living. People say, "A birth in this world is a death in the world of ghosts." Menstrual blood implies power, and there are many taboos in connection with ii. During the puberty ceremonial, a girl is taken to the river, where she is disrobed and immersed three times with the words: "We quench the bara fire at its source". Again like the !Kung menstruation evokes supernatural danger. Menstrual blood is thought to nullify all supernatural powers possessed by persons, spirits, or objects. These powers, if rendered inactive by contact with a menstruating woman, have to be "recharged, as it were, by propitiation, extirpation, and augmentation rites, to placate them and build them up anew."

If a woman dies during childbirth, she is treated like a warrior who has lost an important battle. A ceremony is conducted that only pregnant women attend. The goal of the ceremony seems to be to chastise the woman who has died, and hence has failed in her primary duty, and to prevent other such failures. They feign shooting the evil and holding knives say: "We told you to fight but you could not fight, when our turn comes to fight we swear the oath we shall not pass out." Thus, the Ashanti impose hunter and warrior imagery on female reproductive functions. By phrasing the natural rhythms of life giving and life taking in the same terms, the Ashanti establish a symmetry between male and female.

The Ashanti were considered extreme enemies of Islam. They had a taboo against male and female circumcision, and no one could become elected as a chief if their skin were cut. Divorce was permissable if either party was a thief or insults kin, the husband was impotent or infertile, or the wife was quarrelsome or practised witchcraft, and was frequent, even among established relationships, because of conflicts of loyalty to partners and children (Broude R83 72). Incestuous sexual intimacy between brother and sister is strongly denounced, partly because it undermines the kinship of matrilineal descent through sisters (R83 149). They did however negotiate promissory marriages and had symbolically dire penalties for anyone caught in adultery with the chiefs wives (Low R427 49):

"the culprit through whose cheeks a sepow knife has already been thrust is taken ... the nasal septum is now pierced and through the aperture is threaded a thorny creeper ... by which he is led about . For other sepow knives are now thrust through various parts of his body, care being taken not to press them so deeply as to wound any vital spot. He is no led by the rope creeper ... to Akyermade where the chief of that stool would scrape his leg , facetiously remarking as he did so ... 'I am scraping perfume for my wives' next to the house of the Chief of Asafo where his left ear is cut off thence to Bantama where the Ashanti generalissimo scrapes bare the right bone. ... then he was made to dance all day after dark his arms were cut off at the elbows and his legs at the knee he was ordered to continue dancing but since he couldn't his buttock flesh was cut off and he was set on a pile of gunpowder which was then set alight Eventually the chief gave permission to cut off the offender's head".

The Dogon of Mali illustrate how sexual identities become antagonistic when the sexual spheres become separated and patriarchal dominance is exerted in violence against the female in the name of social order. Their cosmology more than any other explains how control of the female and violence to her to maintain paternity certainty are the prime 'thrust' of patriarchal dominion.

The Dogon are a society of millet and onion farmers who reside in a system of stone canyons and plateaus on the southern edges of the Sahara, where temperatures are high and food, water, animals and plants are scarce. On their small fields they cultivate their staple diet stored in high quadrangular granaries around which they build their house. They possess an unusually complex and advanced cosmology, with intimate knowledge of the stars and planets, a numerical system, extensive physiological and anatomical knowledge, genetics and a systematic pharmacopoeia. (Griaule and Dieterlen R267 57). They believe that the star Sirius is a binary system, with a smaller counterpart, invisible to the naked eye, orbiting it. This was recorded in 1931, 40 years before the existence of Sirius B was confirmed with telescopic photography for the first time, and 6 years before the first Christian missionaries made contact with them. Their mythology includes Saturn's rings, and Jupiter's four major moons and a knowledge that planets orbit the sun.

The Dogon claim they were part of the ancient Mandingo empire of Keita, (10th - 13th cent.) which dominated a greater part of West Africa. They emigrated from the west bank of the Niger River to northern Burkino Faso, where local histories describe them as kibsi. Around 1490, they fled a region now known as the northern Mossi kingdom of Yatenga when it was invaded by Mossi Islamic authority calvary. They ended up in the Bandiagara cliffs region, safe from the approaching horsemen. Carbon-14 dating techniques used on excavated remains found in the cliffs suggest that there were inhabitants in the region before the arrival in the Dogon, dating back to the 10th century. They slowly absorbed this Tellem culture who became part of their mythology.

Although unusual for Africa, a continent with many matrilineal societies, their classically patriarchal family system, endorsing polygyny, with patrilocal residence, patrilineal inheritance, and male-biased institutions, including preferential inheritance of property by sons has many parallels with societies in Asia and, to a lesser extent, the Western world.

Sarah Hrdy (R330 254) and Meredith Small (R647) describe various aspects of Beverly Strassmann's discoveries (R670 - R672):

Polygyny among the Dogon—as in other patriarchal societies—occurs hand in hand with various means of monitoring female sexuality. Countering millions of years of evolution, the Dogon have become a culture where ovulation cannot be concealed. Each woman's menstrual cycle is open to public scrutiny. By custom, as soon as she detects bleeding, a woman must relocate to a special hut, as documented in about 2 percent of tribal societies.

The menstrual huts are situated outside the walled compounds of the village, but in full view of the men's thatched-roof shelters. As the men relax under their shelters, they can readily see who leaves the huts in the morning and returns to them in the evening. And as non-menstruating women pass the huts on their way to and from the fields or to other compounds, they too can see who is spending the night there. Failure to comply with the rules, especially cheating (pretending to menstruate when a woman is actually pregnant), brings social reprisals in the real world, and the prospect of worse punishments in the supernatural one. In this way, a man can be confident that any woman he marries is not already pregnant by another man. The huts are cramped, dark buildings - hardly places where a woman might go to escape the drudgery of work or to avoid an argument with her husband or a co-wife. The huts sometimes become so crowded that some occupants are forced outside - making the women even more conspicuous. Although small children can go with their mothers to the huts, they are not allowed to spend time with the rest of their families. Yet they are still expected to do their usual jobs, such as working in the fields.

The explanation is that a menstruating woman is a threat to the sanctity of religious altars, where men pray and make sacrifices for the protection of their fields, their families and their village. If menstruating women come near the altars, which are situated both indoors and outdoors, the Dogon believe that their aura of pollution will bring calamities upon the village. The belief is so ingrained that the women themselves have internalized it, feeling its burden of responsibility and potential guilt. Violations of the taboo are rare. A menstruating woman who breaks the rules knows that she is personally responsible if calamities occur.

However Beverly Strassmann who investigated their habits proposes the menstrual taboos are actually expressing a carefully defined reproductive protocol. She notes: "There are two important pieces of information for assessing paternity: timing of intercourse and timing of menstruation. By forcing women to signal menstruation, men are trying to gain equal access to one part of that critical information." Such information is crucial to Dogon men, because descent is marked through the male line; land and the food that comes from the land is passed down from fathers to sons. Information about paternity is thus crucial to a man's lineage. And because each man has as many as four wives, he cannot possibly track them all. So forcing women to signal their menstrual periods, or lack thereof, helps men avoid cuckoldry. When she leaves the hut, she is considered ready to conceive. When she stops going to the hut, she is evidently pregnant or menopausal. And women of prime reproductive age who visit the hut on a regular basis are clearly infertile.

The Dogon do use that information to make paternity decisions. In several cases a man was forced to marry a pregnant woman, simply because everyone knew that the man had been the woman's first sexual partner after her last visit to the menstrual hut. Strassmann followed one case in which a child was being brought up by a man because he was the mother's first sexual partner after a hut visit, even though the woman soon married a different man.

In addition to menstrual monitoring, ancient female incentives for confusing paternity are countered by removing each girl's clitoris. The Dogon take it for granted that after clitoridectomy a woman will find sexual intercourse outside marriage less tantalizing, not worth the risks. In this way, older men with several young wives can be as certain of paternity as any primates in the world—Dogon certain.

Dogon women mostly play by the rules. In 86% of the hormonally detected menstruations, women went to the hut. Moreover, none of the tested women went to the hut when they were not menstruating. In the remaining 14% of the tested menstruations, women stayed home from the hut, in violation of the taboo, but some were near menopause and so not at high risk for pregnancy. None of the women who violated the taboo did it twice in a row. Even they were largely willing to comply. In general, women are cooperative players in the game because without a man, a woman has no way to support herself or her children. But women follow the taboo reluctantly. They complain about going to the hut. And if their husbands convert from the traditional religion of the Dogon to one that does not impose menstrual taboos, such as Islam or Christianity, the women quickly cease visiting the hut.

Like the !Kung a woman in a natural-fertility population such as the Dogon has only about 110 menstrual periods in her lifetime. The rest of the time she will be pre-pubescent, pregnant, lactating or menopausal. Women in industrialized cultures, by contrast, have more than three times as many cycles: 350 to 400, on average, in a lifetime. Women spend most of their reproductive years in lactation amenorrhea, suppressing ovulation from nursing each child on demand. . Dogon women bear eight to nine children on average.

Does certainty of paternity ensure that Dogon men invest more in their children? Not necessarily, especially not if they have several wives and many sons. As in most patriarchal societies, a man's attention tends to be focused on gaining and maintaining prestige, with its corollary of more wives and more children.

Typical for this area, child mortality among the Dogon is very high. 46% will die before age five. What is more noteworthy, though, is that the chances of a child dying are 7 to 11 times higher if the mother is in a polygynous family, working together with and sharing meals with cowives, than if she is married monogamously. In a monogamous union, a mother's loss is equally the father's. But in the case of a man married to three wives, the polygynist comes out ahead reproductively even if more than half his children die.

Unlike a mother's goal, which is generally "quality," well-spaced, healthy offspring, each one well provided for, the Dogon's father's goal is "quantity"—as many children as he can have, even if many die. Among the Dogon, this is particularly unfortunate, because land is increasingly in short supply, and men can bequeath a homestead only to one select son, or to a couple of sons. Yet men have little incentive to take fewer wives. For women work hard. Owning them confers prestige, a higher standard of living, and reproductive success.

Dogon mothers claim that their sons are being poisoned by co-wives. Strassmann was invited to attend rituals at which masked dancers intimidate women to deter wives from such nefarious pursuits. Indeed, wild-sounding accusations about children poisoned by cowives can be extensively documented in Malian court records. Occasionally women actually confess to poisoning a rival's child. But why primarily sons? Because daughters leave home when they marry, and it is sons who are favored, and who remain at home to compete with their father's other sons for inheritances of scarce land.

Why don't wives married to the same man manage to cooperate more? In some societies, they do, especially if the husband marries sisters. Among Australian Aborigines, wise men often seek to marry wives who are related to each other precisely because such women are known to get along better. But among the Dogon, the benefits of reduced strife do not outweigh the benefits to the patriarch of discouraging his wives from forming alliances. The patriarch's strategy is to "divide and conquer." Strassmann notes that sisters and other related women are specifically prohibited from marrying into the same patriline. Such strictures make it hard to sustain the functionalist argument that these polygynous families are set up for the common good, with eugenic intent to promote the well-being of all concerned. In a world where the optimal number of fathers per child is pretty obviously at least one, not some fraction of one, most Dogon men still aspire to be polygynists.

In 'Conversations with Ogotemmeli' Marcel Griaule (R266) recounts a cosmological tale of sexual origins from the creator God and Mother Earth in which sexual antagonism leads to an order reinforced by male and particularly female circumcision at every stage. Despite being a type of joint creation including an androgynous primal couple, the entire cosmology is both sexual and confrontational. We can see frankly enshrined a root collision between male and female sexual and orgasmic capacity, and its 'cutting' out of the female to 'feminize' her in the (negative) image of man. At every stage this creation myth re-emphasizes the dominance and invincibility of the male in setting out the 'world order'.

Dogon mythology describes the creation of the universe in terms of contrasting motions. In his initial act of creation, the one God Amma, threw out the seed of the world, which radiated out in four directions forming the surface of the earth. The stars came from pellets of earth he flung out into space. He had created the sun and the moon by a more complicated process: the art of pottery.

The God Amma took a lump of clay, squeezed it in his hand and flung it from him, as he had done with the stars. The clay spread and fell on the north, which is the top, and from there stretched out to the south, which is the bottom, of the world. It extends east and west with separate members like a fetus in the womb. This body, lying flat, face upwards is feminine. Its sexual organ is an anthill, and its clitoris a termite hill. Amma, being lonely and desirous of intercourse with this creature, approached it. That was the occasion of the first breach of the order of the universe.

At God's approach the termite hill rose up, barring the passage and displaying its masculinity. It was as strong as the organ of the stranger, and intercourse could not take place. But God is all-powerful. In the primal act of female circumcision, he cut down the termite hill, and had intercourse with the excised earth. But the original incident was destined to affect the course of things for ever; from this defective union there was born, instead of the intended twins, a single being, the pale fox, or jackal, symbol of the difficulties of God.

God had further intercourse with his earth-wife, and this time without mishaps, the excision of the offending member having removed the cause of the disorder. Water, which is the divine seed, was thus able to enter the womb of the earth and the normal reproductive cycle resulted in the birth of twins. Two beings were thus formed. God created them like water. They were green in colour, half human beings and half serpents. From the head to the loins they were human: below that they were serpents. Their red eyes were wide open like human eyes, and their tongues were forked like the tongues of reptiles. Their arms were flexible and without joints. Their bodies were green and sleek all over, shining like the surface of water, and covered with short green hairs, a presage of vegetation and germination.

These spirits, called Nummo, were of divine essence like himself, and developed normally in the womb of the earth. They are androgynous couples who each embody the proper balance of the sexes. Their destiny took them to Heaven, where they received the instructions of their father. They were of the essence of God, made of his seed, which is at once the form, and substance of the life-force of the world, from which derives the motion and the persistence of created being. This force is water, and the Pair are present in all water: the water of the seas, of coasts, of torrents, of storms, and of the spoonfuls we drink.

The Nummo, looking down from Heaven, saw their mother, the earth, naked and speechless, as a consequence of the original incident in her relations with the God Amma. It was necessary to put an end to this state of disorder. The Nummo accordingly came down to earth, bringing with them fibres pulled from plants already created in the heavenly regions. The purpose of this garment was not merely modesty. It manifested on earth the first act in the ordering of the universe and the revelation of the helicoid sign in the form of an undulating broken line, for the fibres fell in coils, symbol of tornadoes, of the windings of torrents, of eddies and whirlwinds, of the undulating movement of reptiles. In these fibres full of water and words, placed over his mother's genitalia, Nummo is thus always present.

Thus clothed, the earth had a language. It was good; nevertheless from the start it let loose disorder. This was because the jackal, the deluded and deceitful son of God, an unnatural and socially disruptive creature born without placenta and thus robbed at birth of his female counterpart desired to possess speech, and laid hands on the fibres in which language was embodied, that is to say, on his mother's skirt. His mother, the earth, resisted this incestuous action. She buried herself in her own womb, that is to say, in the anthill, disguised as an ant. But the jackal followed her. There was, it should be explained, no other woman in the world whom he could desire. The hole which the earth made in the anthill was never deep enough, and in the end she had to admit defeat. The myths of the pale fox demonstrate the chaos resulting from this imbalance of male and female qualities. This prefigured the even-handed struggles between men and women, which, however, always end in the victory of the male.

The incestuous act was of great consequence. In the first place it endowed the jackal pale fox with the gift of speech so that ever afterwards he was able to reveal to diviners the designs of God. It was also the cause of the flow of menstrual blood, which stained the fibres. The resulting defilement of the earth was incompatible with the reign of God. God rejected that spouse, and decided to create living beings directly. Modeling a womb in damp clay, he placed it on the earth and covered it with a pellet flung out into space from heaven. He made a male organ in the same way and having put it on the ground, he flung out a sphere which stuck to it. The two lumps forthwith took organic shape; their life began to develop. Members separated from the central core, bodies appeared, and a human pair arose out of the lumps of earth.

At this point the Nummo Pair reappeared. The Spirit drew two outlines on the ground, one on top of the other, one male and the other female. The man stretched himself out on these two shadows of himself, and took both of them for his own. The same thing was done for the woman. Thus it came about that each human being from the first was endowed with two souls of different sex, or rather with two principles corresponding to two distinct persons. In the man the female soul was located in the prepuce; in the woman the male soul was in the clitoris. Man's life was not capable of supporting both beings: each person would have to merge himself in the sex for which he appeared to be best fitted. The Nummo accordingly circumcised the man, thus removing from him all the femininity of his prepuce. The prepuce, however, changed itself into an animal which is "neither- a serpent nor an insect, but is classed with serpents." This animal symbolized the pain of circumcision and the need for the man to suffer in his sex as the woman does.

The man then had intercourse with the woman, who later bore the first two children of a series of eight, who were to become the ancestors of the Dogon people. In the moment of birth the pain of parturition was concentrated in the woman's clitoris, which was excised by an invisible hand, detached itself and left her, and was changed into the form of a scorpion. The pouch and the sting symbolized the organ: the venom was the water and the blood of the pain. Dual souls were implanted in a new-born child by holding it by the thighs above the place of the drawings with its hands and feet touching the ground. Later the superfluous soul was eliminated by circumcision, and humanity limped towards its obscure destiny.

As if this surgical excision of the female identity were not enough the creation process continues with the complete take-over of Mother Earth by male identity. The divine thirst for perfection was not extinguished, and the Nummo Pair, who were gradually taking the place of God their father, had in mind projects of redemption. But, in order to improve human conditions, reforms and instruction had to be carried out on the human level. The Nummo were afraid of the terrifying effect of contact between creatures of flesh and blood on the one hand and purely spiritual beings on the other. There had to be actions that could be understood, taking place within the ambit of the beneficiaries and in their own environment. Men after regeneration must be drawn towards the ideal as a peasant is drawn to rich farmland. The Nummo accordingly came down to earth, and entered the anthill, that is to say, the sexual part of which they were themselves the issue.

In the fullness of time an obscure instinct led the eldest of the offspring of the primal pair towards the anthill which had been occupied by the Nummo. He wore on his head as head-dress and to protect him from the sun, the wooden bowl he used for his food. He put his two feet into the opening of the anthill, that is of the earth's womb, and sank in slowly. The whole of him thus entered into the earth, and his head itself disappeared. But he left on the ground, as evidence of his passage into that world, the bowl which had caught on the edges of the opening. All that remained on the anthill was the round wooden bowl, still bearing traces of the food and the fingerprints of its vanished owner, symbol of his body and of his human nature, as, in the animal world, is the skin which a reptile has shed.

Liberated form his earthly condition, the ancestor was taken in charge by the regenerating Pair. The male Nummo led him into the depths of the earth, where, in the waters of the womb of his partner he curled himself up like a fetus and shrank to germinal form, and acquired the quality of water, the seed of god and the essence of the two Spirits. And all this process was the work of the Word. The male with his voice accompanied the female Nummo who was speaking to herself and to her own sex. The spoken Word entered into her and wound itself round her womb in a spiral of eight turns. Just as the helical band of copper round the sun gives to it its daily movement, so the spiral of the Word gave to the womb its regenerative movement. Thus perfected by water and words, the new Spirit was expelled and went up to Heaven.

All the eight ancestors in succession had to undergo this process of transformation; but, when the turn of the seventh ancestor came, the change was the occasion of a notable occurrence. The seventh in a series, it must be remembered, represents perfection. Though equal in quality with the others, he is the sum of the feminine element, which is four, and the masculine element, which is three. He is thus the completion of the perfect series, symbol of the total union of male and female, that is to say of unity. And to this homogeneous whole belongs especially the mastery of words, this is, of language; and the appearance on earth of such a one was bound to be the prelude to revolutionary developments of a beneficent character. What the seventh ancestor had received was the perfect knowledge of a Word-the second Word to be heard on earth, clearer than the first, destined for all mankind. Thus he was able to achieve progress for the world. In particular, he enabled mankind to take precedence over God's wicked son, the jackal. In the future order of things he was to be merely a laggard in the process of revelation.

The potent second Word developed the powers of its new possessor. Gradually he came to regard his regeneration in the womb of the earth as equivalent to its capture and occupation, and little by little he took possession of the whole organism, making such use of it as suited him for the purpose of his activities. His lips began to merge with the edges of the anthill, which widened and became a mouth. Pointed teeth made their appearance, seven for each lip, then ten, the number of the fingers, later forty, and finally eighty, ten for each ancestor in a kind of vagina dentata of genealogy.

These numbers indicated the future rates of increase of the families; the appearance of the teeth was a sign that the time for new instruction was drawing near. But here again the scruples of the Spirits made themselves felt. It was not directly to men, but to the ant, avatar of the earth and native to the locality, that the seventh ancestor imparted instruction. At sunrise on the appointed day the seventh ancestor Spirit spat out eighty threads of cotton; these he distributed between his upper teeth which acted as the teeth of a weaver's reed. In this way he made the uneven threads of a warp. He did the same with the lower teeth to make the even threads. By opening and shutting his jaws the Spirit caused the threads of the warp to make the movements required in weaving. His whole face took part in the work, his nose studs serving as the block, while the stud in his lower lip was the shuttle. As the threads crossed and uncrossed, the two tips of the Spirit's forked tongue pushed the thread of the weft to and fro, and the web took shape from his mouth in the breath of the second revealed Word. By so doing he showed the identity of material actions and spiritual forces, or rather the need for their co-operation.

Consistent with this stark division between the sexes, the Dogon divide their community into two opposed categories: living or pure man, and impure or dead man. The Hogon, the most important village chief, is leader of the pure men, while the Olubaru, the highest official of the Awa society, is leader of the impure men. The Awa society assumes control during the ceremonial period, while the Hogon is the leader of the community during the rest of the year and assumes ritual duties at the time of agricultural rites. The impure perform rituals associated with death, such as the preparation and burial of the corpse, the sacrifice and eating of sacrificial animals, and the construction and maintenance of the menstrual huts.

In 'Female Power and Male Dominance' Peggy Reeves Sanday (R609) analyzed over 100 societies seeking the causative or contributory factors leading to male dominance. She examined societies both from their creation mythologies and actual social patterns. She divides societies in three types, 'equal' where women and men shared power and there was little or no aggression or suppression, 'mythically dominant' where there was male aggression in the presence of female economic or political power, and 'unequal' where males were both mythically and practically dominant (R609 164). Dominance was expressed in both exclusion of women from political and economic decision making and male aggression against women in several forms: the ideal that males should be tough, brave and aggressive, the existence of exclusive men's houses or spaces, frequent quarreling fighting or wife beating, institutionalization or regular occurrence of rape and raiding other groups for wives. She cites a variety of anthropological theories for male dominance giving some validity to each of them and then developing a theory of her own which is a form of the prisoner's dilemma polarization.

Marvin Harris has suggested imbalance between protein sources and population density leads to male dominance. This has several suggested manifestations. Female infanticide ensues to produce hunters and warriors to compete for the available protein supplies. This slows population but causes a shortage of marriageable women requiring men to take them from hostile groups. Polygyny, the mark of a successful and powerful hunter and warrior exacerbates the shortage. Male supremacist institutions arise as a by-product of warfare, male monopoly over weapons, and the use of sex to nurture aggressive male personalities. There is some debate about this issue. Sanday (R609 45) claims the Yanomamo have a protein deficiency with 85% of the diet from plant sources, noting they have a specific word for craving meat. However this proportion for gathering is similar to the !Kung diet and although the !Kung hunt with lethal weapons war is unknown. Chagnon (R111 94) has this to say: "The most prominent champion of the protein theory is an anthropologist named Marvin Harris. We disagree a good deal and have 'debated' the protein issue publicly on a number of campuses. The argument began when I cautioned the protein-deficiency advocates that the Yanomamo did not suffer from a protein shortage and that their warfare (and the warfare in any group) was too complex to reduce to a single variable."

Charted results from Sanday (R609) indicate that sexually equal societies are likely to be aboriginal and peaceful while migratory and warlike societies are likely to be mythically or materially male dominant. A constant food supply also favours equality while stress from erratic food supply is associated with male dominance. The form of the society is also reflected in its creation myths with mythical or actually male dominates societies having male creation mythologies unlike sexually equal societies. Joint creations are not necessarily indicative of equal societies. Extremely warlike patriarchal societies such as the Yanomamo and Jivaro use joint creations specifically to portray sexual antagonism.

Ernestine Friedl (R225) suggests that men have greater control than women over the extra-domestic distribution and exchange because of the male monopoly on hunting large game. Among shifting agriculturalists this becomes male monopoly on clearing land and its cultivation. Warfare then becomes the domain of males because they are the expendable sex in reproductive terms. There is also some evidence to support this as a contributory factor.

Rare and occasional parental care of young children is associated with male creation myths, hunting especially of large game and shifting cultivation and advanced agriculture are likewise, while gathering and horticulture are associated with balanced or feminine creation myths.

Martin and Voorhies (R447) deduce that paternal descent and residence rules are adaptive where resources are scarce or where populations have been subjugated by patrilineal invaders. Matrilineal and matrilocal patterns are accommodating and integrative while patrilineal ones acquisitive and internally divisive. There is also evidence for this factor both in the social forms equal and unequal of these differing residence and lineage patterns and in the fact that matrilineal and matrilocal societies have become rarer over time, having been displaced by more aggressive patrilineal and patrilocal systems.

Hrdy (R330 252) states: "Such matrilineal arrangements are fragile, and they quickly disappear after contact with patrilineal herders, agriculturalists, or wage economies. A mid-twentieth-century survey revealed 15 percent of the world's cultures were matrilineal, and they were becoming scarcer." Hrdy notes that 70 percent of human societies were living in male philopatric arrangements. About two-thirds of these patrilocal societies have patrilineal descent groups, and most are polygynous and founded on paternity certainty at the expense of female choice. "Elaborate modes of socialization, rituals, and whole mythologies have grown up to endorse male control over the inconvenient sexual legacy that women inherited from their primate predecessors". Low ( R427 223) likewise associates the male inter-group violence occurring in 60% of human societies with primate raiding parties (p 148).

However, unlike the matriarchal origins of Bachofen and the hopes of some feminist authors, genetic studies on the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial mtDNA distributions (Seielstad et. al. R633) indicate that human societies have been predominantly patrilocal with moderate polygyny throughout human emergence with an eight times higher rate of female migration overall. Thus while more extreme forms of patriarchal dominion have definitely emerged, human sociobiology over the last 100,000 years appears to have been similar to ape societies rather than like many monkeys and other mammals in which related females reside together.

Matrilocal and matrilineal societies each tend to be more equal then patrilineal and patrilocal societies, which tend strongly to mythical or actual male dominance.

This picture was further refined and a more complicated picture emerged with the work of Giovanni Destro-Bisol and Gabriella Spedini three years later (New Scientist 7 Feb 2004 40-42). In this study gatherer-hunter societies tended to have higher male migration, possibly associated with greater male mobility in the division of labour, and agricultural populations had more female mobility possibly associated with the rise of agricultural patriarchy. Large spreads of male Y-chromosomes were also associated with the Batu migrations although these would have also been accompanied by women. There were clear signs of Y-migration into pygmy populations where we know there has been cultural adaption. Conversely there is an outward flow of female mtDNA from Pygmy to Bantu, reflected in a low bride price and a reputation for high fertility, but higher-class Bantu women did not 'marry down' in the other direction. Western Biaka have 62% of a Bantu Y-mutation called M2 coinciding with the beginning of the Bantu migrations. By contrast a much lower Y-influx has occurred in the !Kung who do not traditionally intermarry with Bantu. The Pygmy Y-inflow may have been caused by affairs with Bantu men, pygmy women returning after divorces, or adopting mixed marriage offspring. Destro-Bisol sees agriculture as being responsible for a traditions from cultures which buffered genetic underpinnings allowing adaption to diverse environments, to "the driving factor for establishment of more complex societies with social inequalities within and between populations".

Sherry Ortner (R517) describes women as associated with nature and life while men's role is driven in compensation to take up the projects of culture. Lacking creative functions man must assert his creativity externally. Simone de Beauvoir notes: "It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex which brings forth but to that which kills." John and Beatrice Whiting take a more psychological point of view in the male need to break a primary identity with powerful women particularly when expressed primarily in the domestic sphere in a way which later can be rejected when a young male finds differing realities in the wider world. Margaret Mead notes the difficulty of striking a balance between the need to reproduce and overpopulaion and that different reactions to population stress involve rejection of powers of fecundity for example in a fixed circut of energy, male only fertilization powers.

These views can be readily combined into a pespective where males are more vulnerable to their feelings of mortality because they do not themselves give birth to new life, they are also fearful and uncertain of their paternity by contrast with the certainty a female has, and they are naturally in sociobiological terms the competitive sex who risks life to reproduce and who throughout the mammalian evolution has sought to jealously guard mates and female resources as a means to secure reproductive advantage.

Peggy Reeves Sanday (R609) takes up Mary Douglas' (R173) idea that patriarchal dominance is part of a people's response to stress. She notes however that adaption to stress does not always involve the subjugation of women. Where there is cooperative immersion in nature and the feminization principle male dominance is unlikely. She thus articulates a two stage process leading from aboriginal cooperative societies to male dominance in which the cultural configuration first enters a divergence of sex-role plans into a dual-sex configuration such as we have seen in the Ashanti, the stage is set for mythical male dominance when competition under stress drives the separate complementary spheres into a symmetry-breaking into dominance. This two-step evolution is really a presentation of the prisoners dilemma and its bifurcation between cooperation as a feminine strategy and competition to the point of violent defection as a masculine strategy.

There are further sociobiological interpretations of this process which are also consistent with the above interpretations but lead to a more historically realistic description of how major societies including our own cultural tradition have entered a major epoch of male dominion. In sexual selection there is always a counterpoint between female reproductive choice and male competition and mate guarding. The exact balance varies from species to species with a degree of genetic conflict from example between hierarchies of male chimps who practice infanticide and raids on other groups and loose female coalitions who in the case of bonobos have managed to achieve a relatively high degree of female power.

It is easy to see that the first migrations of homo sapiens were into niches not previously occupied by modern humans, and only sometimes by relatives such as Neanderthal and so there was initially little need for inter-group competition and stress between modern humans. Populations could also gravitate to regions where the food supply was relatively constant and plentiful. However once modern human populations spread widely, the niche opens for a more predatory type of male-dominating culture to take selective advantage, based on male coalitions, warfare, abduction of females and rapid population growth fuelled by resource exploitation. Such societies would be associated with migration, war, food stress caused by ecological instability, patrilineal inheritance, patrilocal residence, drives for increased population rather than attempts to balance fertility and male domination of females. Viewed in this way the emergence of male dominance is as natural as the emergence of carnivores, but its also raises serious questions of ecological stability of the human species if the population of predatorial societies begins to exceed that of the 'hosts'.

These processes can become profoundly amplified by technological changes such as the transition from gathering to horticulture espoused predominantly by women through to large-scale plow agriculture dominated by men, and a parallel transition from hunting through to shepherding and animal husbandry again male dominated. Major inventions such as metallurgy, the wheel and the domestication of the horse not only transformed society in peace time but gave huge new opportunities for migratory warfare. New types of society evolved in which several of these motifs come together such as the liaison between planter queens and shepherd kings in Sumeria portrayed in the tale of Inanna and Dumuzi (p 180).

The evidence is that the sexes have complementary evolutionary strategies, the male based on competition, by dominant rank or subterfuge, exploitation of reproductive advantage, even at risk of death, exponentiation of resources to provide unbounded reproductive opportunity, and maximum investment in the current opportunity, without necessarily providing long-term. By contrast the female investment is more out-front, honest and massive over time, seeking to spread the benefits over all offspring in a way which conserves scarce resources in a way which is sustainable over time. By being closer to the immortal flow of life in the cytoplasmic continuity of the birth process the female is also more liable to make a cross-generational investment than the male who does not reproduce directly and lives in mortal fear of cuckolding.

No one who would question the idea that sexual paradox has been the evolutionary driving force for our linguistic articulacy, diverse crafts and skills, abstract reasoning and technology can deny that sexual relationship is the dominant theme in spoken fable, written literature, music and song, now winging the 'air-waves' of radio and television throughout human culture. Without it, mass media and popular literature, and the trappings we associate with 'culture' would atrophy, if not collapse. This view is central to all social theories of the evolution of intelligence through the dissonance between trustworthiness and deceit, the subtleties of detecting and concealing deceit and the complexity of the social 'grapevine'. Notably gatherer-hunters such as the !Kung spend long evenings discussing their sexual and emotional relationships and the resulting stresses, often through to the dawn.

Acknowledging our sociobiological roots does not mean conceding society and culture are biologically determined, but simply that biology cannot fail to contribute its heritage, subtle or frank, to the form of society and culture. Any culture which ignores, or rejects, its biological foundations will experience dissonance or repression. To ignore such factors will mean that they play out their effects in less constructive ways, despite social taboos. To repress them will result in tyranny and human misery. However in acknowledging and taking advantage of our biological roots, we may not only come to a point of genuine personal and cultural freedom of expression, but also gain the capacity to enjoy a sustainable evolutionary future. Neither does a complementary view of gender divide the sexes, for the feminine is present in both men and women, as the small spots in the yin-yang symbol of the Tao attest.

The evidence from both primate and human gatherer-hunter societies shows that the patrilocal kinship common to apes does not automatically lead to a cultural emergence based on patriarchal dominance, or women being treated as commodities. Male dominance may arise rather through cultural stress and the development of patterns of social predation. At issue in our view of gender and culture is not whether individual women have better innate ecological sustainability than men, because survival of the species depends ultimately on both, but the more subtle question of the survival value of the complete human reproductive strategy, with the feminine playing a full and pivotal part as a complementary contributor to the male, in conceiving and forming whole sustainable societies. Repression of the reproductive protocols of an entire sex in a society could thus have potentially disastrous consequences.

It behooves us to consider whether current ideals of partnership involving a division between the illusion of strict monogamy and images of sexual attraction based on the heroic fantasy of a 'rebel without a cause' serve the creative needs of human cultural evolution. It is not clear the ideal of the delinquent 'he-man' portrayed on the media serves reproductive interests of women, in a society of increasingly single-parent and dysfunctional families. A non-violent society of 'conjugal bliss' follows only from a more open and honest approach to sexuality and our biological roots, in which women are able and encouraged to make good choices which abet the best in male resourceful defence and support of the family, agreeableness, humour, affection, and all the features of artistry and skill the 'good hunter' can provide, as Geoffrey Miller (R475) suggests (p 53). Moreover this needs to happen with some respect, and room for, female reproductive choice to occur, in all its gambits, from established long-term partnership, to more secretive affairs, along with a reasonable degree of ethical compassion on the part of men towards supporting, with love, those offspring who are not their own children, without stripping bare all the devices of sexual selection, through genetic testing and paternity suits.

We have to lay at Adam's feet, in the spermatogenic evolutionary strategy, responsibility for all the unstable features of competitive and exploitative instability society is displaying. Instability which compromises our future viability and sustainability - an endlessly exponentiating relentless industrializtion, extinction-risking boom and bust economics, winner-take-all exploitation of natural and non-renewable resources, population crisis, environmental impacts which are never addressed until the damage is possibly irreversible, and the devastation of a billion years of evolutionary diversity. The use of controlled violence combined with reproductive competition has led to war, atrocity and genocide as well as the development of industrial civilization and post-modern culture. These features began with the patriarchal dominion of large city states, exacerbated by patriarchal religious leaders who insist on the male right to reproduce as well as man's dominion over nature. They have resulted in war and genocide to the point of final end-game 'solutions' such as sheol and the nuclear madness of mutually assured destruction. For this reason it is necessary to exorcise the doctrine of original sin which has cursed Eve throughout the history of patriarchal monotheism.