Traditions are important to many people and this includes the !Kung tribe. This can be seen in the way girls and boys are treated differently, girls have a celebration for their first menstruation. This is used as a time to show the end of childhood and beginning of adolescence. Which is the third stage of life to them. The boys learn from a young age they are the providers for their future family. The men are the ones who do all the hunting, they are responsible for making sure their family can live the best life possible. Although this is all true men and women roles are very interchangeable both being able to be performed by either gender, they have good equality in this sense. (Shostak and Nisa 2000).
Another way the boys and girls are different is in how they choose their life partner, the women of the !Kung tribe have little to no say into this topic, men on the other hand basically choose who their daughter is eligible to marry, and once this happens since the girls are usually married very young (usually before menstrual cycle begins) the husband is usually expected to help raise the daughter/wife, also the males are to not have sex with their wife until after her first menstrual cycle and because of this many men do have other partners during this stage of the girls life. Girls' first time having sex is often times traumatic.(Shostak and Nisa 2000). A girl's job once she has her family is to take care/watch over the kids while her husband is out hunting and also planting and gathering the little things she can. Most kids just hangout all day they are not expected to do much.
If the women are unhappy and feel that they are not being paid enough attention to by their husbands they will do a few different things, one thing they do is they threaten suicide, another is they will runaway for the night and comeback once found by tribe. These things are rare but do happen and result in the tribe knowing the way the girl is feeling. (Shostak and Nisa 2000).
When girls go through their first menstruation it is a big celebration for everybody except her, the women of the tribe gather and dance and sing while the girl lays in a hut with her face cover, she is to not be seen by any men of the tribe during this time, during the dancing and singing which the women do outside of the hut the men are sitting a little ways away watching. (Shostak and Nisa 2000). This is very different from when the boys have their initiation because theirs takes place far away from where the women can hear or see them. This celebration last the entire menstruation and at the end the girl is washed and brought out of the hut. This does not represent the girls entrance into adulthood only the end of the adolescence stages. (Shostak and Nisa 2000). If the girl has postponed sexual relations she will soon be pushed into becoming sexually active whether she likes it or not.
Shostak, Marjorie, and Nisa, eds. 2000 Nisa, the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Cambridge Mass. Harvard University Press. (Retrived from eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) on October 27, 2015.)
FGeography And History
History
The !Kung tribes are of the San people living if the Kalahari Desert in Africa. They call themselves the !Kung or the !Xun, but most of the world only refers to them as Kung. They use to live in camps of 10-30 people, and would live by a body of water until it dried up. Then they would move camp to a new body of water (Fielder and King). They were hunters and gatherers, with men hunting and making tools like spears and poison arrows while women would spend days foraging for roots, nuts, and berries (Fielder and King). The tribe has many beliefs, such as not mentioning anyone dead for fear of the ghost attacking them and also that women should birth their child alone in the wild (Shostak). In recent times, they've taken to farming cattle, and as a result are making more permanent settlements and towns (Fielder and King). They are also famous for their language, which features a large number of clicks.
Fielder, C., & King, C. February 1, 2004. Culture Out of Africa. Retrieved September 13, 2015.
Shostak, M. (1981). Nisa, the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (2nd ed., pp. 77-81). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Geography
The area where the !Kung people reside is in the Kalahari Desert across the lands of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa which is about 360,000 square miles. The north is considerably wetter than other areas and to the east there are woodlands. It is also part of the Kalahari Basin which includes the Okavango River and its delta. The area receives about five to ten inches of rain annually (n.p. n.d.). A few things about the desert itself is that it's not actually a desert because of the rainfall that does fall. Due to that fact it would be better to call it a "thirstland" (Harvey n.d.). This rainfall allows for sparse vegetation like desert grasses, shrubs, deciduous trees and camelthorn which is a key part of the ecosystem. The temperature also varies greatly in the area and can range from 117 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer to a bone-chilling 7 degrees Fahrenheit during the winter (n.p. n.d.).
Harvey, Martin. n.d. "Kalahari Desert." WWF. Retrieved September 15, 2015 (http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/teacher_resources/best_place_species/current_top_10/kalahari_desert_.cfm).
N.p. n.d. Kalahari Desert. Retrieved September 9, 2015 (http://www.kalaharidesert).
Map of !Kung Locations
The !Kung tribe is different from what I grew up knowing in many ways, now that being true they are more alike to us then we expect also, one of the ways being their gender roles. The gender roles of the !Kung tribe are different because in our society and culture the male has always been seen as the one to get the money and be the bread winner of the family, and the women are seen more of stay at home and take care of the house and cooking and children. Now this is different and the same in the !Kung tribe because the Male and Women hold almost the same jobs, the men are the hunters and are expected to be able to bring food back home to their family, and the women are expected to garden and cook and take care of the children all day, that being said the differences are that the women roles and the males roles are very interchangeable so the men are able to stay at home and cook and garden just as much as the women are able to go out hunting, now this may not be seen as a difference in our society today and how it has changed and is changing and becoming more excepting of the women being the bread winners and the males being home cooking but that is what we are moving towards. I think the !Kung tribe are unique in this way they have always excepted and allowed the women to go out and hunt and the men stay home, in this way the !Kung tribe that is usually seen as behind in todays society are actually ahead of us.
ReplyDeleteNow another part of this is how women and men actually choose to be together, I don't think that the way the !Kung tribe decides marriage and how the whole thing works out is actually right or good. The reason being because women in their tribe don't get very much say in who they marry or who they like or when they have sexual relations and such. Now many people in our society can see how this is wrong, women should have say in things like marriage and sexual relations.
Now some things are the same such as how the men are still the ultimate more powerful of the genders in the tribe, and how marriage and menstruation and puberty in the men and women are seen as big deals/points in their growth in maturity and their life ahead of them. The things that are different is the ways we celebrate these thing, and how these things may be choose to happen.