by Corry Shores
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the "civilized mind" attempts to simplify and level the world whereas the "savage mind" is not afraid to become enmeshed in its complexity. (57bc)
The manner in which primitive peoples conceptualize their world is not merely coherent but the very one demanded where objects are discontinuous and complex. (qt 59c, emphasis mine)
The human task was to discover social themes coded in nature and cataloged as taxonomy, told as stories and danced to the rhythms of animal-skin drums. (58a)
Memory becomes more important the bigger and more dangerous the game, the more helpless and far-traveled the gatherers. (58a)
When tracking, the !Kung San note birdcalls and signs and discuss the spoor. Tracks tell the species, age, sex, speed, and physical condition of the animal and whether it was accompanied by other animals, what it was feeding on, and when it passed. Since tracks change over time, the !Kung San develop "their discriminating power to the highest degree," estimating how far ahead the animals are. The hunters read the dung and watch for bits of the foliage dropped from the animals' lips while eating. They appraise the size of a herd, whether it has been seeking shade, resting, or halting to feed. The stalking of a wounded animal opens new and repeated discussions and decisions. (58c-d)
During overnight stops the hunters observe specific taboos in a ritually heightened state. Access to the spirits by hunters -- ancestral, demonic, plant or animal -- is not unusual and can be undertaken in prayer, supplication, dream, trance, visionary disembodiment, and ecstatic flight to the other world. This spiritual state leads to a deeper insight into the meaning of the hunt, the chancy character of the game that may lead to a loss of the hunter's life, and the ethical implications of taking other lives. (58-59, emphasis mine)
Animal masks in rites give palpable expression to transitional states. On the body of a person the animal mask joins that which is otherwise separate -- not only representing human change but conceptualizing shared qualities -- so that unity in difference and difference in unity can be conceived as a pervasive truth. And some animals, by their shape or habit, such as foxes and frogs, are also boundary creatures who already signify the threshold world of human passages. In dance and song, bodies, painted and adorned, move to deep rhythms that bind the world and bring the human into mimetic participation with other beings and the truth of the multiplicity of all domains. (59bc)
Wind, light, temperature, ground-contour, minerals, vegetation, all play a part; they are not simply there, as they are for the tourist or the botanist, but rather they function, they act. (qt 59d)
the array of natural species about them. Animals and plants are regarded as centers, metaphors, and mentors of the different traits, skills, and roles of people. Insofar as they model diversity and the polythetic cosmos, the animals provide analogs to the multiplicity of stages and forms: the are interlocutors of change that is brought ceremonially into human consciousness. (60bc)
The original chancy game of prey and predator, of eating or being eaten, takes on a more significant meaning in a gifting world where chance is still an element: the only question is when the gift will pass on. (60c, emphasis mine)
Hunter/gatherers know nature well enough to appreciate how little they know of its complexity. They are engaged in a humble play of adventitious risk, which is hypostasized in gambling, a major leisure-time activity. Gambling is, after all, miniaturizing the game, depicting in the bodies of beasts, lounging or in repose, the ravishing mystery and fun of being a counterplayer, of moving and being moved in the excitement of the chase, the stillness of its sacred aftermath, and the joy of retelling. The great game of chance is elaborated in foragers' myths rich in the strangeness of life with its unexpected boons and encounters, its unanticipated penalties and rewards, not as arbitrary features of supernatural visits but as infinitely complex affiliations. (60-61, emphasis mine)
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