Comment éviter de prendre la grosse tête chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs !kung (et accessoirement de créer une hiérarchie et asservir les autres) :
Quant un chasseur tue une proie, les autres le raillent sur la taille ou la qualité de la bête
When the men go to fetch the kill, they then express their disappointment at its size: “What, you made us come all this way for this bag of bones?” The hunter is expected to play along, and not to be offended. All of this is intended to prevent the hunter from regarding himself as superior. As one !Kung Bushman explained to a visiting ethnographer: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
La proie appartient au détenteur de la flèche, pas à celui qui a tué l’animal. Et les flèches sont souvent échangées
To further complicate matters, the !Kung have a tradition that the meat from a kill belongs to the owner of the arrow that killed it, rather than the hunter who fired it. (If two or more arrows bring down the kill, the meat belongs to the owner of the first arrow.) Since the men routinely exchange arrows, this makes grandstanding by individual hunters even less likely.
Et si le chasseur a trop de succès, il s’arrête de chasser quelques temps pour pouvoir se nourrir de proies d’autres personnes et ainsi rééquilibrer les choses
When a hunter has had a run of good luck and produced a lot of food, he might stop hunting for a few weeks in order to give others the chance to do well, and so avoid any possibility of resentment. Taking a few weeks off also means the hunter can allow others to provide him with food, so that there is no question of an outstanding obligation to him.
Lu dans An Edible History of Humanity, de Tom Standage
