Читать книгу Anthropology For Dummies - Cameron M. Smith - Страница 66

My colleague, Dr. Evan Davies, spent months with the BaAka of central Africa. His doctoral dissertation, describing his experiences, is a combination of emic and etic descriptions. Following is an etic description of the phenomenon of social fission as an example of what anthropologists can learn from fieldwork:

There are two major seasonal changes throughout Central Africa that affect the subsistence strategies of the BaAka, the rainy season which lasts roughly from to April to October and the dry season, which runs the rest of the year with the exception a few brief periods of rain during the winter months. During the dry season, the game animals in the forest must congregate around the major water sources (rivers and their tributaries) in the forest, and are hunted with relative ease by the BaAka. During this time, the BaAka live in semi-permanent villages close to towns and embark into the forest on day hunts. They are usually able to catch enough game during a day spent hunting to last them several days. A village sized band of approximately 75 people may therefore spend the months of the dry season hunting every fifth day or so, and the rest of the time will be spent in their village cooking, eating and resting, repairing their dwellings and their tools.

With the advent of the rains in the spring, the game animals hunted by the BaAka have more water sources available to them, and so are no longer forced to frequent the perennial sources of water that as they did during the dry season. Because the animals are more dispersed in the forest, the BaAka must travel further into the forest and remain for longer periods of time to catch enough to feed themselves.

For this reason, it is no longer advantageous for these hunter gatherers to travel in a large single group as they did during the dry season, when game was plentiful. It is more helpful for members of the group to fragment into smaller, nuclear family sized groups and spread out into the forest much as the game they are hunting, and so, during the rainy season we witness social fission among the BaAka.