Gathering and Hunting communities.
This ideology builds cohesiveness within a community. I really enjoyed hearing how our ancestors combined their man/womanpower to build structures. In our modern world we’ve slowly moved away from gender based roles due to the complexities of life. Indeed, there is something’s that hasn’t changed drastically. Historically males had more dangerous roles, such as: hunting and killing of large ferocious mammals; comparable to current times of males building bridges and highways. Likewise women roles still consist of daily gathering of children, groceries and so on.
In the Paleolithic era life for the San people was based on values and norms. They didn’t particularity have a hierarchy system; everyone based life on what’s expected as a member of a cohesive group.
I enjoyed reading the passage regarding “insulting the meat” and how the older members of the group would not encourage inequalities within the group.
“When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferior. We can’t accept this we refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill someone. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle” (pg. 27).
In comparison in today society we have an enormous abundance of inequalities and in my opinion most come from mass media and the super flux of how the population has grown. “We don’t trade with things, we trade with people” (pg. 27).
Indeed, as the population grew, people changed from small bands of ten to twenty people to hundreds to thousands and so on. It’s evident that the larger the group the more complex situations become; hence, not just for Homo sapiens but for animals as well.
In essence, Robert Strayer’s readings seem more in the field of anthropology rather than history, however one discipline can’t be solely defined as one they all are intertwine.
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