Eating Christmas in the Kalahari

(PHOTO:Wikimedia Commons)

This article, written in 1969, is one of the most fascinating anthropological papers I’ve ever read. In it, Canadian ethnographer Richard Borshay Lee describes a very strange Christmas Day he spent with the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in the late 1960s.

Wanting to thank his subjects for their helpful cooperation with him over the past year of study, Lee decided to gift the tribe with a magnificent ox, to be slaughtered on Christmas Day. Though not Christians, the !Kung had heard of Christmas through British missionaries, and held a celebration around that season. The festivities were mostly filled with local traditions like trance dancing—and cooking and eating an ox.

The animal Lee bought, he writes, “was solid black, stood five feet high at the shoulder, had a five-foot span of horns, and must have weighed 1,200 pounds on the hoof.”

Yet when the iKung saw the beast, they all—to a man—expressed immediate shock and dismay that Lee had purchased such a poor specimen; they complained that it was skin and bones, asserted that it would hardly be worth eating or dancing over at all, and even said the lack of meat to go around might cause fighting amidst the crowd on Christmas!

Utterly baffled, Lee waited and watched on the day of the big feast as the animal was cut open. As he’d known, it was beautiful: fatty and full of meat. What was going on?

Hey /gau,” I burst out, “that ox is loaded with fat. What’s this about the ox being too thin to bother eating? Are you out of your mind?”

“Fat?” /gau shot back, “You call that fat? This wreck is thin, sick, dead!” And he broke out laughing. So did everyone else. They rolled on the ground, paralyzed with laughter. Everybody laughed except me; I was thinking.

There’s an elegant and totally surprising explanation for Lee’s bizarre Kalahari Christmas, one that reveals the !Kung’s marvelously pragmatic approach to gifts and may hold a lesson for ostentatious gift-givers in more familiar societies. I’ll leave you to read it.