Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San. Roger Hewitt
relative quantities of each species used, no picture of the |Xam diet and its nutritional value can be drawn.
Small animals such as tortoises, snakes, lizards and locusts were also collected by the women if they happened to come across them but for the most part the women would concentrate on a specific veldkos source, gather there over a period of time until the source was exhausted and then move to another source. The women worked together in large numbers, accompanied by their children, using, where appropriate, a weighted digging-stick of about three feet long, sharpened at one end or perhaps tipped with horn and weighted by a perforated stone which was wedged in place about 12 inches from the bottom. Each woman collected her own food, packing it into skin bags, and returning home, together with the other women, when she had gathered sufficient (Moffat 1842: 54; Barrow, op. cit., Vol 1, 271ff; D.F. Bleek 1923: vi).
Judging by other hunter-gatherer groups, it is likely that the women contributed much more veldkos to the group than men contributed meat (Lee & DeVore 1968: 92ff). They were also responsible for fetching water. A woman would set out for a water-hole with as many ostrich egg-shells as she could carry in her nets of leather thongs. Each egg-shell had a small hole drilled at the top plugged with a stopper. She would fill the shells in turn with a perforated half-shell, plug each shell firmly, and return to the encampment. Most of the shells were then stored near the huts or buried to keep them cool and lifted out when required.
Some types of gathering were also performed by the men. Honey was exclusively the province of men. The |Xam were extremely fond of honey and any nest that was discovered would be marked by a small pile of stones or other sign to make ownership explicit. A nest was the property of the man who discovered it and the responsibility for distributing the honey was initially his. Another form of gathering in which the men engaged was the digging-out and sifting of ants’ chrysalids, also a favourite and common food for the |Xam. The men used digging sticks for this job but the sticks they used were unweighted (Moffat, op. cit., 172; Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 353ff; Lloyd, op. cit., 17).
Industries and trade
The main goods manufactured by the group were hunting implements, digging-sticks, cooking and eating utensils, clothing, bags, nets, small containers for buchu6 or various medicines, body ornaments, musical instruments and pipes for smoking. The only division of labour was between the sexes. Anything to do with hunting, arrows, bows, poisons, etc. was made by the men as were clothes and some small eating utensils. Women made clay cooking pots, egg-shell beads, drums and dancing rattles. From what is known of the division of labour, it appears that the manufacturing tasks falling to women tended to be for items only infrequently in need of manufacture, while those of the men would be likely to occur more frequently. Without a complete inventory, however, it is difficult to tell what this indicates in terms of relative hours spent in hunting and gathering. In any case it is known that both sexes enjoyed a great deal of leisure time except in periods of scarcity when the women would have greater difficulty in collecting sufficient veldkos (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 11, 343ff, 351, 359; Bleek & Stow, op. cit., xxiiif).
Most of the manufactured tools were of flint, bone or reed, except where iron had been obtained through trade. These included blades, scrapers, awls and borers. On the manufacture of clothing and bags Dorothea Bleek writes:
Every hunter owns the skin of the animal he shoots and dresses it himself. After being scraped with a stone it will be squeezed, rolled and unrolled, wetted, burried in sand, and rubbed with fat. Then he will make it up into a bag or garment for his family or for barter (Bleek & Duggin-Cronin 1942: vii).
Nets, bowstrings, the strings of musical instruments, harpoon cords, etc., were made by rubbing strands of sinew together between the palms. Spoons were made either from springbok horn, from a shaped rib bone or from a small piece of wood to which animal hair was attached by binding. Pipes were of many kinds but were usually made from a short section of an antelope’s leg bone (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 251, 293; Stow, op. cit., 52).
Trade was carried on both with other groups and with other races. Between |Xam groups exchange was sometimes for articles of value which could not be obtained within the territory of the group. Colouring, for example, used as a body decoration, might be acquired from a group living in an area where pigments were found and these would be purchased in exchange for arrows, skin bags, or other manufactured articles (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 377). Such exchange, however, is difficult to distinguish from reciprocal gift-giving. Trade with other races is more recognisably barter. Dorothea Bleek writes:
Barter with Hottentot or Bantu tribes has long been carried on by the Bushmen. Besides utensils and iron for knives and arrowheads, tobacco has been the object of greatest demand. In exchange Bushmen give game or skins, but they adore smoking, and as they grow no tobacco, must obtain that from others. Everyone smokes, even the children (Bleek & Duggin-Cronin, op. cit., 5).
Food-sharing
The division and sharing of food was a complex matter governed by a number of rules, obligations and avoidances. It appears that veldkos was gathered for each nuclear family independently but all meat was shared by the whole group. Springbok seem to have been the game most commonly eaten by the |Xam of the northern Cape and something is known of its division.
Assuming that three hunters tracked and killed a springbok, the division into parts was made by the two whose arrows did not secure the kill. The viscera were divided between the three families, and the killer received the upper bones of the forelegs and the neck. Of the other two hunters, one received the back, the tail and the skin, and the other the stomach and the blood. It is not recorded who had the remaining parts, but the shoulder-blades were not given to the hunter who made the kill. This division was made prior to the cooking, the meat being then given by the men to the women of each of their households to prepare and cook. When the meat was ready to be eaten, a second distribution was made, the men cutting for their male children, the women cutting for the girls. The children were especially given the leg bones which were broken open for the marrow (Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 275ff).
Lorna Marshall (1961: 236ff) has recorded how, in the !Kung-speaking bands of the Nyae Nyae region of the Kalahari, a third wave of sharing takes place throughout the group, this being governed by a network of obligations of various kinds. One such obligation exists where the user of an arrow which has been received as a gift gives meat which has been shot with that arrow to the person who made the gift. The arrow-giver might then share that meat with another from whom they had initially received the same arrow and so on. The |Xam also practiced the exchange of arrows (D.F. Bleek 1931–36, Part VIII, 149; Bleek & Lloyd 1911: 281ff) and it is, therefore, likely that some similar system of obligation also operated amongst them. Lorna Marshall also observed that the hunter who secured the kill often ended up with less meat than those further down the line of distribution. The missionary Robert Moffat (op. cit., 59) noticed that in the division of food-gifts from Dutch farmers to the |Xam, ‘Generally it is observed the one who first received the boon retained least for himself’. Lorna Marshall believed that amongst the !Kung-speakers, this custom might be designed to avoid tensions and jealousies that could arise if the hunter was consistently given preference.
However complex the initial system of meat distribution, another principle influenced the sharing at a different level and this consisted in a variety of avoidances and preferences based on certain beliefs and superstitions. Certain kinds of food were not eaten by adults at all, only by children. The flesh of the lynx was not eaten by women and it was regarded as unlucky for women with young children to eat hartebeest (an animal thought to resemble the mantis, which, in turn, was associated with the supernatural being |Kaggen). Children were not given the tips of springbok tongues, and certain portions of the ostrich were also forbidden them. Some children were not given jackals’ hearts for fear of promoting cowardice, but given leopards’ hearts, where possible, to encourage bravery. Baboon were not eaten at all by the San inhabiting the north-western plains because of their resemblance to humans. The variety and range of these preferences and avoidances was very great and possibly varied from one area to another and from one time to another (D.F. Bleek 1931–36, Part I, 175f; W.H.I. Bleek, op. cit., 16f; Lloyd, op.