A third very ancient and somewhat isolated people are the Kung San bushmen of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa. The ancestral human population had split into three branches before the exodus from its homeland. These three branches, identified by the genetic element known as mitochondrial DNA, are designated L1, L2 and L3. Everyone in the group that left Africa is descended from daughters of the L3 lineage. The ! Kung San belong to L1, the most ancient branch point of the mitochondrial tree of descent, and as hunter gatherers they may have been quite isolated ever since.
Contributing to that isolation was a remarkable technology that long helped them resist encroachment from other peoples. The San discovered how to poison their arrows with toxin from the pupae of chrysomelid beetles. A single arrow carried enough poison to kill a large antelope within 6 to 24 hours. Their lightweight hunting bows were also effective in warfare. They fought regularly with their pastoralist Bantu neighbors, killing their cows and fending off counterattacks with their poisoned arrows. The southern San held off the better armed and mounted Boers for 30 years until overwhelmed by the Boers’ greater numbers.105
The religious practices of these three ancient people—Australian Aborigines, the Andaman Islanders and the Kung San—are probably as close as one can come to reconstructing the religion of the ancestral human population. And though the religions of these three peoples may have absorbed foreign cultural influences, the features they all share can reasonably be assumed to stem from a common source: the religion practiced before modern humans dispersed from Africa 50,000 years ago.
From the accounts written by anthropologists, it is clear that the religions of these three hunter gathering peoples differ greatly from religions familiar in Western countries. Primitive religions have no priests or ecclesiastical hierarchy. They are practiced by the community as a whole, with no distinctions of rank. No separate organization such as a church is recognized—the entire community is the church.
A second special feature of these three hunter gatherer religions is that their rituals, as noted in the previous chapter, are characterized by rhythmic physical activity, with singing and dancing that may go on for 8 hours or longer. These dance marathons, with everyone moving in time together, evoke intense emotion and bind together all who are present with a sense of community and shared exaltation. The focus of their rituals is communal activity and needs, not individual psychic satisfaction.
Third, the sacred narratives of primitive religions convey moral or practical lessons of relevance to the community’s survival, just as do those of Western religions. But the sacred narratives are integrated with the rituals and ceremonies and are not the focus of religious practice.
Fourth, primitive religions are little concerned with matters of theology. They focus on practical issues such as initiation rites and on problems of survival that include healing, hunting, and control of the weather. Another practical goal, of the greatest importance for maintaining the group’s social cohesion, is that of settling feuds between people in dispute and wiping the slate clean of enmity.
The distinctive aspects of primitive religion are more easily appreciated by considering the specific practices of the ! Kung San, the Andaman Islanders and Australian Aborigines.
The Ritual Healing Dance of the Kung San
The ! Kung ritual healing dance, as practiced by the Nyae Nyae ! Kung who live in the Namibian part of the Kalahari desert, has several features typical of these three religions. The dance is the !Kung’s principal religious rite. It bears very little overt resemblance to a routine service in a church or synagogue, where a sedate audience gathers at a fixed time every week to watch a priest chant the words of a sacred text. In the !Kung dance, everyone participates. Anthropologists have named the rite a healing dance because it incorporates some of the concepts and gestures used by healers when treating individuals. But in the ritual healing dance, few people are actually healed.
The dance has a larger purpose, that of healing the community. The !Kung do not call it a healing dance but a nlum dance, nlum being a supernatural force. (The /, like !, indicates one of the many click sounds in their language; others used below are // and =.) A dance may be held at moments of crisis or to ease tensions with a neighboring group. Or the dance can also occur as a celebration, such as after a successful hunt, when it serves to soften the tensions that may arise after the distribution of meat. Following is an account based on the description by the anthropologist Lorna Marshall, who observed 39 such dances between 1952 and 1953.106
The nlum dance is an intricate interplay of physical movement, music and song. It is physically and emotionally demanding, and so intense that many of the men go into a deep trancelike state, achieved naturally and entirely without drugs. Many of the healers do attain trance and perform their rituals in that state, but trance is not necessary for healing. Any of the men can become healers, though some are better than others.
The dance may start around 9 P.M., after the evening meal. The first sign that one is about to happen occurs when a woman carries a burning branch to light a small fire in the middle of the dancing space. Soon other women join her. They sit close around the fire, squeezed together with shoulders and knees touching. There is no special clothing for the dance. The women wear their usual skin cloaks. They start to sing in high register, often quite loudly.
Then the men turn up and start to dance in a circle around the women. Their feet soon tread out a large circular groove in the sandy desert soil. The women in their singing circle begin to clap in coordination with the stamping feet of the men. The claps are of a special kind, with the fingers held back so that the rims of the palm catch a small pocket of air, making a high-pitched popping sound.
The women clap in two rhythms simultaneously. The basic line, called !gaba, matches the rhythm of the men’s stamping feet and that of the song. Most of the women do the !gaba line but some clap the =ku line, an off-beat improvisation that weaves in between the !gaba line. The women clap with great skill and precision, aided by the fact that they are touching one another and can feel as well as hear each other’s clapping.
The men contribute to the percussion, both with the stamping of their feet and with strings of soft-sounding rattles, called /khonisi, which are wound around their legs. The rattles are made of moth cocoons from which the pupa has been extracted and replaced with small stones or fragments of ostrich egg shell. Some 80 or 90 of the cocoons are threaded together on a string a yard long, and the string is wound round a man’s leg. Because the cocoons are made of silk, the sound of the /khonisi is not harsh but more like a loud swish, which adds a third layer of texture to the percussive sound of the dancing feet and clapping hands.
The heart of the performance is the women’s chorus, much of it sung in yodeling style. The women sing what are called nlum songs. Nlum is a powerful supernatural essence, possessed by people, animals and things, which may be either harmful or protective. The healers use their own nlum to heal people. The n/um songs are sung polyphonically, with some women singing the basic melody, and others shortening or prolonging the rhythmic intervals. !Kung songs are usually sung softly, but in the healing dance the nlum songs are belted out, the men’s voices interweaving with the women’s. The songs are accompanied with instruments such as stringed hunting bows and a four-stringed instrument known as a II gwashi.
The dance is broken into periods of 10 to 15 minutes, between which there are brief pauses for rest during which people walk around and chat. After the dance begins, the men prance in a circle around the women for two or three dance periods. The men are naked, apart from their usual breechclout, but the dance is without overt sexual overtones. Then at some point the leader of the line of male dancers slowly moves out of the rutted path around the women and leads his line right through the circle of seated women, past the fire, and out on the other side.
With the women’s line penetrated, the men dance a figure of eight, going clockwise around one half circle of women, counterclock
wise around the other. Up to 90 people may be engaged in the performance. A cascade of sights and sounds now assails the senses. The interweaving lines of dancing bodies shimmer in the firelight against the background of the starlit desert sky. The air is thick with the clapping of the women, the stamping of the men, the rhythmic swish of the men’s rattles and, rising above the rich percussive beat, the women’s powerful singing of the ancient nlum songs with descant voices soaring above the chorus.
After an hour or two of dancing, the men begin to go into trance. A person going into trance will look preoccupied, then begin to stare fixedly and stagger slightly. At this point, whether in trance or not, the men who are healers will start the healing ritual. They lean over one of the seated women, and briefly flutter their hands on her back and chest while uttering special cries.
The intensity of the dance increases and some of the healers enter a deeper level of trance. A man may start to breathe heavily, staring ahead without seeing while his whole body shudders. “He may throw back his head, yelling ‘II Gauwa is killing me,’ ” Marshall writes, referring to the great god who lives in the !Kung’s western sky. “He may stagger around and lurch into the fire, trample on the women, fall headlong into their circle, somersault over them, or crash full-length onto the ground and lie there rigid as a stick. The men say that the strength of their nlum overwhelms them. They lose their senses. Things appear to be smaller than normal and to fly around. The fire appears to be over their heads.”
Others will look after the men in trance, pulling them to their feet or dragging them out of the fire if they fall into it. The healers feel their power is at its height. Several rush out into the darkness, hurling invective at II Gauwa and the surrounding II gauwasi, the spirits of the dead. It is // Gauwa and the spirits who afflict people with serious sickness. The Kung are not perplexed by theodicy, the problem of justifying a good and omnipotent deity who permits evil; //Gauwa is omnipotent, the ! Kung say, and therefore sickness, and everything else, must come from him. One day he will protect a man, on another let him step on a puff adder or be savaged by a leopard.
After these sorties into the darkness, the healers’ trance may deepen. They are convulsed, sit down, shudder, stream with sweat or froth at the mouth. One may rush into the fire, heaping embers on himself until dragged out by the women. Reaching the deepest stage of the trance, men fall unconscious, their limbs rigid and clammy, their eyeballs rolled back to the whites. In this state, which the Kung call half-death, a man’s spirit temporarily leaves the body. He may encounter //Gauwa. The greatest healers may even meet =Gao N!a, //Gauwa’s counterpart who lives in the eastern sky.
A healer in half-death is in grave peril since his wandering spirit may be seized by the //gauwasi. Other healers flutter their hands over him, exhorting his spirit to return. They rip off his rattles and shake them to show the wandering spirit where its body is. After a period, often up to 20 minutes or so, those in half-death are revived.
Meanwhile the dance and the singing continue. The intensity of the performance waxes and wanes throughout the night but reaches a climax toward sunrise. As dawn breaks, the women break into a nfum song known as the Sun song. The dance may continue for several hours into the day, but the dawn is its emotional crest.
The benefit of the healing dance is the social cohesion it generates. “People bind together subjectively against external forces of evil, and they bind together on an intimate social level,” Marshall writes. “The dance draws everybody together.... Whatever their relationship, whatever the state of their feelings, whether they like or dislike each other, whether they are on good terms or bad terms with each other, they become a unit, singing, clapping, moving together in an extraordinary unison of stamping feet and clapping hands, swept along by the music. No words divide them; they act in concert for their spiritual and physical good and do something together that enlivens them and gives them pleasure.”
A very similar conclusion was reached by another anthropologist, Megan Biesele, who studied a nearby group of !Kung at Dobe, in Botswana, some 15 years later. “The trance dance,” she wrote, “is thus not only an art form in which all can participate, but a concerted effort of the entire community to banish misfortune. The fact that all members of a group participate personally in this effort accounts for much of its psychic and emotional efficacy. The dance is perhaps the central unifying force in Bushman life, binding people together in very deep ways which we do not fully understand.”107
This is religion raw, before it was tamed by the busy life and cooler tastes of cities.
!Kung religion has many other facets—people pray, receive treatment from healers, and explain windfalls, disasters and other events beyond their control in terms of supernatural intervention. These behaviors doubtless provide substantial psychological benefits, such as building confidence in the face of danger, but none seems likely to provide a signif icant evolutionary advantage, meaning one that enables a person to raise more surviving progeny. The healing dance, on the other hand, clearly enhances the viability of the Kung group. It raises the quality of the society by drawing people together and dissolving quarrels. It fosters group cohesion against external threats, whether supernatural ones like the //gauwasi or real foes such as other human groups. People belonging to such a society are more likely to survive and reproduce than those in less cohesive groups, who may be vanquished by their enemies or dissolve in discord. In the population as a whole, genes that promote religious behavior are likely to become more common in each generation as the less cohesive societies perish and the more united ones thrive.
The Dance of the Andaman Islanders
The !Kung provide one example of religious behavior that benefits the community. The Andaman Islanders furnish another. They bear an ancient signature in their mitochondrial DNA that suggests they are one of the populations derived from the original modern human migration from Africa to Australia.108 These relict populations are called Negritos because they have dark skin and are small, generally less than 5 feet in stature. They have survived only in remote places, such as the forests of Malaya and the Philippines, where they could avoid being overwhelmed by later populations practicing agriculture.
The Andaman Islands were another such Negrito refuge. During the last ice age, when sea level was more than 200 feet lower than today, the islands were probably only 40 miles from the coast of Burma and reachable by boat by the first modern humans. When sea level rose after the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, the islands’ distance from the mainland tripled. Adding to their inaccessibility was the inhabitants’ reputation for discouraging visitors. Marco Polo wrote that the islands’ inhabitants “are idolaters, and are a most brutish and savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth resembling those of the canine species. Their dispositions are cruel, and every person, not being of their own nation, whom they can lay their hands upon, they kill and eat.”
In fact the Islanders looked no more canine than anyone else and their reputation for cannibalism was probably undeserved. But they did kill anyone who landed on their shores. And they did better than they knew to burn the bodies of those they killed. When the Andamans were eventually settled by the British rulers of India, the tribes of the main island quickly died of imported diseases like measles and syphilis. But before they perished, their way of life was studied by the anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who visited the islands between 1906 and 1908.
As with the !Kung San, the central element in the Andaman Islanders’ religion was the dance, always accompanied by sacred songs. The dances would start at night and last 5 or 6 hours or longer. The women clapped and sang the chorus while the men danced to the beat of a sounding board. The Andaman dances are intense emotional experiences. The style of the dance, with the legs bent and the body bent at the hips, is highly energetic, with almost all the body’s muscles under tension. The dancer’s physical and mental activities are all directed toward one end, and he gains energy as he surrenders to the rhythm.
“This effect of the rhythm,” Radcliffe-Brown writes, “is reinforced by the excitement produced by the rapid movements of the dancers, and the loud sounds of the song and clapping and sounding-board, and intensified, as all collective states of emotion are intensified, by reason of being collective; with the end result that the Andaman Islanders are able to continue their strenuous dancing through many hours of the night.”109
The purpose of the dance is to bind participants together. “The dance produces a condition in which the unity, harmony and concord of the community are at a maximum, and in which they are intensely felt by every member. It is to produce this condition, I would maintain, that is the primary social function of the dance,” Radcliffe-Brown says. “The well-being, or indeed the existence, of the society depends on the unity and harmony that obtain in it, and the dance, by making that unity intensely felt, is a means of maintaining it.”
Before setting out for a fight, an Andaman village would hold a dance to increase everyone’s sense of unity. The dance would also “intensify the collective anger against the hostile group” and “produce a state of excitement and elation which has an important influence on the fighting quality of the Andaman warrior.”110
Andaman religion operated in several other ways to bolster the notion of community and the individual’s awareness of his dependence on society. In initiation rites, youths were made to endure punishing deprivations of food and sleep before they could resume eating two prized items of the Andaman diet, turtle and wild pig. During these periods they were not allowed to join in the communal dances, a symbol of exclusion from social life.
The hunting of turtle and pig are activities seen as full of danger, but performance of the approved rites can protect the hunter. The taboos involved in both initiation rites and hunting serve to impress the moral force of society on the individual. It is only by following social rules that a person may eat and hunt safely.
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