In the words of anthropologist Richard Lee, hunter-gatherers are "fiercely egalitarian." Part and parcel of this egalitarianism is their staunch sense of individual autonomy. They do not believe that anyone has the right to tell another person what to do. Hunter-gatherers do not have big men, or chiefs, or bosses, who give orders. Historically, those sorts of leaders came later, with the rise of tribal societies and agriculture. Hunter-gatherers' stricture against controlling others through force applies even to parent-child relationships. Parents might try to coax their children to behave in certain ways, but they do not believe they have the right to give orders backed up by power. By refraining from giving orders, by refraining from trying to boss one another around, hunter-gatherers keep all of social life potentially within the realm of play. The band makes all group decisions through extensive discussion and debate until a consensus is achieved. People may voice their opinions vigorously, but they do not use coercive means to enforce their opinions.
How Hunter-Gatherer Bands Are Like Play Groups
This non-coercive approach to governance works for hunter-gatherers because the band itself is similar in many ways to a social play group. Hunter-gatherers are highly mobile people. They own no more property than what they can easily carry on foot, and they all have friends and relatives in other bands, so they can move at a moment's notice from one band to another. Just as people playing a social game are free to leave the game if they are not pleased, hunter-gatherers are free to leave the band, and join another if they are not pleased. But, at the same time, people are motivated to keep the band together. A stable band is more effective in meeting people's survival needs than is a band whose membership constantly changes. Moreover, people within a band become close friends and want to stick together because they like one another. Therefore, to keep the band together, people behave in ways that are designed to please the others and keep them from leaving.
Just as any attempt to coerce another in a social game may cause that other to leave the game, any attempt to coerce another within a hunter-gatherer band may cause that person to leave the band. Even children may leave a band, to live with relatives in another band, if they feel they are being mistreated. Freedom to quit is the ultimate source of all freedom and equality within any social game, and it is also the ultimate source of freedom and equality within a hunter-gatherer band. People within the band are motivated to hunt, gather, and participate in other band activities because such activities, when not coerced, are fun, please others, and keep the group together.
Humor as a Device to Keep Order and Prevent Dominance
Many anthropologists who have lived among hunting and gathering people have commented on their good humor--their joking, teasing, and easy laughter. Humor of this sort is common in all social play and it adds to the playful quality of all social interactions. Laughing together helps to maintain a sense of closeness, friendship, and equality, and it does so by evoking the sense of play. Good-natured teasing is a way of acknowledging yet accepting one another's flaws. So, humor itself brings the spirit of play to people's social activities and thereby motivates people to abide by the rules and cooperate willingly.
A number of anthropologists have commented on another use of humor among hunter-gatherers--that of correcting the behavior of those who are in some way disturbing the peace or violating a social rule. For example, Colin Turnbull wrote: "[The Mbuti] are good-natured people with an irresistible sense of humor; they are always making jokes about one another, even about themselves, but their humor can be turned into an instrument of punishment when they choose."[2] Similarly, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas noted that the Ju/'hoansi that she had lived among would not criticize people directly, but would do so through humor. She wrote: "The criticized person was not supposed to take offense at the jokes and would be sure to laugh along with the others. On the very rare occasions when self-control broke down, such as happened when two women could not stop quarreling, other people made a song about them and sang it when the arguments started. Hearing the song, the two women felt shamed and fell silent. Thus the community prevailed without mentioning the problem directly."[3]
Richard Lee has commented most directly on hunter-gatherers' use of humor as a tool to quell budding expressions of individual superiority and to maintain the sense of equality. Concerning hunter-gatherers in general, he wrote: "There is a kind of rough good humor, putdowns, teasing, and sexual joking that one encounters throughout the foraging world. ... People in these societies are fiercely egalitarian. They get outraged if somebody tries to put on the dog or to put on airs; they have evolved--independently, it would seem--very effective means for putting a stop to it. These means anthropologists have called ‘humility-enforcing' or ‘leveling' devices: thus the use of a very rough joking to bring people into line . . . ."[4]
In his book about the Ju/'hoansi, Lee tells a wonderful story of how the people he was studying turned their leveling humor on him.[5] At one point early in his fieldwork, Lee decided to reward the people he was studying with a feast, for which he purchased the fattest ox that he could find in the nearby farming community, "1200 lbs on the hoof." He was excited about announcing this gift and expected that the Ju/'hoansi would be grateful. When he announced the gift, however, he was surprised and hurt to find that the people responded not with the words of gratitude that he had expected, but with insults. For example, Bena, a 60-year-old grandmother, referred to the ox as "a bag of bones" and asked, to everyone's amusement except Lee's, "What do you expect us to eat off it, the horns?" A man who had been one of Lee's closest confidants among the Ju/'hoansi said, in mock earnestness: "You have always been square with us. What has happened to change your heart? Or are you too blind to tell the difference between a proper cow and an old wreck?" Such humor, at Lee's expense, continued for days preceding the feast.
Lee was already aware of the Ju/'hoan practice of "insulting the meat" that hunters brought to the band, and at some point he began to suspect that this practice was now being used on him. Nevertheless, his pride in providing such a wonderful gift was taken away; his masculine ego was hurt. And that was precisely the purpose of the insults. The Ju/'hoansi were treating him in just the same way that they treated any of their own hunters who brought home a big kill and failed to show proper modesty about it. As Tomazho, a wise Ju/'hoan healer, subsequently explained to Lee: "When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle."
The effectiveness of humor--in reducing aggression and promoting humility--comes, I think, from its direct relationship to play. To make fun of a dispute or a boast to say, "This disagreement that has you so angry, or this thing that you are so proud of, is not as important as you think it is. This is play, and the important thing in play is to be a good sport." When hunter-gatherers use humor to resolve even the most serious social problems that they face, they bring all of social life into the domain of play.
The relationship between laughter and play lies deep in our biological makeup. Our laughter has its evolutionary roots in the primate play face--the signal that all primates use to suppress dominance and enable play. Play fighting and chasing, with its accompanying laughter, is the original form of humor. When we humans, of any age and in any culture, use humor to quell a real fight or deflate a puffed-up ego, we are calling on a very primitive biological mechanism. We are saying, in effect, "This is play; and in play we don't really hurt anyone and we don't act in a domineering manner." We are saying it in a way that works because it strikes at the gut level of instinct, which we have no means to refute, rather than at the intellectual level of verbal argument, which we are all so good at refuting or ignoring.
