Life's
a struggle for many, often grim for some of us for years. During
such periods you'll feel better if you recall that you weren't born
an Ik.
The
Ik are
an ethnic group of about 10,000 people living in the mountains of
northeastern Uganda near the border with Kenya.
They
featured in anthropologist Colin Turnbull's ethnography The
Mountain People
(1972), from which Joseph Tainter (The
Collapse of Complex Societies,
1988) condenses this account: “the Ik live in such a food- and
water-scarce environment that there is absolutely no advantage to
reciprocity and sharing. The Ik, in consequence, display almost
nothing of what could be considered societal organisation. They are
so fragmented that most activities, especially subsistence, are
pursued individually.”
Each
person spends “weeks on their own searching for food and water.
Sharing is virtually non-existent. Two siblings or other kin can
live side-by-side, one dying of starvation and the other well
nourished, without the latter giving the slightest assistance” to
the former. “The members of a conjugal pair forage alone, and do
not share food. Indeed, if both members happen to be at their
residence together it is by accident. Each conjugal compound is
stockaded against the others. Several compounds together form a
village, but this is largely a meaningless occurrence. Villages have
no political functions or organisation, not even a central meeting
place.”
“Children
are minimally cared for by their mothers until age three, and then
are put out to fend for themselves. This separation is absolute. By
age three they are expected to find their own food and shelter, and
those that survive do provide for themselves. Children band into
age-sets for protection, since adults will steal a child's food
whenever possible. No food-sharing occurs within an age-set.”
If
you perform a reality-check on this, some qualified confirmation can
be obtained from their Wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ik_people
. “Turnbull himself mentions his sources' uncooperative nature and
tendency to lie.” “Milton Obote nationalized traditional hunting
lands as national park for European tourists, and prevented the Ik
from hunting in their traditional hunting grounds. After a couple of
generations of starvation conditions, the Ik, originally a
cooperative, child-loving tribe, became a group of selfish cruel
people who don’t trust or help anybody.”
“Overall,
living with the Ik seems to have afflicted Turnbull more with
melancholy and depression than anger, and he dedicated his work "to
the Ik, whom I learned not to hate". “ Since Obote first came
to power in the early '50s it's actually only 20 years that this
radical cultural transformation took!!
We
can only marvel at the extent to which cultural transforms can
eliminate goodwill between humans, eh?
“Archie
Tucker, the English linguist, accepted an invitation to come up and
see just what this extraordinary language was, for it certainly was
not Sudanic or Bantu. Archie finally pronounced, with no little
satisfaction, that the nearest language he could find to this one was
classical Middle-Kingdom Egyptian!” — The
Mountain People,
Ch. 2, p. 35. Not the only African tribe with an ancestral northern
origin, either.
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