preview

Summary Of Eating Christmas In The Kalahari

Decent Essays

The article “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari” by Richard Borshay Lee, is an article that explains the differences between two cultures and shows how hard it is to get away from your own personal beliefs. Lee, an anthropologist, writes about his experiences with the !Kung Bushmen, a South African tribe. This group of hunter and gatherers work together to teach him an important lesson he wasn’t aware of. Richard Borshay Lee is a professor at the Univeristy of Toronto. He focuses most of his research on human rights, the people and culture of Africa, and he is most known for his ethnographic studies of hunting and gathering societies, particularly the !Kung Bushmen. Since graduate school he has made over 20 research trips to Africa. He has also spent a lot of research on the Africa AIDS epidemic …show more content…

At this particular point Lee could not figure out what was wrong with the !King Buschmen. In his head the ox was the ultimate gift for Christmas, but the Bushmen had different views. “When a young man kills such meat he comes to think himself as a chief or a big man and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. So we always speak of his meat as worthless.” Lee finally realized, the lesson in this was humility. Lee stated “wish us whites, Christmas is supposed to be the day of friendship and brotherly love.” His idea of Christmas was not the same of the villagers. Lee, still didn’t realize why the Bushmen were so cruel in teaching him the lesson. He stated that their jokes ruined his holiday. Even though he had been around them for a long time, he still wasn’t aware of their hunting and gathering beliefs. He also wasn’t aware of how they taught humility. This experience proves that its difficulty to stray away from what you believe in, even if you’re in someone else’s habitat. This also shows how easy it is to misunderstand someone else’s actions if you don’t

Get Access