Kalahari - Chapter 2

“Eating Christmas in the Kalahari” by Richard Borshay Lee is about a joke that was played. The !Kung of Africa celebrate the Christian holiday, Christmas. To them, it is the celebration where they “praise the birth of white man’s god-chief” (Conformity and Conflict p. 11). The tribe remains interested in the holiday due to the Tswana-Herero tradition where an ox is slaughtered. Lee, a social anthropologist, would slaughter an ox for the Christmas celebration. He had the sincerest intentions. He had chosen the biggest ox in a herd. He believed it would be the best for the celebration. But the villagers joked and said they thought it was a “bag of bones” (p. 13). Lee had been led to believe that the villagers, the older the ox, and the less fat it had. Fat is where the energy, the nourishment is, and this old ox didn’t have enough fat. The villagers revealed that they were joking about the ox; however, Lee couldn’t shake his doubts. He asked Tomazo why they had played a joke on him. He said, “Why insult a man after he has gone to all that trouble to track and kill an animal and when he is going to share the meat with you so that your children will have something to eat” (17)? Tomazo repied, “Arrogance” (17). The villagers played a joke on him to keep him level headed. It was reasoned that just because Lee could afford the gift for the villagers did not make him any better than them. Lee rephrased this as, “There are no totally generous acts” (17). Lee's essay, to me, shows the way villagers protect themselves from external influence. They changed the holiday and then they changed the way Lee viewed his gift to them.