Distant Mirror Research Articles

The Harvey Lecture Series. In Good Years and in Bad: Food Strategies of Self-Reliant Societies

CLIMATOLOGISTS and scientists who monitor the world's resources predict increasingly difficult times ahead (Burton, Kates and White 1977). The contemplation of scarcity may come as a shock to us, but recurrent scarcity was a fact of life accepted by our own ancestors and it still is an expected phenomenon among most of the world's peoples. Barbara Tuchman, in A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978), provides a record of almost constant disaster: crop failures associated with the onset of the so-called little ice age, recurrent outbreaks of plague, rising taxes, revolt and reprisal, invasions, brigandage, and a loss of confidence in both the natural and social order (see also Mayhew 1973:91-118). For centuries after that, famines were a recurrent feature of European experience. Only during the past century have we been able to entertain the assumption that each year must be a good one: that we should be able to build toward a new prosperity in the new year, based upon the gains of the old. Our predecessors cherished no such illusion of the inevitability of growth and progress. They hoped to make up during the good years for the losses of the bad, to survive through the bad, and so in the long run to end up no worse off than their parents and grandparents. Now that we again face shortages, a good deal of interest is being engendered in what is called 'vulnerability and resilience,' or what makes for survival under adversity. Now, if there is anything to the arguments of the social biologists, given our history it can be argued that human genes have been selected over the millennia to foster coping abilities, that is, for resilience. This paper deals with coping strategies used in societies where each household expects to be largely self-sufficient: i.e., societies which follow the domestic mode of production, though even among these some trade is normal. In such societies, food stuffs are acquired by the efforts of household members who have to be prepared to face the probability that any year may bring shortfalls in normal supplies. We ought to assume, therefore, that in thinking about how to exploit their environment, they take into consideration longer periods than the annual cycle. But we seem to be rather poorly equipped to discover what that longer period may be, because anthropological field work in the past has been geared to the year and to the assumption that if we saw the annual cycle through, we would know the normal run of behavior. It is only through repeated visits that you discover that there is no such thing as a normal year. We know little, therefore, about the real parameters within which hunter-gatherers and subsistence cultivators plan, despite such valiant efforts as those of Roy Rappaport to project through time his findings of a single year (Rappaport 1968). In the discussion that follows, I am drawing upon the ethnographic literature and also upon my own field research among the Makah of the Pacific Northwest Coast and the Plateau and Gwembe Tonga of Central Africa. When I worked among the Makah in 1941-42, some Makah households knew hunger because of fluctuations of the American economy upon which they were then dependent, rather than due to fluctuations in the weather; but they could tell me of hunger periods faced by their immediate ancestors, fishermen hunters-and-gatherers dependent for their food upon

Display of penile erection in squirrel monkey ( Sainuri sciureus)

In studies on the social behaviour of the squirrel monkey ( Saimiri sciureus), it has been found that the male displays penile erection under a variety of conditions. The types of display are described under the headings of (1) distant display, (2) mirror display, and (3) display in the communal situation. Distant display refers to the display that occurs between animals separated in cages. The same pattern of display occurs when a mirror is held up before a monkey (mirror display). In the communal situation, the male may display penile erection to another male or to a female. Such displays are performed in what is described as the (i) open position and (ii) closed position. General observations suggested that a male may display to another male in the closed position as a means of exerting and establishing dominance. Special studies were undertaken to obtain measurements of dominance based on the outcome of rivalry for food and on display. The findings indicated that the observations based on penile display give a clearer indication of hierarchy in the social structure of squirrel monkeys in captivity than does the outcome of rivalry for food.