Ju/Hoansi Cultures: Video Analysis

When cultures go through changes and start adapting to a new modern world, aspects of their traditions and way of life change. They went from hunting and gathering to becoming more agricultural or domesticated. While these technological advances can bring prosperity, there are also many long term consequences that can see today. One big aspect of traditional cultures was the idea of interconnectedness. This means that all of their aspects of life such as religion and politics and the economy were all interconnected, they weren 't separate. For example, the !Kung or the Ju/‘ Hoansi cultures were small groups of people who lived in bands, and all of their aspects of life were interconnected. Religion, economy and politics weren 't separate …show more content…
Their culture started to evolve and change such as their exchange systems, social control (legal systems), and religious systems. These cultures practiced reciprocal economic behavior. They specifically practiced generalized reciprocity, meaning that those who give to others don’t expect anything back in return. This is usually what is practiced in families, and these bands and cultures where very close like families are. In the video that we watched in class, the bands in Africa hunted giraffe, and when they killed a giraffe and got a lot of meat, they gave some of the meat to the other bands who didn 't have any, but they didn 't expect or receive anything in return. Engaging in reciprocity helps maintain social harmony within their groups. They didn 't have money because they didn 't need it. This was because they 'd dint own anything. They didn 't feel the need for somebody to compensate them for what they gave to them. Once these cultures became more domesticated, there small groups turned into larger villages, and people started to own land and acquire wealth. Due to this, they started having a monetary exchange system. There was now a market mentality, meaning there …show more content…
As seen in the Economic Anthropology video that we watched in class, the Achanti in Ghana go to the markets to buy and sell goods. Only women participate in this in their culture. A monetary exchange system allows for a society to have social inequality, individual ranking and class stratification. All of these were unintended consequences to domestication. We now live in a world where so many things are defined by their monetary value. For example, in the video The Story of Stuff, people who live near the resources that are being taken over don 't own anything because they don’t own the means of production or consume a lot of goods, and therefore they don’t have any value. Our culture is always spending and buying, and the monetary exchange system is what makes this all possible. For example, when I 'm volunteering I tutor a girl named Noorhan, and for the past couple of weeks I 've been helping her with her college applications. She didn 't understand or agree with he fact that you had to pay a fee in order to apply to colleges, and she just count wrap her brain around the fact that she might pay for