A Million Years with You by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas Page B

grandmother and wipes out her cape with straw. (2) Dabe Ma sits with his grandmother. (3) Dabe Ma walks back to Di!ai by himself. (4) In a few minutes he sits on her lap and nurses. (5) Dabe Ma gives Gao Lame
[the baby’s teenage uncle]
a piece of food which Gao pretends to eat then gives it back.
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    But even these small interactions could prove fascinating. For example, I learned how hyenas copulate because some of the Ju/wa boys performed a reenactment. The event went into my journal as a photo entry because my brother happened to be filming when the boys did this. Here’s the entry:
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≠Wi/abe was playing the giraffe and the hyena songs for sound sync
[playing the songs on the string of a hunting bow, tapping the string with a stick, changing the note by pressing the string with a finger—no doubt the origin of the guitar and violin]
and in the middle of it he stopped, and he and /Giamakwe pretended to be two hyenas copulating—a majestic imitation with snarls and growls, sniffing the female’s behind, and so on. One boy started as the male and the other as the female, then they swapped, shivering with ecstasy, then more growls, until the male fell away, exhausted, and curled up on his side, whereupon the female attacked him. The play lasted for hours, it seemed. The boys seemed so literal that they probably imitated the copulation process exactly, taking the same amount of time to do it. Both boys were deadpan; neither was excited or laughing, although the boy who was the male pretended to use his penis. They did this again and again and with growls and all, and it sounded exactly like 2 hyenas who were heard copulating outside of camp a few nights ago—and that went on for hours. A curious thing—when the kids acted it out, the female bucked the male off by raising her hindquarters and letting the male slip down over her head.
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    Being a girl, I was also assigned to learn as much as I could about the women and children—this being a suitable female province—which I did by going on gathering trips with the women and helping out by sometimes carrying the children whom the women brought along. My mom meticulously recorded the names of all the plants the women gathered. She produced quantities of notes such as the following, which I have chosen at random from her lengthy list.
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23. tshũ
Wallerina nutans
Kirk. A small plant with grasslike leaves has a firm round storage organ about the size of a golf ball which grows near the surface of the ground; gathered by Band 1 in the direction of Gura and in the vicinity of Nama Pan.
24. /dobi **unidentified. A climbing vine; a fibrous watery underground storage organ, resembles a large turnip in size and shape, has rough-looking but thin brown skin; grows elbow-deep and deeper. The tubers become woody and bitter when old and are thrown away; cooked like n≠wara (#21), split on top of coals. An important food during the dry season in the Gautscha vicinity. 2
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    A more comprehensive account of plants used by the Ju/wasi has never been made. And while my mom was doing this, I was out in the veldt experiencing how these plants were collected.
    I’m glad I went. There’s more to the cultural implications of gender than one might think. In some cultures, women with their menstruation and sexual allure pollute the world of men and are suppressed for that reason. Not so in Ju/wa culture, where women were the equals of men in every way that mattered—substantially more so than in our culture. But they were barred from hunting, also from contact with men right before a hunt, and also while menstruating or giving birth. I have come to think that this was not because of a polluting factor or a weakness, but because of female power. Hunting was by far the most significant male activity, requiring not only great skill but also training, experience, and voluminous knowledge. Yet a woman—with no instruction, no