Selected by Mark Van Vugt

Author:Mark Van Vugt [Vugt, Mark van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-35864-6
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2011-01-18T05:00:00+00:00

Parliamentary or Senate sessions are the modern versions of this STOP, as are annual general meetings and shareholder meetings in the business sphere.

When an influential person steps out of line there is also evidence that hunter-gatherer groups engage in a third STOP: satire, which is direct criticism leavened with humour. The Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee learned this the hard way, during his time living with a band of the !Kung San tribe.22 He gave the band a fattened cow – a gift that was rejected and ridiculed because, to the tribe, it signified arrogance and an ulterior motive. As Lee recounted it, the refusal was justified like this: ‘When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a Big Man. And he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse someone who boasts for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.’ Not that Lee should have felt particularly bad; the practice of ‘insulting the meat’ is a common one among the !Kung, with (usually) good-natured teasing routinely dished out to those who make the biggest kills. Such ribbing tempers the tendency to boastfulness, which is regarded as detrimental to the group’s egalitarian ethos.

This technique – using humour as a weapon of criticism – is surprisingly ubiquitous. Our own research suggests that humour and its product, laughter, are great ways to relieve tensions within groups and can smooth relationships between superiors and subordinates. Court jesters were often used to express the thoughts of the people; no offence could be taken if truths were embroidered with song, dance and juggling. In Fools Are Everywhere, a study of court jesters throughout history, Beatrice K. Otto writes: ‘The court jester is a universal phenomenon. He crops up in every court worth its salt in medieval and Renaissance Europe, in China, India, Japan, Russia, America and Africa. A cavalcade of jesters tumble across centuries and continents, and one could circle the globe tracing their footsteps.’23 Today’s equivalent of the court jester is media satire, such as the British panel show Have I Got News for You, which lampoons politicians, and its American cousin, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, not forgetting satirical blogs and magazines.

When gossip, public discussions and satire fall on deaf ears, a fourth STOP is disobedience. A range of actions come under the disobedience umbrella, from simply ignoring a leader’s instructions to killing him. In ancestral societies, bossiness – even if it came from individuals who enjoyed a position of authority through, say, peacekeeping duties – was not tolerated. For example, among the Iban, a tribal people in the Philippines, no one listens to a leader who issues a command as opposed to making a suggestion. Hunter-gatherer groups are proudly autonomous, and the notion of obedience outside the family domain does not exist. Schneider once noted that East African tribal leaders ‘cannot order people to do anything’.

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