But seriously, Thanksgiving is, to me, one of the more interesting holidays. It is a “feast.” You knew that already, but what you may not have known is that “feasting” is a human activity found world wide and often studied by anthropologists. Feasting is not exactly a human universal, as it is rare in foraging societies. But whenever certain conditions arise, feasting seems to emerge as a part of normative culture.

As a human, you may automatically think of feasting as a pleasantry, a fun thing to do, one of the perks of having extra food and a social system that brings friends and relatives together. You probably also think of gift giving as fun, a perk, a positive feature of human sociality.

Both, however, are acts of violence. Or, at least, part of an overall social system held together by uneasy alliance and often bloody warrefare, or something close to warrefare. (Yes, I spelled it like Hobbes would. On purpose.)

I wrote an essay a while back, revised a few times, that talks about feasting and Thanksgiving, putting each in the context of the other. Check it out: The Feast (A Thanksgiving Day Story).

By knowing what is actually happening at your own Thanksgiving, you may have stand a better chance of surviving it.

(This all relates, of course, to the controversial anthropology discussed here and here.)

And now back to more practical matters.

Here is some advice on how to make stock, how to make gravy, and how to cook a turkey.

What really happened on the first Thanksgiving? This!

Find out about the domestic turkey and the first thanksgiving.

Two podcasts, featuring in part, moi, on the Turkey and its history:

A partial history of the turkey: Where and when were they domesticated

Another helping of turkey: More than there ever were

Since we are talking about cooking and history, remember that cooking itself has a history.

An entertaining and informative video from the American Chemical Society. Without chemistry, Thanksgiving itself would be impossible!

A Thanksgiving Day Classic:

A Thanksgiving Joke, from here:

An elderly man in Phoenix calls his son in New York and says, “I hate to ruin your day, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing; forty-five years of misery is enough.”

“Pop, what are you talking about?” the son screams.

“We can’t stand the sight of each other any longer,” the old man says. “We’re sick of each other, and I’m sick of talking about this, so you call your sister in Chicago and tell her,” and he hangs up.

Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone. “Like hell they’re getting divorced,” she shouts, “I’ll take care of this.” She calls Phoenix immediately, and screams at the old man, “You are NOT getting divorced. Don’t do a single thing until I get there. I’m calling my brother back, and we’ll both be there tomorrow. Until then, don’t do a thing, DO YOU HEAR ME?” and hangs up.

The old man hangs up his phone, too, and turns to his wife. “Okay,” he says, “they’re coming for Thanksgiving. Now what do we tell them for Christmas?”

Finally, on the origin of the term “Black Friday.”

All traditional forager groups incorporate hunting and butchery into a broader cultural context. There is often ritual associated with hunting. Animals, especially mammals, are dismembered in stereotypical ways ways with some sort of meaning associated with the process. In many cases, meat goes through a process of “distribution and redistribution” whereby specific body parts are distributed to individuals based on their role in the hunt, and then, these parcels of meat are redistributed among the group on the basis of need, generally very evenly.

It appears that foragers value meat above other sources of food even if those other sources are more life-staining by being a larger part of the diet. The word “hunger” may sometimes really mean “hunger for meat” more than simple hunger for food. Although anthropologists have tried to link hunting success to reproductive success, this link is unclear. But, some concept of hunting ability or reliability seems to be associated in many cultures with one’s value in the group.

Almost all hunting of mammals is done by men in all foraging societies, with a few exceptions. The exceptions do not make up a large percentage of the meat acquired, and are rare even within the societies in which they occur. A majority of non-meat foods are obtained by females, but a larger percentage of non-meat foods are obtained my males than meat obtained by females. Many reasons have been given for this but few of the seemingly pragmatic reasons seem to hold up well to further scrutiny, such as “hunting is dangerous and women have kids.” Women engage in all sorts of dangerous foraging activities. It may be that the best explanation for the sexual bias in foraging vis-a-vis animal and plant foods is to be found in the cultural roles of hunting.

Dietarily, meat is probably very important for most groups as food for pregnant and nursing women and young children. There are special dietary demands for such individuals that may not be well met with only wild plant foods, but that are easily addressed with meat. Putting this all together, one might suggest that obtaining and distributing meat by men is an important form of parental investment.

The archaeological record shows a long association of chipped stone tools made of selected conchoidally fracturing rock and meat acquisition. Early sites have both stone tools of this type and bones that seem to show marks of butchery with these tools. This has led many archaeologists to emphasize the role of hunting in human evolution. However, chipped stone tools do not leave preservable evidence of use on plant foods or other materials, because these foods and materials are not found on archaeological sites. The wear patterns on the tools themselves can sometimes be studied and these indicate that many stone tools were used extensively on plant material, either food items or objects of use (i.e., digging sticks or some other wooden implement). It may be that most stone tools were used for tasks other than hunting and butchery. Also, both stone tools and cut-marked bones are rare prior to about two million years ago, so piecing together a good prehistory of tools and animal acquisition is probably asking too much of the data. Nonetheless, we see evidence of the use of animal products quite early in human evolution; this is not a practice invented by modern humans, but rather, one practiced by human ancestors as well.

Modern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) hunt mammals and eat them. The total amount of meat consumed by a group of chimpanzees over the course of a year is much lower than the typical amount of meat in the diet of modern human hunter gatherers, but it is a regular addition to the diet. There are a lot of groups of chimpanzees for which we can not say hunting is documented, but every group of chimps that has been studied by primatologists exhibit this behavior. There is a large amount of variation across chimpanzee groups in how hunting is carried out and how much meat is typically obtained. Most of the meat is in the form of other primates (monkeys) but other mammals are taken. Non-mammal sources are also used by chimpanzees including birds and eggs and other vertebrates (but no fish, probably). When chimpanzees hunt monkeys, and are successful, the level of attention given to the captured food source is inordinate compared to, say, finding a good source of fruit. Chimpanzees of both sexes are excited about the prospect of getting a bit of monkey flesh.

Insect food is obtained by chimpanzees and also by many other primates. It may be the case that virtually all primates eat some insects (some eat mostly insects), though there are several species not especially known for it.

We think that the last common ancestor (LCA) of chimpanzees and humans was more chimp like than human like. Also, we think that this LCA was more like a common chimp (Pan troglodytes) than a bonobo (Pan paniscus). Since modern chimps across Africa, including those that have been separated from each other for a very long time, hunt mammals, and modern human foragers and their immediate ancestors are clearly documented as hunters of mammals, it is reasonable to postulate that the LCA also carried out this behavior.

Eating mammalian meat and other animal products is probably part of our evolutionary heritage at least since the chimp-human split. Modern foragers and, perhaps, modern chimps seem to attribute an importance to meat greater than one would expect from meat’s caloric contribution to the diet, and in modern foragers, hunting, butchery, and consumption of meat is tied in with numerous cultural practices.

Meat is probably an important contribution to the human “palaeolithic” diet and an even more important contribution to the human cultural repertoire. The invention of certain technologies, starting with chipped stone tools, allowed for the increased role of meat in our diet, though whether or not that increase happened in any given time or place is difficult to ascertain. For well over a century, mostly male archaeologists have held a fascination with the often phallic looking implements of hunting found in prehistoric cultures around the world, and in doing so have communed with the mostly male (we might guess) producers and users of those implements in the past. The human practices of hunting, butchery, and the associated often elaborate technologies are embedded in a meaning-drenched symbolic system that speaks to the role of males vis-a-vis females and children. If systems of kinship, marriage, and social power are characterized by an ever present though differentially strong patriarchy, hunting and butchery, and the tools of that trade, are material manifestations of that patriarchy.

Photograph (c) 1991 by Greg Laden

I’m writing a piece that will be published elsewhere on the book, Chagnon, and the Yanomamo (I’ll insert a link HERE when it is available) but at this time I mainly wanted to tell you about the new book. Before doing that I just want to note the following: The fight between biological anthropology and cultural anthropology, represented in only one of its forms (or should I say fronts) by the fight over the Yanomamo is often viewed as a fight between those who seek explanations for the diversity of human behavior in genes vs. those who see human culture as constructed entirely from experience. In truth, very few anthropologists believe either of those models to be perfectly correct. Quite a few anthropologists in both fields recognize a more nuanced explanation for human behavior. The evolutionary history of our species has shaped us to have certain drives, tendencies, abilities, and limitations that are important factors in our development but culture and individual behavior are just as much products of history and lived experience guided, tempered, limited, and potentiated by drives shaped by natural selection.

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists reviews many of Chagnon’s key findings about the Yanomamo and discusses the controversy over these findings. I’m not yet sure if the new book replaces the older ethnography for use in the classroom; that is going to depend on what a particular course is about. Chagnon reviews his theory of where Yanomamo “fierceness” comes from and all that, but his monograph and this new volume both remind us that there is much about Yanomamo lifeways beyond guys beating each other up with sticks. To me the most important lesson of Chagnon’s work, which is supported by parallel work by others in the region, is this: Human culture is capable of a wide range of variation including but not by any means limited to strong patriarchy with a violent edge. Women in Yanomamo society are often treated badly. This does not make the Yanomamo unique, as women are treated badly in most human societies. The difference is that the Yanomamo are a group of people living in a smaller scale society than our own, and especially, a society that is different from our own, so it may be easier to parse out some of the connections between context and cultural expression. The Yanomamo do not show us something that we could not see in ourselves, but the anthropological view of that group and any other group “elsewhere” in culture or even distant in time (i.e., pre-industrial) or that relies on a very different economy (swidden in the case of Yanomamo) reveals human nature by reflecting it in different kinds of mirrors. When it comes to understanding culture, all mirrors are like the ones in the fun-house, distorting and biasing. For this reason, we need to use a lot of different mirrors. Anthropology reminds us that our own culture does not provide us with the best possible mirror even if we tend to think it does, and that all mirrors are similarly untrustworthy.

In his research with the Yanomamo, Chagnon may have done some things wrong, or things that we would not do today as methods and understanding of ethics have changed. But the same could be said of other anthropologists who worked in the field back in the 1960s, but for some reason we don’t hear that criticism. Personally, I think that this is primarily due to Chagnon’s identification with biological anthropology. Hell, he even uses the word “sociobiology” which is a dog whistle for many indicating a tendency towards genetic determinism. In any event, it may be instructive to look at a parallel case of ethnography done in the bad old days, but by a different field researcher.

Today, Colin Turnbull’s book about the Mbuti Pygmies of the Congo, The Forest People, is often used in anthropology classes, and his ethnography of the Mbuti is generally accepted by many sociocultural anthropologists as valid and useful. The thing is, The Forest People is full of easily refutable facts, such as the “fact” that there is no seasonality in the rainforest and that the seasonal movement of Pygmies in pursuit of wild honey is a culturally constructed behavior unrelated to the ecology of the land. Turnbull, in this and other writings, openly denigrates the people (“Bantu farmers”) who live alongside the Mbuti, painting them as dim witted, mean spirited, violent slave owners (or, at least, poorly behaved masters over the Mbuti serfs). Turnbull also worked in Uganda with a different group, the Ik. If we turn to Turnbull’s work with the Ik of Uganda, popularized in his book The Mountain People, it gets worse. Every alternative ethnography or other source of information about that group dramatically conflicts with Turnbull’s ethnography in one way or another. Turnbull’s depiction of the Ik is horrific, with infanticide and other forms of violence widespread in Turnbull’s work but not so much in other depictions. Turnbull determined that the Ik, who had been pushed off their hunting lands and otherwise severely affected by outside forces, were a people not worth saving, and advocated dispersing the entire culture using very draconian means by the government in power in Uganda. In other words, Tunrbull’s anthropological work is highly questionable, and he quite literally collaborated with the government in an effort to wipe a group of people off the face of the earth, but many cultural anthropologists still use at least one of his books and he has not received the treatment Chagnon has received even though he seems to have actually carried out acts similar to those for which Chagnon is, apparently falsely, accused. But Turnbull was a member of the sociocultural anthropology family. Or, shall I say, the sociocultural anthropology “tribe” (a term I use reluctantly here, but that refers to Chagnon’s subtitle … by now you certainly understand the reference).

I quickly add that the comparison I make between treatment of Chagnon and treatment of Turnbull is only a loose one; there are many other factors to take into consideration including when the work was done, and the state in which the affected tribal groups were found by anthropology to begin with. Nonetheless, when I see cultural anthropologists lining up to score points taking down Chagnon, I often wonder what would have happened if Turnbull put forward an explicit biological explanation for his observations and was not a cultural constructivist.

One of the thing the Yanomamo are “used” for is to model past human societies. For a number of reasons I think this is misguided, but again, the Yanomamo do speak to the human condition more generally. In particular, Chagnon’s ethnography and other work, and criticisms of that work, speak to the problem we Westerners often have with the Hobbsian concept of “Warre.” A human society can be in a state of constant threat, constant struggle over women, resources, or some other thing with the threat of violence being ever present, but actual violence only rarely happening. It would be hard to argue that international politics of the 1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s was not dominated by the constant threat of the end of humanity itself due to all out nuclear war between the USA and the USSR. This struggle was the primary organizing force in world politics. But none of those nuclear weapons were ever used. The highest level of threat of violence that ever existed on this planet … the most “fierceness” to ever be brought to bear in the arena of human interaction … had enormous effects on human society and culture but was never actually operationalized the way we feared. There are other examples of fierceness being a big part of a culture but actual violence being modest in extent or intensity.

My own personal theory of Yanomamo violence is two part. First, it is complex. There is no reason to exclude male biological ineptitude in the area of reproduction (men have never figured out how to have babies on their own) as a causal factor in male anxiety about, and possessiveness over, women. We see this across cultures, in high school lunch rooms, and in the halls of the United States Congress. Men have an interest in controlling women’s reproduction that in some contexts may be manifest as violence among men, violence by men against women, athletic competition, absurd and offensive legislation, and all manner of things.

But with the Yanomamö, I’d suggest there is also something else going on. Some time prior to Chagnon’s arrival on the scene, perhaps decades before, perhaps centuries before, the Indians in the upper Amazon acquired plantains. Prior to this, if they grew food in gardens, it would have been local crops such as manioc. Plantains are Asian, and reached Africa in antiquity, and got to interior South America some time after they were introduced by Portuguese or Spanish explorers or settlers. The thing about plantains is that they are easy. You plant a shoot that was taken from an older plant, and you get this big bunch of starch to eat with very little work compared to many other forms of horticulture. But at the same time, they have a problem: Plantains take forever to grow. Many months pass before the cheap food is available, and this means that a garden is vulnerable to attack by your enemies, and some of your neighbors are probably enemies.

Chagnon documents the process of Yanomamö setting up new gardens and moving villages, something one must do now and then because of the ecology of swidden (slash and burn) agriculture, as tenuous and dangerous. A village with no allies would have a hard time moving to a new location. Preferably, a village sets up initial gardens near another village that is friendly(ish), continues to use the old gardens for food as the new gardens grow, and eventually everyone moves to that location. Chances are the new neighbors are is friendly because there has been an exchange of marriage partners over a period of time. That could only occur, however, between villages that already have good relationships perhaps owing to the trading of goods between the villages, and that sort of trade relationship usually follows a period of cooperative ritualized feasting designed to lessen tensions and enhance ties.

Feasting, followed by trading, followed by the friendly exchange of marriage partners is a pattern seen in many traditional groups around the world, including traditional (ethnographically documented) Native Americans outside the Amazon. A similar pattern can be seen among the royal families of Europe as well. Something like this seems to be a common pattern which is, unfortunately, too often interrupted by intergoup warfare because this system is tenuous and prone to collapse. Chagnon and other anthropologists have described this pattern with the Yanomamö. There probably isn’t much dispute about that. Where Chagnon and I might disagree is that to him concern over women is the main source of angst, where I’m thinking that concern over gardens may have effects of a similar magnitude.

In my view, the Yanomamo do represent a datum on the spectrum of one particular subgroup of humans: People living with traditional technology and practicing horticulture. There are lot of different traditional human societies that produce food using traditional means, some with swidden agriculture, some raising cattle, and so on. Across these societies, living in different environments and with different regional cultural traditions, there is a lot of variation in cultural practice, but as a whole we can identify a handful of common traits with variations. For example, age grading is not strict or complex in horticultural groups like the Yanomamö, but it is more common in pastoral, cattle keeping, groups. But even among cattle keepers, it is most commonly found at a higher level of development in Nilotic groups. Taken together, the rain forest dwelling gardeners in the Amazon, elsewhere in Latin America, Africa, and Asia may very well share more in common than any of these groups do with pastoral groups. A nice test of this idea are the Gauchos of South America (who, by the way, were friends of Darwin). After cattle keeping was introduced to the Pampas, a culture emerged that resembled in many ways traditional cattle keepers of central Asia and Africa, perhaps also resembling the early ranchers of Texas and Florida, if we step far enough back and squint a bit. You’ve heard the phrase “you are what you eat” … well, how about the somewhat clumsier, “Your culture is what you’all do about food and stuff.”

Many of the readers of this blog, because you just love missionaries, will find one of the main themes of Chagnon’s book especially interesting. I refer here to the relationship between the missionaries working in that part of the Amazon, the Yanomamo or other groups living there, Chagnon and other anthropologists, and the government officials (and a handful of others). The last phase of Chagnon’s work in Venezuela involved more messing around among these entities than it involved data collection, it seems. I remember a conference a few years back, around the time when these events were unfolding, and during one of the Chagnon-bashing waves, when numerous accusations were about regarding Chagnon, including the suggestion that he had attempted to overthrow the government of Venezuela. I remember thinking that a lot of otherwise smart people were treating a wide range of accusations, some very clearly absurd, as roughly equally viable, ignoring credibility of the suggestions and rather holding on to each possible wrongdoing as just another of several arrows in an academic quiver. The harrowing story Chagnon tells in Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists is his version (and he was there) of those events. Dangerous tribes indeed.

As I’ve mentioned above, I’ve written something elsewhere that I’ll link to here that addresses additional aspects of Chagnon’s work, the controversy, and the Yanomamo. Now, I’d like to switch to a more technical question about the name of the “tribal” group discussed in Chagnon’s book.

Throughout the text above, I’ve used the term “Yanomamo” without any fancy diacriticals, partly because I don’t trust your browser (or anyone’s browser, really, not just yours!) to get it right and I don’t want my blog post to be riddled with random happy faces or some other inappropriate symbol. But one needs to use diacriticals to say what I’m about to say so forgive me if you encounter oddness in what follows. I want to briefly discuss how to spell “Yanomamo” as well as how to pronounce the term. Also, there may be some politics.

“Yanomamö” and “Yanomamï” are two different spellings of the same word, and both are dog whistles, it turns out. Chagnon used Yanomamö and many more recent writers use Yanomamï. The use of the latter has caused many people to pronounce the name of the group in question “Yanomamee” (or, to put it differently, “Yanoh mommy”). This is exaserbated by the common mispelling (because of a dropped diacritical) “Yanomami” which really looks like Yan Oh Mommy.

Both words are the same and are meant to be pronounced the same way, but they use two different conventions developed by linguists to indicate various sounds used across the world’s languages. It is my understanding that the second depiction is the one more in favor these days, which would render “Yanomamö” obsolete. However, I stick with the older form because I follow a different convention; once a term has become widely used even if convention changes it is better to stick with the historical version that has been used for years in titles, indexing systems, etc. etc. unless the term is inherently offensive. To me, Neanderthals will never be Neandertals, even though the correct pronunciation of “th” in that word has always been a hard “t” and for some reason we’ve decided to acknowledge that by rationalizing (this one time) the spelling.

I’m pretty sure, though, that people who write “Yanomamö” are more likely to be biological anthropologists, and people who write “Yanomami” or “Yanomamï” are more likely to be cultural anthropologists. I find this cute but annoying at the same time. It is annoying mainly because a generation of students are learning to mispronounce the name, because the purveyors of the latter convention don’t actually know how to use it. By the way, Robert Borofsky, in his book titled “Yanomami,” further claims that yet another variant, “Yanomama,” is the term preferred by cultural anthropologists but “Yanomami” is more neutral.

Even my own use of the term here is incorrect because I can’t get my software, or blogs, to add the squiggly thingie that is supposed to be attached to the bottom of the “a” in the word. Still, you will want to know how to pronounce the term correctly. Roughly, it is like this:
First, make your voice nasalized. If you don’t do that, then you are wrong no matter what. Then say:

Yan oh ma moe(the oe like in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe).

If you said “Yan oh mam ah” you’d be much closer than if you said “Yan oh mommy” and if you said “Yan oh mamo, rhymes with “book ‘em Danno” you’d still be wrong but less wrong.

Having said all that, there may be variations in how the word is actually, in the field, pronounced over time and space. For instance, the same group has been “pronounced” elsewhere in time and space as Yanoama. That’s way different. One problem with all of this is that people name themselves in ways that may not be in accord with what we Westerners think. In other places I’ve discussed the Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana whom I called “Ju/‘hoansi” (good luck pronouncing that, there’s a ‘click’ in there somewhere). This word is partly based on the affix use for “real” as in “of our world” (roughly speaking). These folks refer to themselves as “the real people” and they also refer to their own dogs, as opposed to dogs of missionaries or other visitors to their land as “the real dogs.” Their term for themselves really just means “us.” Both culture and language are variable and changing. There really is no way that does not offend that principle of reality to assert that a particular spelling or pronunciation of the name of the Amazonians in question is correct to the exclusion of others. And, it is just like culture to come up with a way to use spelling variants as a fierce weapon!

These problems may be overstated. Referring to someone by a physical trait isn’t necessarily considered negative. African Americans are Blacks and Euro-Americans are Whites. But even in these contexts, these references to physical traits can be problematic, perhaps depending on what is meant or who uses the word. “Black is Beautiful” (you might have to be older to remember that phrase). One of my best friends calls herself a “Black Girl.” On the other hand, Donald Trump says he has “a great relationship with the Blacks” and when I’m in South Africa and I hear someone use the term “The Blacks” I become wary, because the next thing the person says may not be very nice. Still, it is not universally the case that a reference to physical features is negative. (I should also mention that in Francophone contexts, “Pygmy” is considered superior to another term often used, “Negrito.”)

The term “Pygmy” as used in biology is unfortunate and also causes confusion. I’ve met people who thought that “Pygmy hippos” were hippos that lived where Pygmies live, but ironically the pygmy hippos live in West Africa only and the Pygmy people live in Central Africa only. I don’t want to go into some of the confusion I’ve encountered between “Pygmy chimps” and Pygmy people. One way to solve this problem, of course, is to change the animal names. These are common names (though the word “Pygmy” is sometimes the root for the Latin binomial which is harder to change) and they can be discarded or altered. In fact, that has happened with the pygmy chimps, which are never called that any more for this reason (and the fact that they are not really smaller than regular chimps). You probably know of them as bonobos.

The real problem is probably the use of the word “pygmy” as a derogatory term, including its use as a slur of someone’s intelligence.

This sort of problem is widespread. There are many cases of people who’s “name” is somehow considered negative. One of the more interesting examples is the term used to refer to the traditionally foraging people of southern Africa, including the Ju/’hoansi and Baswara people, but also many other groups. The two terms of concern are “San” and “Bushmen.” The former is said to be a negative term applied to these folks by their cattle keeping neighbors who looked down on them. It may mean something like “wild.” It is part of the phrase “Khoisan” which relates to the term “Khoi Khoi.” Put simply, San are foragers and Khoi Khoi (or just Khoi) are herders, but otherwise the people referred to by these terms share languages and other aspects of their culture, and are physically similar. Khoisan (Khoi+San) refers to all of these folks together. (These terms are mainly South African and older, used in the 17th century and onwards and not used so much recently.) The term “Bushmen” also means “wild” and that is considered an inappropriate term as well.

During the 1980s, when various anthropologists were working with groups of San/Bushmen in Namibia and Botswana to help them organize politically, they (the San/Bushmen) of that area decided to call themselves “Bushmen.” There were two reasons for this. The primary reason is that the word “Bushmen” was widely known and they wanted to use a term that everyone would recognize as they strove for political and cultural recognition and improved status. The second reason is that by this time it was cool to be a Bushman. Bushmen are Beautiful, if you will. So Bushmen is the correct term in that area of Namibia and Botswana. But, to the south in South Africa, the term “Bushman” never caught on among the politically thoughtful. There, “San” was considered to be a better word. Many of these folks adopted the term “San” in South Africa, while their distant relatives to the north eschewed the term. And that’s the simple version of the story. There are many different cultural groups with different languages living in different parts of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa who prefer their more local name such as Barwa or Sho or other terms.

So, in the case of the San/Bushmen (let your eyes settle on either of those words depending on if you are from Botswana or South Africa!) one part of the solution was to ask the people what they want. This has been done with the Pygmies to some extent. I did it myself. I have had this conversation with Efe people on many occasions. Efe is the term used, by themselves, for Pygmies that live in a certain part of the Ituri Forest in the Congo. The Efe are both the largest and smallest Pygmies. They live over a larger area of Africa than any other group, and there are probably more Efe than any other group of Pygmies. Since Pygmy stature (they are indeed short) is of such great interest, every group of Pygmies has been repeatedly measured by anthropologists. So, we know that the Efe are the shortest of the Pygmies. Largest (in area) and smallest (in stature).

A local term for the Efe and other Pygmies of the Ituri is “Bambuti” (Singular: Mbuti). The Pygmies that the famous anthropologist Colin Turnbull lived with and wrote about called themselves Mbuti, and they live to the south of the Efe, speak a different language, and have some other cultural differences. Having said that, I did some work in the area of overlap between Efe and Mbuti and the distinction isn’t perfectly abrupt or consistent. Anyway, the non-Efe people of the area often use the word “Bambuti” for the Efe (and the Mbuti) but some people consider “Bambuti” to be a little derogatory. But not everyone thinks that.

The Efe I’ve spoken to know the term Pygmée (the French for Pygmy) and they don’t regard it as derogatory. They never use that word to refer to themselves, however, which makes it inappropriate for local use. The problem is, though, that just like the Ju/’hoansi of Namibia and Botswana recognized, if we want to speak of these folks in a broader context–in classrooms or among those interested in human rights in the area, etc.–we are forced to use the word Pygmy so people have a clue what we are talking about. And, as far as I know, the Efe don’t particularly mind.

I suppose it is more important to be respectful than to speak respectfully.

And now … a feast.

The enemy has arrived, in force, outside your village. The men are armed and wearing the symbols of war, which is appropriate because your group and the group milling about outside your walled settlement are at war. One of the men, wearing war garb but adorned also with white flagging to indicate a peaceful intent attempts to enter your village but is stopped by guards. They converse briefly and the guards allow the man to crawl into your village through the only opening in the surrounding wall left following preparations for possible attack. The man walks into the center of the plaza and kneels, and is handed a large container of beer which may or may not be poisoned. He drinks the entire amount without stopping, so that if it is poisoned, he will surely die, and if it is not, he will surely cop a buzz.

The visitor drops the container that once held the beer, still squatting on his haunches, and sways back and forth for a moment. He does not feel the poison. He only feels the buzz. He belches, stands up and walks towards the entrance whence he came. On his way, he is stopped by a warrior who places a large package on the visitor’s back, a tumpline across his forehead to help carry it, muttering a few words about how he knows his sister is young and unmarried. The visitor gives the warrior a stern look and crawls, carrying the package of ready to eat food, out of the walled village where he will share it with his compatriots as a snack.

An hour later a group of the enemy warriors, shouting a war cry, pushes their way through the tiny village entrance only to find that every single one of your warriors, dressed in the symbols of warfare but also adorned with small white flags, is taking a nap. The invading warriors, six of them, engage in an aggressive-looking dance shouting “we are strong, we will pierce your skull with a spear.” Every other one of the six visiting warriors is indeed armed with a spear, and as they approach you and your sleeping compatriots, none of you appear to wake. Perhaps a sleepy eye opens to glare at the bellicose visitors now and then, but for the most part, not a muscle is moved or a nostril twitched as the visitors jab, inches short, at the reclining men, again and again, until each warrior has been mock attacked by the three dancers. By this time you notice that the other three dancers are women, the wives of the warriors making the threats, in drag.

Just as these six retire to a place of their choosing near the center of the plaza, another set of enemy warriors enters through the small hole in the wall. Their dress is that of the warrior, but again, topped with little white flags made of the down feathers of a certain bird. Their dance is aggressive but this time also sexual in nature, and their chant is very different form the last “Your girls are ready to fuck. Your girls are ready for us to take them away when we slit your throats.”

And again, each of your male compatriots continues to recline and appear to not notice the intrusion, while the children hide behind stores of food and the women sit and watch, quietly bemused. Except the young women, who giggle, and some taunt back “You are too old and shriveled” only to be shushed by the older women who know that sometimes these events go very badly, when the visitors practice treachery instead of ritual, killing the men who recline indifferently in their hammocks.

Again and again groups of visiting enemies enter, sometimes just men, sometimes men and women, dressed outrageously and engaging in a dance and a chant, the combination of which has never been seen before and will never be seen again. They’ve been working on this routine for weeks. Again and again, your village’s warriors ignore the threats as though they were less significant than a bothersome fly, the children continue to hide but peek out from their burrows with increasing boldness, and the women go from sitting quietly to taunting and chanting back to eventually rising up and getting to the most important business they have on this day …

… cooking the feast.

After all the enemy have danced their way into the village, each group retiring to the growing gaggle in the middle of the plaza, your warriors jump from their hammocks and causally pick up bows and arrows, spears, or simply rip a pole from their front porch, to use as a weapon. They surround and approach the seated visitors who pay them no mind. As they approach, you notice your distant cousin among the enemy visitors, and just as you see him, one of your own warriors, your brother, walks to him and leads him by the hand back to his section of the circular village, to sit by his hearth or lay in his hammock. The visitor’s elderly wife follows, and that is when you finally recognize her … she is your grandmother’s sister, and was born in the village you live in now. Again and again this happens: Members of your village invite visiting families to their hearth and home, and now and then you recognize a relative among the visitors, or you mark the relationship between one of your own and the enemy family, and very often the women in the group are rather close to your own lineage.

Over the next few hours, after the sorting out of the visitors so that all are resting, their weapons cast to the side, at one hearth or another, you all start to eat. Universally, a buffet can only begin when someone in charge of cooking the food cajoles someone who is visiting to begin to eat. Two older women who have been in charge for the last five days of making the beer, cooking the turtles captured last week by the men on a foraging trip, baking the plantains harvested from the garden, and processing the fruits collected by younger women and children just this morning, drag some of the visiting enemies to the beer trough or to one of the large cauldrons of food and get them started on distributing it. Quite suddenly the activity level rises, and in less time that it takes an old man to choke on his ebene¹, almost everyone is chowing down on the victuals, and most of the conversation has stopped.

Over the next two hours, the food is put aside and the men begin to talk. They talk about previous battles. Strangely, when one man reveals his pride in how quickly he killed the brother of one of the other men at the feast, there seem to be no hard feelings. It was war, and the man who did the killing was brave and is now of high status because of that killing. More important than that event, at the moment, is the fact that these two men each have a younger sister who is unmarried, and a younger brother who is also available. That there is blood spilled between them seems to increase the urgency with which they close a deal whereby they exchange their sisters in a marriage arrangement. In an hour or two, that deal is sealed. Now it only remains to get the girls to go along with it (now and then they do, though usually not).

Other men talk about their weapons, the narcotic drugs a particular person makes, a cache of machete’s recently obtained from the boat of a missionary that went missing (the boat, not the missionary) and two or three young dogs just now past their initial training and ready to hunt (if, indeed, the dog will hunt). Deals are made, objects are exchanged on the spot, other exchanges promised for later. Even though the women of your village were once renowned for making excellent pottery, today it is claimed that no one in your village, even the older ladies, have a clue as to how to do that. It just so happens that the visiting village, the enemies (or shall we say, at this point, the new allies?) are known to make the best pottery, while your village is known these days, though they never seemed to do this before, for making the best monkey-killing arrows.

Pottery and arrows and promises of more pottery and more arrows are exchanged, as well as two more promises of marriage. And, off to the side, a group of men have planned out the details of a raid on a third village, located to the south, former allies but since the breaking of two marriage contracts and a handful of other untoward events, now freshly minted enemies.

This goes on for three days. Shows of bravado, of expertise, making of alliances through trade and exchange and, ultimately (and we shall see how this goes) marriage arrangements, and perhaps equally ultimately, arrangements to cooperate in raids, waft through the conversation. Men speak in ritualized tones, sometimes softly but with a stage whisper meant to be heard by others, sometimes loudly with a chanting cadence, strongly suggesting that others are stingy, passive-aggressively decrying their own suffering for having gotten the short end of a deal, loudly committing their younger, healthier brothers and cousins to this or that duel to the death (the brother or cousin happens to be out of town at the moment).

While the men have contributed measurable effort to prepare for the feast, the women have done most of the work and continue to do so. But as they alternately prepare food, nurse the children or clean the pots, they catch up. Many of these women are sisters, across the boundary between your village and the former enemy, or in-laws from marriages way back or cousins of some kind. Every married woman is a cousin of some kind to her husband, but not of the same clan, but since all the men are of the same clan, many of the women end up being from one clan, but a different one from the men, and are therefore at least nominally related, if not sharing known and fairly recent ancestors. The men eye the women suspiciously as they converse quietly, as to not be heard. If the alliance being formed today goes well, these women may end up all living in the same village, and their friendships, broken for the last several years by war but now renewed, will be important. If the alliance fails, then every one of these women may be considered a spy, because she may be more loyal to her brother or her cousin’s husband than to her own spouse. The women are well aware of this concern, and they remember to allow certain bits and pieces of conversation to be overheard by the occasionally quiet men, bits and pieces that will enhance a sense of uncertainty for some of the men, a sense of security for others, depending.

In truth, and not admitted by the men, the women now conversing in the background are the ones who arranged this feast. On a day to day basis, the men of warring villages avoid each other, only coming into contact when a raid is carried out, and then, that contact is in the form of a firefight with arrows or an attack with spears. The women, in the mean time, forage in small groups (of only women) or work in distant fields or some specialized resource gathering area (like a mineral or clay deposit) that may be shared by the women of warring villages. In truth, and not known to the men, many of these women have conversed just weeks before, and see each other with reasonable frequency, as their day to day business simply can not be carried out if they are not allowed to do so, irrespective of the state of alliance or hatred among the men. It was through these conversations between women of the two villages, across the boundary of warfare, that this feast was arranged.

…

The above fictionalized prose is a reasonable description of a typical traditional Yanomamo feast, as documented by several anthropologists during the 20th century. Obviously, we are speaking today of a feast because Thanksgiving is a feast engaged in by Americans on the third Thursday of November, and there may be some connections. The Thanksgiving Feast is thought by modern Americans, especially those who read Wikipeda (which has pretty much ruined any possibility of having a non-trivialized conversation about American Thanksgiving, as per Wikipedia’s usual inability to address matters anthropological or historical) to be just another harvest festival, a gathering to partake in the harvest and to thank the appropriate god or gods for their largess.

That may be at least a little true. Harvest festivals do not need historical continuity to be connected to each other or to be similar in how they work. It need not be the case that Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving and some roughly similar festivals found this time of year elsewhere are all descendants from some original Neolithic ritual. And, in fact, I would argue the opposite. The “first thanksgiving” (in the United States) was an event that happened at Plymouth in 1621. The documentation of this event is reasonably good, and it certainly happened, but much of what we know about it comes from documents that were clearly propaganda tools designed to raise money to fund the adventures of the Plymouth Plantation and other efforts. The event may have gone on for days and may have looked in some ways like the event I describe above, at least in so far as shared displays of bravado and arrangements for trading and overall male bonding are concerned. It was a male-oriented event but it is likely that most of the work was done by women. Both sides, the Wampanoag and the English (consisting of religious Puritans and others) brought the food, and it was held at the village of the English. The English may well have been engaging in something that seemed familiar to them earlier in Europe, and Wikipedia, in an all to typical fit of Western Centered cultural imperialism tells us so. But this ignores the fact that feasting was probably a widespread Native American activity.

One might argue that feasting is a global phenomenon, and that would be more or less true. Not all cultures have feasting, any more than all cultures have any given trait. But many do, and feasting is found in Eurasia, Africa and the New World, as well as Australia. But the nature and purpose of the feasting varies a great deal.

Here in Minnesota, Ojibwa Native Americans occupied most of the woodlands and some of the prairies during the 18th and early 19th century, with Lakota/Dakota/Sioux (I’ll call them Dakota) occupying the prairies of the western and southwestern part of the state, and the Dakotas. They were often at war. Ironically, the Dakota were probably the more war-like, having a culture more invested in bellicosity in comparison to the Algonquin speaking Ojibwa, but the Ojibwa had lucrative fur trapping contracts with the French and the English and, related to these contracts, were armed with guns. That made the Ojibwa more powerful than the Dakota, though the latter had certain advantages. As a result, it was clear to various leaders of the day that a continued war between them would result in strife and loss of income. Rather than fight all the time, they fought seasonally, selectively, and avoided fighting all together when it interfered with the efficient exploitation of the numerous beaver of the region.

And, from all accounts, the maintenance of alliances between Ojibwa and Dakota was facilitated, in part, by feasting not entirely different (but perhaps less ritualized) than that described above. It seems most likely that the English at Plymouth, in the 1620s, were being brought into a Native practice by the Wampanoag, which was possibly done a few times then dropped (as other developments beyond our scope here occurred). By the time the “first Thanksgiving” was revived, about a century and a half later (eventually codified as an official holiday) the real meaning and purpose of it would have been forgotten. The first American Thanksgiving was probably a ritualized gathering meant to forge alliances, at which it is possible that a raid or two was planed, but at which there is no record of intermarriages between English and Native being arranged.

Of the first Thanksgiving we have exactly two contemporary descriptions, and it isn’t much. In fact, there is so little, you can read it all in a minute. First, by Edward Winslow, from a letter of 12 December 1621, published for wider audiences within a year of its writing:

Our corn [i.e. wheat] did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom. Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

The second description was contemporary and from a good source (William Bradford) but was not known to anyone else until the middle of the 19th century. It was the event of this description becoming widely known that caused the revival in the US of the idea of a “First Thanksgiving” and this is the reason we celebrate the holiday today.

They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercising in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want; and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion. Which made many afterwards write so largely of their plenty here to their friends in England, which were not feigned but true reports.

In the end, I think we all know what the true meaning of Thanksgiving is. Gravy, with stuffing a close second. Enjoy your feast and remember to treat your suaboya² well.

Sources

Bradford, William. 1908. Bradford’s History fo Plymouth Plantatoi 1601-1646. (Written ca. 1650) Orignial Narratives of Early American History (Series), Jameson, J. Franklin, Ed. Charles Scribiner’s Sons, NY.

Chagnon, Napolean A. 1996. Yanomamo (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology). Harcourt Brace; 5th edition (November 15, 1996)

Heath, Dwight B. 1963: Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Corinth Books: New York

Winslow, Edward. 1621. Letter. In “Mourt’s Relation,” Heath 1963.

Notes

¹Ebene is a narcotic substance ingested via the nose that results in vomiting and severe illness along with a hallucinogenic state.

²Suaboya is your appropriate aged unmarried paternal cross cousin (father’s sister’s offspring) and thus your preferred marriage partner.

The use of ethnography as a way to understanding humans is complicated by many factors. Ethnographies are (almost always) written by outsiders, and we can assume that such works include biases, inaccuracies, and misconceptions. The people under study may hide things or may simply have a different idea than the ethnographer of what to demonstrate. The ethnographer may simply be blind to certain practices, or may attribute normative-ness to the odd, or oddness to the normative. What is viewed may be biased by a biased strategy, and what is recorded may be biased by what is thought important vs. trivial. What is seen, heard, and experienced is typically analyzed and written about at a later time, and this involved multiple transformations. In one case, an ethnographer reported (at a professional meeting) trancing among a certain group of people. The report was detailed and rich in data. I spent considerable time one on one with this researcher because I was interested in both the trancing and the particular people she had worked with, and during this time I discovered that the trancing was never observed. To paraphrase: “I did not see or even know about the trancing. I only observed it later, indirectly, in my data! Isn’t that remarkable!”

Indeed.

There may be ways past these problems, and there may be aspects of ethnography that are more or less confounded by the process of observation and recording. This itself is a major study. If one enters a graduate program in Anthropology with the intention of studying “ethnography” one may end up reading almost no actual ethnographic of traditional cultures. Instead, one may intensely study the process of ethnography itself and look only at ethnographies of current people (not cultures) in settings of transition, economic change, or political repression. Many current ethnographies are ethnographies of the ethnographer.

This is all well and good, but the evolutionary anthropologist still desired to look at humans across a range of economic and environmental settings, with as much ‘modern’ stuff stripped away, accounted for, or factored out. This does not mean that the above mentioned biases should be ignored, but it does mean that the evolutionary anthropologist may take a few more chances than a modern-trained cultural anthropologist.

Recently, a faithful reader (who may or may not choose to uncloak) has asked me a question that a lot of people ask me, or in some cases that I trick them into asking me: What ethnographies should I read? Here, I’d like to give a short list of ethnographies that share certain characteristics, for your edification. Many of these texts can be acquired used, but be aware that there are multiple editions and it is almost always the case that later editions include important critique (addressing the above mentioned issues) that earlier editions may ignore.

Characteristics of the items on this list are:

1) Geographical constraint. These works are all about people living in the tropics or subtropics.

2) Geographical and ecological diversity. These works are mean to represent a continental range and an ecological range. In this area, the list falls short because I chose to ignore certain regions or habitats rather than to recommend ethnographies that I’m less comfortable recommending. In this way, this list is a starting point. We can talk later about filling in some of the gaps (such as the African Rain Forest or the subtropical New World arid regions).

3) Critique. These ethnographies are either much re-written or self-evaluative, or have been the subject of much discussion (regarding the issues and problems outlined above) and thus form the basis for reading extensive and intensive literature on the topic.

4) Economy. These ethnographies tend to focus on “pre-Western” forms or manifestations of the cultures that are examined. These studies represent both foraging lifeways and horticulture, with some effort at representing diversity in horticulture.

South American Humid Tropics: Post plantain horticultural people who were probably foragers recently.

Yanomamo (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology)

The Canela: Kinship, Ritual and Sex in an Amazonian Tribe (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology)

African Arid and Woodland/Savanna

Foragers:

The Dobe Ju/’Hoansi (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology)

Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman

Food producers:

Bunyoro: An African Kingdom (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology)

Turkana Herders of the Dry Savana: Ecology and Biobehavioral Response of Nomads to an Uncertain Environment (Research Monographs on Human Population Biology)

(Broken Spears: A Maasai Journey)

The Maasai of Matapato: A Study of Rituals of Rebellion (Routledge Classic Ethnographies)

“Oceania” and E. Asia

Grand Valley Dani: Peaceful Warriors (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology)

Challenging Gender Norms: Five Genders Among Bugis in Indonesia (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology)

So read these and get back to me.

A moment or two ago a person who could only be described as annoying, whom I do not personally know, corrected me on Facebook. I had responded to Carl Zimmer‘s lament that he was unable to look back at Facebook entries, RSS feeds, and so on that had accumulated during his one week vacation. My comment was simply to say that absolutely nothing had happened over the previous week, so he should not worry. Obviously, I was kidding. But Mr. Annoying had to jump in with some news items that had in fact happened, with the implication that these news stories were very important to him and I was really bad for suggesting that it had been a slow week.

He started his Facebook troll-comment¹ with the phrase “Not so…”

It turns out that² I can’t hear or read a comment that starts with “Not so…” without getting real annoyed because it is a verbal expression that has extra meaning to me.

This extra meaning comes from a guy I knew when I was very young. Ten years old plus or minus one, I would say. He was a man of about twenty two who did his hair and beard up to look exactly like the standard Western depiction of Jesus Christ. One time, while staring at my aunt, who was a Franciscan nun, he simply said to her “Do I remind you of someone?” She thought for a moment and answered “Yes, actually, you remind me of a DJ I know in Hawaii,” and kind of grinned.

Anyway, he was trying to court my sister, and he was a councilor at the boys camp next to the state camp ground my family would live on for the months of May and June most summers. No matter what I ever said, he’d respond “Not so…” and then tell me how I was wrong.

I was rarely wrong, so this was especially annoying. I was just a kid, and he was Jesus Christ, so he probably figured I was wrong all the time by default, but little did he know that I was one of those obnoxious precocious smart kids who in fact had already read his first encyclopedia and was about half way through his second, which he was carefully and sincerely doing just so that some day he could say “Oh. Encyclopedias. Yeah, I read a couple of those…”

So, if you say “Not so … bla bla bla” to me I’ll rarely hear the bla bla bla, I’ll think of this obnoxious guy (well, I think my sister liked him, but she was a teenager at the time so that does not mean much) and I won’t be listening to the rest of your sentence. Rather, I’ll be pleasantly recalling in my mind the fate that eventually came to Jesus Christ. Which was, if you must know, this: The boys at the boys camp, many of whom had been sent there by their parole or probation officers, were also annoyed by Jesus Christ. So one day he walked in after lights out to make sure the kids were all in their bunks, and some kids dropped on him from the rafters of the crudely built dormitory, tied him up, and shaved off every bid of hair on his head. I think they even plucked his nose hairs out for good measure.

So, that what i’ll be thinking about. You, de-haired.

I have a more pleasant example: “That makes me laugh.”

Last night, I was having coffee with Lizzie, and we were talking about her life and her plans for the next few years, which could involve moving. So we were talking about how representative New York City was of the rest of the east coast, and this got me on to a topic I often bring up which is how to know a phrase or mannerism is particular to an individual, vs. regionally or subregionally used. When I first moved to Minnesota, I already knew about certain Midwestern mannerisms, because I had lived in the Midwest for a while a couple of years earlier. So when people started randomly talking to me in the video rental store, I knew this was a Midwestern thing. I quickly learned that Minnesotans, uniquely and to the exclusion of Wisconsinites, reversed the meaning of “yet” and “still” compared to people on the east coast.

But there were other things I was not so sure of, and several of these came from my BFF Stephanie, who is the first person who took the time and energy to really show me around The Cities. She would say, for instance, “that makes me laugh” quite frequently (but at appropriate times). I didn’t know at first if “that makes me laugh” was her or Minnesota or the Midwest. After a while I concluded that it was Stephanie. But then I met my wife and her sister, and they said it too, and then I noticed that occasionally Amanda’s brother says it, and I heard a couple of their old high school friends say it. So I now realize that this is a Western Suburb (Golden valley, Plymouth, Hopkins) thing of a particular generation. It probably spread among these folks in high school.

I don’t hear many people say “that makes me laugh” but I use the phrase myself in my writing. When I do, that means that I’m thinking of Stephanie. So now when you read my stuff, you’ll know that.

I mentioned all this to Lizzie, pointing out that she does not have any western Twin Cities mannerisms because she is from the eastern Twin Cities. As I said that, she was twirling the end of the single braid of brilliantly red hair that came down from her feathered head dress, which nicely complemented her shamanistic necklace and her home made little black dress. Then I thought … wow. Lizzie has no mannerisms. So that is the second unique characteristic that makes me think so highly of her. “Actually, I think all your mannerisms are from Berkeley, California. Have you ever lived there?” I asked her. “Not yet,” was her reply.³

There are a whole bunch of blogospheric expressions that have emerged fairly recently that invoke particular meaning for me. The phrase “to call one out” in one form or another is particularly annoying to me no matter who uses it because it invokes the idea of the self righteous judgmental twit who thinks it is his or her job to patrol the blosophere for people who say or do certain things (whether they really do or not), then drag those individuals into the public square for some kind of blogflogging. The negativity arises, of course, from the fact that the first twenty or so times I heard the expression, it was me that was getting “called out!”

“As it were” reminds me of an old friend who used that expression, with irony, all the time. The construction “it is doing” for the English habitual “it does” reminds me of two or three European friends and their semi-broken English. Walter Cronkite’s “And that’s the way it was” is almost identical to the Efe Pygmy expression that ends most short story segments. That makes me laugh.

Am I the only person who experiences mannerism flashbacks?

¹It is of note that I am very rarely annoyed by anything anyone says on facebook. But I am often annoyed by comments on my blog. I suppose on facebook … well, those are my friends.
²This expression always makes me think of Terry Deacon.
³That was totally paraphrased.