Interview about the Kalahari Bushmen

Yesterday, I interviewed Dr. Crandall, who teaches in the anthropology department here at BYU and teaches a class dealing with the Kalahari bushmen. I decided to record this interview instead of taking notes so that I could focus on the aspect of learning orally instead of being distracted by writing. The things I remember from listening to Dr. Crandall were:

1.  The clicking noises in the languages of the Bushmen are just sounds and, although they are interesting to us, they do not mean anything.
2. The Bushmen language is passed down like any other language: it is the language that the children learned while growing up.
3. The current theory about the descent of the Bushmen is that they came from Asia: not all the way from China, but Asia as it used to be known.
4. One way the Bushmen express themselves is through "mood songs". One example of this is a story of a man who's brother-in-law called out to him, but he did not respond. His brother-in-law could not find their camp until the next morning and the man felt so horrible that he wrote a song expressing his feelings.
5. There are more malevolent spirits that good spirits. 
6. The spirits of the dead sometimes stay downwind of their graves. 
7. Jealousy is like a sickness that has to be cured before it can be removed. 

When I went back and listened to the recording, the extra things I picked up on were mainly details of the points explained above.

1. The Bushmen at first inhabited a basically empty continent. They had to migrate to the deserts they now inhabit from the good lands of the coastal plains and mountains when the Bantu (most Africans are Bantu) and Europeans moved to the area and wanted the good lands to themselves. While Bushmen are hunters and gatherers, some believe that they may have, at one time, had cows and horses. 
2. We can't assume that the Bushmen languages were mutually intelligible, as different communities did not interact with each other very much.
3. The general beliefs of the Bushmen, although they vary through different communities (much as Christianity varies between different sects) are taught informally to their children. These "become ideas that they believe to be true about the world." Bushmen think of everything as part of the natural landscape. They believe that ghosts/souls spend some time downwind of the community from which they came and, some of the Bushmen have a ritual to help get them from land to sky.
4. Ups and downs in life create stress that, once it reaches a point, is impossible to get away from and becomes a sickness. An example of this is jealousy. The Bushmen try very hard not to show favoritism, but when jealousy happens, it becomes a sickness and must be gotten rid of by someone who has special powers. They know they are responsible for causing this "sickness" in the first place, but it will not leave on its own. Someone with the power to rid the people of this sickness will do a "trance dance" by going into a trance-like state and placing his hands on everyone's heads. This removes the evil feeling from the group. This represents a clearing of the path, and the jealousy is gone.

The part of the interview I remembered the most, without listening to it again, was the story. This explains why stories were a big part of oral knowledge: they were something that the listeners retained easily. I also realized that repetition helped me remember a lot more of what I was listening to. As I listened to the recording, I came across things that made me think, "Oh, yeah, I remember him talking about this." This is another aspect of oral knowledge that I have seen much of, both from studying the Bushman and listening to and memorizing parts of King Benjamin's speech. Repetition helps ingrain the message into the listeners mind more that it would have otherwise.