For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. (Rom. 12:3 NRSV)

As a teacher an introductory Cultural Anthropology course, I assign some entertaining readings, one of which is Richard B. Lee’s "Eating Christmas in the Kalahari."1

Lee reports learning a hard lesson while studying the hunting and gathering economy of a community of "Bushmen" of the Kalahari desert region in southern Africa. (Think of the people depicted in the film, The Gods Must Be Crazy.) His project required that he refrain from giving or sharing food in order that he not interfere with their traditional patterns of food gathering. His restraint allowed him to get good data, but at the cost of seeming a stingy miser to the Bushmen, who customarily shared with each other whatever they gathered and the meat from every kill.

As his fieldwork came to a close, he tried to make amends by using what had become, since the advent Christian missionaries in the early 1800s, a Christmas custom. One or another of the pastoralists in the area of the watering hole where Lee camped would slaughter an ox for a feast of goodwill toward his Bushmen neighbors. Lee decided to find the biggest, meatiest, fattest ox in the territory to give to his Bushmen consultants.

After weeks of watching the herds, he finally spied a huge, twelve-hundred-pound animal that he was sure would provide at least four pounds of meat for every man, woman, and child of the Bushmen bands. Food consumption calculations were, after all, his specialty. With ten days to go before the great feast, he bought the ox and asked the pastoralist owner to keep it with his herd until the time of celebration.

Lee was completely unprepared for the Bushmen’s reaction. Delegations came to him to complain of how scrawny, old, and worthless his ox was. Everyone he consulted told him the same thing. Wisecracks about his big bag of bones filled the days before the feast, which everyone now said was going to be a bleak, depressing affair. One elder warned him quite somberly that the scarcity of meat on the old beast was likely to result in fights among various bands of Bushmen. Lee began seriously to consider creeping away from the watering hole before the predicted Christmas debacle.

But then Christmas came, the ox was slaughtered, and it made as fat and rich a feast as any Bushman could possibly have wished. Lee challenged one of his previous tormentors:

"Hey … that ox is loaded with fat. What’s this about the ox being too thin to bother eating?"

"Fat? You call that fat?" the Bushman shot back, "This wreck is thin, sick, dead!" And then he and his fellows laughed so hard they rolled on the ground.

Lee was not laughing. He spent the next several days finding out why he had been the butt of such an elaborate, effective, and, well, malicious joke. He discovered that he had only been treated like a Bushman. This was the way they always talked about hunts and kills, to each other as much as to outsiders. Why insult a man after he has gone to the trouble to track and kill an animal and share the meat, Lee queried.

Arrogance, was the reply. When a men kills much meat, he tends to think of himself as big man or chief and to regard his fellows as his inferiors and servants. The Bushmen cannot accept such pride, so they deride his meat as worthless. "This way we cool his heart and make him gentle."

Lee slowly realized that his wealth of unshared food and his control of other resources made him a perfect target for the Bushmen’s way of enforcing humility. After all, killing an animal and sharing the meat was something all Bushmen did for each other all the time, and with a lot less show.

My students and I enjoy this story as much for its humor as for its instructiveness. This year, however, a thoughtful student remarked, in writing, that the Bushmen were addressing what seems to be a universal human motive and problem, and she asked what we do about the problem in our culture. I realized, on reflection, that our market-driven culture demands we do the opposite of the Bushmen. We must cultivate pride, not cool it. Of course we call it by a prettier name: self-esteem.

You must have self-esteem in our culture and economy, otherwise, you won’t do as well on those all important exams that get you into the schools and programs of your choice. Without self-esteem you cannot shine in the meetings in your office or on your management team. Without self-esteem you won’t impress the professors, bosses, supervisors, older colleagues that hold the key to your career advancement.

Indeed we know that without self-esteem, you will be depressed. This finding of social psychological research creates a conundrum because such research reveals at least certain aspects of self-esteem to be self-deception. Some studies have found that people in American society are less likely to be depressed the more likely they are to have unrealistically high opinions of themselves—as measured by the opinions of those who know them best: their friends, roommates, and families. People who assess themselves pretty much in line with the perceptions of their friends and family are more likely to be depressed. Our culture of self-esteem—read, Pride—is also a culture of at least a certain amount of self-deception.2

In a society where the market makes everything and everyone into a commodity and commands everyone to look out for "Number One," this power of positive self-deception is something we cling to for psychic survival. It makes it difficult, however, for us to hear the Apostle Paul when he exhorts the Roman Christian "not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think."

Paul was trying to teach the church at Rome what it means to live together and depend on one another as the diverse members of the unified Body of Christ. Richard Lee’s Bushmen friends were teaching him what it meant for them to depend upon one another for sheer physical survival in an environment where they could provide for themselves only a day at a time.

For all the cultural difference and geographical distance that separates Western Christians from Kalahari Bushmen, however, I suspect Lee’s tale can teach us that, just as the Bushmen needed their fellows, so we Christians need our fellow church members, especially those we find least congenial, to keep our natural self-regarding biases in check. We may hope that our church fellowship will involve customs less brutal than those Lee encountered, but even if not, we separate ourselves from our fellows at peril of falling into spiritual self-delusion.

Notes and References

1. In James Spradley and David W. McCurdy, eds., Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, 10th ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000), 27–34.
2. For an overview of "self-regarding bias" and other findings on "self-esteem" in modern psychology, see David G. Myers, Psychology, 7th ed. (New York: Worth, 2004), 607–14.

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