A Culture Living Abundantly Without Money Today

Gender roles are distinct, but for women there is none of the forced subservience knit into many other cultures. A significant number of Hadza women who marry out of the group soon return, unwilling to accept bullying treatment. . . . 

The chief reason the Hadza have been able to maintain their lifestyle so long is that their homeland has never been an inviting place.  The soil is briny; fresh water is scarce; the bugs can be intolerable.  For tens of thousands of years, it seems, no one else wanted to live here. . . .

None of the other ethnic groups living in the area... are hunter-gatherers. . . . Many of them look down on the Hadza and view them with a mix of pity and disgust: the untouchables of Tanzania. . . .

No Hadza I met... seemed prone to worry.  It was a mind-set that astounded me, for the Hadza, to my way of thinking, have very legitimate worries.  'Will I eat tomorrow?  Will something eat me tomorrow?'  Yet they live a remarkably present-tense existence.

This may be one reason farming has never appealed to the Hadza--growing crops requires planning;  seeds are sown now for plants that won't be edible for months. . . . To a Hadza, this makes no sense.  Why grow food or rear animals when it's being done for you, naturally, in the bush?  When they want berries, they walk to a berry shrub.  When they desire baobab fruit, they visit a baobab tree.  Honey waits for them in wild hives.  And they keep their meat in the biggest storehouse in the world--their land. . . . 

Tanzania is a future-oriented nation, anxious to merge into the slipstream of the global economy.  Baboon-hunting is not an image many of the country's leaders wish to project.  One minister has referred to the Hadza as backward.  Tanzania's president, Jakaya Kikwete, has said that the Hadza "have to be transformed."   The government wants them schooled and housed and set to work at proper jobs. . . .

The school-age kids I spoke with... said they had no interest in sitting in a classroom.  If they went to school, many told me, they'd never master the skills needed for survival.  They'd be outcasts among their own people.  And if they tried their luck in the modern world--what then?  The women, perhaps, would become maids; the men, menial laborers. It's far better, they said, to be free and fed in the bush than destitute and hungry in the city.

More Hadza have moved... to Mangola... in exchange for money, they demonstrate their hunting skills to tourists. . . .  Yet among the Hadza of Mangola there has been a surge in alcoholism, an outbreak of tuberculosis, and a distressing rise in domestic violence, including at least one report of a Hadza man who beat his wife to death. . . .

There are things I envy about the Hadza--mostly, how free they appear to be.  Free from possessions.  Free of most social duties.  Free from religious strictures.  Free of many family responsibilities.  Free from schedules, jobs, bosses, bills, traffic, taxes, laws, news, and money.  Free from worry. . . .

The days I spent with the Hadza altered my perception of the world.  They instilled in me something I call the "Hadza effect"--they made me feel calmer, more attuned to the moment, more self-sufficient, a little braver, and in less of a constant rush. . . . My time with the Hadza made me happier.  It made me wish there was some way to prolong the reign of hunter-gatherers, though I know it's almost certainly too late. . . .

However, then Finkel explains why Hadza life isn't for him, mentioning negative aspects of Hadza life he sees:

But I could never live like the Hadza.  Their entire life, it appears to me, is one insanely committed camping trip.  It's incredibly risky. . . . About a fifth of all babies die within their first year, and nearly half of all children do not make it to age 15.

But he, like most of us in modern civilization, doesn't know how to handle death.  We think we have it conquered when we experience just as much death as the Hadza or anybody ever did or ever will.  We don't get it.  We are people of possession.  Loss of possession is death.  Finkel brings up the solution to the problem right before his eyes:

So, after two weeks, I told everyone in camp I had to go.  There was little reaction. The Hadza are not sentimental like that. They don't do extended goodbyes. Even when one of their own dies, there is not a lot of fuss. They dig a hole and place the body inside. A generation ago, they didn't even do that—they simply left a body out on the ground to be eaten by hyenas. There is still no Hadza grave marker. There is no funeral. There's no service at all, of any sort. This could be a person they had lived with their entire life. Yet they just toss a few dry twigs on top of the grave.  And they walk away.

Who is the Real Serpent in Eden?