Mbuti Culture - 1130 Words

Mbuti Culture Micheal Smith ANT 101 Prof. Tracy Samperio September 24, 2012 Mbuti Culture Mbuti primary mode of subsistence is Foraging. A forager lives as hunter and gatherer. The Mbuti hunt and gather food from the forest, and they trade as well for survival. They are referred as hunter-gatherer. They are a small band of kinship groups that are mobile. All foraging communities value their lifestyle. The Mbuti show how their kinships, beliefs and values, and economic organization are the key for their forager culture. In the forager societies kinship is one of the key importance of the lifestyle. Mbuti are called the people of the forest, who believe they are the children of the forest. Their beliefs and values are very†¦show more content†¦They work hard to feed their families. They value the idea of a family and working together. That is why their leisure time is so important. Leisure time is used to spend time with the kin and friends, the foraging societies believe (Nowak and Laird, 2010). They work hard to find food and hunt for a couple of da ys and rest of the time is for leisure activities. The Mbuti have ritual that they do during their leisure time. They have a ceremony called molimo. It is performed by the men and is associated with singing and the use of a trumpet called the molimo (Nowak and Laird, 2010). The molimo ceremony used the molimo, a strictly forest institution, which young men are initiated after they have become successful hunters (Lee, pg. 244). This is how most of the leisure time goes to, the family. The forager culture has high value for working together and sharing (Nowak and Laird, 2010). Those values show how their economic organization works wells. They see economic importance as cultural tradition. This is how they survive also. It is easy for forager to move place to place because they don’t have many material items. That is what makes the exchange process so easy also. The reciprocal economic systems are a form of exchange of goods and services that occurs between members of a kinshi p group (Nowak and Laird, 2010). Foraging societies has a similar way of using this system. The amount of food and other resources occurShow MoreRelatedMbuti Culture Essays2460 Words   |  10 PagesIn the Congo, of Africa, lives a tribe known as the Mbuti. They are pygmies (dwarf like people) living in a luscious rain forest known as the Ituri. The Ituri Forest existed prior to the last ice age. The universe of the rainforest is one of purged sunlight below a lofty, expansive cloak of trees, where abysmal peace exists with the punctuating cries of the numerous birds and animals that share the forest with the Mbuti. 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