Prof: I see this is
largely,
but of course not exclusively a
female class,
and I know that's because of
the reputation of the class as
being very tough on men.
 
What have we learned about men
so far?
They're violent,
they contribute only a speck of
protoplasm to the next
generation, they help hardly at
all in child rearing.
 
In the Tuesday reading you
found that they're even afraid
of their wives,
and on Thursday how many of you
did the reading about the Na?
 
What do they believe about
man's role in reproduction?
Student:  Gardening.
 
Prof: Just do gardening,
they just water it.
That the baby comes totally
from the woman's substance and
men just have to water it
occasionally.
As you know water is water,
is water so it doesn't matter
which man waters it,
and they have a very
promiscuous sexuality.
 
Feeling very sorry for the
males, and I don't want them to
go through too much of an ego
crush,
I have to tell you that some
cultures indeed give credit to
males in all of this.
 
In particular,
the Barre tribe of Venezuela,
who are one of the isolated
tribes in the Venezuelan Amazon,
and they believe that a woman's
body is just a vessel and that
men do all the work of
reproduction.
The only limitation--the very
first act of sex must be between
husband and wife.
 
They have marriages but the
first copulation has to between
husband and wife because that
plants the seed,
and it's very important that
the seed belong to the husband.
Once he has planted the seed
the growing fetus is not done
with male need,
so the fetus obviously has to
be nourished,
it's keeping to grow has to get
the nourishment.
 
It doesn't get the nourishment
from the mother,
it gets it from semen.
 
The fetus needs a constant
contribution of semen all along
to make it grow.
 
The Barre claim that this is
very hard work for men to
support a pregnancy.
 
They have to have sex all the
time to do this and the women
are worried about wearing out
their poor husbands.
Now this is not just this
cultural-- just dreaming stuff
up, this has real empirical
basis and the Barre say,
'look it's obvious,
women grow fat during the
pregnancy,
while men they grow thin from
all their work,' so they have
good reasons for believing what
they do.
 
What's the solution?
 
Well they ask other men to help.
 
The husband--they don't want to
wear out their husband,
he's got to do a lot of stuff.
 
They ask other men to help,
and it's strange,
even though it is such hard
work, the men seem quite willing
to pitch in and help.
 
It's very nice,
it's very heartwarming that men
can, at least temporarily,
stop all this male/male
competition and help another guy
when his wife needs a little
nourishment.
 
When we get to discussing the
reproductive biology that
relates to abortion much later
in the course,
you will find that actually
Western scientific knowledge
does not go much beyond what the
Barre understood until about
1840 and well into the
nineteenth century.
That's--until then what--how a
fetus was formed,
what the male contribution was,
what the female contribution
was, was a big hot argument.
 
Some thought it was all woman,
some thought it was all male,
and they just had no idea.
 
Human fertilization was not
discovered until 1840 in the
West.
 
We were having the same
argument that the Barre do.
Furthermore--anybody know
approximately how long it takes
if a human couple wants to get
pregnant how long it takes on
average?
 
It's more like five months.
 
You'll hear--again when we
discuss abortion you'll hear the
reasons for that.
 
Actually, in that five months,
the husband gets the first
copulation,
but thereafter a lot of guys
have to help,
so by the time five months
rolls around,
the average for getting
impregnated,
an awful lot of guys have had
their seed in there.
 
Again, in actuality,
paternity is totally uncertain.
That is it comes right back to
the chimp story that the
community hangs together,
one reason because no one knows
anything about paternity.
 
Okay, last time I was
describing how all cultures have
mechanisms so that families in
fact only have about half as
many children of which they're
biologically capable.
Remember we did this
calculation and we found this 69
number and so forth.
 
I was in the middle of a story
and actually it's in your
reading.
 
It's reading for last Tuesday
about the Mae Enga of New
Guinea.
 
They believe,
the males and females both
believe, that the sexual fluids
and odors and emanations from
women are dangerous and even
lethal to men.
Hence, the men are terrified of
having sex with the women.
Now you read this in your
reading and you may again throw
it off as just one of these
cultural practices of primitive
people,
and that's not the way you
should approach this class.
 
You should--on the other hand
ask how does such a practice
arise?
 
What are its roots?
 
How does it help their culture
to survive?
The theory being that most of
the things that people are doing
have some role in helping them
in a difficult world.
As you know,
in chimps as in most human
societies,
they're exogamous,
that instead of the male going
out to mating,
the males stay together in one
community,
and the females go out to
mating.
The same is true with the Mae
Enga, and females transfer
groups.
 
Also we know that,
as in chimps,
in New Guinea each of these
tribes is always at constant
warfare with their neighbors.
 
They are truly enemies.
 
When women are exchanged
between neighboring communities
they don't travel very far;
they'll get killed if they
travel very far,
so the only people they know
are the neighboring communities
and someone from this community
will marry--
will get a woman from a fairly
neighboring community which
means getting a wife from their
enemy.
 
That's again very similar to
the chimp setup.
The Mae Enga are very much
aware of this,
as you've read,
'we marry the people we fight,'
and there's a lot of distrust
and fear of the enemy wives.
Because of that,
the husband does not sleep in
the hut with his wife and
children but sleeps in the men's
hut.
 
It's a male bonding sort of
thing rather than a male/female
bonding sort of thing.
 
Apparently culture has used
this distrust of the wife,
this fear of the wife,
as a mechanism for restricting
sexual activity.
 
Of course, the Mae Enga like
every other human has
tremendously strong sexual
drives but they're living on
very fragile ecological land and
they can't overpopulate it,
so they have to have some
mechanism of tamping down
reproduction.
 
This is one of the mechanisms;
the men don't even sleep in the
same house with women.
 
It's a rare event when the
women--when they visit the
women, a rare and dangerous
event and that keeps the
birthrate down.
 
Now in the reading,
there's a third point that's
very easy to miss because it's
just one little phrase and it
talks about how dangerous sex
is.
You remember who it says is
particularly vulnerable?
The young males are partic--she
remembers that.
The young males are
particularly vulnerable to these
dangers and so their health will
be undermined,
not only by frequent
intercourse with women,
but even by frequent contact
with women.
Of course the older men are
rather immune;
as you grow older you gather
immunity to this.
Now we know younger males are
driven very much sexually,
older males it cools down
somewhat,
and so here's this cultural
belief counteracting biology.
It's the inverse of what you
would expect.
You would expect the younger
men to have a lot of sex and the
older men to sort of tail off on
it, but what does it insure?
It insures the control by the
older, dominant,
mature men.
 
Again, it goes right back,
it's the Mae Enga;
it can be perceived as the Mae
Enga version of dominance
hierarchy in the chimpanzees.
 
Well there's an extended
description of this in the
reading which is wonderful,
which I hope you've already
done.
 
The--so far I've been
describing how culture,
communities push fertility up,
because,
if you don't get on average
eight or so children from each
woman,
the culture disappears,
but they also have to push it
down because if reproduction
goes too wild the children just
die.
I showed you data about inter
birth interval can't get too
short or the children just die.
 
Individuals--that's all from
the community perspective so
far--but individuals,
and individual families,
they have to adjust these
rules.
There's these cultural rules
which are usually very strongly
enforced,
but individual families
have--each has a different
situation and they have to
adjust the rules somehow to cope
with their individual situation.
Of course this leads to
conflict between what an
individual or an individual
family wants and what the
culture says you must do.
 
One of these examples,
I mentioned last time,
is post-partum abstinence,
that in many parts for instance
of Africa,
after a child is born there
will be three years in which a
woman is not supposed to engage
is sex.
 
Obviously, primarily a
mechanism for spacing births,
so that the children stay alive
and the woman doesn't get killed
from too much strain on her
resources.
Now if you think about that a
little bit,
you have a young woman,
young husband,
marriage is fairly young
generally,
the husband will be a good bit
older but still young and he's
facing--
the wife has a kid,
he has a kid,
and the wife is face--
the husband now facing three
years without any sex.
What is he going to do?
 
He's going to want to take a
second wife or maybe visit a lot
of prostitutes and spend money.
 
That's something that often the
wife--the first wife or second,
or third, or wherever she is in
the chain, will not want.
Sometimes she does want that
and we'll talk about polygamy
later and why women very often
choose to be in polygamous
relationships,
but very often she won't want
him to take another wife unless
he's got a lot of money he just
won't be able to help more than
one wife.
What does she do?
 
She has to figure out of way of
resuming sexual intercourse but
not get pregnant.
 
What does she use?
 
Contraception;
so surprisingly in Africa,
one of the major reasons for
the people accepting
contraception is not a desire to
reduce fertility as in most all
the rest of the world,
but a desire to resume sexual
relationships without getting
pregnant.
She has to do this not only to
protect herself because she
knows that if she has children
too often she wears out her
body,
and there's a reading on
exactly what certain groups in
Africa--
one group in Africa considers
this wearing out of the body.
Also, if she gets pregnant
right away the community knows
that she and her husband have
violated the taboo,
and there's very strong social
proscriptions against--
proscriptions against violating
the taboos,
so contraception which you take
privately is sort of the perfect
solution for women wanting to
return to sexuality but not to
get pregnant.
 
Another aspect which we
already--I just mentioned of
control of fertility is what I
call gerontocracy,
ruled by old folk.
 
The old folk can
monopolize--the older men,
can monopolize the sexual
activities of younger women,
and because they're not as
vigorous shall we say that
reduces--
is one mechanism for reducing
fertility.
 
One of the ways which came up
in one of the sections is the
idea of bride price.
 
Dowry is more commonly known is
where the wife's family pays the
husband, the husband or the
husband's family when the wife
gets married.
 
The reverse of that is called
bride price and it's much more
common then dowry in Africa.
 
In this case,
the man or the man's family,
or the man's side must pay the
father of the wife for
the--before he gets the woman.
 
It's sometimes in the West
considered buying the woman but
it really is not a buying
situation.
These bride prices can be very
high and a young man usually
does not have the money to buy a
bride.
Who controls the money of the
village?
Who controls the resources?
 
Why the older men who are the
village elders and control
everything.
 
They dole out very sparingly
the bride price to allow men to
get married.
 
This is like among the Maasai
of Kenya, very tall people with
a lot of popular press about
that.
And because the young men are
not getting married and there's
roughly--
equal numbers of males and
females,
that leaves a lot of excess
young girls,
fertile young girls,
and who gets them?
 
The older men go polygamous and
they can have several wives,
but remember for every man who
has more than one wife that
means there's another man that
has no wife whatsoever.
When you read the ethnography
of this,
the anthropologists who go in,
it's very clear that the young
men are held in a state of
sexual frustration and the young
men have ways that they talk to
each other,
and they are just on the verge
of rebellion.
The strategy of the older guys
is to keep these young men just
below that--
keep as much sex for themselves
but keep the young men from
getting together and rebelling.
They co-opt what we now
were--they co-opt the young guys
when the older more dominant of
the younger guys,
when things start to get out of
hand a little bit,
we now have bride price,
and you can go and get married
and that co-opts him and takes
him out of the cabal that might
start a small revolution.
 
This is all going on subtly,
often hidden within these
communities.
 
These are large--affects this
whole polygamist situation.
In much of West Africa almost
half of all wives are in
polygamous marriages and that
means about half of the men have
no wives whatsoever.
 
And in the 1920s--so a lot of
what I'm describing is
traditional culture and we all
know that the whole--
everywhere in the world is
changing very rapidly,
but you can't understand where
they're going unless you know
where they're coming from.
 
In the 1920s,
40% of the men got to be 40
years old without having been
able to marry,
so that's almost half your
population without
"legitimate sexual
outlet" until they're 40
years old.
 
Today, even today,
and this is from a few years
ago,
the median age of marriage is
still almost 30 and great
pressure and power from the
older guys is necessary to
maintain a situation like that.
They also leave sort of a
pressure valve on this whole
situation that they don't
totally suppress the sexual
activity of young men.
 
They turn a blind eye to a fair
amount of prostitution;
that's reasonably accepted,
and to "discrete access to
the younger wives of older
brothers or even of their
fathers."
 
Again there's the dominant
males who are sort of officially
in charge, but there's a lot of
extra stuff going on.
Again, it's the great ape kind
of pattern.
Even today, this story of the
dominant older males getting the
most sex has by no means
disappeared.
Now it gets a little more
unpleasant because this control
of population by pre- is very
often post-pregnancy.
We've described so far all
kinds of pre-pregnancy
mechanisms reducing sex,
etc., but women still get
pregnant and very often they or
their families decide that they
can't have these children.
 
A lot of this is post-pregnancy
population control and even--and
post-natal also.
 
Abortion and infanticide are
common among--or have been
recently--among almost all human
groups.
Different communities and
different individual families
have a different amount of
resources and they must match,
in some way,
match their fertility to the
resources that are available.
 
This is a very discussed and
studied topic in population
circles,
so a few years back Karen
Mason, who was president of the
Population Association of
America gave a wonderful quote
about how people adjust their
family size.
 
"Parents kill their
infants,
abandon them,
neglect them in the hopes that
they will die,
give them into the care of wet
nurses where they usually die,
sell them, give them up for
adoption,
marry them off at a young age,
loan them to other families for
fostering,
send them into service,
or into other households,
send them to the military,
the merchant marine,
prostitution,
or send them overseas as
migrants."
 
All of these are very standard
mechanisms for individual
families controlling the number
of children that they have to
rear.
 
In Western culture it's
certainly not unknown,
the founding myth of Jewish
people?
Moses.
 
What happened to Moses?
 
He's a baby;
he's thrown in the basket,
floated down the Nile.
 
You go to China,
a very standard way of getting
rid of children--
everywhere--every culture that
has a river,
babies are put in baskets and
floated down the river as a way
of getting rid of them.
Of course the Bible story that
the Pharaoh's daughter finds
this baby floating down the
river and you can believe that
or not,
but obviously,
that sort of behavior of
putting a newborn infant in a
basket and floating him down the
river was apparently extremely
common at that time,
so the story wouldn't have been
surprising.
 
Student:  There is one
minor difference.
Moses mother didn't want to
kill him, on the contrary,
she wanted him to survive.
 
Prof: That's the story.
 
Student:  Yeah,
because the Pharaoh would have
had him killed otherwise--as all
the Jewish boys were killed.
Prof: Yeah,
if you read the
original--you're completely
correct, if you read the
original story it reads as if 1.
 
She wanted to keep him alive
and Pharaoh was going to kill
them all, and 2.
 
that she saw the princess sort
of on the other side of the
river and thought that the
princess would see it,
so you can interpret the story
as you want,
but it's a very standard
multi--many, many cultures,
cross-cultural mechanism of
infanticide and there it
appears.
 
What is the founding myth of
the Roman people?
Students:
 Romulus and Remus.
Prof: Romulus and Remus;
what's the story of Romulus and
Remus?
 
Student:  Raised by a
wolf.
Prof: Raised by a wolf,
so Romulus and Remus
twins--we'll talk about twins in
a moment, left out on a
hillside;
standard form everywhere in the
world of abandonment,
you know some animal will eat
it, but in this case the wolves
didn't eat the babies,
they suckled them and they came
up to found the Roman Empire.
Sure, so it's quite interesting
how many of the founding myths
have this abandonment story in
them.
With respect to twins,
for instance,
the Uwa tribe who were very
traditional,
isolated people in Columbia and
South America,
when they have twins they
abandon them in the forest or
toss them into the rivers,
and their cultural belief is
that they bring bad luck.
 
Of course in this situation
where a mother is undernourished
she probably is going to have
difficulty bringing up one
child,
and two is just kind of
impossible.
 
If she believes,
or the culture has sort of over
history figured out that the
children are going to die,
one or both of them,
then the amount of resources
put into trying to raise a child
who you know is going to die
anyway is just not acceptable.
 
Of course none of this is a
conscious calculation.
If you ask the people why
they're doing it,
they always give some kind of
religious or mystical,
or magical kind of
interpretation to this behavior,
but we can see it as one of the
mechanisms for having families
limit their fertility to what
they think they can cope with.
In addition to controlling the
rate of reproduction,
the control of population
continues after birth.
We haven't talked about
abortion, but during pregnancy
via abortion,
we'll get to that later.
Societies are also really very
careful about controlling the
number of child bearers and
they--
in England, for instance,
and we'll talk a little more
about this at a later time,
people couldn't marry.
The peasant on somebody's
estate could not get permission
to marry unless he had enough
property to support a wife and
children.
 
Very often this meant that he
couldn't marry until his father
died.
 
The father was living in the
house and he just had to wait
until the father dies and then
he was owner of this property,
then he could take a wife.
 
Well the father dies when the
guy is maybe 40 or late 30s,
and so that cuts down his
reproductive potential a lot,
and of course the wife that he
marries has not been married up
until then,
so her reproductive potential
has also been knocked down.
 
In many ways,
since the fertility of a
society basically does not
depend on the number of men,
it depends primarily on the
number of women.
We saw this--last time we
discussed the permissibility of
polygamy even with limitations
when a lot of men are dying in
war,
but this happens in many,
many situations.
 
In India, as you know,
traditionally it's almost never
practiced nowadays.
 
A man dies, what happens to the
wife?
Sacrificed on the funeral pyre.
 
Again, there's all kinds of
religious and cultural
explanations for it which the
people will tell you,
but standing back from it among
other things,
it's a way of controlling the
birthrate of the population.
Sometimes in a single
geographical setting you can see
the two different things working
together.
The Mae Enga,
which you've already heard
about in New Guinea,
they live in an overpopulated
territory.
 
They are pressing up against
the ecological limits of their
resources.
 
The women are severely degraded;
funerals are held to honor men
and pigs, but not women or
children.
If a husband dies,
if a man dies,
his widow is strangled within
24 hours of his death.
On the same island,
New Guinea, the Fore people
have a different problem.
 
They have kuru,
which we now call Creutzfeldt
Jakob Disease,
a prion that destroys the brain
so they have a very high death
rate and their territory is
quite under populated;
they have great difficulty in
getting enough people to stay
alive.
In that culture,
where everybody is scarce,
they mourn women and children
as much as men;
they encourage premarital sex,
and widows are not killed but
immediately courted for
remarriage by the men.
Again, this is a society when
you're way below the limit,
then you want to keep a woman's
womb full and you want to keep
them reproducing.
 
I've told you this mechanism
for reducing the number of child
bearers is severe,
very severe around the world,
and I mentioned and you'll hear
it again,
that the estimates that there
are by various mechanisms of
discrimination against women,
there's a hundred million women
missing in the world and this is
a big part of the global control
of population.
 
We've seen some people and a
lot of the popular discussion
thinks that fertility control,
contraception,
all that is a new thing that's
burst in 1960 or something when
the pill was invented--
that it just burst on the world
and some people think it's
wonderful and some people think
it's immoral,
but in fact,
cultures have always had
mechanisms for controlling their
fertility.
 
They've often been more brutal
then what we currently have.
I want to shift gears a little
bit.
It follows along the following
way: so we've been talking about
the way people regulate their
fertility.
What is the main limitation on
fertility?
Well it's often food,
and food depends on how much
land you have.
 
Most of what we read in history
and what we're used to thinking
of human society has to do with
very crowded places from Europe,
or China, or India.
 
In historical times all of
these places have had very
high--historically
compared--very high,
even dense populations.
 
In all of these cultures you
have masses of peasants without
any land,
landless peasants,
called land hunger,
everybody wants land and there
isn't land for it,
they fight over land,
if you manage to own land,
you're going to be very rich
from land,
you don't have to work it
yourself,
there's always plenty of
landless peasants that can do
the work for you,
and so forth.
 
This is pretty much true
of--pretty much the characters
of recent human history,
but for most of human history
that was not true at all,
the opposite was true.
The world was open and there
was plenty of land available.
We were not a numerous species;
we had almost no population
growth rate, and so what was
scarce was not land,
land was plentiful,
but what was scarce was people
to fill up the land.
 
Cultures have been aware of
this problem,
as well as the opposite
problem, but this problem for a
long time,
so one of the great Chinese
philosophers,
Mo Zi (Mo Tzu) fifth century
B.C.
 
wrote, "What is hard to
increase?"
He's talking about politics and
everything, "Only people
are hard to increase."
 
He argues--he says that there
are policies which can increase
population.
 
"The kings of old required
that all men marry by the age of
19 and all women marry by the
age of 14.
Now those who want to marry
early marry at 20;
those who want to marry late,
marry as late as 40.
We can expect two or three more
children to survive if we were
to reduce the age of marriage.
 
Through universal marriage we
should be able to increase the
population size."
 
This is his advice to the
rulers on how to increase the
population in their territory.
 
There's plenty of land,
that's not a problem.
They have to be strong because
there's neighboring warring
states,
they're always fighting with
each other,
if they don't have a big
population their neighbors will
come in and wipe them out.
Of course this idea that the
government should be an agent of
control of the population again
has not disappeared;
China does it now.
 
In the old days they wanted to
use the government and did
sometimes use the government to
increase the population.
China now wants to use it to
decrease the population,
but it's the same idea that
control in one way or another is
important for every society.
 
In this--the rest of this
lecture, we'll see how long it
takes;
we're going to talk about under
population of places.
 
The examples are largely going
to come from the tropics,
and especially we're going to
talk about Africa,
and that is because until
recently the tropics have
generally not had a dense
population.
They have been what you might
call under-populated.
People were scarce.
 
Up to now we've been talking
about--
we talked about biological
determinants of population size,
of reproduction,
we've talked about cultural
determinants.
 
There's another whole big
factor: geographical
determinants.
 
And we're going to talk about
three very important
geographical determinants of
population size,
and largely we're using the
tropics as an example of this.
The tropics generally have low
agricultural productivity.
The great granaries of the
world are not in the tropics.
They have parasitic diseases
which are endemic,
and geographically they're
often isolated from the rest of
cultural worlds.
 
This is the--just a general map
of Africa and what you see is,
this is very standard,
here is the equator and--
I'm sorry here is--no this is
the equator up here,
so what you have is in
Sub-Saharan Africa,
well in all of Africa,
you have in the center a rain
forest.
 
This is the very traditional
jungle and it's flanked north by
the Sahara Desert,
south by the Kalahari Desert.
Then here is another green zone
right along the ocean and the
very north,
this is Tunisia and Algeria,
Morocco--
just the coastal sections of
Africa are green,
they have rain.
We're not going to talk about
North Africa because that's
included in the Mediterranean
world, just culturally that the
Sahara Desert divides.
 
We're going to talk about
Sub-Saharan Africa.
You may note that these deserts
continue into Saudi Arabia,
then into the Sind Desert of
Pakistan and the Rajasthan
Desert of India,
and then the Himalayas
interrupt it but you get the
Gobi Desert up here and it
continues across and in the
Americas there's the Amazon
around the equator,
a very dense jungle,
and what's the desert to the
north of the Amazon?
The Sonora Desert of Mexico,
New Mexico, Arizona,
that desert is in the similar
geographical position to this,
it moves up and down.
 
What's the southern desert in
South America?
The Atacama Desert of Chile and
you go over the Andes and it's
not quite as desert but it's the
Pampas,
which is a very dry region in
Argentina,
so all over the world you have
this--
a central zone around the
equator which is extremely wet,
flanked by desert zones,
and then once out of the desert
zones you get a moderate
rainfall again.
Quickly, the reason for this is
quite simple.
This is the tropics,
heat comes down,
the hot air rises,
it's the hottest part of the
earth,
so the hot air rises,
bringing up the moisture from
the tropics,
as it rises it cools,
what happens as hot air-- hot
moist air cools?
 
Rain, so this is a very rainy
region.
Now the air has risen,
it's dropped out its moisture,
it's dry air,
the air that continues to rise
pushes it away,
so it goes either north or goes
south,
and it now by the time it
reaches somewhat farther away
it's cooled a lot,
it's dry because it lost its
rain, so now you have cool dry
air,
and because this region is
sucking air back in there's a
little bit of a vacuum,
the air falls back down as cold
from being up here,
cold dry air,
and you get the desert regions.
They happen in the north and
they happen in the south so you
get deserts here,
and you get deserts here.
This is just a characteristic
of the whole world,
and of course this is
interrupted by oceans;
this is interrupted by
something like the Himalaya
Mountains so there's a lot of--
it's not a perfect schema but
it explains an awful lot of the
geography of the earth.
In this schema,
as I've just showed you,
in Africa, look how much of it
is taken up with that schema.
It's from here,
from the north edge of the
Sahara Desert to the south edge
of the Kalahari Desert.
It turns out its 97% of Africa
or something;
93% of Africa lies in one of
those regions;
a very wet jungle or too dry
and you just have a very thin
region here,
and some region here,
which gets some of the monsoon
circulation of air,
of warm air out of the ocean.
 
We have the image of the wet
tropics anyway as extremely lush
and fertile and you think what a
wonderful place for farming.
It's a tropical paradise.
 
Actually nothing is farther
from the truth;
the tropics are generally very
difficult to farm and if you do
farm them, they're very poorly
productive regions.
Why is this?
 
How many of you are aware of
that, that the tropics are not
good for farming?
 
All you Forestry guys ought to
be aware of this.
The reason is that the soils
are very bad and they're bad for
a number of reasons.
 
Well let's go back a little bit.
 
Plant growth is very rarely
limited by sunlight.
What the tropics have is plenty
of sunlight but it's very rare
that that is the limitation on
plant growth,
so the most productive part of
the world is in terms of
bio-productivity?
 
The ocean around
Antarctica--very,
very cold region in terms of
intensity of sun,
every part of the world gets
the same number of hours of
sunlight in a year,
but the intensity around
Antarctica is very much less,
so there's very little
sunlight, yet you get these
tremendous algal blooms,
the krill eat them,
the whales eat the krill,
and it's a tremendous
productive region.
Why?
 
It has nothing to do with
sunlight;
it has nothing to do with
temperature.
You have Antarctica,
the continent of Antarctica,
which has rock down below it,
it's not like the North Pole,
there's rock there and the
glaciers slide down to the sea
and they grind the rock.
 
Where the glacier is
coming--falling into the sea,
underneath is a layer of what
they call glacier flour and
that's ground rock,
falls into the sea,
fertilizes the sea,
tremendously
valuable--tremendously nutrient
rich and then that circulates up
the west coast of Chile,
for instance the pacific coast
of Chile,
the Humboldt current you may
have heard of,
brings up all these nutrients
and the richest fishing banks in
the world are off Peru where the
Humboldt current comes up and
brings all these nutrients to
the surface.
 
All over the world nutrients
are almost always what limit
agriculture.
 
Well what's the story in the
tropics?
The soil may have started with
a lot of nutrients at some time
back,
but the rains come,
a huge amount of rain,
and what does rain do,
washes the nutrients back away.
 
In most places nutrients are
recovered by several mechanisms.
One is by mountains being
eroded down, that the mountains
erode.
 
In February,
I was in the Peruvian Amazon
and you're sitting there right
in the shadow of the Andes and
the rains come into the Andes,
erode the rock,
and parts of the Amazon have
rich water flowing through it
with the Andes nutrients.
 
Most of the Amazon is flat,
does not have any runoff from
the Andes Mountains,
infertile as hell,
no nutrients there.
 
How does the jungle--so you
have this nutrient poor soil,
if you go there you'll see the
soil is extremely thin.
You take your boot and you kick
it and a few--
an inch or two and there's no
soil left and if you look at the
trees,
what do the roots of tropical
trees often look like?
 
These huge things because
there's not enough soil to
support them on deep roots,
there's nothing down there,
so they spread out and
hopefully stay upright because
with these huge,
huge buttressed kind of roots.
Everything is telling you,
if you know how to look at
everything, it's telling you
that this is thin and poor soil.
Nevertheless,
there's all this biomass in the
jungle and the mechanism is that
the whole floor of the jungle is
covered with a fungus,
with a fungal mat,
when a leaf falls and it's wet,
and so then it's never--cannot
fall far from a fungus because
they're everywhere.
The fungal hyphae,
the sort of root of the fungus
in a sense, invades the leaf and
very rapidly sucks out its
nutrients.
 
What does it do with those
nutrients?
Well one end of the fungus is
attached to the decaying leaves
and other stuff that falls down.
 
The other end is attached to
the trees, and it gives these
nutrients to the trees.
 
Why is it so generous?
 
Well the trees must be giving
something to the fungus.
Well the trees are up there in
sunlight.
The jungle floor is dark.
 
The canopy of the forest let's
very little sunlight in,
so they can't photosynthesize
down at the bottom.
It's--there's not a lot of
grass and stuff under jungle
trees.
 
The trees make the sugars
through photosynthesis,
they send them down,
pass them to the fungus,
the fungus decays and
everything else sends the
nutrients back up into the tree.
 
It's a wonderful cycle and so
basically all the nutrients are
up in the jungle canopy,
up in the forest,
not in the soil.
 
This stuff, this decaying
vegetable matter is the source
of fertility and you measure how
much of it there is,
and the productivity of the
soil depends very closely to the
percent and depth of the humus,
this stuff is called humus in
the soil.
 
In tropical soils it's less
than 2% of the soil that things
live in is humus.
 
In temperate soils it's always
over 10%;
in upper New York state or Ohio
it's 10% to 12%,
and the richest Iowa farmlands
it's up to 16%.
So you can see the productivity
of Iowa is just going to be--
just from the soil
consideration--there's going to
be an awful lot greater than the
productivity of the Amazon.
Another thing is the rapidity
of decay aside--
anything that the fungus
doesn't get,
which is rare,
decays by bacteria and maybe
other fungi that don't feed the
trees.
It's hot, it's hot all the time
in the Amazon,
and what does temperature do to
chemical reactions?
Speeds them up,
so for every ten degrees warmer
the chemical reaction in general
goes twice as fast.
In a jungle floor--in a jungle
you'll have maybe 30 degrees
higher than New York state,
than Ohio, or Iowa so that's
two, four,
eight--decay will go eight
times as fast as in say New York
or in my backyard;
to say nothing of the absence
of the winter where decay
basically doesn't happen at all.
 
I know I make a mulch pile and
it takes four years.
When I put in a leaf,
four years later it's down to
good soil,
and then takes more years,
I don't know how many before
that turns all back to carbon
dioxide and water.
 
The whole thing is organic;
the whole thing eventually goes
away.
 
In a jungle it happens much,
much more quickly.
To summarize all this,
this is--you've got to have
some biology in this course.
 
What is--which is more fertile,
the Sahara Desert or the Amazon
Basin?
 
The answer is really surprising.
 
There's a quote,
"Annually millions of tons
of dust from the Sahara are
blown by the northeast trade
winds,
thousands of kilometers across
the Atlantic Ocean.
 
There they settle upon the
Amazon.
Some scientists suggest that
this is one of the major sources
of soil nutrients for the poor
soil of the Amazon."
It's really--and not a mild
situation;
it's very extreme,
if nutrients from the Sahara
can blow a few thousand miles
and drop in and be a very
significant source of nutrients
for the Amazon.
Now, what happens if you try to
farm this place?
Try to farm in a jungle,
what do you do?
Well you have to chop down the
trees, right?
Now mind you,
I told you that the forest
floor is moist and dark,
and if any of you have been
there, you'd know that it's very
striking.
You're not boiling at all.
 
Now you cut down the trees;
the sun now beats down,
the tropical sun can be quite
brutal and it dries out the
soil, it bakes the soil.
 
What dies?
 
The fungi die because fungi
need coolish and moist
environment.
 
They die, your means of
recycling nutrients is gone;
the soil has very little
nutrients itself.
What have you done with the
trees that you chopped down?
If you're a commercial
agriculture place you ship them
down river to a saw mill,
so the nutrients that are
there, they're taken away.
 
The secret of what's called
Swidden agricultural,
slash and burn agriculture,
is that yes they do chop down
the trees but in a very local,
very small plot of land,
and they burn the trees in
place and that puts the ash as
the mineral nutrients which are
so missing and that fertilizes
the soil.
 
It's not wonderfully efficient
but it does work if you keep
your plot small because then the
fungus,
which is killed there,
can reinvade from the
surrounding trees.
 
You start doing commercial
farming with many,
many acres of spread then
there's no way that soil is
going to regenerate.
 
How does this work out?
 
For instance,
in the Yucatan of Mexico,
the Maya lived there for a very
long time.
In the sixteenth century,
a Franciscan bishop Diego de
Landa,
who was--he wrote everything,
everything we know about the
pre-colonial Mayan existence
comes from him.
 
The Yucatan,
this is from him,
"The Yucatan is the
country with the least earth
that I have seen,
since all of it is one living
rock,
and has wonderfully little
earth."
 
When you read all these
chronicles they always are--
they're speaking always of
famines in the Yucatan because
there's so little productivity
and how do they avoid the
famines,
and this is again before the
Spaniards came.
 
They take care of their--they
have exports which they exchange
for food from better regions.
 
What do they export?
 
Honey; which you don't have to
farm, salt which you don't farm,
and slaves.
 
That's another use for
"excess people"
and controlling your
population, you sell them as
slaves.
 
You look all over the
pre-modern world and of course
you know it's not gone in the
modern world,
slavery is a very big thing and
a very big part of what happens
to population.
 
We'll talk a little bit about
that later.
Well let me say it now as long
as the topic came up.
What is slavery a response too?
 
It's very relevant to this
lecture--under population.
You don't have enough laborers
so you import slaves.
In the middle of Europe,
where you have teeming
populations, or India,
or China, are you going to have
an awful lot of slavery?
 
No, there's no land for them to
be utilized.
Slaves get used,
like in the Roman Empire,
not as farmers;
there were hordes of Romans,
peasants that would love to
have some land to farm.
They're used in the mines;
there were household slaves,
sex slaves, in the mines.
 
The Arab countries took a lot
of slaves through Madagascar and
continental Africa;
household slaves,
sex slaves, somewhat in the
mines but they didn't have that
many mines.
 
Slavery is a response to under
population.
Where do you get huge slavery?
 
When you discover the new world
and how you have this very thin
Indian population in these
worlds,
largely because we killed them
with diseases as you either have
read or will read.
 
You have an under
populated--two under populated
huge continents with much good
land,
you first in Western--in
history first you try to enslave
the Indians,
the Indians don't do very well,
they die out,
so you stop that and you import
African slaves who manage to
stay alive.
Slavery itself is a response to
under population.
It fits exactly into what I am
talking about.
Wherever you see massive
slavery you're going to find
under-population,
you're going to find areas of
land that have nobody on them,
and someone can,
by military force,
capture people and force them
to work for themselves.
 
There's many other reasons why
the tropics are hard to farm.
Where are the grain belts in
the world?
What do you know about--where
is grain grown?
Where is the really rich places?
 
Anybody?
 
Student:  US.
 
Prof: U.S.,
where in the U.S.?
Student: Midwest.
 
Prof: Midwest,
upper Midwest,
Iowa, Kansas,
Minnesota.
Does it go north of the U.S.?
 
Student:  Yes.
 
Prof: Yes,
Saskatchewan,
Alberta, way the heck up there,
you have this fabulous
production of grain.
 
You see pictures of northern
Saskatchewan in Canada with the
big grain reapers.
 
China, where are the great
grain fields of China?
Wheat--up in Manchuria,
goes up the northeast of China,
is all grain,
all wheat, way up into
Manchuria,
and Manchuria goes up it's more
or less the same as Alberta and
Saskatchewan.
In the south you don't get your
great grain growing regions in
the tropical region,
certainly not in the desert
regions.
 
You get them--Morocco,
for instance,
has very productive agriculture
right on the coast where it's a
wet region.
 
That's not very far north,
and down in South Africa,
and Africa just doesn't go that
far south.
In South America you get it
down in Argentina,
so again--so there's something
that agriculture gets more
productive the further north you
go,
with a limit of course,
it doesn't go into the tropics.
Why should that be?
 
That goes contrary to our
expectation.
Again, the reason is
biologically rather simple.
During the daytime,
plants take in the sunlight and
make sugar, make energy.
 
They also respire,
they also have to run their own
machinery,
so they're also using energy,
using sugar all the time,
they use it day and they use it
night.
 
Now the sun goes down and
photosynthesis shuts down,
but respiration continues,
they have to keep themselves
alive at night just as we do,
we don't stop breathing when we
go to sleep.
 
The ratio between daylight and
nighttime, how many hours of
daylight and how many of
nighttime is a very important
factor in plant productivity.
 
In the tropics what's the ratio
of daylight to nighttime the
whole year round?
 
Student:  1:1
Prof: About 12/12,
about equal.
 
What is it up in Saskatchewan
or Manchuria?
Daylight, daylight,
daylight, very little
nighttime.
 
The plants have so many more
hours in which they're
photosynthesizing and much
smaller amount of time where
they're not photosynthesizing
but still respiring.
That's one big factor why you
get these grain belts going up
north.
 
Also temperature,
how much energy does it take
you to just keep yourself alive?
 
Well we've just said,
all chemical reactions go--
every ten degrees they more or
less double,
so respiration plants the
warmer they are,
the more respiration they have.
 
At nighttime it's still warm,
so everything is working rather
fast in the tropics.
 
In Canada, it's a lot of sun
during the day,
but it cools off at night,
and so respiration is at a very
low level.
 
The productivity of a plant is
the balance between its
photosynthetic productions,
it's production,
and its respiration,
use of that produce for its own
purposes.
 
There's a big difference in the
ratio in the north from Iowa to
Saskatchewan,
or from the Yangtze up into
Manchuria,
that ratio is just much better
than it is in the tropics.
 
We won't continue too much with
this.
We can also talk about the
diseases that--
in tropical regions you get
Malaria,
you get a whole bunch of insect
borne diseases,
tsetse flies carry sleeping
sickness, etc.
One to two million Africans die
of Malaria every year and that's
about the same number as AIDS.
 
Malaria and Aids are about
equally devastating to a
population.
 
It's about 11% to 22% of all
deaths in Africa are Malaria
deaths.
 
Yellow fever,
Leishmaniasis,
bilharzia , roundworm,
hook worm, the number of
parasites that live in tropical
regions is enormous and very
often they kill humans and
make--
they can't go in there to farm
because they'll die.
Why are the tropics so much
more susceptible to disease,
this kind of disease,
insect born stuff than the
northern regions?
 
It's a simple factor, winter.
 
Winter kills insects,
it kills them massively,
very hard for insects to not
freeze to death over the winter.
Tropics don't have winter so
it's a whole class of problems;
they dry out,
the winter is extremely dry,
they go desiccate and freeze
and it's very--organisms kill
them.
 
In the tropics,
nice all the time,
insects just have a good time
and they can evolve,
use their evolution to attack
animals and people much better.
All of this really adds up and
geography counts and people have
to adapt to the geography.
 
In this case the adaptation is
to an under-population and I'm
going to show you--
 
well just to give you an idea
of how densely populated Africa
is or isn't,
here are some European--some
non-African places.
 
Netherlands is one of the most
crowded in the world;
1,011 people per square mile.
 
Japan: 870, but that's--in
terms of arable land Japan is
mostly mountains.
 
They just have very small areas
where people can land,
so to compare the Netherlands
are all flat,
people can live everywhere.
 
But if you want to compare this
to that they're probably--per
arable land where it's more
crowded than the Netherlands.
Belgium same as here,
India, China and again China is
the same thing,
they have the whole Himalaya
Mountains in the west,
the whole huge dry regions in
the north,
Tibet--Mongolia and the
northwest regions so this is way
an underestimate for China.
Mexico has a lot of desert,
looks fairly under populated,
but a lot of that is because
you got desert space.
Now you go to Africa,
Nigeria one of the most densely
places is 346,
that's not extreme.
Since Nigeria it's all--no
mountains, no deserts.
In principle all of this land
could be used so that's a real
number,
whereas, the Chinese number you
should multiply it by a factor
of three,
it's about a third of the
Chinese land that's actually
arable,
so China is ballpark 1,000 and
Nigeria is about a third of
that.
Kenya is down--again Kenya is
pretty much all livable,
and they have a low population.
 
Madagascar's all livable.
 
Angola is all livable.
 
Mali and Niger have deserts so
those numbers have to be
corrected.
 
Congo doesn't have deserts.
 
The point is that the
population density in Africa is
a lot less than other places
that we think are--
we don't think of Holland as
overpopulated,
but in terms of just a simple
people per arable land it
definitely is.
 
Africans, again,
we're looking at something that
has a big historical component.
 
I have to be careful when I'm
talking--what era of time I'm
talking about.
 
These are modern numbers I'm
going to show you but they
reflect people's attitudes that
have changed that are
appropriate for some time in the
past,
and only change very slowly.
 
This is Morocco on the coast,
this is not part of the
Sub-Saharan Africa zone.
 
This is very integrated into
the Mediterranean zone.
Almost everything you can say
about its culture,
it's really a Mediterranean
culture.
Look what's happened to its
fertility over time.
It was very high,
more or less equal to every
other place,
7.2 children per women and that
stayed the same,
but in recent times it's gone
down to less than half of that,
3.2.
This is not the most recent
data.
I wanted to show you a little
bit older data.
It's gone down even further.
 
That zone of North Africa,
Tunisia is at replacement
fertility level,
and North Africa has
characteristic of this.
 
Now I'm going to show you the
next country to the south which
is Mali.
 
I'm sorry Niger,
because Mali is also there,
but Niger is--when you go south
you cross the Sahara Desert and
you're in Sub-Sahara and Africa.
 
Now look at its fertility,
this is even a little bit later
in time, and look at its
fertility rate,
it hasn't budged at all.
 
It's again, eight--seven,
eight children,
middle, eight children,
and it ends up here even more
then it was in 1950s.
 
It has not changed.
 
The fertility rate has not
responded to whatever it is
about modern times and we'll
talk about it a lot what has
caused fertility to go down.
 
Now one thing you can say is
how many women don't want to
have any more children,
and that, of course,
depends on the number that you
already have.
It gets up too--it starts women
have no children,
very few, most of them want
children, and they have one
child that's enough for two.
 
At two children already you
have like 40% of women already
saying, two children's enough
for me;
again this is Morocco in the
Mediterranean zone.
Then when you get up to six
children almost everybody says
enough.
 
The average for the whole
country is--that's like 53.3%.
More than half of the women
say, okay no more children,
and again this data is seven
years old, it's even lower now.
You compare this to Mali and
this is the number of women that
don't want any more children,
and I think the final there is
8.6 or something,
an enormous difference.
That no matter how many
children they have even--
this is eight--six and more
children,
still only a very few,
about a third of them say six
or however many I have,
six and over is enough for me.
This is in respect of those
two, you might say,
well Niger is a very poor
country, Morocco is not anywhere
near so poor,
it has something to do with
infant mortality.
 
This is indeed Morocco,
and look infant mortality has
come down quite a bit.
 
It's getting there and so you
say, oh well that's why
Morocco--
Moroccan's want and have fewer
children because they have a
better situation with infant
mortality,
but then you look at Niger and
not--
it's not as good as Morocco but
it's still come down quite a bit
and since then it's come down
further.
 
You expect--well you'd see some
response in the fertility levels
to that but you don't,
you don't see it at all.
What's the difference?
 
It's not religion.
 
So both Niger and Morocco are
Sunni Muslim,
and as far as I'm aware,
there's no big differences in
the interpretation of religion
there.
You see the same story in
Christian Sub-Saharan Africa
countries.
 
This is Tanzania,
again about the same years,
and basically no change in
fertility--a little drop in very
recent times.
 
Zambia is coming up next,
in Zambia it's--even went
higher and then it's down back
to where approximately where it
started.
 
This is characteristic.
 
It's not a religious thing.
 
There's something special about
Sub-Saharan Africa.
Even South America doesn't look
like this at all.
If you're in South America the
fertility is way,
way down.
 
There is something quite
special about Africa,
and we're going to have to try
to figure out what that is.
You'll read a really
interesting article by John
Caldwell which talks about a
whole culture of reproduction.
Again, Africa is a huge place,
has many different cultures and
we're just talking Sub-Saharan
Africa.
North Africa is a different
story;
South Africa we have the
European settlement,
that's another different story,
but the bulk of Central Africa
to some degree fits this.
 
You have places where you don't
have bad soil,
so in the tropics Java has
volcanoes, volcanoes replenish
soil.
 
The mountain slopes of Kenya
have good soil from--again from
volcanic soil.
 
The stories there are a little
different.
In general, we're talking about
those parts in Africa where it's
hard to stay alive,
it's hard to get a population
going that we're--
that places traditionally under
populated and just now with
Western medicine are the
population rates coming up to
where you might consider it
crowded.
 
A place like Nigeria now is
certainly crowded.
In Africa, reproduction is at
the core of--the central core of
traditional culture.
 
Their religious ideas are all
tied in, very--essentially,
with reproduction in the
lineage itself that means your
line of ancestors.
 
The prime duty of a human,
in this cultural setting,
is to reproduce the lineage,
keep the lineage going.
This is not at all unique to
Africa.
In Indonesia I saw there was an
awful lot of this going on and
I'll talk about other examples
of it.
It's very pronounced in Africa
but not in any sense unique.
The idea is that--one of the
ideas is that when a man dies he
doesn't just disappear.
 
We have a nice funeral service
and say bye-bye,
and maybe once a year we come
and give flowers onto the grave,
but we have no sense that that
person is still around.
In these traditional parts of
the world the person lives on in
kind of shadow world,
but he can communicate with his
descendants.
 
That's often not very
difficult, and he's dependent on
his descendants for sustenance.
 
If they don't feed him and give
him what he needs in the
afterlife he is in big trouble.
 
If a man does not have
descendants then he really
doesn't get anything when he
dies.
Again, I saw this in Bali
enormously, where there was
enormous effort to bring
offerings to the recently dead
ancestors.
 
They're very,
very sensible about it.
You see in Bali the women
carrying these--
they're beautiful in their
beautiful dress,
and they have these huge
platters on their heads filled
with the most delicious fruits
and arranged just gorgeously,
and they bring them to the
temple and the ancestors can
partake of them,
and the next day they come and
take it home and eat it,
because they understand that
the ancestors are getting
spiritual not the physical
stuff.
 
So they leave it there and then
the ancestors can take what they
get out of it,
and then the humans can take
what they get out of it,
so it's not wasteful.
Every store and every house
will have a little--every day a
little thing out in the front
with a little bit of grain and
everything.
 
The dogs come by and eat it.
 
Of course the dogs come by and
eat it, but that's okay.
The ancestors have taken,
and the spirits have taken what
they want out of this.
 
In temperate zones we associate
religion and our culture--
big empires,
big states, the United States
is huge and any western country
population is large compared to
say a Balinese Village or an
African Village.
Religion is big.
 
How many billions of Christians
are there, how many billions of
Muslims are there,
of Buddhists and Hindus,
we got everything--everything
is big.
In Africa, in a sense,
each family's ancestors are its
gods, and both traditional and
political authority,
and religion are very,
very local affairs.
They're not agglomerated into
big things.
No one expects the people in
this village to worship the same
as the people in the next
village.
There isn't so much the idea of
a central monotheistic type of
god which is--that comes up when
you have empires.
You have a central emperor and
you have a central god.
When you don't--when your
political thing is just your
village,
again traditional times,
there's no concept,
no need to have these either
central political leaders versus
central religious gods.
Immortality for you is provided
by your descendants.
Immortality is very local;
it's your own descendants.
That changes in Western
religion, especially in the
Muslin Judeo-Christian
tradition.
It's the religion,
it's God that gives you
immortality.
 
It's not your descendants,
so everybody's interested in
immortality;
it's very important whether you
go to heaven or hell and so
forth.
The huge shift is whether it's
given to you by your
descendants,
whether they take care of you
and give you a kind of
immortality,
or its given to you by your big
mega-religion,
which tells you what you have
to do in order to gain
immortality.
 
When a person dies,
there again,
they don't go off to a distant
heaven,
they stay right locally and
gradually after a few
generations they kind of
disappear into the mist and they
have a very careful departure.
 
Again, in Indonesia,
again comparing tropical
regions, one of the big islands
is called Sulawesi or Celebes as
we say in Western languages.
 
Again, in many different
cultures, but in some of them a
person dies, you don't want to
disturb that person because they
can do bad stuff to you.
 
You swaddle them;
he's going to rot,
so you got problems,
you give him swaddling clothes
and you sit him in a chair,
him or her, in a chair right in
his own bedroom,
right where they live in houses
sort of,
thatch houses,
and they sit there for a long
time and gradually as they
decay,
they smell, they take off the
swaddling clothes,
get rid of that and swaddle
them up again until they're down
to bones.
And then they're taking up--so
they're not disturbed,
by that time they're ready,
they don't have their flesh
anymore,
they're ready to leave,
so they take them to these big
cliffs overlooking the village,
and there's caves,
natural caves in the cliff,
and the dead bodies are brought
up there to sit,
and look down over the village,
they're not very far away.
It's really quite wonderful.
 
I was in Bali stumbling around
under funny circumstances in a
cemetery, and all these graves
were open.
I said, what's going on are
they expecting--have they dug an
awful lot of graves expecting
everybody to die soon?
No, it turns out that a rich
man had just died.
Now the poor people want to
provide for their ancestors in
the next life but they don't
have money;
they don't have any stuff,
so they bury him and they wait
until a rich man dies.
 
Then a rich man has this huge
procession.
They're wonderful things to see
with big caskets,
and big chariots,
and all this--just wonderful
preparation and he's very rich
and the rich man's body is
thrown into the ocean and all
kinds of stuff is thrown into
the ocean to support this rich
man in his afterlife.
Well, the poor people,
and it's quite okay because
it's a very communal culture
Bali,
very supportive of poor people,
they dig up their bodies,
and they bring them in the same
time the rich man is put into
the ocean.
 
Poor people are put into the
ocean.
They partake of all of this.
 
What happens the next day,
of course the ocean--
all the coins and what not have
come up on the beach and the
rag-pickers,
the really poor people come by
and collect all this stuff.
 
It has--this cultural act of
burying the rich,
not only does it equalize the
afterlife of the rich people and
the poor people,
but the very poorest people who
are still alive get some income
out of it as well as of course
everybody who prepares the
funeral.
It's a wonderful sort of way
that everything sort of hangs
together as they usually do in
cultures.
We will continue next time.
 
