Peripheral Visions

extraordinarily skilled trackers, able to tell from tiny clues when the animal passed and how it was feeling, taking note of where it urinated, where it defecated, even of where it staggered and brushed against a bush. The veldt speaks to them in great detail, so rich in information that the difference from a city dweller’s vision of the same landscape must be like the difference between black and white and color vision. They read the whole condition of the animal they are pursuing from its spoor, as a modern physician might from an array of lab tests. The hunters, focused on the trail, knowing exactly what they are after, must move quickly because the quarry can cover a lot of country before it slows down. When the meat is eventually brought home, it will be shared with everyone in the band, providing a moment of celebration and excitement.
    If you are a San woman, you also set off with a small group of companions, but not with the hope of getting one large piece of meat. For a day of gathering, you will probably head to an area where nuts rich in protein, say, or wild melons are known to be found, but in the course of the day you may find and bring home a dozen different foodstuffs: roots, nuts, gourds, melons, edible insects, eggs from a bird’s nest, a tortoise, a whole variety of foods spotted along the way.
    Because the women move more slowly, they can talk and gossip through the day, whereas the men tracking are moving faster and doing less talking. Several of the women will be carrying nursing infants, and there is probably another child or two along, who refused to be left in someone else’s care back at the camp. Some of the children are more or less walking but need periods of rest and will probably ask to be picked up on the trip home, when everyone has the most to carry. In the meantime, the children on foot are zigzagging a little into the bush, so you are watching what each child is doing, looking up in the branches, scanning and checking along the ground for a burrow or a vine that betrays an edible root. Back in the camp women do a second shift, preparing food, looking after children and old people and the sick, carrying firewood and water—doing a variety of overlapping and enfolded tasks. If you imagine yourself as a San woman, you can get the sense of multiple focus that frees the men for the narrower focus of the hunt.
    The food that the women bring home is shared without fanfare in the immediate family. Nobody has a party about it—no one gives it that much attention—so it is not surprising that anthropologists took so long to notice its importance. The response to the food gathered by the women is reminiscent of the old notion of a woman as “just a housewife”: “not working,” not contributing to the GNP, achieving nothing worthy of notice. Nobody celebrates the fruit of her effort. Hunting skills are reserved for men; men do sometimes gather food on the veldt, but they do so unenthusiastically, gathering less efficiently.
    With contraception, alternative ways of feeding, and low infant mortality, we no longer need to let the division of labor be determined by reproduction. Men and women do a great variety of tasks, demonstrating a range of potential unexplored in the Kalahari, tasks that require myriad styles of attention. But the advantages that men have enjoyed and the extra value given to their contributions carry over in an extra value given to narrowly focused attention, to doing one thing at a time. The more our society moves toward specialization, the more women and men alike are forced to focus on single activities, living in narrow channels. Yet there are many reasons why less narrow attention, more peripheral vision, offers richer and more responsible living.
    My own habits of attention have been shaped by combining different roles. This is useful to me as an anthropologist, for in the field you never know what will prove relevant. Too narrow an attention to the obvious—a dead sheep, say—can make one miss something essential going on at the periphery, or block awareness of the intricate weave of culture. Other professions develop their own special patterns of attention. Employees and junior executives may be trained to attend to one thing at a time, but at the top the peripheral issues can never be fully dismissed, although they can be delegated or tagged for attention when they pass certain thresholds. A leader or chief executive has to include very diverse issues