ZEITGEIST ORANGE
It's a spring night in south-east Queensland, just before the rising of a slightly waning moon. A group of us are sitting in a field around the bright glow of a fire pit (no bans tonight) – adults, teenagers, dogs. We pass around snacks; we pass stories as well.
The fire's orange plays beneath this darkness, softening what we can see of each other's features in the same way this holiday has softened the speed at which we're living for a while and made it possible to see what's underneath our normal pace.
For American anthropologist Polly Wiessner, firelight provided a crucial impetus for the human work of storytelling. Through time spent with the Ju/'hoansi (the!Kung bushmen of Botswana and
Namibia) across more than four decades, Wiessner explored changes brought about by human control of fire on 'anatomy, social and residential arrangements', looking past the impact of fire on cooking to its impact on social activities and the development of human imagination.
Where earlier hypotheses suggested that stories grew out of a need to share information about resources, Wiessner focused on their function in terms of people understanding other people; of people finding ways of talking that stepped paper:
