The God's Must Be Crazy Reflections

The God’s Must be Crazy

                1. In the film The God’s Must be Crazy, the coke bottle which falls from the sky symbolizes how we create meaning from our social life and base it on various symbols. In our modern world, we could equate this to brand name sunglasses or a sports care as symbolizing elevated financial or social status. In the film, the coke bottle was an extremely useful tool which could not be recreated. It quickly became a source of jealousy between the members of the bushman tribe, much like a member of a neighbourhood winning the lottery would do. The branch of social science which would examine this is primarily anthropology. Anthropologists frequently dig up and examine ancient or modern artifacts and try to explain or theorize their purposes in a society or culture. In the God’s Must be Crazy, the coke bottle is one of those artifacts. Obviously, a modern anthropologist would know what a coke bottle was, but someone from another planet might think it has a completely different use.

                2. In our society, we have numerous socializing agents with many variations for each one. Some of them are government run institutions, some are private, and some are religious. In our society, school is a very important and influential socializing agent. It is in school that we learn how to interact with one another, how to learn, and how to discover ourselves as people. The media is another very important socializing agent. The media teaches us slang and influences how we speak, it encourages us to dress a certain way, and decides what our interests are. In the bushman culture, there are much fewer socializing agents and they are much simpler. Since they have no centralized government, economy, or organized system of education, the socializing agents of the bushmen are much more related to their day to day chores and activities. For example, the bushman children play games together and learn to interact in that way. As they grow older, they learn to hunt and gather food which affects their roles in the community.

                3. I would prefer to live in our society. Although the bushmen have a simple and relaxed life, I would miss the perks of technology, the comfort of our modern world, and the potential for learning and achieving large scale goals. I think though that there are sometimes, and will continue to be times when I am stressed out about things, such as school or work, and I would gladly live in a society where those things do not matter. With the bushmen, there is no need to worry about money, material things, and commitments to oneself and others. The bushmen just live peacefully and happily, sharing what few possessions they have and helping each other out in any way they can. That to me would be a very good life, however it would be too simple at times and would not give the opportunity to fulfill all of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs according to me. With the bushmen, I would never be able to achieve self-actualization.