Talking Taino: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective

11. The Chip-Chip Gatherers (2007)

11 The Chip-Chip Gatherers Chip-chip: a small shellfish found along the tideline of Trinidadian beaches. Gathering chip-chip is a weary task, bringing almost no reward. —Shiva Naipaul, 1973 In 1973, Shiva Naipaul, the brother of renowned author Sir V. S. Naipaul (Theroux 1998), published the aforementioned book in which he used chip-chip gathering as a metaphor for the futility of life. Chip-chips are tiny Donax clams that live in the sand along the tide line and used to be eaten throughout the Caribbean and southeastern United States.They are a delight to watch as they leave the sand with each passing wave, and then burrow furiously back into the sand as the wave ebbs, only to repeat this action with every passing wave. As Naipaul indicated, gathering and preparing chip-chip is a weary task. Each clam contains less than a gram of meat, and they must be quickly collected between each wave. Because these clams live in sand, their meat must be thoroughly washed after it is removed from the shell. The meat is then grated, which given its small size can be hard on fingertips, and then washed and strained to remove any remaining sand. The effort is worth it. If you are in Trinidad around the time of Carnival (chip-chip is only available in February and March), we strongly recommend that you make every effort to find a place that serves this tasty mollusk. The consumption of chip-chips has an ancient history. At the St. Catherine site that we excavated in Trinidad there were thousands and thousands of their shells in the midden (refuse) deposit. Although we don’t find chip-chip in archaeological sites in the Lucayan Islands, we do find a wide variety of similar small mollusks whose collection and processing provide very small amounts of meat, such as the beaded periwinkles that cling to shoreline rocks. This raises the question, why would anyone endure such a weary task for so little reward? Certainly people had 62 / Chapter 11 more productive things to do with their time! But this attitude reflects our Western philosophical heritage. A common assumption, traced back to the writings of Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes 1651), is that life in the past was “nasty, brutish and short.” Hobbes’ philosophy later received a boost from Thomas Malthus (An Essay on the Principle of Population , 1798), who recognized that if population continued to grow unchecked (due to the “unbridled passion of the sexes”) that humans would soon outstrip available food resources, resulting in starvation and death. Charles Darwin (Origin of Species , 1859) further promoted this conclusion in his oft-quoted notion of “survival of the fittest” (although fitness for Darwin was measured in the contribution of offspring to the next generation). Alfred Lord Tennyson expressed this view most eloquently in his poem “In Memorium A. H. H.” (1849): Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shrieked against his creed. When the scientific disciplines of evolutionary biology and human ecology first developed, it was assumed that finding enough of the right foods to eat was the main struggle of animals and people (finding an appropriate mate was also important ). Given the number of people living today in poverty, the views of Hobbes, Malthus, and Darwin seem not so far-fetched. From this perspective, people reduced to eating tiny clams must surely be on the verge of starvation. After all, a person expends more energy collecting these clams than they get from eating them. Until the 1970s, notions of progressive cultural evolution viewed modern society as the acme of social development. People in the past must have lived deprived lives and cultures that survived by hunting and gathering were viewed as barely managing to survive. Civilization was only possible with the development of agriculture , which served as the foundation for the world’s great civilizations. Then along came Marshall Sahlins (1972), who was one of the first to actually calculate the amount of time hunter-gatherers spent obtaining food. He found that although these people had a paucity of material goods, they spent far less time than modern workers. In sum, they actually worked less hard to meet their needs than most of us do today. For this reason he called them “The Original Affluent Society.” Perhaps The Chip-Chip Gatherers / 63 H. L...