The Economic Culture of Maogusi
Section 2: The Economic Culture of Maogusi—Maogusi Hunting Culture. The Tujia people who hold Maogusi live in the Wuling Mountains, with dense forests and high barriers. In the Maogusi era they had to adopt a gathering, fishing, and hunting economy, later developing with difficulty into slash-and-burn farming. This is the economic-cultural type Maogusi mainly reflects.
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Section 2: The Economic Culture of Maogusi
The Hunting Culture of Maogusi
The Wuling mountain area where the Tujia people, the bearers of Maogusi, live is one of deep grass, dense forests, and high mountain barriers. In the Maogusi era, they had to choose a collecting, fishing, and hunting economic production mode, and later struggled to develop into a slash-and-burn extensive agricultural production mode. The economic-cultural type mainly expressed by Maogusi is the collecting, fishing, and hunting economic-cultural type; slash-and-burn agricultural culture is also expressed, but did not occupy a dominant position. In the scene performances of Maogusi, "Shijie (Hunting)" and "Catching Fish" account for a very large proportion of the entire Maogusi performance—that is to say, Maogusi places great emphasis on the fishing-hunting-collecting type. In the 1960s, anthropologists gave high praise to the collecting-hunting economic-cultural type, confirming that hunting was the core of human evolution. The 1966 conference held at the University of Chicago on "Man" and "Hunter" concerned the role of hunting in human evolution and was regarded as a milestone in the development of anthropological thought. This conference was of very great significance; it affirmed that the forms of existence of stone tools and animal bones accumulated in the prehistoric record are clear evidence of meat-eating. As Green and Isaac of Harvard University showed, this evidence means that throughout the Pleistocene there was continuous progress along a trail of stones and bones, and these accumulated stone artifacts and animal remains are regarded as fossil "home sites." In other words, our ancestors are believed to have once lived like modern hunter-gatherers, but in a more primitive form.
The Life Culture of Maogusi
Once there were humans, there was life, and life cannot be separated from food and drink. The food culture of Maogusi also has its own characteristics.
First, the types of food. In the Maogusi performance, there was once a saying about eating palm tree seeds. Of course, modern people would not eat palm tree seeds; whether palm tree seeds are actually edible has never been tested by anyone. But Maogusi eating palm tree seeds may not be a literal reference; it could also be a general term for all wild fruits, which is to say that the Maogusi era was mainly based on eating wild fruits. In addition, Maogusi also ate meat; the purpose of Maogusi's 'chasing meat (hunting)' was to eat meat. From the offerings presented to the Eight Tribes Kings when performing Maogusi, there were pheasant meat, muntjac meat and other wild meats, white-faced meat (masked palm civet), animal skins, and the feathers of some birds, and it was also clearly stated that the Eight Tribes Kings liked to eat raw food. This reveals a piece of information to people, namely that the people of the Maogusi era all ate raw meat. This coincides with the ancient butchery traces at Site 50 discovered by Glynn Isaac in 1977 on the Karari escarpment about 24 kilometers east of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, which further proves the authenticity and reliability of the developmental study of Maogusi food culture. The third type of food of Maogusi was wild vegetables. The wild vegetables eaten by Maogusi were dried bamboo shoots, dried Chinese toon tips, dried fern sprouts, dried scallions, tree bark, tree leaves, houttuynia, etc. Among them, apart from tree bark and tree leaves, these wild vegetables are still the best wild vegetable foods of the Tujia people today. From this it can be seen that Maogusi's diet made an indelible contribution to the creation of human food culture.
Second, the dietary methods. When performing the Maogusi sacrifice to the Eight Tribes Kings, raw dog heads, raw pig heads, raw ox heads, and raw internal organs were used for the sacrifice, because the Eight Tribes Kings liked to eat raw food. Maogusi's offering to the Eight Tribes Kings shows that the Maogusi era and the Eight Tribes Kings were of the same era, in the infancy of humankind. When the Maogusi was performed in Matizhai, Longshan, Xiangxi, the sacrifice to the Eight Tribes Kings was even more concrete and vivid. On the first day they arranged the ranks; on the second day they killed a pig to sacrifice to the Eight Tribes Kings. When killing the pig, the butcher had to be chosen from experienced hands, and the knife had to be sharp, because blood had to be seen, and the more blood flowed, the better. After killing the pig, it was split open without removing the hair. The entrails had to be taken out bloody to sacrifice to the Eight Tribes Kings. The whole pig, without removing its hair, was also brought to honor the Eight Tribes Kings, and raw pig blood was even smeared on the mouth of the statue of the Eight Tribes Kings. This vividly shows that Maogusi completely preserved the raw-eating custom of humanity's primitive period. It shows that at that time humans had not yet invented fire or used fire. The invention of fire was also an important sign of humanity's movement toward civilization, because once humans used fire they could eat cooked food, and cooked food could better promote the development of the brain.