As the Bushmen are portrayed in the film, they are a simple and quite non-materialistic culture that lives off the land, gathering plants and hunting for their food and the survival of the entire tribe. They enjoy each other, and do not feel any need for outside intervention or modernity.
When the Coke bottle drops into the tribe's midst, it creates divisions that were never there before. It illustrates how just the slightest intervention by the white man can change the ways of a culture forever. As
Xi travels with the "evil thing" to the end of the world, he encounters
"civilization," but it does not seem very civilized to him. He is accused of stealing a goat, and has many other misadventures before he makes it home to his people.
The film is a sociological study in a variety of ways, from how tools changed the lives of the hunter/gatherers forever, to the roles and values of men and women in a non-structured society. Before the Coke bottle drops from the sky, the people share their tasks equally, but after the Coke bottle is used as a tool, one person has the advantage over the others, and so the others covet the tool that was never necessary before. Suddenly, the values and mores of the women have changed. They no longer work happily together, because they are angry and jealous that only one woman commands the tool. This illustrates an important concept in society, that those with the "most tools" are the most powerful, and the most competitive. As the Bushmen compete to use the Coke bottle for various tasks, they build walls between themselves, and their society begins to change. Before the bottle, they lived simply, and continued the folkways and values of their ancestors, that had been handed down for centuries.
They did not change because they did not have to, and their lifestyle worked perfectly for