Kalahari hunter-gatherers : studies of the!Kung San and their neighbors
Richard B. Lee (Editor), Irven DeVore (Editor)
This is a comprehensive account of the extensive research of the Harvard Kalahari Research Group, founded in 1963, comprising studies by 17 authors (anthropologists, medical doctors, archaeologists, etc.). The book is divided into four sections: 1) ecology and social change, 2) population and health, 3) child development, and 4) the cognitive world, and provides a full bibliography. The aim of the studies is to document how the San people sustain the demands of communal existence in a "subsistence ecology". It is also shown how the fencing and patrolling of the Namibia-Botswana border by the South Africans in the mid-1960s induced a number of families to settle at Chum !Kwe (Tshumkwe), where the South African authorities supplied rations and some employment in return for increased social control. There is, however, little discussion of other changes during the colonial period which have forced the "Bushmen" into an existence very different from the stereotypes of a "hunter/gatherer" society as a stage in the development of humankind. See also the substantial monograph by Richard B. Lee, mainly concerned with the !Kung San in northwestern Botswana: The !Kung San. Men, women and work in a foraging society (Cambridge U.P., 1979). and, for a different perspective, Robert Gordon. (Eriksen/Moorsom 1989)
Print Book, English, 1976
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1976
xix, 408 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
9780674499805, 9780674499850, 0674499808, 0674499859
1622336
I. Ecology and social change
1. The Dobe-Du/da environment : background to a hunting and gathering way of life / John E. Yellen and Richard B. Lee
2. Settlement patterns for the !Kung : an archaeological perspective / John E. Yellen
3. !Kung spatial organization : an ecological and historical perspective / Richard B. Lee
4. Subsistence ecology of Central Kalahari San / Jiro Tanaka
5. From hunters to squatters : social and cultural change among the Farm San of Gnzi, Botswana / Mathias G. Guenther
II. Population and health
6. The population of the Dobe area !Kung / Nancy Howell
7. Regional variation in !Kung populations / Henry Harpending
8. Medical research among the !Kung / A. Stewart Truswell and John D.L. Hansen
III. Childhood
9. Social and economic constraints on child life amon the !Kung / Patricia Draper
10. Maternal care, infant behavior and development among the !Kung / Melvin J. Konner
11. A !Kung woman's memories of childhood / Marjorie Shostak
IV. Behavior and belief
12. Education for transcendence : !Kia-healing with the Kalahari !Kung / Richard Katz
13. Aspects of !Kung folklore / Megan Biesele
14. !Kung knowledge of animal behavior (or: The proper study of mankind is animals) / Nicholas Blurton Jones and Melvin J. Konner
15. Sharing, talking, and giving : relief of social tensions among the !Kung / Lorna Marshall