Kalahari Hunter-gatherers: Studies of the !Kung San and Their Neighbors

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).