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Title Ecology of a Contemporary San People
Full text http://hdl.handle.net/1807/18025
Date 1978
Author(s) Lee, Richard B.
Abstract Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the San is the fact of their survival. In Botswana, hundreds of Bushmen are hunting and gathering for a living with bows and poisoned arrows. Elsewhere in the country there are thousands more who have taken to agriculture and stock-raising only within the last generation. Mr and Mrs Laurence K. Marshall initiated a renaissance in Bushman studies in 1951 when they began their researches among the 6oo full-time hunting and gathering !Kung Bushmen around the Nyae Nyae area of South West Africa, or Namibia. At the same time, Professor Phillip V. Tobias and the Kalahari Research Committee of the Witwatersrand University were initiating a series of investigations into the physical anthropology of the Bushmen. Since 1953 new studies have been made by many of the authors contributing to this volume. In recent years the style of Bushman research has been transformed from a salvage operation to the study of on-going social and economic systems. This new research has overthrown many of the traditional views of the Bushmen and has played a part in developing a more accurate picture of the hunting and gathering way of life in general - a way of life that was, until lo ooo years ago, the universal mode of human organisation. Among the last of the hunting and gathering !Kung Bushmen are the I 600 scattered at waterholes in north-western Botswana between the Kavango swamps and the South West Africa (Namibia) border and around Lake Ngami. The largest and most isolated population in 1963-1965 was the 466 !Kung in the Dobe area, a line of permanent waterholes around the Aha mountains.
Subject(s) Hunting and gathering societies - The San people; The San People - Changing trends in studies and field work
Language en_ca
Publisher Human & Rousseau
Type of publication Book chapter
Rights Reproduced with the permission of the publisher, Human & Rousseau.
Identifier Lee, R.B. (1978). Ecology of a contemporary San people. In The Bushmen: San hunters and herders of Southern Africa (Tobias, P., Biesele, M., et al, ed.), 94-114; 0798106689
Repository Toronto - University of Toronto
Added to C-A: 2014-07-14;18:31:50