Bushmen

5 Pages 1253 Words

Bushman: a member of a group of short-statured peoples of southern Africa who traditionally live by hunting and foraging. While the term bushman has come to be known as both racist and sexist, it is easily the most recognized term when describing the people living amongst the bush of southern Africa. The San, as they are now known as, are a cluster of indigenous peoples of southern Africa who speak a click language and who have a tradition of living by hunting and gathering (10). In the book The Dobe Ju/`hoansi, Richard B. Lee, an anthropologist from the University of Toronto, takes an interesting and in-depth look into the San life by centering his studies on one specific group. Lee’s focus of study takes place on the border between the countries of Namibia and Botswana in an area called the Dobe. Here there live a tribe of people known as the Dobe Ju/`hoansi. Lee centers on several important issues of the Ju/`hoansi culture and lifestyle throughout the book. He provides a tremendous amount of information that is broken into twelve chapters that continually draws deeper into the internal thinking of the Ju/`hoansi culture. The method of bringing out this information is delivered first externally with their environment and examples of hunting techniques while moving into deeper issues such as sexuality and religion. Lee also informs the reader on the Ju/`hoansi's kinship, social organization, marriage, as well as conflict, their politics, and social change. Lee begins the case study by providing an interesting lead-in as to the trials and tribulations of locating the Dobe people. I thought that this was an interesting device in order to grasp the reader's attention towards the immense isolation that the Ju/`hoansi remain in. Once contact has been established, Lee delves into covering basic background information such as the environment that they live in including climate, physical features, and settlement patterns. I found this inform...