Bushmen : Kalahari hunter-gatherers and their descendants

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Bushmen : Kalahari hunter-gatherers and their descendants

Alan Barnard

Cambridge University Press, 2019

  • : pbk

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Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-200) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

The hunter-gatherers of southern Africa known as 'Bushmen' or 'San' are not one single ethnic group, but several. They speak a diverse variety of languages, and have many different settlement patterns, kinship systems and economic practices. The fact that we think of them as a unity is not as strange as it may seem, for they share a common origin: they are an original hunter-gatherer population of southern Africa with a history of many thousands of years on the subcontinent. Drawing on his four decades of field research in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, Alan Barnard provides a detailed account of Bushmen or San, covering ethnography, archaeology, folklore, religious studies and rock-art studies as well as several other fields. Its wide coverage includes social development and politics, both historically and in the present day, helping us to reconstruct both human prehistory and a better understanding of ourselves.

Table of Contents

  • 1. 'Bushmen': unity and diversity
  • 2. The politics of indigeneity
  • 3. How far back can we go?
  • 4. Discovery and destruction of the /Xam
  • 5. The !Xoo and their neighbours
  • 6. G/wi, G//ana and the central Kalahari
  • 7. Naro: 'Central', 'Northern' or unique?
  • 8. Ju/'hoansi or !Kung: classic San
  • 9. Hai//om: Khoekhoe-speaking San
  • 10. Bushmen of the Okavango
  • 11. Sharing the land with others
  • 12. Conclusions.

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