ANT101.

7
Book Review on
Anthropology and the Bushman
By Alan Barnard

Submitted To:
Nur Newaz khan
Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Sociology (PSS),
North South University, Bangladesh.

Submitted By: Group 3

Nafiz Niaz  1130598030
Fahad bin Hossain 1130755030
Sahil Uzzaman Khan 1130872030
Farin khan Muna 1420170030
Sanjana Islam Orin 1722358630

Submission Date: April 23, 2018.

Alan Barnard
Professor Emeritus; Honorary Professorial Fellow; formerly Professor of the Anthropology of
Southern Africa.
Dr. Alan Barnard is one of the world’s leading Decision Scientist and Theory of Constraints’
experts.Alan’s goal in life is to use his 20+ years TOC research, consulting and
implementation knowledge & experience to help both organizations from the private and
public sector as well as individuals see and unlock their inherent potential.
His contribution in anthropology :

 Comparative ethnography in southern Africa

 Contemporary hunter-gatherers
 The history of anthropology
 Social anthropology and human origins
 Origins of language and symbolic thought
 The co-evolution of language and kinship
 The interface between archaeology and social anthropology
Importance of studying Anthropology and the Bushman

This book is an interplay with Bushman or San people and with the idea of ‘the San’ or ‘the
Bushman’. Anthropologists constantly change the images of these people in diverse ways.
These reflect time, African national traditions and shifting and often complex theoretical
positions. The purpose of this book is to enlighten the anthropologists and help explain what
anthropologists do and have done among the San. The book covers a number of different
themes:

 The history of ethnographic representations of peoples known as ‘Bushmen’ or ‘San’.

 The influence of these representations on anthropological thought.
 The nature of the models anthropologists carry with them in the field and employ in
their writings: scientific, humanistic, and so on.
 The political and social history of southern Africa.
Beckoning of the Kalahari
Abbe breuil
The white lady is the mysterious case of other origin of the Bandberg . which is describe by
Abbe Henri Breuil. Bandberg is Namibia’s highest mountain. Breuil tells the story of his own
discovery of the painting in the introduction of the book on the “White Lady”. During his trip
to southern Africa, in 1929 he shown a water color copy of White lady. And in1937 he saw
copies of the White lady painting. In 1938 he was shown tiny negative of the painting but
enlargements were not easily come by in those years. A few years later , he reports that a
young air man said to his secretary and assistant miss Mary E Boyle to fly Atlantic, go to
Lisbon where Abbe breuil worked if she did this general smuts would be much obliged. In
late 1941 breuil had chanced upon enlargement of the white lady photograph. He sent a
further enlargement of the head to smuts with a note bt smuts was in war so that breuil and
boyle left Africa withouthaving seen the white lady. In 1947 breuil got to know white lady is
not a lady bt a man with a panis, holding in this right hand what is apparently a chalice and in
his left a bow and arrows .

The Kalahari beckons:

Bushman were not sophisticated enough to have done great art was not uncommon in a world
view still dominated by diffusionist thinking. In Bushman history describe the impact of
darwnisim and social evolutionism that influence western thinking by migration and
acculturation people still clinging to primitive culture Schmidt especially to interest in
Bushman because of older culture and primitive monotheism. He sent father Martin Gusinde
to Kalahari to do field work. Bushman were primitive, but they were not early. In the 19th and
early 20th centuries Asia and Europe was the original habitation of humankind but Africa was
not. Even Europe were hailed as likely sites of a Garden of Eden. In the present condition of
geological knowledge it is impossible to determine whether South Africabor Europe has been
the home of human beings. Stone age hunter-gatherers similar to modern San once occupying
the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa, and other peoples, with livestock and techniques of
cultivation, coming down from northern place some thousands of years ago.
Bain would bring Bushman and his researchers to the public. A few months after this field
trip, he brought a number of /’Auni and khomani to the empire exhibition in Johannesburg,
where they entertained audiences with skills such as lighting fires. In that same era, Franz
Taaibosch, a ‘pygmy Africa Bushman’, the only genuine Bushman in America. Through the
1920s and 1930s, ‘klikko’ or ‘clico, wild dancing South Africa Bushman’. Bushman were
first similarly exhibited in Europe in 1847, at the Egyptian Hall in London. In 1883 Canadian
entrepreneur William Hunt, who called himself Guillermo Farini, brought a group to Europe
and exhibited them in London’n Royal Aquarium as the ‘Aq’ , also describe in his publicity
material as the ‘earthmen’, ‘pygmies’ and ‘yellow devils’. In 1949 the south African Air
Force dispatched planes to try to find it, to no avail.
South African novelist Wilbur Smith sets his The Sunbird. The first half of The Sunbird
features two fictional archaeologists and their discovery of the Phoenician city of the moon
and the 2nd 5half of book is a flashback to the last days of the city. The Bushman, named
Xhai, is the only character to appear under the same name in both halves of the book. And in
the flashback Xhai ends his days painting a ‘proud god like figure with its white face, red-
gold beard and majestic vaunting manhood above the devastated city.

Amateurs and Cultural Ecologists

The Marshall Family

Lorna Marshall and the Marshall Expeditions

The Marshall expedition was named after Laurence and Lorna Marshall. They were the
couple along with their children John and Elizabeth Marshall conducted eight ethnographic
expatiation in Kalahari to know the Kung Bushmen AKA Ju/'haonsi from 1950 to 1961.
Initially they intended to study the animal behavior but lack of expertise they had to do
ethnography. They had no training before and that this made the civil engineer and English
literature's product the finest ethnography of any people with well ordered detailed accounts
of social organization and religious belief and practice.
The Marshalls Expeditions included other people , such as botanist Robert Story,
musicologist Nicholas England, archaeologist Robert Dyson and physical anthropologist Eric
Williams, and others with local knowledge, Fritz Metzger who was the author of Naro and
His Clan (biography of a Ju/’hoan man) and The Hyena’s Laughter (a subsequent book of
Bushman fables). Lorna’s articles were published in the journal Africa between 1957 and
1969 which together comprised almost a full ethnography of the Ju/’hoansi, social
organization, together with some added material, formed the basis of her book 'The !Kung of
Nyae Nyae' (L. Marshall 1976). Other then these, Lorna’s most interesting work is probably
that on religion with a book, Nyae Nyae !Kung Beliefs and Rites. She also has two significant
ethnographic discoveries: Ju/’hoan kinship terminology and the mechanisms of sharing. they
found that there is a system Where genealogy ends and it works through personal names.
Through such systems, hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari and in many other parts of the world
maintain social relations. However, Lorna’s work was not fully accepted by the theoretical
niche but became popular to the North American hunter-gatherer studies.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and John Marshall

The Marshalls children Elizabeth was a writer and John was a documentary film-maker and
Both were Kalahari enthusiasts, Elizabeth wrote on Bushmen, The Harmless People (Thomas
1959) and a travelogue of expedition to Uganda. And John Marshall started his film-making
in 1950. He always just filmed ‘people’, that he was not an ‘ethnographic’ film-maker but just
made documentaries all in the same way, with the focus on people. With him there was a
surgeon called E. van Zyl who wanted to find the fabled lost city of the Kalahari.
In the 1950s John shot many short documentaries on aspects of Ju/’hoan life like, A Joking
Relationship (1962), An Argument about a Marriage (1969), A Curing Ceremony (1969),
Bitter Melons (1971) and Debe’s Tantrum (1972). N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman (1980).
John led the call for modernization to the bushmen by encourage cattle herding. on the other
side his opponents preferred attempts to enable Ju/’hoansi to regain a hunting lifestyle which
he always mentioned as ‘a subsidized plastic stone age’.

Silberbauer, Lee and the Western Tradition

Interest in Bushmen would grow through the 1950s, thanks to the Marshalls themselves and
also to two others: Phillip Tobias and Laurens van der Post. In the 1950s Phillip Tobias
participated in several expeditions to the Kalahari. His influence was significant in South
Africa, and in many ways marks a natural transition between earlier times and the modern era
exemplified by the Marshalls. He was also important in bringing Bushmen to the attention of
a wider anthropological public through articles.
Sir Laurens van der Post was the face of the Bushman to the worldwide general public, but
the interest he attracted rubbed off on anthropology too. He mistrusted 'scientists' with their
specialized knowledge and inability to think beyond the confines of their disciplines; and
they disliked his mysticism and self-promoting ego, his inability to speak any Bushman
language, the short duration of his time in the Kalahari, and his cavalier attitude to
differences between Bushman groups.

George B. Silberbauer
The book describes an ethnographic present many years before its publication date, when
between 1958 and 1964 Silberbauer spent much time at intervals of a few months each visit
living with the G/wi. The original thesis version contained a fold-out flow chart with over
200 interconnected boxes, and apparently it illustrated the connection of everything in G/wi
society, culture and environment to everything else. There is no flow chart, but an attempt to
portray in an ecological framework not merely humanity and nature as understood in Western
science, but also a G/wi vision of their own ecology. He wrote a few articles on the G/wi, but
through much of his career his main publication was the Bushman Survey report, a 138-page
document consisting mainly of original G/wi ethnography but with recommendations too
about the future of what he there called simply the Central Kalahari Reserve. They could not
call it G/wi 'tribal land' because, in Tswana terms the G/wi, G//ana and Kgalagadi who lived
in the reserve were not 'tribes'. Botswana became independent in 1966, and the Botswana
government would over the coming decades gradually provide resources such as a school and
a clinic in the reserve, and then gradually remove such facilities and put pressure on the G/wi
and others to move out. In 2004, the now-retired George Silberbauer returned to Botswana as
an expert witness, on the G/wi side, in the case of 243 CKGR inhabitants suing their
government over the rights to their ancestral land.

Richard B. Lee
Richard Lee has a more conventional anthropological background. Perhaps the most eminent
of all Canadian anthropologists, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and his book
The !Kung San was named by American Scientist as one of the 100 most important works of
science of the twentieth century. Most of Lee's !Kung or Ju/'hoan work follows quite directly
from his Ph.D. dissertation , which was based on fieldwork carried out in 1963 and
1964.Lee's work became widely respected for its detail on traditional subsistence pursuits and
other daily activities, as well as its comprehensive coverage of Ju/'hoan knowledge of plants
and animals, the resources available in the Dobe area and, in due course, the changes that
affected their society between the time of his early fieldwork and later decades. Lee was to
follow it with The Dobe !Kung , more readable and designed for undergraduates, even in
introductory courses, and covering the whole of Ju/'hoan life rather than just 'men, women
and work'. The Dobe !Kung is also based not only on his own work but also on the work of
many others who have done research with Ju/'hoansi, on topics such as religious belief and
spiritual healing.The second edition was retiled The Dobe Ju/'hoansi and added two new
chapters on later developments, especially in Namibia, including the work of John Marshall
in economic development.

A Japanese Tradition: the Legacy of Kyoto Primatology

It is interesting for two reasons that Kyoto should be the Japanese university where African
hunter-gatherer studies should take root. First, Kyoto University is known for and prides
itself on its egalitarian ethos. Ever since the university's beginnings in the nineteenth century,
professors there in all fields have been called by surname plus the respectful but less formal
-san rather than the more formal -sensei, the term still often used in other Japanese
universities. Secondly, Kyoto is noted for primate studies, and anthropology there grew from
that interest. The first great Kyoto primatologist was Kinji Imanishi, who in the 1940s moved
from the study of wild horses to Japanese macaques. Just as Westerners have used primate
studies in the tropics to reflect on what it is to be human, Imanishi, Itani and their school first
used Japanese macaques as mirrors of humanity, and as 'nature' living within their own
society. One Japanese primatologist-turned-anthropologist confided in me that he used the
same fieldwork techniques among Bushmen that he had among primates.
Jiro Tanaka
The major figure in San studies in Japan is Jiro Tanaka. In Silberbauer's time, there were few
G//ana in the western part of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, where both Tanaka and
Silberbauer stayed, but by the late 1960s members of the two groups there lived in close
proximity. His 1971 to 1972 research with G//ana was as part of Lee and DeVore's Harvard
team, and Tanaka's intention at the time was to compare G//ana with Ju/'hoansi. Tanaka's
major Japanese publication is Busshuman, eventually expanded and published in English as
The San, Hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari. Silberbauer's review of The San captured the
profound differences between his own findings and Tanaka's: 'We contradict each other on
almost every point which is considered to be significant in Western social anthropology and
on the very question of what is of importance'. Tanaka stressed the detail, whereas
Silberbauer's main concern was with the pattern. Ellen's solution stressed different theoretical
approaches, whereas Silberbauer's explanation of differences between Tanaka's account and
his own stressed changes at ≠Xade pan in the 1960s.
Kazuyoshi Sugawara : Sugawara's uniqueness derives from the addition of discourse as a
focus and from his blend of ecological study, linguistic competence and the phenomenology
of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Concerned less with the relation between
human beings and their habitats, Sugawara is interested more in relations between speech acts
and social relations, between apparent egalitarianism and communication theory, between
joking and game theory, and between speaking and bodily behavior. His English publications
include various chapters in books and articles in African Study Monographs, and some of
these cover similar interests but with less detail. There is growing interest within San studies
in Japan in relations between language and social structure, as well as a continued dominance
of ecological studies in a narrow sense. When eventually more Japanese material does appear
in English, San studies in the West will undoubtedly be affected, and I think for the better -
not because Japanese studies are superior to Western but because diversity in approach can
only improve wider understanding.
Comparisons between Japanese and Western traditions show uncanny parallels and structural
oppositions. They had spent the period just before, in 1963, studying baboons in Kenya. Both
Tanaka and Sugawara began as primatologists, although the kind of anthropology they
developed was rather different. Whereas Lee and Tanaka developed conventional approaches
to the study of subsistence ecology, albeit with different emphases, Silberbauer and especially
Sugawara challenged the bounds of ecological anthropology. Silberbauer remained within the
field but came to see ideology as more significant than others did, and Sugawara turned away
from cultural ecology in its narrow sense towards the study of language and social
interaction. For Sugawara, G/wi not only know their environment well; they communicate it
well. As for the Marshalls, their work, especially Lorna's, marked the new baseline of
Bushman studies, and, although not particularly theoretical in itself, its theoretical impact
would soon hit home.
An Original Affluent Society?
Man the Hunter
Botsawana a country in Africa, surrounded by south Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe.it got its
independence in 1966 from Britain. But the challenge for the country was its 70% of its
geographic area was Kalahari desert. To overcome the challenge in 1960 George Silberbauer
a device to protect and the wild life and indigenous human inhabitants of the area for
ecological and socio-economic development.
Later, in 1966 after the independence Marshall Sahlin’s first presented the idea of hunter
gathers as the original affluent society in “MAN THE HUNTER” conference. He challenged
the Hobbesian view of hunter gather for difficult. existence. Also, Lee was present in “MAN
THE HUNTER” conference raised ethnographic points relevant to Sahlins theoretical one.
He gave opinion that, primarily dependence on animal animal hunting will cause another
Kalahari to the country. The original affluent society as the English version of Sahlin’s essay
become the lead chapter of his age economics.

Sahlin’s notion of the relationship between kinship and the modes of production did,
however, faced criticism. The most important of these critiques is the Bird-David culturalist
model (1992). The claim is that Sahlin’s wrongfully merged the ecological model (consisting
of labor time) and the culturalist model (referring to needs and wants). Bird-David claims that
the giving environment and cosmic economy of sharing (1990 and 1992 respectively) are
developments in Sahlin’s model. It builds on the idea that hunter gatherers own views of their
environment are important to denote for ethnographic clarity, and that hunter-gatherers have
‘immediate-return’ economics. The bushman ethnography once again serves to present the
economic system of the subjects as in tune with ‘nature.’

Capitalism or communism?
There is a debate as to whether the bushmen were communist or capitalist. Liz Wily
expresses that the bushmen were not poor when their lives revolved around hunting and/or
gathering. She claims they only become poor when pastoralists and ranchers; or in other
words, modernity came into contact with them. This vision of the bushmen as an oppressed
class against the modern oppressing class fits into the communist narrative of the proletariat
vs. bourgeoisie. On the other hand, H.J Heinz stood in direct contrast to this narrative,
claiming that individualism (and thus, by extension; capitalism) was part of the way of the
bushmen. They collectivized their resources and the general idea (as shown by Heinz’
ethnography) was to increase the collective herd resources, but this was pursued by individual
motives. In fact, Wily and Heinz were both correct. It remains obvious that the bushmen are
neither capitalist nor communist, but their insights show us that the bushmen are both driven
by individualism and individual ownership, as well as collective ownership of land and
resources as well as equalization of wealth through various means and rituals.
Egalitarianism and Leadership
The bushmen have been studied vigorously for their egalitarianism. Thomas (1959) describes
them as peaceful and free. Many other ethnographies have suggested the importance of
sharing in bushmen culture. This agreement of sharing extends to both material and
otherwise. Another claim is that sharing and cooperation transcend the family unit to include
the larger group (or extended members). Dorothea Black (1928) tells us that there are no class
distinctions between groups. Except the medicine men, there is also no trade.
Jamie Uys’ blockbuster film The Gods must be Crazy and its sequels represent the
egalitarianism values of politics and economics of the bushmen. The film shows the disorder
created by a Coke bottle (representing modern products and vis-à-vis capitalism) and the
actions taken by the leader to restore order. Leadership is hard to identify in the
egalitarianism societies of bushmen. Leadership depends on age, personal qualities,
‘ownership’ and ability to make good decisions. However, the non-violent image of the
bushmen is incomplete. They have faced their share of violence and ethnographies (such as
Lee (1979)) highlight the conflicts and violence they have experienced. They however do not
get involved in warfare. When Marshall had told them stories of conflicts on an occasion,
they commented on the warfare that ‘they are silly customs’ and ‘somebody might get hurt.’