The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers

Natural History, Feb, 2001 by Meredith F. Small

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, edited by Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly (Cambridge University Press, 1999; $125)

When Marjorie Shostak died in 1996, anthropology lost two compelling voices--Shostak, a keen observer and passionate writer, and Nisa, whose words and personality fill Shostak's narratives about the lives of !Kung women. In 1969 Shostak joined a team of Harvard University anthropologists who had begun a long-term study of the !Kung San (Bushmen) six years earlier. She spent twenty months interviewing !Kung women in the Dobe area of northwestern Botswana, in the northern Kalahari Desert. Fifty-year-old Nisa, whose stories seemed to Shostak "larger and more important than the details they comprised" stood out.

First published in 1981, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman is not just an ethnographic account of a people but a singular tale told in Nisa's own words. The book became a classic, selling over 200,000 copies. I doubt there is a single anthropology or women's studies student in the past two decades who hasn't been assigned this book. Now Return to Nisa chronicles the story of Shostak's month-long visit to the !Kung in 1989. No standard anthropology text, this is a personal memoir, haunted by Shostak's battle with breast cancer.

"My future had been cast into deep, threatening shadow; the present turned in on itself as my daily experience acquired a brutal, slashing edge," she writes, referring to her cancer diagnosis and mastectomy in 1988. Although she wanted to see Nisa again, she had to consider the consequences of an extended separation from her husband and children (including a two-year-old who had been weaned early, after Shostak's cancer was diagnosed). Yet Africa called in a way familiar only to those who have spent time in the field: "The decision to go had preceded the practical, starting with a need, the need to return: to see, to taste, to smell, to experience again, perhaps even to heal."

Shostak sets out for Dobe once more, but the romantic vision of a quest soon evaporates. This time, Nisa's people are more concerned with their own affairs than with talking to Shostak, and Shostak is exhausted by illness and travel. Her relationship with Nisa is full of ambiguity. "Nisa seems to have so little compassion, at least for me," Shostak writes. "She likes me because I have rewarded her for our work. She has no idea of what I feel. I don't even think she likes me in any real sense. I sometimes wonder if I even like her." On this trip, Shostak is drawn to anything that might pull the evil from her body. She hires the healer Kxoma to perform a ceremonial trance dance and hires Nisa (also a healer) to perform a drum dance. For Shostak these are spiritual moments; for the !Kung they are performances, and everyone wants to be paid. Here we have fieldwork, warts and all.

Return to Nisa offers no neat package of connection and redemption, but Shostak does tell a compelling tale of her need to revisit a place and a people who represented a defining period in her life. She also looks at the pressures that are moving the !Kung away from hunting and gathering: the border war between Botswana and Namibia that slices through their ancestral land and separates families; the scarcity of game; the acquisition of cows, which requires a more settled life; and interruptions in the transmission of skills from the elder to the younger generations.

Shostak finds that the !Kung respond to these changes with a certain resilience--a characteristic not only of the !Kung but of other peoples like them, according to The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. In what has proved to be the most successful pattern of adaptation in human history, people have hunted and gathered for millions of years, turning to sedentary agriculture only 12,000 years ago and to industrialization (with its disconnection from the land) a mere 200 years ago. Indeed, the globe is dotted with groups that still partly rely on foraging.

The encyclopedia's eighty-eight contributors present the history, ecological setting, economy, political organization, social organization, spirituality, and current status of more than fifty societies from seven geographical areas. Described as generally egalitarian, cooperative, and on the move, these people readily split into small groups or temporarily gather together as circumstances demand. They still forage in forests, across savannas, and on ice packs but also utilize the goods and services of sedentary neighbors, incorporating modern food and tools into the hunting and gathering life.

All, of course, have been affected by the pressures of colonization, the loss of land, and political strife. Remarkably, many groups have recently banded together to preserve their way of life. "Far from being simply the cast-offs of creation or victims of history, the foraging peoples have become political actors in their own right, mounting land claims cases, participating in the environmental movement, and lobbying for their rights with governments and the UN," write editors Richard B. Lee, a University of Toronto anthropologist who was part of the first team to study the !Kung, and Richard Daly, an anthropologist who works on aboriginal rights cases in British Columbia. Such a political voice might allow these groups to survive in the modern, electronically interconnected world--and to survive in the way they choose. i Historically, Westerners have either vilified hunters and gatherers as savages or they have worshiped them as living testimonies of ancient and more "natural" modes of existence. Anthropologists have always been interested in them as windows to our past. But as Nisa, Return to Nisa, and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers demonstrate, these people are not museum specimens but members of dynamic societies, both connected to the past and moving forward.