Review by Choice Review
Despite his book's romantic title, anthropologist Suzman (director, Anthropos Ltd.) provides a well-reasoned, gently sympathetic, engaging account of life among Ju/'hoansi and related foraging peoples of arid Namibia and Botswana. He situates his account in cultural histories and social theory and outlines brutal realities of contemporary politics, but Suzman's strength lies in his interpersonal engagement with particular people and places. On page three readers meet //Eng (slashes denote clicks), she of "busy hands" and "green fingers" always tending her garden, who, with patient wisdom, gently teases the expatriate anthropologist as she does others of her community. Readers are transported to transcendent locations like Botswana's Tsodilo Hills, whose astonishingly vibrant, 70,000-year-old artworks may be the world's oldest evidence of complex ritual activity. Although Ju/'hoansi descend from such ancient civilizations, nowadays they lead difficult lives, and Suzman does not shy away from describing indignities to which they are subjected. Yet, like //Eng, many find fulfillment with few frills. Though beset by the double consciousness of "being in one world but of another," most maintain their dignity, and indeed, Ju/'hoansi throw the lives of striving, inexorably dissatisfied members of "production cultures like our own" into "uncomfortable relief." Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries. --Allen F. Roberts, University of California, Los Angeles
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Anthropologist Suzman challenges the notion that production-based societies like the U.S. are more prosperous than hunter-gatherer communities, such as the people of the Kalahari Desert in Namibia known as the Bushmen. In his thoughtful, in-depth look, he focuses on the Ju/'hoansi people, whom he has been working with for more than two decades. Suzman observes that before white colonists invaded southern Africa, the Ju/'hoansi were so successful at hunting and gathering that they only had to perform this work on average 20 hours a week in order to have everything they needed. The secret to their success was that they only took what they required at the time; they didn't stockpile or hoard food. Suzman delves into the Ju/'hoansi's way of life in the past and how that changed once Namibia was colonized and the Bushmen were forced into servitude. Now living communally on farms, they've largely moved away from their hunter-gatherer roots. A fascinating examination of a society drastically changed by forced modernity.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A spirited ethnography of the ancestral peoples of the Kalahari.Suzman, the head of a Cambridge-based think tank devoted to real-world anthropological applications, has vast experience living and working among the people once mostly known as the Bushmen, which has a derogatory connotation, later as San or Khoisan. "A staple of safari lodge-style coffee-table books and glossy posed postcards," they have been mythologized in several ways, perhaps most effectively by Laurens van der Post's Lost World of the Kalahari, published nearly 60 years ago. One of the most enduring images to emerge from the many books about them is what the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins characterized as "Stone Age economics," gathering and hunting enough to stay alive but working not much more. Suzman complicates this account with a closer view of what Khoisan economics really entails, but on the whole, he agrees that the Khoisan traditionally lived freer and easier than most wage slaves today. Their world has largely disappeared, though, in at least some measure because their Kalahari homeland has been transformed by settlers from outside who have introduced a cattle-based economy. Indeed, Suzman writes, the last generation of Khoisan to live traditionally has already passed away, their people having lived in spatial stability, as the author puts it, even as other populations were moving out of Africa to populate the rest of the world hundreds of thousands of years ago. Suzman writes with skill and appreciation of ancient concepts such as n!ow, a kind of inborn spirit, but glances over larger ideas such as his provocative thought that "language is neither the primary medium of culture nor is it a universal tool capable of translating everything from one culture into another." (If not language, then what?) He does better, though, in showing how old San ideas of how to live can be applied to our overly extractive, Western consumerist society, spearheaded by the rising generation of millennials. A welcome contribution to a once-vibrant anthropological literature without many recent entries. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
