Introduction

The Zhun/twasi of Botswana, Angola, and Namibia lived as a nomadic hunter-gatherer society for nearly all of human history, and 90% of the 100,000 years of human existence. As Marjorie Shostak notes in her ethnography of the Zhun/twasi, or Kung! Bushpeople as they are also known, they have experienced contact with Western people and law, agriculture, animal husbandry, and technological modernization in the past century that has drastically redefined their ancient lifeways. Anthropologists have meticulously documented the !Kung.  Shostak was particularly focused on the roles, social and economic lives, and experiences of women in her ethnography Nisa, documenting the title character’s life story in intimate detail.  In Nisa’s recounting from the 1950’s we immediately see the impact of modernization on the !Kung.     Cigarettes and other Western goods have drastically impacted their traditional economy. Important to Shostak’s research in particular, the influx of Western and African culture and technology had changed the dynamics of women’s roles as owners/controllers, impacted women’s traditional responsibilities revolving around water ownership and food distribution, enhanced the role that men play in economics and leadership, and resulted in transforming most of the traditionally nomadic Kung! Bushpeople into agriculturalists living in permanent, Westernized settlements that no longer reflect their traditional lifeways. 

The Position of !Kung Women as Owners, Controllers, and Distributors

Famed anthropologist Ernestine Friedl, in her 1975 book Women and Men – An Anthropologists View, formulates a theory about women’s roles in societies that considers their positions higher depending on how much they are involved in both the ownership/control of group subsistence resources and their influence over the public distribution of these resources.  The !Kung in their traditional lifeways were a highly egalitarian society living in variable-sized groups or kin-groups.  Women provided some 80% of subsistence resources from gathering activities, women or sibling groups controlled access to critical water sources in the seasonally very dry area where groups were concentrated, and women were the sole distributors of all food brought in by a family, sharing with the whole group to mitigate inequality. Reflecting the correlation between the control and distribution of food and other resources by women that Friedl noted increased women’s position in groups, the !Kung women had considerable power in their traditional groups and beyond in these capacities as owners, controllers, and distributors.

For example, women were free to decide when and where to move, initiate divorce, and have affairs or lovers, while the distribution of food and the sharing of water sources enabled women to form friendship bonds with other groups using those resources, cementing relationships among neighbors and other groups or peoples.  Men contributed meat accounting for about 20% of food resources for the group, but the roots and vegetables that women gathered, as well as the water sources, were static and safely acquired.  This permanence of the resources combined with control, ownership, and distribution activity firmly established women as integral providers in the economy of the !Kung, leading to the highly egalitarian system observed in hunter-gatherer societies noted by Friedl.

The Changing Role of Men in !Kung Groups 

Men hunted the bush for the meat they returned to the family.  While it only constituted about a fifth of the food resources acquired by the group, it was an extremely popular addition to an otherwise vegetarian diet (lesser amounts of meat were caught by women and children).  It was also an exceptionally dangerous activity that rewarded survivability and skill with social and political capital.  This contribution along with sheer manpower, spiritual economy, and family resources were traditionally the primary sources of power for !Kung men.  However, even in an egalitarian society such as the !Kung, men retained an edge on power.

As Nisa recounts, men were prone to outbursts of anger and physical violence against both sexes of the group.  Additionally, the sexual freedom afforded group members extended to men as well as women.  By impregnating another woman or leaving his wife altogether, a !Kung man had an edge on power over the safety and health of women and, especially, small children or babies.  Since neither men nor women had many personal belongings or any property, except for the loose ownership of water resources by women and sibling groups, people exercised their relative power by withholding or sharing resources.    In this way, traditionally, married men had an edge on power over women in the group, such as nursing mothers and aging women family members.  Nevertheless, as the outbursts, tantrums, and even measured responses of men that Nisa recounted to Shostak show, they inevitably rebounded back to a near-egalitarian approach to living among their family and group members.  The necessities of life in the bush demanded this egalitarian structure, as survival through drought, animal attacks, and the trials of a difficult life outdoors was not conducive to power structures that marginalized women.

The Effects of Modernization on Traditional !Kung Lifeways

This carefully evolved dynamic was interrupted by modernization, and through the years has been eroded to the point that it more closely resembles the sexual dynamics of children and adults in Western culture today.  First, other pastoral tribes moved into the regions traditionally inhabited by the !Kung Bushpeople.  One tribe with which Nisa interacted frequently was the Herero.  The Herero cultivated livestock and practiced agriculture, as well as living in settlements, and even towns, today. They also have a headman which arbitrated several disputes that Nisa recounts about her marriage to an abusive husband.  For the first time, the 20th century brought a form of Western justice to !Kung lifeways, overlapping the communal and environmental pressures that traditionally metered the conduct of group members.  Invariably, the arbiter or headman was just that, a man, and so the egalitarian society immediately shifted as these groups came together to a slightly less egalitarian arrangement where men held more power.

As researchers from Harvard began arriving in the 1940’s, cigarettes and other Western amenities became extremely popular with the !Kung.  People had to start earning money to buy amenities, cartons of cigarettes, and even food items and livestock as the !Kung settled into permanent towns.  Men left for other parts of Africa to work seasonal jobs, further changing the economic dynamic bending it in favor of the provider of currency, a new and foreign addition to the !Kung lifeways.  Today the !Kung are nearly subsumed by the villages and townships that dot their once pristine environment, and their society looks more like Western capitalist societies, likely with a corresponding degree of inequality among the sexes. The poignant study of !Kung women undertaken by Shostak and her colleagues reminds the reader of a time many thousands of years ago, pre-modern, in which the perils and unencumbered freedom of the hunter-gatherer lifeways served as a set of delimiters producing egalitarian societies that stand in contrast to civilization today.    

References 

Shostak, Marjorie. Nisa, The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Cambridge, Massachusettes. Harvard University Press. 2000.