International African Institute
The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society by Richard Borshay Lee
Review by: Alan Barnard
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 50, No. 3 (1980), p. 328
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African Institute
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328 REVIEWS
The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. By RICHARD BORSHAY LEE.
Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1979. Pp. xxv, 526, ill., maps, tables, appendices,
bibl., index. ?22.50 cloth; ?7.95 paper.
In this volume Professor Lee pulls together the contents of his unpublished but widely
circulated Ph.D. thesis (1965) and his numerous papers on !Kung ecology and social
organization.He also adds new materialon leadership,conflict and social change. For the past
decade Lee's work has been increasingly Marxist in perspective; and although this approach
features prominently in the book, non-Marxists, and particularlyecological anthropologists,
will find much to interest them. In his introduction Lee notes that the book draws on three
theoretical perspectives; the cultural ecology of Julian Steward, the Marxist frameworkof
Maurice Godelier and others, and ecological systems theory. Yet the emphasisthroughoutis on
an understandingof the dataand not on any particulartheory as an end in itself.
In chapter 1, the author describes his three years of fieldwork with the !Kung. He first
arrivedamong them in 1963 and has been working with the !Kung intermittently ever since.
But of course, Lee's extensive and important data provide a much better testimony to the
quality of his fieldwork than any description could ever do. Some of the anecdotes in this
chapterare revealingand the photographof Lee on his donkey is very funny (page 27), but is it
really necessaryto know what brandof notebookshe used or how many pages of notes he took
or carboncopies he made?
Chapter2 is mainly about what to call them-San, Bushmen or Basarwa.This topic seems to
be obligatoryin everything written about the hunter-gatherersof the Kalaharithese days, and
Lee's review of the literatureis fuller than in his previous edited volume (with Irven DeVore),
KalahariHunter-Gatherers. The fact is, the Bushmen (this reviewer'sterm) have long been felt
inferiorby peoples aroundthem, and any term applied, including the Nama word 'san', can be
a term of abuse. But the more important issue raised in this chapter is the problem of ethnic
and linguistic classification, and Lee raises this issue all too briefly. And on several points of
detail, his linguistic classificationis inaccurate.
From chapter3, though, RichardBorshayLee does what he does best; he describesthe Dobe
area !Kung and their relationship to the environment. The Dobe !Kung are still hunter-
gatherers,although they have lived near Bantu-speakingcattle herdersfor a long time and are
today (some of them) learning to read and write and taking jobs in the South African mines.
Topics include technology, plant resources, the mongongo, hunting, the sexual division of
labour, the allocation of nutritional stress, production and reproduction, and economic and
social change.
Two chapters which give interesting and new data are of particular theoretical interest.
Chapter 12 deals with ownership, leadership and the use of space. Here Lee examines the
various activities which cause !Kung aggregations and dispersals and argues that the
preventionof conflict, and not ecological necessity, is the majorreasonwhy !Kung groups have
traditionallyspent more time in (wet season) dispersalthan in the larger(dry season) camps by
the permanent waterholes. In the next chapter, on conflict and violence, he argues that the
!Kung are not quite the harmless people they have been portrayedas, and his argument is
persuasive.
Finally, it is worth noting what is not in the book. Religion and cosmology are not treated;
nor are kinship or the gift-giving relationship, except as these relate directly to band
composition and subsistence activities. The!Kung San is not a general ethnography,but as its
subtitle suggests, a study of men, women and work in a foraging society; and what Professor
Lee does discuss, he discusses well.
ALAN BARNARD
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