The Harmless People“A study of primitive people which, for beauty of . . . style and concept, would be hard to match.” —The New York Times Book Review In the 1950s Elizabeth Marshall Thomas became one of the first Westerners to live with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Botswana and South-West Africa. Her account of these nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose way of life had remained unchanged for thousands of years, is a ground-breaking work of anthropology, remarkable not only for its scholarship but for its novelistic grasp of character. On the basis of field trips in the 1980s, Thomas has now updated her book to show what happened to the Bushmen as the tide of industrial civilization—with its flotsam of property rights, wage labor, and alcohol—swept over them. The result is a powerful, elegiac look at an endangered culture as well as a provocative critique of our own. "The charm of this book is that the author can so truly convey the strangeness of the desert life in which we perceive human traits as familiar as our own. . . . The Harmless People is a model of exposition: the style very simple and precise, perfectly suited to the neat, even fastidious activities of a people who must make their world out of next to nothing." —The Atlantic |
Contents
| 3 | |
TWO The Road | 19 |
FOUR The Fire | 54 |
SEVEN Mood Songs | 113 |
EIGHT The Dancers | 129 |
ELEVEN Toma the Leader | 174 |
TWELVE The Grove | 202 |
THIRTEEN Short Kwi the Hunter | 219 |
FOURTEEN The Sun Dance | 237 |
The Bushmen in 1989 | 263 |
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Common terms and phrases
animals arms arrow asked baby band Beautiful began beside body boys branches brother bushes Bushmen called camp carried cattle dance dark dead eyes face farmers father feet felt fire followed Gautscha gave girl gone grass ground hands head heard hunter hunting killed knew Kung later Lazy Kwi leave light lions lived looked meat medicine melons morning mother moved never night Nyae once perhaps person played present pupa rain reached roots season seemed seen Short Kwi side sitting skin smoke sometimes song soon sound stopped talk things thought tiny told Toma took trees trucks turned Ukwane veld voices waited walked wanted watching werf wife wind woman women young