Return to Nisa

by Marjorie Shostak

The story of two women―one a hunter-gatherer in Botswana, the other an ailing American anthropologist―this powerful book returns the reader to territory that Marjorie Shostak wrote of so poignantly in the now classic The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Here, however, the ground has perceptibly shifted. First published in 1981, Nisa served as a stirring introduction to anthropology’s most basic Can there be true understanding between people of profoundly different cultures? Diagnosed with breast cancer, and troubled by a sense of work yet unfinished, Shostak returned to Botswana in 1989. This book tells simply and directly of her rediscovery of the !Kung people she had come to know years before―the aging, blunt, demanding Nisa, her stalwart husband Bo, understanding Kxoma, fragile Hwantla, and Royal, translator and guide. In Shostak’s words, we clearly see !Kung life, the dry grasslands, the healing dances, the threatening military presence. And we see Shostak herself, passionately curious, reporting the discomforts and confusion of fieldwork along with its fascination. By turns amused and frustrated, she describes the disappointments―and chastening lessons―that inevitably follow when anthropologists (like her younger self) romanticize the !Kung. Throughout, we observe a woman of threatened health but enormous vitality as she pursues the promise she once discovered in the !Kung people and, above all, in Nisa. At the core of the book is the remarkable relationship between these two women from different worlds. They are often caught off guard by the limits of their mutual understanding. Still, their determination to reach out to each other lingers in the reader’s mind long after the story ends―providing an eloquent response to questions that Nisa so memorably posed.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Africa, Botswana, Ethnography, Biography

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Marjorie Shostak (May 11, 1945 - October 6, 1996) was an American anthropologist. Though she never received a formal degree in anthropology, she conducted extensive fieldwork among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari desert in south-western Africa and was widely known for her descriptions of the lives of women in this hunter-gatherer society.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Mehwish · Rating 4 out of 5]

A magical read. It is not an ethnography in it's true anthropological sense but there couldn't have been a better way to highlight the similarities in various cultures.

[Lgordo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shostak’s first book was about Nisa and the life of the !Kung. This book is more about herself, a travelogue of sorts, describing the anthropologist experience in general and her own experience, as someone searching for reassurance and meaning while facing death. In the end, her trip seems to reinvigorate and disappoint in equal measures, due the problem of “you can’t go back.” The society she’s visiting has changed irreversibly, the politics have changed irreversibly, and the people – who were tinged in romance by distance – were irritatingly not changed enough.

Two main points I found interesting in this book.

1 – she describes how Nisa’s story changed when revisited a couple of decades later. Circumstances clearly affected her recollections. This makes you wonder what you can really trust from her story and the non-data component of anthropological work. People, after all, are rarely 100% factual when telling a good story. So it can be problematic to attempt to extract data from narrative.

2 – She sat down with !Kung adults who had lived both the foraging lifestyle and had transitioned to the pastoral/farming lifestyle and asked them which they preferred. Outstandingly, they preferred farming. This is notable because it contradicts some of the more recent currents in popular anthropology (explicated in Against the Grain by James C. Scott), namely that because foragers work so few hours of the day, there’s no way anyone would ever give up that lifestyle unless they were forced to.

However, the foragers didn’t describe the lifestyle differences based on hours worked, but rather by effort per hour. When foraging, they’d spend hours walking, digging, and carrying upward of 45 pounds of forage, often with a child on their back or shoulders as well. As pastoralists, they could use a donkey to carry things for them. Farming requires more hours of work per day, but the level of effort is lower. Foraging is an endurance workout; farming is just work. (By comparison, our 8-12 hours of labor per day is not work at all, merely extensive justification for our caloric intake.)

They also appreciated the availability of food. Instead of having to go out and find food when they were hungry, they could just grab a melon off the pile in the shed, or milk the cow. It should, however, be noted that they were likely biased by government famine handouts; they had never experienced the painful product of agricultural failure.

The book dragged on in the end, as Shostak’s pursuit of a healing ceremony was somewhat less interesting after reading the note that the book was published posthumously.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating read. Amazing book.