Living on Mangetti
`Bushman' Autonomy and Namibian Independence
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The Hai||om 'Bushmen' of northern Namibia are still a gathering people, living not only on mangetti [nuts] and other wild foods but also on the by-products of the cattle industry on the mangetti farms. Namibian independence in 1990 with its new options has created a dilemma which may result in a loss of autonomous modes of social organization. The personal quality of their social relations relies on a high degree of individual autonomy, cultural diversity, subsistence flexibility, social permeability, and of immediacy in religious affairs. This book describes the main strategies that the Hai||om have developed to deal with independence and dependency - their ways of accessing the new economic resources, their communication skills, their storytelling practices, their sophisticated ways of creating name and kin relations across spatial and social boundaries, and their way of co-operating in the medicine dance, their main religious ritual.
As a practice-orientated ethnography, Living on Mangetti is highly successful and presents a good example for anthropologists in search of a new way of writing ethnography without creating cultures as discrete and bounded entities. It is rich in ethnographic detail, methodologically sophisticated and penetrating in its analyses, and it offers a stimulating theoretical approach. It deserves to be widely read, not just by "Bushmen" connoisseurs but also by anthropologists who find themselves tempted by the call to abandon generalization. * Folk: Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society *
Living on Mangetti is an ethnographic monograph that subtly escapes the alleged pitfalls of general ethnographic description without giving in on analytical generalizations ... it demonstrates very clearly that anthropological monographs have something to offer which history, political economy, or social geography cannot provide. * Folk: Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society *
ISBN: 9780198233893
Dimensions: 242mm x 163mm x 22mm
Weight: 604g
312 pages