THE !KUNG OF NYAE NYAE

First edition: xxiii, 433 pages, frontispiece, numerous photographs, diagrams and maps, beige cloth boards, a very good copy in the dust jacket which has a tear on the spine, now housed in a Brodart protector.

This is the definitive publication of Lorna Marshall’s incomparable record of a hunting-gathering society and a now-vanished way of life. The !Kung Bushmen whom she and her husband discovered in an unexplored part of the Kalahari Desert, and lived with for periods ranging from a month to more than a year.

The area known as Nyae Nyae (pronounced ny-ny, rhyming with tie), in South West Africa, is an arid region of some 550 square miles. When the Marshall expedition reached the area in 1951, its !Kung inhabitants were subsisting, as had their ancestors, wholly by hunting and foraging; isolated from outside influences, they lived and moved in traditionally organized bands, with no agriculture, no herds or domesticated animals, no permanent settlements or campsites. It was fortunate that the first Westerners to enter into the world of these !Kung came with the purpose of studying and recording their age-old ways; the data gathered then could not be duplicated today. Within a decade profound changes began as government and other agencies undertook to bring the people of Nyae Nyae into the modern world. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674180574