The Old Way

Sometimes you pick up a book that turns out to be not what you thought it was at all, but rather something better.  I am reading such a book now, The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.  I spotted the book on the remainder shelf at the Harvard Book Store, and knowing that Elizabeth Marshall Thomas had written books about animal behavior (The Hidden Life of Dogs and The Tribe of the Tiger, most famously), I picked it up.  It turned out to be about the Bushmen* of the Kalahari, and I was quite surprised to realize that she was one of *the* Marshalls who packed up their family and headed for the Kalahari in the 1950s.  Despite the fact that none of them (at that time, at least) were professional anthropologists, they ended up having a profound impact on both the anthropology of the area and the field of anthropology in general.  Lorna Marshall's book Nisa:  The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman is a classic introductory text to ethnography--I taught that book as a TA, and even then had no idea Lorna wasn't an anthropologist herself but rather a retired English teacher/housewife/community organizer (fascinating obit about her).  Then-teenage son John Marshall became a pioneer of ethnographic film, and his films about !Kung hunting have also become intro to anthro course staples (if you've ever seen a film in which a group of hunters hit a giraffe with a poisoned arrow and then track it for days until it dies, then you've seen one of his films).  The father of the family, Lawrence Marshall, did not as far as I know go on to write anything, but he helped the !Kung groups that they worked with maintain their economic independence as much as possible, and became a legal champion of their rights.  When they first arrived, it was still quasi-legal for white farmers to kidnap and enslave groups of !Kung and force them to work on their farms, on the rationale that it was civilizing them, and his protests and political connections helped put an emphatic stop to that.

( If you've read this far, you probably are willing to read the rest )

Holiday party today, woohoo!