Return to Nisa Book

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.