Kung Bushmen

Evolutionary Models Based on the !Kung

The earliest major anthropological research in the Kalahari was done by members of the Marshall family. Beginning her second career as an anthropologist in the 1950s, Lorna Marshall offered early descriptions of !Kung economic and social behavior. Most important among these were her early accounts of sharing and reciprocity networks, which became a key long-term research focus among the !Kung. Marshall depicted the !Kung as gentle and nonviolent people living in peace, with egalitarian social and economic practices and no differentiation in status between individuals. She saw a society in which all economic resources were shared, accumulation of resources was not tolerated, and status differences were quickly and forcefully diffused. Despite this somewhat utopian flavor, Marshall's ethnography was excellent in its detail and extremely influential in its effect on contemporary anthropologists dealing with foragers. In addition, her accounts influenced a great deal of the evolutionary thinking of the1960s and [Page 1389]established food sharing as an important feature of early hominid evolution. Filmmaker John Marshall captured vivid images of the !Kung that became prominent features of anthropology classrooms around the world for decades, further securing the place of !Kung as evolutionary models even in the minds of lower-level students. John Marshall filmed his important images of the !Kung over a long span of time, documenting the changes in !Kung culture during this time. Thus the Marshalls established the persistent and popular image of the !Kung as isolated, autonomous, egalitarian foragers living in a manner very close to the earliest humans. Harvard physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn, in the latter part of his career by the 1960s, was also important in promoting forager research in order to document analogues with which to understand the past and build evolutionary models.

...