Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen

by James Suzman

Overview

“Insightful and well-written . . . [Suzman chronicles] how much humankind can still learn from the disappearing way of life of the most marginalized communities on earth.” -Yuval Noah Harari, author of SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMAN KIND and HOMO DEUS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW

WASHINGTON POST'S 50 NOTABLE WORKS OF NONFICTION IN 2017
AN NPR BEST BOOK OF 2017

A vibrant portrait of the “original affluent society”-the Bushmen of southern Africa-by the anthropologist who has spent much of the last twenty-five years documenting their encounter with modernity.

If the success of a civilization is measured by its endurance over time, then the Bushmen of the Kalahari are by far the most successful in human history. A hunting and gathering people who made a good living by working only as much as needed to exist in harmony with their hostile desert environment, the Bushmen have lived in southern Africa since the evolution of our species nearly two hundred thousand years ago.

In Affluence Without Abundance, anthropologist James Suzman vividly brings to life a proud and private people, introducing unforgettable members of their tribe, and telling the story of the collision between the modern global economy and the oldest hunting and gathering society on earth. In rendering an intimate picture of a people coping with radical change, it asks profound questions about how we now think about matters such as work, wealth, equality, contentment, and even time. Not since Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People in 1959 has anyone provided a more intimate or insightful account of the Bushmen or of what we might learn about ourselves from our shared history as hunter-gatherers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632865724
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

James Suzman, Ph.D., is an anthropologist specializing in the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa. A recipient of the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in African Studies at Cambridge University, he is now the director of Anthropos Ltd., a think tank that applies anthropological methods to solving contemporary social and economic problems. He lives in Cambridge, England.

Table of Contents

Author's Note vii

On Names and Clicks ix

Maps

1 Southern Africa and the Kalahari Basin xiii

2 Khoisan Peoples and Language Groups of Southern Africa xiv

3 Key Archaeological Sites in Khoisan History xv

4 Eastern and Central Namibia xvi

5 The Bantu Expansion xvii

Part 1 Old Times

1 The Rewards of Hard Work 3

2 The Mother Hill 21

3 A Beachside Brawl 34

4 The Settlers 43

5 Living in the Moment 64

6 Tsumkwe Road 77

Part 2 The Provident Environment

7 The Hollow Tree 97

8 Strong Food 109

9 An Elephant Hunt 117

10 Pinnacle Point 135

11 A Gift from God 145

12 Hunting and Empathy 161

13 Insulting the Meat 175

Part 3 New Times

14 When Lions Become Dangerous 193

15 Fear and Farming 204

16 Cattle Country 216

17 Crazy Gods 229

18 The Promised Land 245

Further Reading 261

Acknowledgments 275

Notes 277

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

An insightful and well-written book, describing the hard transition of foraging communities in Namibia from relative affluence during the Stone Age to contemporary poverty and misery. Avoiding both modern conceits and romantic fantasies, Suzman chronicles how economics and politics have finally conquered some of the last outposts of hunter-gatherers, and how much humankind can still learn from the disappearing way of life of the most marginalized communities on earth.” —Yuval Noah Harari, author of SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMAN KIND and HOMO DEUS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOMORROW

“To know what it is like to live as people lived for most of human history, you would have to find one of the places where traditional hunting-and-gathering practices are still alive…Fortunately for us, the anthropologist James Suzman did exactly that…The news here is that the lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think. We're flattering ourselves by believing that their existence was so grim and that our modern, civilized one is, by comparison, so great.” —John Lancaster, The New Yorker

“Suzman's descriptive prose and affection for his subjects generate the reader's genuine empathy…This fascinating glimpse into a disappearing way of life leads Suzman to reflect on our world today: a world where wealth and possessions are valued above all other pursuits. Suzman's account of the lives of Bushmen, past and present, offers plenty of fuel for thought.” —Rachel Newcomb, The Washington Post

“Mr Suzman deftly weaves his experiences and observations with lessons on human evolution, the history of human migration and the fate of African communities since the arrival of Europeans. The overarching aim of the book is more ambitious still: to challenge the reader's ideas about both hunter-gatherer life and human nature.” —The Economist

“[Suzman creates] a feeling for the landscape, the difficulties encountered by the Bushmen, and the pleasures of their simple, if rapidly changing, way of life... In all, this is a delightful book, full of perceptiveness and understanding.” —Science

“[A] fascinating book. . . Part-ethnography, part-memoir, this is a poignant account of a culture on the brink of extinction.” —Sunday Times

“Suzman's talent for evoking the region's vast and haunting landscapes, his elegiac account of a passing covenant with nature, and his warm and compassionate character sketches of individual Ju'/hoansi, make this a fascinating and at times profoundly moving work of literary non-fiction.” —The Irish Times

“[T]hrough neglect, abuse and misunderstanding, an ancient way of life is being finally extinguished… Yet, Suzman argues, even now the Bushmen have much to teach us about a social order that, in many ways, offered a freer, fairer existence and a non-invasive adaption to ecology.” —Ben Collyer, New Scientist

“This book has truth on every page and is filled with important insights that range from hunting and tracking to how we think about time, money, value or success.” —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of THE HARMLESS PEOPLE and THE OLD WAY

“This beautiful book—part memoir, part ethnography—offers a window into the lives of one of the most enduring of human cultures . . . If you have ever wondered how it might be to measure wealth not by material possessions but by the strength of social relations between people, read this book.” —Wade Davis, author of THE WAYFINDERS and INTO THE SILENCE

“[A] beautiful, heartfelt paean. AFFLUENCE WITHOUT ABUNDANCE is learned without being condescending, tender yet unsentimental. It is both a celebration of an ancient way of life and a lament for all that has been lost in our own headlong pursuit of the material.” —Peter Godwin, author of MUKIWA and WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN

“A spirited ethnography of the ancestral peoples of the Kalahari . . . A welcome contribution to a once-vibrant anthropological literature without many recent entries.” —Kirkus Reviews

“In his thoughtful, in-depth look, [Suzman] focuses on the Ju/'hoansi people, whom he has been working with for more than two decades… A fascinating examination of a society drastically changed by forced modernity.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

2017-04-30
A spirited ethnography of the ancestral peoples of the Kalahari.Suzman, the head of a Cambridge-based think tank devoted to real-world anthropological applications, has vast experience living and working among the people once mostly known as the Bushmen, which has a derogatory connotation, later as San or Khoisan. "A staple of safari lodge-style coffee-table books and glossy posed postcards," they have been mythologized in several ways, perhaps most effectively by Laurens van der Post's Lost World of the Kalahari, published nearly 60 years ago. One of the most enduring images to emerge from the many books about them is what the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins characterized as "Stone Age economics," gathering and hunting enough to stay alive but working not much more. Suzman complicates this account with a closer view of what Khoisan economics really entails, but on the whole, he agrees that the Khoisan traditionally lived freer and easier than most wage slaves today. Their world has largely disappeared, though, in at least some measure because their Kalahari homeland has been transformed by settlers from outside who have introduced a cattle-based economy. Indeed, Suzman writes, the last generation of Khoisan to live traditionally has already passed away, their people having lived in spatial stability, as the author puts it, even as other populations were moving out of Africa to populate the rest of the world hundreds of thousands of years ago. Suzman writes with skill and appreciation of ancient concepts such as n!ow, a kind of inborn spirit, but glances over larger ideas such as his provocative thought that "language is neither the primary medium of culture nor is it a universal tool capable of translating everything from one culture into another." (If not language, then what?) He does better, though, in showing how old San ideas of how to live can be applied to our overly extractive, Western consumerist society, spearheaded by the rising generation of millennials. A welcome contribution to a once-vibrant anthropological literature without many recent entries.

Kirkus Reviews