The Harmless People“A study of primitive people which, for beauty of . . . style and concept, would be hard to match.” —The New York Times Book Review In the 1950s Elizabeth Marshall Thomas became one of the first Westerners to live with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Botswana and South-West Africa. Her account of these nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose way of life had remained unchanged for thousands of years, is a ground-breaking work of anthropology, remarkable not only for its scholarship but for its novelistic grasp of character. On the basis of field trips in the 1980s, Thomas has now updated her book to show what happened to the Bushmen as the tide of industrial civilization—with its flotsam of property rights, wage labor, and alcohol—swept over them. The result is a powerful, elegiac look at an endangered culture as well as a provocative critique of our own. "The charm of this book is that the author can so truly convey the strangeness of the desert life in which we perceive human traits as familiar as our own. . . . The Harmless People is a model of exposition: the style very simple and precise, perfectly suited to the neat, even fastidious activities of a people who must make their world out of next to nothing." —The Atlantic |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
Afrikaans animals antelope arms arrow asked baby band Bantu baobab Beautiful Ungka began Bitter Melons Botswana brother bushes Bushmanland Bushmen called camp cattle Chuana Crooked Kwi crouched dance dark Dasina dead Dikai elephant eyes farmers father fire Gai's Gao Feet Gautscha gemsbok Ghanzi Gikwe giraffe girl grass ground hands head heard herd hunter hunting jeep Kalahari kaross killed knew Kung Kung Bushmen Kwi's wife Lake Ngami Lazy Kwi leave lions Little Dabe lived looked meat medicine melons mother Nama Namibia Nhwakwe night Nyae Nyae Okwa perhaps Pishiboro poison rain roots scherm season seemed Short Kwi side singing skin smoke song springbok talk tiny told Toma Toma's tree trucks tsama Tsamko Tsetchwe Tsumkwe Twikwe Ukwane Ukwane's veld food vine waited walked watching waterhole werf wildebeest wind Windhoek Witabe woman young boys