The Ju/’hoan San, or Ju/’hoansi, of Namibia and Botswana are perhaps the most fully described indigenous people in all of anthropology. This is the story of how this group of former hunter-gatherers, speaking an exotic click language, formed a grassroots movement that led them to become a dynamic part of the new nation that grew from the ashes of apartheid South West Africa. While coverage of this group in the writings of Richard Lee, Lorna Marshall, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, and films by John Marshall includes extensive information on their traditional ways of life, this book continues the story as it has unfolded since 1990. Peopled with accounts of and from contemporary Ju>/’hoan people, the book gives newly-literate Ju/’hoansi the chance to address the world with their own voices. In doing so, the images and myths of the Ju/’hoan and other San (previously called “Bushmen”) as either noble savages or helpless victims are discredited. This important book demonstrates the responsiveness of current anthropological advocacy to the aspirations of one of the best-known indigenous societies.

A comprehensive and fascinating account of all the major groups of southern African hunter-gatherers.

Transformations of Global Food Systems for Climate Change Resilience: Addressing Food Security, Nutrition, and Health provides poignant case studies of climate change resilience frameworks for nutrition-focused transformations of agriculture and food systems, food security, food sovereignty, and population health of underserved and marginalized communities from across the globe. Each chapter is drawn from diverse cultural contexts and geographic areas, addressing local challenges of ongoing food and health system transformations and illustrating forms of resistance, resilience, and adaptations of food systems to climate change. Fourteen chapters present global case studies, which directly address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s global call to action for transforming agriculture, addressing food security and nutrition, and the health of populations impacted by climate change and public health issues.They also integrate reflections, insights, and experiences resulting from the COVID-19 Pandemic. This edited volume includes research on (1) enhancing food sovereignty and food security for underserved populations with a particular focus on indigenous peoples; (2) improving locally contextualized definitions and measurements of climate change resilience, food security, hunger, nutrition, and health; (3) informing public health programs and policies for population health and nutrition; and (4) facilitating public and policy discourse on sustainable futures for community health and nutrition in the face of climate change and natural disasters, including ongoing and future pandemics or emergencies. Within this book, readers discover an array of approaches by the authors that exemplify the mutually engaged and reciprocal partnerships that are community-driven and support the positive transformation of the people with whom they work. By doing so, this book informs and drives a global sustainable future of scholarship and policy that is tied to the intersectionality and synergisms of climate change resilience, food security, food sovereignty, nutrition, and community health.

They are laborers, soldiers, refugees, and orphans. In areas of the world torn by poverty, disease, and war, millions of children are invisible victims, deprived of home, family, and basic human rights. Their chances for a stable adult life are extremely slim. The powerful interdisciplinary volume Vulnerable Children brings a global child-rights perspective to the lives of indigenous, refugee, and minority children in and from crisis-prone regions. Focusing on self-determination, education, security, health, and related issues, an international panel of scholars examines the structural and political sources of children's vulnerabilities and their effects on development. The book analyzes intervention programs currently in place and identifies challenges that must be met at both the community and larger policy levels. These chapters also go a long way to explain the often-blurred line between vulnerability and resilience. Included in the coverage: Dilemmas of rights-based approaches to child well-being in an African cultural context. Poverty and minority children’s education in the U.S.: case study of a Sudanese refugee family. The heterogeneity of young children’s experiences in Kenya and Brazil. A world tour of interventions for children of a parent with a psychiatric illness. An exploration of fosterage of Owambo orphans in Namibia. UNICEF in Colombia: defending and nurturing childhood in media, public, and policy discourses. Vulnerable Children is a must-have volume for researchers, graduate students, and clinicians/professionals/practitioners across a range of fields, including child and school psychology, social work, maternal and child health, developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, social policy, and public health.

When the notion of ‘alternative facts’ and the alleged dawning of a ‘postfactual’ world entered public discourse, social anthropologists found themselves in unexpectedly familiar territory. In theirempirical experience, fact—knowledge accepted as true—derives its salience from social mechanisms of legitimization, thereby demonstrating a deep interconnection with power and authority. In thisperspective, fact is a continually contested and volatile social category. Due to the specific histories of their colonial and post-independence experience, African societies offer a particularly broad array of insights into social processes of juxtaposition, opposition, and even outright competition between different postulated authorities. The contributions to the present volume explore the variety of ways in which authority is contested in Southern and Eastern Africa, investigating localized discourses on which institution, what kind of knowledge, or whose expertise is accepted as authoritative, thus highlighting the specificities and pluralities in ‘modern’ societies. This edited volume engages with larger theoretical questions regarding power and authority in the context of (post)colonial states (neo)traditional authority, claiming space, conflict and (in)justice, and contestations of knowledge. It offers in-depth critical analyses of ethnographic data that put contemporary African phenomena on equal footing with current controversies in North America, Europe, and other global settings.

This book describes the Nyae Nyae Village Schools, an innovative and unique mother-tongue education initiative set in north-eastern Namibia. Inspired by the optimism of Independence, the project was designed in close consultation with the Ju'hoansi community in the early 1990s. Drawing upon their traditional knowledge transmission strategies, and initiated in a supportive political environment, the project exemplified 'best practice.' During the following two decades, the Village Schools have transitioned from a donor-supported 'project' to government schools, and have received much attention and support from donors, civil society organisations, researchers, and others.However, the students still do not seem to succeed in the mainstream schools. Why is this? Based on long-term field-work in the region, including interviews with Nyae Nyae residents over several years and work with involved organisations, the book addresses this question. Contextualising the Village Schools within post-Independence Namibia, southern African history and the global indigenous rights movement, it examines the enormous paradoxes that schooling presents for the Nyae Nyae community. 'Owners of Learning' is the English translation of the Ju'hoansi word for 'teacher' and it serves to highlight a fundamental question - to whom does education belong?"

4: Twenty-First-Century Hunting and Gathering among Western and Central Kalahari San / Robert K. Hitchcock and Maria Sapignoli -- 5: Why Do So Few Hadza Farm? / Nicholas Blurton Jones -- 6: In Pursuit of the Individual: Recent Economic Opportunities and the Persistence of Traditional Forager-Farmer Relationships in the Southwestern Central African Republic / Karen D. Lupo -- 7: What Now?: Big Game Hunting, Economic Change, and the Social Strategies of Bardi Men / James E. Coxworth

Publisher description

Thinking Blue/Writing Red interrogates contemporary culture across a range of texts, from the pandemic (‘Covid’ and ‘Trump Speak’) to high theory (Melville's narratives) and popular culture (Beyoncé's ‘Formation’ and Super Bowl performance, Twin Peaks , metamodern ‘cli-fi’ films). Inspired by Derrida’s idea of the secret, Tumino examines the significance of social movements (Black Lives Matter, Occupy, alter-globalization) and naïve art (Darger, Ryden) to argue that these texts speak of the secrets that capitalism cannot speak. Contending that the cultural surfaces narrate only the ‘nonsecret,’ that to see the social logic of the culture one must dig into what Bruno Latour questions as the ‘deep dark below,’ Thinking Blue/Writing Red reads these texts to tease out the underlying narratives of the culture of capital. This book will be of interest to students in several disciplines, including philosophy, literary and cultural studies, film studies, women's studies, critical race studies, history, LGBTQ+ studies and environmental studies.

New perspectives on transitions in human history This book is about transitional periods of cultural and environmental change as seen through the lenses of archaeology and ethnography. Incorporating data from across six continents and tracing the human experience from the Late Pleistocene to the present, these chapters offer a global comparative perspective on transitional states. Questions of causality are considered, as are hypotheses about the processes of cultural change. Archaeology on the Threshold focuses on major transitions such as the shift from foraging to agriculture, the adoption of new technologies, the emergence of large-scale societies, the transition from egalitarian to inegalitarian leadership, and changes that occur in socioeconomic and ideological systems as a result of climate change and disease. Theoretical approaches range from processual to postprocessual, humanistic, and interpretive. Methodologies include ethnoarchaeology, the use of ethnographic analogy, cross-cultural comparisons and large-scale data approaches, oral history, the historical record, participant observation, and focus group discussions. Challenging archaeologists to query long-held assumptions and theoretical positions, this volume aims to refocus inquiry into change-causing and larger evolutionary processes to problematize notions of revolutionary, irrevocable change. These case studies examine and shed light on assumptions regarding the linearity and oscillations of adaptations, with intriguing implications for archaeological inferences.