Kung SAN

A detailed Summary of Kung SAN


The !Kung San tribe is located in isolated areas of Botswana, Angola, and Namibia in Southern Africa located near the Kalahari Desert. The !Kung people refer to themselves as the Zhun/twasi, which means "the real people." When research was first done on the !Kung, it was done by anthropologists from Harvard during the 1960's. These anthropologists did a long-term study on their daily life. When research was done, the anthropologists described the !Kung as relatively isolated, peaceful, and sharing. These people tried to define the !Kung as the ideal society, which is hardly true. These researchers turned out to be wrong when it was found out that the !Kung homicide rate is extremely high, and half of all the children were killed by disease. This is hardly an ideal society.

The !Kung's environment in which they live is considered to be harsh by outsiders. They live in a semi-arid region with some trees, but it is mostly brush and grass-covered low hills and flat spaces. Rainfall during the wet season varies from only five to forty inches. Temperature during the winter is below freezing, but during the summer it is well above one hundred degrees. The !Kung are able to survive their harsh environment by simply adaptin


g to their surroundings. The !Kung live in villages which consist of ten to thirty people and are semi-permanent. Once their source of water dries up, the village has to carry their belongings to a new area where a reliable source of water can be found. The people of the villages live in grass-built huts with a fire burning in front of each hut all the time.

The !Kung are hunter-gatherers, with men mainly being responsible for providing the meat. Typical animals that the men hunt are wildebeest, gemsbok, giraffe, various reptiles, and birds. The men's game is distributed in the generalized reciprocity form. This means giving and taking the game without the use of money. The women of the !Kung provide the majority of the food. They spend an average of two to three days a week foraging. Some foods the women gather are mongongo nuts, baobab fruits, water roots, bitter melon, or !Gwa berries. The children stay back at the huts to be watched over by those remaining at the camp. Both men and women of the !Kung have a remarkable knowledge of which foods are edible, and of the medicinal and toxic properties of different species. Animals in the wild are very sparse for the !Kung and sometimes men have to travel a great distance to get it. When the animal is brought back, the meat is not the only part used b

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 891
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous

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