A study of the influence of environment on culture and social organization among the Khoisan, a cluster of southern African peoples, comprised of the Bushmen or San "hunters," the Khoekhoe "herders", and the Damara, (also herders).

The Khoisan are a cluster of southern African peoples, including the famous Bushmen or San "hunters," the Khoekhoe "herders" (in the past called "Hottentots"), and the Damara, also a herding people. Most Khoisan live in the Kalihari desert and surrounding areas of Botswana and Namibia. Despite differences in their ways of life, the various groups have much in common, and this book explores these similarities and the influence of environment on their culture and social organization. This is the first book on the Khoisan as a whole to be published since the 1930s.

The Cape Herders explodes a variety of South African myths - not least those surrounding the negative stereotype of the 'Hottentot', and those which contribute to the idea that the Khoikhoi are by now 'a vanished people'.

This volume shows how hunter gatherer societies maintain their traditional lifeways in the face of interaction with neighboring herders, farmers, and traders. Using historical, anthropological and archaeological data and cases from Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia, the authors examine hunter gatherer peoples—both past and present--to assess these relationships and the mechanisms by which hunter gatherers adapt and maintain elements of their culture in the wider world around them.

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

“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