More about culture--!Kung

For this week blog post I am writing about a “classic” ethnography in anthropology. This is Nisa by M. Shostak, which describes the life of Nisa, a !Kung woman, through her own words and stories, plus observations by the author's fieldwork.

!Kung is a gathering-hunting society which lives in the area between Botswana and Namibia, southern Africa. As the description goes, !Kung’s life is based on gathering and hunting—that is their way to survive. They spend most of the day gathering food: fruits, nuts, vegetables and whatever other thing they found that is eatable. They also hunt a wide variety of animals, from cows to giraffes. Usually mothers go gather food with their children and father go hunt by themselves. Having this lifestyle—living in the bush and the wild—does not mean !Kung people are less smart or intellectuals than other cultures. As I said in my previous blog post, culture is how people see and understand the world. They live that way because it is how they see the world and how they understand the environment around them, not because they are not intellectual or have lack of reasoning.

!Kung people live in villages and have no boundaries. Each family has a set of huts where they sleep. !Kung people has a lot of customs that I found interesting and that are much different from my culture. One of the aspects of the !Kung people I found more interesting is the relationship they have in each nuclear family. There are things I like about them and that I would even like to apprehend in my life, but there are other things, from my ethnocentric point of view, I found very extremists that I don’t like. One of the things I found interesting is the relationship children have with their parents. Based on Shostak’s observations, children do not view parents as a great figure of authority—the relationship between them is very intimate. !Kung children have a closer relationship (compared to many other cultures, including mine) with the father. Since fathers are not a notable authority figure, !Kung children see them more as friends and peer than a rule figure. The kind of conversations they have one another is different from the ones I would have with my father. In my culture, parents are a very important authority figure. I was raised with the idea of always respecting my father and doing what he tells me to do. The relationship with my father is very close, and we talk about many things, but comparing it to the !Kung, it is much different. This kind of relationship in !Kung life is influenced by their lifestyle. Since they live in small villages and families spend much time together, they develop that kind of relationship.

While I was reading the book, each time I found an aspect of !Kung customs very different from my culture, I tried to think back in my life to see how I see that and how I experienced that, and then tried to compared it to their way of seeing it. I imagined myself being one of them to try to understand why and how they did something in such way and had such understanding of something. Reading this book, I now realize how true are things anthropologist says about how the environment and its elements, shape people’s view toward the world and things around them in order to create what is called culture. Each time I imagine myself as one of them and kind of understood the reason why and how they see things in their own way, made me realize how there are people in the world that think completely different than myself and people around me. With the background of readings I have now through this course I have a wider understanding of world cultures, not only in the new culture I am currently surrounded by, but of gathering-hunting cultures like the !Kung.