Paper short abstract:

In the years 1980-2012, the Ju/’hoansi of Namibia underwent traumatic changes, including low-intensity warfare, and threats to their land base. During this period, anthropologists played key roles in helping the Ju/’hoansi. This paper documents their intervention, its successes and failures, and attempts to draw up a balance sheet.

Paper long abstract:

The Ju/'hoansi-San of Namibia and Botswana have a long history in Anthropology as a favourite case study of authors of introductory textbooks. Studies and filmed representations of their lives as hunter-gatherers, --sharing, foraging, dancing, arguing,-- have enlivened classrooms for generations.

Less well-documented are the current realities of their lives in a globalizing world of commodified labour, ethnic tensions, and mass communications. This paper focuses on the Nyae Nyae Ju/'hoansi as they enter the third decade of life in post-Apartheid Namibia, where their long history of relative self-reliance and local autonomy has been supplanted by incorporation into and domination by the structures of the bureaucratic state and capitalism.

Through the 1980s the Ju/'hoansi attempted to cope with Apartheid's attempts to cling to power through counter-insurgency warfare. Then when South Africa was finally defeated and Independence for Namibia was proclaimed in 1990 under SWAPO, they faced rapid immersion in the cold bath of neo-colonial capitalist relations of production.

Through this period, seeing the desperate circumstances the Ju/'hoansi faced, an ad hoc group of anthropologists became reluctantly involved as change agents. The late John Marshall, Megan Biesele, Pauline Wiessner, and Robert Hitchcock are four of the major figures in this drama of redemption. Despite mistakes and reversals, the Ju have survived. Did their scholar-activist interlocuters help them avert more dire outcomes?