Review Of The Life And Words Of A !Kung Woman By Marjorie Shostak

In the excerpt from Nisa, titled “The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman”, Marjorie Shostak conducted research in the early 1970’s about understanding the life of earlier Paleolithic people and their cultures and ways of life. She traveled to the Kalahari Desert where she meet the San people, gathering and hunting people who still follow the ways of their earlier ancestors. She was acquainted with a middle age woman who shared the details of her life and that of her childhood. Nisa told stories of her life growing up. She talked about her father’s hunting trips, and how she eagerly wait for his return as he would bring back meat or some cases honey which she loved. It could be somewhat of an isolation, as she never knew anyone else during her upbringing outside of those who had lived with her and her family in the “bush. She then goes on to give details of her life as it unraveled. She had married and had a “marriage hut” which seemed to be the norm amongst here people.

It was also the norm for both men and woman to have multiple lovers as one was seen as inadequate and could not full all ones needs. She had also became an “N/um”, a in which they use to refer to people with the power of healing and getting into trances. Nisa’s life to some could be a deviation in terms of original traditions of the early Paleolithic people, as the study were conducted thousands of years after they had become extinct, certain rituals and traditions have passed been down generations after generations which are still entrenched in the San people of the 1970’s and even to this very day. One thing can be said, is that her description of social relationships during her time may have aided historians and anthropologists to better understand the Paleolithic Period. In the Gregory Curtin, “The Cave Painters Lascaux Rock Art”, we see something rather astonishing, early paintings of the Paleolithic people that had been discovered in a cave in Lascaux, France in the 1940’s by some teenage boys. This discovery gives us an up-close look into the life of these people that would have never been possible. It shows a man and different animals placed together in close proximity but lack a clear meaning or interpretation.

Where they the source of good fortune, as drawing these images would have been about gather efficiency in hunting? Alternatively, was it the site of religious ceremonies as they were found so deep with the caves? Alternatively, as the book suggest, examples of “totemic” thinking, the ideology that people came from animals. As historians struggle with a clear answer to these questions. , it shows never the less a stark contrast in the idea of these people being illiterate. It draws another questions as to why these particular objects where drawn in the places they were drawn? It displayed a variety of animals such as horses, bison, stags and a bird but no reindeer, although that was one of primary sources of meat at the time. Did they deliberately left it out to place meaning on something else or was it just a too important to be placed among other objects. Regardless to say these findings have helped us over the decades to better understand and grasp life during that period where writing was nonexistent.