Summary Of Kung Bushmen

Improved Essays
Richard Lee was an anthropologist studying the !Kung Bushmen. The !Kung Bushmen celebrates their version Christmas differently by having activities that include December Congregation at the cattle post for trading, marriage brokering, and several days of trance dance feasting at which the local Tswana headman is host (Lee 1). Instead of the essential Christmas story of “praise the birth of white man’s god-chief” (Lee 1). The !King Bushmen rarely had days supply of food on hand, (Lee 1) so Lee wanted to share the Christmas spirit by buying the best ox and serving it for Christmas. Lee was often opened for accusations and hard- heartedness and was considered a miser. Lee was determined to find the fattest ox to say, “thank you” to the !Kung

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    The Dohasan Calendar

    • 593 Words
    • 3 Pages

    After interpreting the Dohasan Calendar, it was begun by a Kiowa chief named Dohasan, who was described as “a very gentlemanly and high minded man.” The Dohasan calendar suggests different ways of understanding and remembering history in sense of it still being continued when Dohasan died in 1866, and was prolonged until 1892 by…

    • 593 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Indians facing persecution turn to Native American religion and practice traditional sacred ceremonies in order to escape the reality of the psychological and physical mistreatment they face within American society. Mary Crow Dog was a Sioux Indian of the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. (Pg.5) As a child Crow Dog attended the St. Francis boarding school where Indian children were forced to assimilate and faced with punishment if they disobeyed. (Pg.4) Crow Dog became involved with the American Indian Movement as a teenager and participated in some monumental movements in the 1970’s, including the Trail of Broken Treaties and the siege at Wounded Knee.…

    • 781 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Introduction The film The Split Horn The Life of a Hmong Shaman in America focuses on how health and illness is dealt with in the Hmong culture. It is about the life of a Hmong family who moved to Appleton Wisconsin from Laos and how they are adapting to this new place. The journey of a Shaman 's family is explored and it is expressed that they have their own set of traditions in their culture but when this family moved to America it was learned that it is difficult to carry out traditions. Illnesses are looked at from different viewpoints across different cultures and depending on an individual 's culture, explanations for health are looked at and treated differently. This family learns that it is difficult to adjust to the American lifestyle,…

    • 777 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    The White Men were the epitome of malevolence. They ravished the Chinook’s holy soil, the trees that they spent all night worshipping were butchered like they were meaningless. Their beloved river became a dump for their strange glass bottles. Their home had become a cesspit of godless men. Eventually they learnt their outlandish ways and language, apparently the Chinook’s were “ savage Indians”, yet they had known the virtues of being civil far better than the White Men could ever have.…

    • 81 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Themes Of Fools Crow

    • 2092 Words
    • 8 Pages

    The Novel Fools Crow written by James Welch depicts a fictional story of the tribe of the Lone eaters. The reading itself provided a different point of view of the situation that the Native Americans lived in after the influx of migrants in search of their wealth. Throughout the novel one can understand the causes of the conflict between the Native Americans and the White society. One can also depict different aspects of Native American culture throughout the novel that are crucial for understanding it’s the way it function and what were the causes of its downfall. In order to understand the situation in more depth one must see the historical connectivity with the fictional story as well.…

    • 2092 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe follows the story of Okonkwo and the Ibo tribe in Nigeria as it experiences the beginning of European colonization and the spread of western influence. Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in response to the savage and animalistic manner in which the Nigerian people are portrayed in western literature. Achebe counters the savage portrayal of Nigerian tribes in literature and reveals the complexity and beauty of the Ibo tribe through their customs and innerworkings. Achebe thoroughly describes the intricate and complex rituals of the Ibo to signify the dignity of the tribe. The entire village gathers together for wrestling matches in which honor is bestowed if great skill is displayed.…

    • 807 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Zitkala Sa’s short story The Soft-Hearted Sioux a Native American boy goes to a mission school that teaches him that killing anything is wrong. His father is sick and unable to hunt, and he did not kill until it is too late. The young man is born and raised Native American but, is taught Christianity in school which made him a social outcast to both his people and their ways of life. Zitkala story The Soft-Hearted Sioux, portrays that the boy is torn between two faiths.…

    • 948 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    The video I choose to analyze was “Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun”. The short documentary explains the communal rituals and cultural festivities of the Saharan nomadic Wodaabe tribe. The film proceeds to inform us that the Wodaabes are an Itinerant clan, dispersed across the Sahel. Their unique tribe came from the roots of the Fulani ethnic group. Most of the Wodaabes can be found in Niger republic and Northern Nigeria.…

    • 201 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    To have a possession is to have control or ownership of something whether it be a materialistic or non-materialistic item. Personal possessions allows us to have a sense of control over something in uncontrollable situations, even when we do not have control of ourselves. In the shorty story, “The Things They Carried”, the author Tim O’Brien used detailed imagery to show how personal possessions, physical objects, reflects the internal objects they desperately try to hold on to. O’Brien describes some of the things his comrades carried stating, “Kiowa, a devoted Baptist carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma” (323), showing that Kiowa’s bible was…

    • 1314 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    An Inside Look at the ! Kung/San The ! Kung/San people are thought to be the oldest known society in the history of mankind.…

    • 1012 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Dama Dance History

    • 929 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The Dama, or the African Mask Dance, has been performed for hundreds of years however is only performed every sixty years as it is based on a celestial cycle that refers to a star that circles around Sirius (Rik Pinxten, 2015). It is a significant part of the African history to follow this particular celestial cycles. The Dama is a ritual dance for the Dogon Tribe of Mali, situated in West Africa. This essay will examine and analyse the movement and non-movement components within the dance. It will also analyse how this ritual dance preserves the Dogon Tribe’s culture and history.…

    • 929 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The article “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari” by Richard Borshay Lee is investigating how the Kung Bushmen’s annual tradition of killing an ox for the community during the Christmas season. Lee begins the article by giving a brief history of how Christmas was introduced to the Bushmen, their basic interpretations of the Christmas story, and why the tradition of killing the ox for the community started. Lee then explains why he decided to study this tradition and how the people view him because he brought supplies to the area that were not readily available to the Bushmen. Lee continues by describing his plan for that Christmas was to find the largest ox possible and practice the tradition to hopefully gain the trust of the Bushmen.…

    • 757 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Ju Hoansi Analysis

    • 1831 Words
    • 8 Pages

    The Adaptation of the Ju/’hoansi Over the Course of 50 Years In the Dobe Ju/’hoansi written by Richard Lee, Lee writes about a small group called Ju/’hoansi, they know to be one of the world’s best-documented foraging society. Lee was in the field for nearly fifty years working to learning and experiencing their culture, their way of living, seeing their values. Throughout the visits over the years, he got to see the changes happening first on hand. Throughout the book, Lee addresses several values that are important to the Ju/’hoansi’s way of living and how the globalization takes effect over the year he has visited.…

    • 1831 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the article “Shakespeare in The Bush”, Laura Bohannan travels back to West Africa for the second time to live amongst the Bushmen to watch ceremonies. Before she set off for her journey, she was sure and wanted to prove to her colleague that human nature was pretty much the same worldwide and brought Hamlet along with her. Since the swamps continued to rise she couldn’t see the elders perform ceremonies, so all they could do was drink and tell stories. This gave Bohannan the opportunity to tell a story that meant a lot to her. Later on down the road, culture miscommunication took its course and she was challenged against the Tiv elders in finding the “true” interpretation of the story Hamlet.…

    • 419 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Clifford Geertz became the face of the discipline of anthropology during the 1970s. With his new approach to synthesizing fieldwork and his conceptualization of the connection between biological evolution and cultural evolution, his work transcended the boundaries of discipline by altering perspectives and frameworks in fields such as philosophy and biology. During the same decade, playwright and writer Alice Walker influenced a resurgence of Zora Neale Hurston’s publications on the Black American experience in the South. Hurston was a Boasian, a student of Franz Boas during the 1920s, whose contributions to the discipline of anthropology had been long forgotten. These anthropologists came to the forefront of the anthropological discussions of the 1970s despite their very different approaches to fieldwork and writing about their work.…

    • 1771 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays