The ! Kung People

The !Kung people of Southern African is a community of modern click language speaker hunters and gathers. Known as the Yellow San, the !Kung are “short, pale-skinned, deep chested, with straight foreheads and small delicate faces and jaws (Lee, pg 11).” The !Kung are one of the very few remaining societies to still depend on foraging to collect food, but many have adopted faming and pastoral practices. Their egalitarian way of life has been increasingly close to extinction due to economic incentives and globalization. The !Kung is a community that is part of the San or ‘Bushmen’ people of Southern Africa. The name San or ‘Bushmen’ was first used by Dutch settlers from the 1650s when they found two groups of people living in Southern Africa.
The !Kung typically lived in a small groups of thirty people and each family had a total two bags of possessions. The family possessions included tools, ostrich shell canteens, childern’s toys, and musical instruments (Ward, pg 68). Any possession a !Kung own had to be able to be easily transported if the group had to find a new location to forage for food. The !Kung being hunters and gathers do not own land. The land is collectively shared among the community. The !Kung people are egalitarian meaning that every person in the community is more or less equal. The !Kung do not have an authority figure or government, only an informal leader to help resolve issues with personal persuasion (Wade, pg 69). The !Kung egalitarian community does have some drawbacks that include a lack of private property and privacy, although for modern !Kung a hunter and gather lifestyle is not possible anymore. The !Kung practice infanticide, the killing of a newborn infant. When a child is born the mother will search the newborn for defects. “If it is deformed, it is the mother’s duty to smother it (Wade, pg 98)” according to a demographer named Nancy Howell. Infanticide is not murder by the !Kung because a newborn is not a person. A newborn becomes a person after the baby is taken back to camp and given a name. That name means the baby is now accepted as a “Real Person” in the community. The !Kung hunter and gather lifestyle means that a women must be able to carry a newborn to forage the land and travel on foot over long distances. A woman will walk 1,500 miles a year carrying a child and their possessions (Wade, og 98). Once a child as learn to walk, a !Kung women will have another child. This has made the practice of infanticide a useful tool for the