Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen

A vibrant portrait of the “original affluent society”--the Bushmen of southern Africa--by the anthropologist who has spent much of the last twenty-five years documenting their encounter with modernity. If the success of a civilization is measured by its endurance over time, then the Bushmen of the Kalahari are by far the most successful in human history. In rendering an intimate picture of a people coping with radical change, it asks profound questions about how we now think about matters such as work, wealth, equality, contentment, and even time. Not since Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People in 1959 has anyone provided a more intimate or insightful account of the Bushmen or of what we might learn about ourselves from our shared history as hunter-gatherers.. A hunting and gathering people who made a good living by working only as much as needed to exist in harmony with their hostile desert environment, the Bushmen have lived in southern Africa since the evolution of our species nearly two hundred thousand years ago. In Affluence Without Abundance, anthropologist James Suzman vividly brings to lif

kmsag said Anthropology for a wider public. This is a beautifully written book that champions writing anthropology for a wider public. I found Affluence without Abundance to be powerfully evocative and full of ethnographic insights that span centuries. Rather than omit the “ever-grimmer realities of modern Bushman life” to serve an entirely romantic agenda, the author recounts the lives of the Ju|’hoansi as they really are. He does this without losing sight of th. Scipio Africanus said Insightful and Enjoyable. Wonderfully written and filled with insights into how one of the world's last hunter-gatherer societies has struggled to reconcile its traditional values with the rapidly encroaching reality of modern capitalist life

. He lives in Cambridge, England. James Suzman, Ph.D., is an anthropologist specializing in the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa. A recipient of the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in African Studies at Cambridge University, he is now the director of Anthropos Ltd., a think tank that applies anthropological methods to solving contemporary social and economic problems

Mr Suzman deftly weaves his experiences and observations with lessons on human evolution, the history of human migration and the fate of African communities since the arrival of Europeans. It is both a celebration of an ancient way of life and a lament for all that has been lost in our own headlong pursuit of the material." - Peter Godwin, author of MUKIWA and WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN"A spirited ethnography of the ancestral peoples of the Kalahari. Avoiding both modern conceits and romantic fantasies, Suzman chronicles how economics and politics have finally conquered some of the last outposts of hunter-gatherers, and how much humankind can still learn from the disappearing way of life of the most marginalized communities on earth." - Yuval Noah Harari, author of SAPIENS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMAN KIND and HOMO DEUS