Kinship Organization

"The nuclear family is the most common type of foraging societies. A nuclear family is composed of a mother and father and its children. The nuclear family is most common because, in a foraging setting, it is adaptive to various situations." Kinship is the central organizing principal. I will be discussing the culture, living structure, and the kinship system of the San also known as the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert.

The Bushmen or San of the Kalahari Desert are one of the few groups of hunter-gathers left in Africa. These people work together in small, tightly knit communities. Traditionally, they move from place to place, searching for insects and edible plants and hunting small animals. The Bushmen or other hunters who live in the desert migrate based on water availability. In tropical rainforest environments where there is little if any seasonality, people move for other reasons. They might have to collect honey, or fruit but otherwise their movement is based on leaving an area while resources reproduce. The loss of the rainforest reduced the Bushmen to eat dry berries, the shallow bulbs of little onions, ground-growing nuts, edible ends of grass places, as well as grub, large ants, baby birds, snails and caterpillars. They also grabbed ostrich eggs which provided them a meal and then might serve them as water bowls.

Hunters-gathers moved around to survive and needed a lot of unoccupied land other populations killed many of them and their way of life. Their society is not based off of money or property but harvesting food and the other necessities of life directly from the natural world. Traveling also required building new shelter. Typically, shelters are built quickly, usually in one day and are made from materials found locally and available to anyone. Shelters are not built to be permanent but rather are constructed as temporary shelters and used as long as needed. Once a shelter is abandoned anyone can use it. Foraging was done as a family, women as well as men spent time foraging. Most times than others men were known to hunt and women were known to gather for their family, but, occasionally there would be an instance where the woman has caught a small animal and the man has gathered for the family. During hunting the Bushmen would use tools made of natural material such as spears or arrows and used poison that was found in the grub of certain beetles. After shooting an animal with an arrow of poison, the Bushmen might track an animal for a few days waiting for the poison to kill it. Meat was an important part of their diets as was vegetables gathered by the women day after day. Households gathered into living groups called camps or villages which are the primary production unit and villages are spread through the environment to maximize access to natural resources.

Kinship is the primary form of social structure of the Bushmen. Within their society, everyone has more or less the same level of ownership