I spend my summers homeless and sneaking from one spot on campus to another to avoid security. This will be my last year as undergraduate but, if my luck holds on just a little longer, I will be able to graduate with no debt. What I have done this summer to pass the time that is not spent working or doing homework is begin a little pet research project that has been a long time coming.

Do you all remember that movie The Gods Must be Crazy? Me neither, but I hear it was a big hit. It was about a “Bushman” from the Kalahari region who encounters a Coke bottle falling from sky and gets caught up in the nasty war between SWAPO and South Africa. Anyway, the portrayal of the “Bushman” caught a lot of flack from anthropologists in some quarters. There is good reason for this flack, and I can assure you that it is not just another attempt to force Political Correctness onto everybody. Land policies and other government programs have removed many “Bushmen” from their homes, and the justifications for such policies is often that the “Bushmen” have no concept of private property rights, or that they have no conception of history. They are the Indians of the New World. Anyway, a lot of new archaeological evidence has lent credence to the anthropologists who have claimed that the image of the “Bushman” as a primitive hunter-gatherer is a myth created by anthropologists themselves. Robert Gordon writes the following: Continue reading →