!Kung Woman

Taking the explication of experience as its object as well as its method, Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman weaves together three narrative strands, and in doing so challenges the ethnographer’s penchant for the general and the anonymous. The first strand, the autobiographical details of a 50-year-old the story of an intercultural encounter in which the distinction between ethnographer and subject becomes blurred.

Nisa explains Nisa’s personality in terms of !Kung ways and, for the general reader, corrects and qualifies a number of received attitudes about “simple” societies. Michel Leiris’ warning that “We are all too inclined to consider a people happy if considering them makes us happy” applies particularly to the !Kung, whose seemingly fights over food undermine the idyllic vision Westerners cherish of childhoods lived in such “simple” circumstances.

Woven into Nisa’s autobiography are allusions to Shostak’s personal engagement with issues of gender. Nisa’s response to “What is it to be a !Kung woman?” also seems to answer another question, “What is it to be a woman?” In fact, Nisa’s answers illuminate not just one woman’s experience, but women’s experience in much ethnographic literature omits the perspective of women about women.

Nisa’s story is interwoven with Shostak’s presentation of their encounter; at times each seems to exist primarily in response to the other. Nisa’s autobiography is a distinct narrative in a particular voice, but it is manifestly the product of a collaboration. Indeed, by casting Nisa in the shape of a “life,” Shostak the dialogue between Nisa and Shostak that a shaped story emerges from this seemingly featureless background.