The Dobe Ju/’hoansi

Anthony Khalil

ANT 104 DC

Book Reaction Paper

Dr. Lynn O’Brien

April 25, 2016

The Dobe Ju/'Hoansi

In the book The Dobe Ju/’Hoansi, Richard B. Lee, an anthropologist from the University of Toronto, studies the daily life of one particular group. Lee’s focus of study takes place on the border between the countries of Namibia and Botswana in an area called the Dobe. Living there is a tribe of people known as the Dobe Ju/’Hoansi.

Lee studies multiple important issues of the Ju/’Hoansi culture and lifestyle throughout the book. He provides an enormous amount of knowledge that has been divided into twelve chapters that continuously digs deeper and deeper into the internal thinking of the Ju/’Hoansi culture. Studying their environment and various examples of their hunting techniques help out in understanding deeper issues such as sexuality and religion. Lee comments on the kinship, social organization, marriage, as well as conflict, their politics, and social structure.

Lee starts off by first discussing the difficulty it took him in finding the Dobe. To my understanding the Dobe live in an isolated environment away from anything or anyone. As soon as Lee found the Dobe Ju/’Hoansi he studies the environment that they live in such as the climate, physical characteristics, and location. Without this particular knowledge I would have found myself not knowing how they live their daily lives.

The Dobe Ju/’Hoansi are hunters and gatherers as explained by the book, some may even say that’s how the cavemen first started out in life. So in turn this is very beneficial and crucial in knowing that they live like this because it helps to retain ancestral pattern. Majority of their calories comes from hunting and gathering. Though now a day we live in the twenty first century and believe in supermarkets. What caught me by surprise was how little it took to feed an entire village of people. According to Lee it only takes two-hours for one single person to gather nuts to be sastified for a couple of days.

The kinship of the Dobe Ju/’Hoansi is very important in understanding how they go about their relationships, inheritance, and companionship. One weird fact is that there are a handful of names that parents could choose for their newborn. A newborn male would be named after his grandfather, and if it were a female it would be named after her grandmother. Parents are not allowed to name their children after themselves. In our culture the difference is apparent.

The sexuality aspect of the Ju/’Hoansi is also very intriguing. In Ju/’Hoansi culture, girls and boys learn to take part in sex at a very early age. Parents and children would sleep together in the same bed, under the same exact blanket and sexual acts would take place discreetly as the child is sleeping. Lee tells the story of one woman and her discovery of sex by playing sexual games with her friends. The woman states that most boys and girls will have some sort of prior knowledge of sexual intercourse by age 15. The Ju/’Hoansi react to sex differently than we do in our society. This includes oral and anal sex, bondage, and sado-masochistic practices. Instead, the one goal is to orgasm.