Nisa Het leven van een Kungvrouw|Marjorie Shostak 9058472574

||boek: Nisa Het leven van een Kungvrouw|vertaling: Peter van der Kaaij|Byblos

||door: Marjorie Shostak

||taal: nl
||jaar: 2002
||druk: ?
||pag.: 285p
||opm.: softcover|ex-bibliotheek|zo goed als nieuw

||isbn: 90-5847-257-4
||code: 1:001714

--- Over het boek (foto 1): Nisa Het leven van een Kungvrouw ---

Nisa - Het leven van een !Kungvrouw - Marjorie Shostak

"In 1981 bezocht de toen nog jonge etnologe Marjorie Shostak Nisa, een Kungvrouw, die woonde in de wilde savannes an Zuid-Afrika. Haar centrale vraag was toen: bestaat er zoiets als werkelijk begrip tussen vrouwen van verschillende culturen?

In 1989 bezocht Marjorie Shostak Nisa opnieuw en leefde wederom langere tijd met haar samen zonder dit verblijf te romantiseren. Marjorie Shostak leed op dat moment al aan een ernstige ziekte, waar haar verblijf bij de Kung een extra intensiteit verleende.

Shostak laat ons de gesprekken tussen haar en Nisa op de voet volgen, laat ons zien hoe Nisa omgaat met haar man Bo.

Ook gaat Shostak mee op de jacht, en wordt daarbij regelmatig geconfronteerd met de aanwezigheid van leeuwen in de directe omgeving van het dorp.

Centraal staat echter de psychologie van Nisa, die zo heel anders is dan die van Shostak. Vooral de heilzame woorden van Nisa voor de aan een dodelijke ziekte lijdende Shostak maken diepe indruk.

Nisa is een fantastisch reisboek, gesitueerd aan de rand van de Kalahariwoestijn, waar het leven van de Steentijd in contact komt met de moderne wereld."

[bron: https--www.reis-boek.nl/product/nisa-het-leven-van-een-kungvrouw]

--- Over (foto 2): Marjorie Shostak ---

Marjorie Shostak (May 11, 1945 - October 6, 1996) was an American anthropologist. Though she never received a formal degree in anthropology, she conducted extensive fieldwork among the !Kung San people of the Kalahari desert in south-western Africa and was widely known for her descriptions of the lives of women in this hunter-gatherer society.

Shostak was raised in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. in literature from Brooklyn College, where she was a supporter of the women's equal rights movement, and met her future husband, Melvin Konner.

From 1969 to 1971, Shostak and Konner lived among the !Kung San in the Dobe region of southwest Africa, on the border between Botswana and South Africa. There they learned the !Kung language and conducted anthropological fieldwork. While her husband looked at medical issues like nutrition and fertility, Shostak examined the role of women in the !Kung San society, becoming close with one woman in particular, known by the pseudonym "Nisa". Shostak's book on the subject, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, was first published by Harvard University Press in 1981, and is now a standard work in anthropology. It weaves together the different voices of Shostak and Nisa, alternating between anthropological observation and the life story of a "primitive" woman told in her own words. In the book Shostak argues that !Kung San women had higher status and autonomy than women in Western cultures because of their food contributions.

During the 1980s, Shostak and Konner also wrote a popular book and a number of articles advocating a "Paleolithic diet", which is based on the idea that many illnesses found in agricultural and industrialized societies result at least in part from diets that differ significantly from those that human beings evolved to eat.

Shostak and Konner had three children together. In 1983 they moved to Atlanta, Georgia, when Konner was offered a position as chair of the department of anthropology at Emory University and Shostak became a research associate at the Institute of Liberal Arts. She also taught courses in anthropology on life history methods and the Kalahari.

In 1989, Shostak, following treatment for breast cancer, returned to the Kalahari to interview Nisa again. She died in 1996, aged 51, while her second book, Return to Nisa, was in preparation. It was released posthumously in 2000. In it, Shostak describes a traditional ceremony in Botswana in which Nisa attempted to heal Shostak's cancer. She was survived by her husband, children, parents, and sister.

Selected works

• Shostak, Marjorie (1981). Nisa, the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00432-0.
• Eaton, S. Boyd; Shostak, Marjorie; Konner, Melvin (1988). The Paleolithic Prescription: A Program of Diet & Exercise and a Design for Living. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-015871-2.
• Eaton, S. Boyd; Shostak, Marjorie; Konner, Melvin (1989). Stone-Age Health Programme. Angus & Robertson Children's. ISBN 978-0-207-16264-0.
• Shostak, Marjorie (2000). Return to Nisa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00829-8.

[source: wikipedia]

Marjorie Shostak - May 11, 1945-1996

In Brief

Earning her bachelor's degree in English literature from Brooklyn College in 1966, Marjorie Shostak traveled to Botswana with her husband for his doctoral research in 1969. In Africa, Shostak photographed and recorded audio of women of the !Kung San people in the Kalahari Desert. There she met a spirited and outspoken woman whom Shostak gave the pseudonym "Nisa." Shostak published her interviews in Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (1981), which became a touchstone for feminist anthropology. Returning to America in 1983, Shostak taught at Emory University and wrote numerous articles on ethnography and the !Kung people and coauthored a book on the Paleo diet. Shostak returned to Africa in 1989 and was working on Nisa Revisited when she died in 1996.

Overview and Education

Although not trained as an anthropologist, Marjorie Shostak authored an anthropological classic, the internationally acclaimed Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, the life history of a woman of the !Kung San (or Bushmen) people of Africa's Kalahari Desert. She also coauthored another important work, The Palaeolithic Prescription, and wrote over twenty scholarly papers on Kalahari ethnography and art, and on the methods of transcribing and writing a life history.

Born in Brooklyn, on May 11, 1945, Shostak was the younger of two daughters born to Jerome Shostak, an educator and author of more than forty English textbooks, and Edna (Schiff) Shostak, a high school teacher. Her forebears originally came from Eastern Europe and England. Shostak studied English literature at Brooklyn College (BA 1966), where she met Melvin Konner. Moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, they were married in 1968, and Shostak became an associate of Harvard's Peabody Museum. They had three children: Susanne, Adam, and Sarah.

Work in Botswana

When the couple traveled to Botswana in 1969 for Konner's doctoral research, Shostak spent her time photographing, audiotaping music, and studying women's artistic productions such as beadwork. Well into her fieldwork, she turned her tape recorder toward recording the life stories of women in the Dobe camp. She had taped several histories with varying results when she was introduced to a feisty and outspoken woman in her early fifties, to whom Marjorie gave the pseudonym "!Nisa" (later shortened to "Nisa" by a publisher reluctant to foist click symbols on the public).

The great strength of Marjorie Shostak's Nisa is its ability to speak to people across cultural boundaries, a credit both to Nisa herself, a storyteller of great depth and candor, and to Shostak, who framed Nisa's words with insight into their shared womanhood and the human condition.

When Nisa appeared in 1981, it quickly became an anthropological classic, reprinted in a paperback edition in 1983 and translated into many languages. Presenting the life history of ethnographic subjects is a well-established tradition in anthropology, an effective vehicle for conveying the life experience of members of another culture in the subject's own idiom. Shostak's Nisa became the most widely read life history in the annals of anthropology. Selling well over 150,000 copies, it became the entrée into anthropology for tens of thousands of students, as well as a foundational text in contemporary feminist anthropology. Shostak's life histories anticipated by a decade the reflexive turn in American anthropology. Her presentation of the words of a woman of the "Fourth World" gave agency and voice to one who was triply disempowered. Shostak's work continues to draw critical attention among scholars even while it delights students and lay readers.

Later Life and Career

In 1983, Shostak and Konner moved to Atlanta, where Shostak became a research associate at the Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University and a faculty member in anthropology, teaching courses in life history methods and Kalahari ethnography. Diagnosed with breast cancer in April 1988, she resolved to return to the Kalahari to see Nisa once again, and did so in 1989. She recorded another series of interviews that form the basis of "Nisa Revisited," a manuscript that Shostak had almost completed before her death.

Marjorie Shostak's long and complex relationship with Nisa became the subject of a play, My Heart Is Still Shaking, written by Atlanta playwright Brenda Bynum. The play, directly addressing the issue of Shostak's illness with power and honesty, was a dramatic tour de force.

Raised in the secular humanistic tradition of Judaism, Shostak was appreciative of older traditions expressed in Friday family dinners and her children's bar and bat mitzvahs. Her personal philosophy combined insights from African cultures, her own Judaism, and other spiritual sources.

Marjorie Shostak died on October 6, 1996, at age fifty-one.

Selected Writings by Marjorie Shostak

• Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (1981).
• The Paleolithic Prescription, with Boyd Eaton and Melvin Konner (1988).

Richard B. Lee [source: https--jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/shostak-majorie]



Made up of a series of analyses and personal interviews conducted by Marjorie Shostak, Nisa, The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman is an anthropological work about women of the !Kung tribe of the Kalahari desert in southern Africa told through the perspective of one individual, Nisa. Though not an anthropologist by training, Shostak learned the !Kung language to hear Nisa's vivid stories of village life, domestic responsibilities, and family obligations. Though Shostak was drawn to Nisa for her storytelling abilities, Shostak holds that Nisa is nonetheless indicative of all !Kung women. As the bulk of the work is made up of transcribed interviews, Shostak tells Nisa's stories in her own words, though through English translation. In Nisa, Shostak admits that her desire to study !Kung women was due to her own feminist leanings, and that she was fascinated by !Kung life because of its economy where women's labor is more important and its society were women freely discuss sex and sexuality. As such, Nisa has been characterized not only as a work of anthropology, but of feminist literature as well.

[source: https--worldhistorycommons.org/nisa-life-and-words-kung-woman-marjorie-shostak]

Review(s)

• "When I reread Nisa, as I have done regularly in teaching over the years, I experience its originality, poignancy, and excitement afresh each time. Few books that were so influential in changing the look and feel of ethnography for entire generations of anthropologists have held up so well. It is a classic, with currency and continuing possibility." --George Marcus, Professor of Anthropology, Rice University
• "[A] scrupulous, sad, exciting book." --New York Times
• "We have a remarkable anthropologist to thank for an absorbing account." --New York Review of Books
• "Both Nisa and Shostak are unusual people, and their collaboration has resulted in an unparalleled account of !Kung life from a personal rather than social or ecological perspective. Even more important, their work results in a revelation of the universality of women's experiences and feelings despite vast differences in culture and society. Nisa helps us know what it means to be !Kung, to be a woman, and finally, to be human." --Choice
• "Nisa is a humbling and inspiring book." --Tim Jeal, Wall Street Journal

About the Author

Marjorie Shostak was a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University and an award-winning photographer.

[source: https--www.amazon.com]

One of my all-time favorite ethnographies and an absolute stable in anthropology [2017-05-20]

I love, love, love this book. I initially read it for a college class in anthropology, but after reading many other ethonographies and ultimately getting my degree in anthropology, Nisa remains one of my all-time favorites. Nisa is a classic in the field, written by Marjorie Shostak of her field work in the 60's and 70's on of !Kung people in Souther Africa through the narrations of one !Kung woman, Nisa. The !Kung are significant in anthropology because they are one of the few peoples in the world that maintain a modern hunter-gatherer lifestyle (at least at the time of Shostak's fieldwork). Thus, they represent a lifestyle that human beings have lived for thousands of years dating back to the earliest hunter-gatherers. It's how we lived for the majority of our evolutionary time, and thus modern hunter-gatherers shed precious light on humanity's origins. Unlike most ethnographies and most social science texts more broadly, Nisa is primarily informed by one voice: Nisa's. The book consists of interviews conducted over time between Shostak and Nisa with the purpose of Nisa bestowing her own knowledge upon Shostak as a younger woman about what it means to be a woman. Each chapter chronicles a period of Nisa's life, which she tells to illustrate not only her own stories by central truths and life lessons. Of course, these are all according to one person, an older woman with a lifetime of lived experience through the lens of her own culture. Topics include growing up, marriage, taking lovers, being a mother, and losing those closest to you. Shostak begins the book with a long introduction describing the !Kung people and putting their culture into context for Western readers, including the !Kung language, traditions, family structures, group dynamics, migration, diet, etc. Then each chapter begins with an introduction to the topic based on Shostak's fieldwork with the whole community followed by Nisa's individual stories and insights. Overall, Nisa is an enigmatic, funny, unique, talented, and captivating storyteller selected by Shostak as narrator for these very reasons. This book is a treasure, and is certain to teach readers much about human truths according to one incredible woman. It's a must-read for anyone interested in womanhood, culture, modern hunter-gatherer societies, African peoples, anthropology, and human kind.

Kristen [source: https--www.amazon.com]