Room to Maneuver:!Kung Women Cope with Men

Abstract

This chapter describes the social and economic conditions that influence the coercion of women by husbands in !Kung society. It discusses several episodes of wife-beating that came during recent field work among the!Kung and also discusses in terms of the cultural values relevant to their former nomadic life and in terms of the realities of current life styles in the 1980s. An extremely interesting aspect of cultural variability is the extent to which the underlying reproductive asymmetry of men and women is institutionalized. By the late 1980s when the field research was conducted, all the!Kung of Western Botswana were settled around permanent sources of water. They were no longer full-time hunter-gathers; instead they lived in villages ranging in size from twenty to forty people. In the last twenty years, the!Kung of western Botswana have settled around sources of permanent water and are becoming food producers.

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