Further Lessons in Kalahari Ethnography and History

Abstract

No event has an autonomous life. It's always limited to things around it. Jean-Luc Godard (1966) It only takes three generations for personal contact to be lost, and then the memory, if it exists at all, passes on to strangers, us. Peter Greenaway (1994) In this journal (HA 20:185-235, hereafter 1993), Lee and Guenther attack me personally and my work, particularly my bookLand Filled with Flies, which elsewhere they (1995:298) say has “a density of error and misrepresentation unrivaled in recent anthropology.” This is not the first nor the last such attack, which began in 1989 when, in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Lee implied that I was complicit in destroying data that he insinuated I wished not to be available for further inspection. He also then accused me, along with my colleague James Denbow, of pandering to the supposed need of the Government of Botswana to create a homogeneous national identity. We were to have done this by orienting our research toward a subversion of evidence of differences among the various peoples—especially “Bushmen”—of the country. Lee has never retracted this nor his accusation of data forgery, although he (1993:20n6) has elliptically acknowledged that the latter is false. Since then, Lee and Guenther, together and alone, have expanded their litany of alleged malfeasance and intensified their attacks. Most recently, Guenther (1999) continues to accuse me of “doctoring” evidence (this term was first used in 1993:217).

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