The Nexus Complex Among the !Xo Bushmen of Botswana

Abstract

In my thesis on Social Organization of the !ko ( !xo) Bushmen 1 of Botswana I mentioned for the first time the existence of a social group larger than the band and for this suggested the term nexus. The term may not be generally acceptable by researchers, but until a better term is forthcoming I suggest its retention. At the time the nexus concept caused considerable raising of eyebrows among workers but to my knowledge it was only attacked by Schmidbauer (1973). What was obviously needed was a more thorough investigation in depth and this has recently been carried out. It is the purpose of this paper to report on this investigation, to show that quite unexpectedly there are certain trans-nexus lines of communication, and to mention that, as yet, unpublished results of the work of Wiessner among the !Kung suggest the existence of a similar social grouping.

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