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In 1963 Irven DeVore and Richard Lee began ethnographic research among a group of Basarwa (Ju/'hoansi) (!Kung) at a place called Dobe, in the Northwest District of what was then Bechuanaland. Little did they know that this work would become part of the ethnographic canon. It will interest readers in Botswana that the Ju/'hoansi have come to occupy a special place in the scholarly and popular imagination in North America and Europe and that the residents of this remote area have become known to generations of anthropologists and students. But what is sometimes forgotten by students and the overseas public is that the Ju/'hoansi like other hunting and gathering peoples have been drawn increasingly into the national, regional and World Systems. Their remoteness and desert location, over three hundred kilometres west of Maun, no longer protect them from the impact of the wider world. The cash economy, poverty, class formation and bureaucratic control, not to mention militarisation, anomie, and alienation have become part of the daily lives of the Ju/'hoansi in the 1980s and 1990s. The purpose of this paper is to trace the history of research in the Area, located around the administrative centres of Qangwa and XaiXai. We want to understand this history against the background of the rapid social change of the last thirty years as Botswana has emerged into nationhood. One image registers the scope and magnitude of social change among the Ju/'hoansi since the early days of field work. Sillery's classic work on The Bechuanaland Protectorate described the area around the /Gcwihaba caverns, where Dobe is located, as the most isolated in the country (Sillery, 1952). Richard Lee's early observations certainly bore him out. During 196364 the area received only one motor vehicle visit every four to six weeks; perhaps a dozen vehicles a year. However, during 1987 field work, Lee counted a motor vehicle every four to six hours, 1500 to 2000 per year, a one hundred-and-fifty fold increase! These vehicles brought a constant stream of government officials, health workers, drought relief shipments, and traders to the Dobe area, in striking contrast to the situation a generation before. The magnitude of this shift in vehicle traffic offers a window on the epochal changes in the lives and circumstances of the Ju/'hoansi. It is important to remember, however, that the !Kung didn't stop being a people when the last hunters laid down their bows and picked up their transistor radios. History moves on and the Ju/'hoansi have moved with it. Equally, one should not assume that the poverty, despair and social problems of the present is a primordial condition. The Ju/'hoansi persist as a people, embattled and struggling, but a people nonetheless, ones with a clear sense of themselves, rooted in what they see as their history of autonomous hunting and gathering. Field work has been going on in the Dobe area now for thirty years. One of the great virtues of long-term field work in social anthropology is that it has at least the potential to add a dimension of historical understanding, helping the Ju/'hoansi to link their present and their past, a coherence and unity so severely shaken by the events of the last three decades.
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