The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

psychological characteristics” while in the principal text, Sextonʹs cultural and social
descriptions have a more important place. 29
Nisa has widely been seen as innovative in its use of life history and as an important
example of polyphonic experimentation in ethnographic writing. 30 With this
biographical project, there seems to have been a large degree of reflexivity, an
understanding of the peculiarities of an interview as an interaction between two people,
each with “unique personality traits and interests at a particular time of life” and the
recognition on the part of Shostak that as an interpreter, and through the ethnographic
relationship, she had been an active participant in the shaping of the personal narrative.
There was also an attempt to broaden the research base by interviewing a wider range of
women in order to compare Nisa’s experiences. Indeed in a self‐assessment by Shostak,
she described her work an attempt to understand “what it meant to be a woman in the
!Kung culture” through the medium of life history and personal narrative. 31
In spite of all this methodological awareness, Shostak’s account of Nisaʹs life has been
criticised as a deeply flawed, very conventional work in which the individual is used
principally as “the token of a type”. 32 The !Kung are presented as “one of the last
remaining gatherer‐hunter societies”, survivors of a prior age, isolated, traditional and
racially distinct, with quite a recent experience of “culture change”. In an exoticised
portrait of ‘the other’, Shostak enters into a world seemingly frozen in time in order to
listen to women’s voices, which may reveal “what their lives had been like for
generations, possibly even for thousands of years”. 33 This uncritically primordial
account of !Kung social life was influenced mainly by the anthropological work of
29 Vincent Crapanzano, ‘Life‐Histories’, p 954‐955.
30 See for example George E Marcus and Michael M J Fisher, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An
Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp 58‐59; James
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), p 42.
31 Marjorie Shostak, ‘ʺWhat the Wind Wonʹt Take Awayʺ: The Genesis of Nisa ‐ The Life and Words of a
!Kung Woman’, in Personal Narratives Group (eds), Interpreting Womenʹs Lives: Feminist Theory and
Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp 228‐240.
32 See the critique by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, ‘Beyond ʺCultureʺ: Space, Identity and the Politics
of Difference’, Cultural Anthropology, 7, 1, 1992, especially pp 14‐16.
33 Marjorie Shostak, Nisa, pp 4‐6.
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