Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari

by Edwin N. Wilmsen

Book Overview

"The image of a pristine isolation has been almost as common in research on foragers as in the popular media. Land filled with Flies is a sustanined argument against such views. Wilmsen marshals an enormous quantity of historical, archival, archeological, ethnographic, and survey data on the Kalahari Zhu to show how far from the reality these images are, how they have their own historical provenance, how they have been analytically distorting,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226900150
• ISBN13: 9780226900155
• Release Date: September 1989
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 420 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

anthropology majors and curious world citizens

this book is thought provoking in that it challenges us to question notions of reality disseminated to us by experts and media organizations. What guides analytical perceptions about the world and the people in it, is a topic that is attempted-I believe successfully- in Edwin Wilmsen's Book: Land Filled With Flies. History is crucial in the development and presentation of realities of existences and Wilmsen uncovers these factors of construction. The identity, under "construction" is the "Bushmen" of the Kalahari. If you like to dismantle structures of power and strip bare pre-conceived notions of perception, then you will like this book. I got all this just from reading the first and last chapter. Even the intro was sizzling. If you like biting remarks and criticisms, he pleases by exposing his anthropological colleagues as accomplices in the shaping of a destructive categorization of a disadvantaged people, the "fictitious Bushmen"