In the early 1990s, conventional wisdom in Kalahari hunter-gatherer studies was challenged by a revisionist movement that precipitated “the Great Kalahari Debate.” Ethnicity, Hunter-Gatherers, and the “Other” provides a collection of “traditionalist” answers to this revisionist challenge. The contributors draw from archaeology, ethnohistory, genetics, linguistics, and contemporary ethnography to argue that precolonial hunter-gatherers in central and southern Africa were autonomous cultural groups, contra the revisionists who claim that they were an underclass created by the regional political economy. All of the contributors demonstrate how hunter-gatherer interactions and associations with agriculturalists and agropastoralists were marked by varying degrees of autonomy, dependency, and assimilation. The reader should already be familiar with revisionist arguments to profit from the rebuttals supplied in this volume.

In the introductory chapter, Susan Kent provides a cursory overview of the issues at stake. She argues that African foragers are a “distinct culture” through a perplexing elaboration of the term ethnicity, leaving readers with a highly idiosyncratic and contradictory distinction between “ethnic groups” and “cultures.” For example, she claims that four distinct “cultures” exist in the Kalahari: the “Basarwa,” the Khoi, Bantu-speakers, and Europeans. Referring to groups as disparate as Afrikaners, Germans, and British as belonging to a homogeneous “culture” is more controversial than Kent appreciates. Her claim that British and Afrikaners are separate ethnic groups within the larger European culture is contradicted by her use of the term ethnicity “to refer to different homogeneous cultures, rather than subcultures within a larger pluralistic [culture]” (p. 2). If one accepts this distinction, one should also claim that the San and Khoi are different ethnic groups within the larger “Khoisan culture.” Yet Kent counts the San as “a distinct culture” that has outlasted the culture of the Khoi. The introduction is weakened by straw-man arguments, spurious explanations of anomalous data, non sequiturs, and an attempt to build a priori proofs of San cultural identity that provide little insight into how forager ethnicity is formed.

In separate contributions, Karima Sadr and Susan Kent address the question of how autonomy and domination would appear in the archaeological record. Kent’s chapter compares findings from North American sites where African slaves were used with those from central and southern Africa. Her data yielded expected findings: Slavery resulted in a decline in the material culture of the subordinated groups. Unfortunately, Kent pays little attention to important differences between African and North American forms of slavery. Alison Brooks provides a comprehensive overview of the genetic, linguistic, and archaeological data from central and southern Africa and asks why some groups of foragers were assimilated into other ethnic groups whereas others remained autonomous. She concludes that the ability to retain territory, linguistic boundary-maintenance practices, and lineage systems all contributed to the continued viability of foraging societies.

Three chapters examine the consequences of contact and association from an ethnohistorical perspective. Richard Lee draws from archaeology, ethnohistory, and contemporary interviews to compile a convincing argument that contact between the Dobe-Nyae Nyae Ju/’hoansi and Bantu-speakers did not translate into relationships of inequality or the assimilation of Ju/’hoansi. Alan Barnard and Michael Taylor outline the history and contemporary situation of ten San groups in southern Africa and conclude, like Lee, that culture contact is not sufficient to demonstrate assimilation. In an elegantly argued chapter, Mathias Guenther illustrates how contact actually encouraged the formation of egalitarian foraging bands. He departs from the cultural ecology approach by claiming that prior to Bantu and European encroachments into Ghanzi, the Nharo and ¹Au//eisi were politically complex and hierarchical large-game hunters. After Bantu and Europeans depleted the game, the Nharo and ¹Au//eisi shifted to a gathering-based foraging mode of production and familiar egalitarian social systems.

Frank Marlowe, and Axel Kööhler and Jerome Lewis examine the Great Kalahari Debate in light of data from studies on central African foragers. Marlowe argues that interaction between the Hadza and nonforagers did not undermine the foraging lifestyle and culture of the Hadza. Kööhler and Lewis examine relations between Twa Pygmies and outsiders and suggest that scholars should pay more attention to the different ways that foragers and nonforagers interpret their relationships with each other.

All of the contributors rightly insist that trade and association do not automatically translate into assimilation, and they highlight the adaptability of foraging societies. Although there are some disappointing pieces in the volume, the strongest essays well reward the attention of specialists.