The Harmless People
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group · Paperback · October 23, 1989
“A study of primitive people which, for beauty of . . . style and concept, would be hard to match.” —The New York Times Book Review In the 1950s Elizabeth Marshall Thomas became one of the first Westerners to live with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Botswana and South-West Africa.
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- Who it’s for
- A spare, readable look at cultures and history, with room to talk it through.
- Genres
- How Cultures Work, African Studies, African History
- Published
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, October 23, 1989
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“A study of primitive people which, for beauty of . . . style and concept, would be hard to match.” —The New York Times Book Review In the 1950s Elizabeth Marshall Thomas became one of the first Westerners to live with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Botswana and South-West Africa.
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Her account of these nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose way of life had remained unchanged for thousands of years, is a ground-breaking work of anthropology, remarkable not only for its scholarship but for its novelistic grasp of character. On the basis of field trips in the 1980s, Thomas has now updated her book to show what happened to the Bushmen as the tide of industrial civilization—with its flotsam of property rights, wage labor, and alcohol—swept over them. The result is a powerful, elegiac look at an endangered culture as well as a provocative critique of our own. "The charm of this book is that the author can so truly convey the strangeness of the desert life in which we perceive human traits as familiar as our own. . . . The Harmless People is a model of exposition: the style very simple and precise, perfectly suited to the neat, even fastidious activities of a people who must make their world out of next to nothing." —The Atlantic
Quietly Observant
A spare, readable look at cultures and history, with room to talk it through.
Come here for
- accessible anthropology, classroom-friendly
- culture-and-history lens, conversation-ready
Expect
- studious pace
- clear, grounded framing
Where it sits
| How Cultures Work | 70% |
|---|---|
| African Studies | 34% |
| African History | 29% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Southern African History
- How Cultures Work
- Social Science Essays
- Authors
- Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
- Publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Published
- October 23, 1989
- Format
- Paperback
- Reading lane
- Southern African History