This project will entail a 20-year follow-up study of the Botswana San (Bushman) healing rituals in the context of major socioeconomic change, carried out by a seasoned linguistically competent team of male and female researchers. The goal of the project is to produce a contemporary ethnography of |Kung religious healing as a response of tradition to new socioeconomic factors such as sedentarization, changing gender relationships, decreased egalitarianism and an emergent politicized leadership. This project will augment research on this society conducted since the 1960s. Six months of field observation will occur at four sites representing a range of social relationships between the |Kung San and the pastoral and industrial societies they live with. The frequency, duration, personnel, rationales for, and delivered services of healer's orations and healing ceremony-songs will complement in-depth interviews on life-histories of healers. Such research is important for the light it sheds on how indigenous peoples understand and react to the broad social, political and economic trends that overwhelm them.
