"Women and Men in !Kung Society" + Assignment

For this assignment, you need to read an article and then submit your answers to some questions about it. The article is called, "Women and Men in !Kung Society" by Marjorie Shostak. As you may recall, !Kung is a name for a community of people indigenous to the Kalahari. The article is unique because in it, anthropologist Marjorie Shostak shares a first-person account of one woman, Nisa. In other words, the article is translated from Nisa's own words, not written by an anthropologist. Many students say they particularly like this reading because it is not full of academic jargon, and it gives us an opportunity to hear directly about someone's experience growing up in a !Kung community. This article specifically focuses on gender roles in Nisa's experience. It covers about five years beginning when Nisa was in her early thirties. It takes place in the 1950s, so it is a time when many San continue to live in their traditional ways and many have been forced to change how they live due to European colonization of their lands. 

Step 1: Read

Read the article, "Women and Men in !Kung Society."   (Note: The very last few lines are on pg. 74, and that page is rotated the wrong way. Just rotate the document when you get to that page so you read the last few sentences.)

Step 2: Write your answers to the following questions.

After you read the article, please answer the following questions. 

1. Based on Nisa's account described in this article, how do you think women are treated in her community?
2. What are some key differences you noticed between how women and men relate in Nisa's community versus the community you live in?
3. What did you notice about the role of Europeans (as Nisa refers to them) in Nisa's life? 
4. What was one part of Nisa's story that you had a strong reaction to? (This could be positive or negative.) Please describe some of your feelings about it. 
5. Finally, what connections do you see between Nisa's story and the Last of the Bushmen film we watched last week?  

STEP 3: Submit your Answers

Submit your answers by clicking the blue, "Take The Quiz" button below and copying each of your answers into the corresponding box in the "quiz." Although I am using the quiz feature for this, it is not a quiz. This is just an assignment. Do your best, but I'm not grading you on getting the right answer; you will be graded based on your sincere attempt to answer the questions and showing that you have read the article, even if you didn't understand all of it.

Please get in touch if you have any issues submitting your answers. 

Note: These are all response questions, not comprehension questions, so I am not including answers this time. I'll be interested to read your thoughts!