The San are the indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples of Southern Africa, historically inhabiting the Kalahari Desert region across present-day Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Angola, and speaking a family of click-consonant Khoisan languages distinct from the Bantu languages of most of their neighbors. San communities are among the most extensively studied hunter-gatherer societies in anthropology, particularly through mid-twentieth-century ethnographic work on the !Kung, though that literature has itself been the subject of the 'Kalahari debate' over how much San foraging life represented a persisting ancient pattern versus a historically contingent adaptation. Land dispossession, including court battles over access to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana, remains a live and documented issue for San communities today. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Group TypeSourced to the subject's own accountIndigenous ethnic group (hunter-gatherer) 1 Typical RegionSourced to the subject's own accountSouthern Africa (Kalahari Desert region: Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Angola) 1 Primary LanguageSourced to the subject's own accountSan languages (Khoisan family, including !Kung and other click-consonant languages) 1 Subsistence ModeSourced to the subject's own accountHistorically hunting and gathering in the Kalahari Desert; today the great majority live in settled communities with limited access to traditional hunting grounds. 1 Disputed
Population Estimateapproximately 90,000 to 100,000 1 Sourced to the subject's own accountPrecise counts are difficult because San identity and self-identification vary, and many San individuals live in mixed settlements without separate ethnic enumeration. Connections
Associated With
Hxaro is a delayed reciprocal gift-exchange network documented among the San (Ju/'hoansi) of the Kalahari, binding partners across dispersed camps.
The healing trance dance is a central ritual of San (Ju/'hoansi) religious and medical practice in the Kalahari, performed to draw out illness through trance.
Sources
1. Wikipedia: San
WikipediaIntroductionQuote, Introduction
The San peoples, or Bushmen, are the members of any of the indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures of southern Africa, and the oldest surviving cultures of the region.
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