Room to Maneuver:!Kung Women Cope with Men

Abstract

Among the !Kung San of Botswana, women are sometimes beaten by their husbands and coerced by other men, particularly their fathers. The factors that contribute to this form of aggression are various and are changing in recent years as a consequence of new economic and residentia l practices now seen among the !Kung as they have transformed themselves from mobile foragers to primarily sedentary food producers. The responses of women and their supporters to incidents of wife abuse are also changing. In this paper several episodes of wife-beating that came to my attention during recent field work among the !Kung will be reported and discussed in terms of the cultural values relevant to their former nomadic life and in terms of the realities of current life styles in the 1980s. In a concluding section, the prospects for future patterns in wife abuse will be discussed. Before proceeding, a few words are in order regarding the general phenomenon of wife-beating in society and regarding the particular subject of wife-beating among the !Kung.