I found this information to be very helpful in my attempt to familiarize myself with the Dobe Ju/?hoansi as to how they live. While Lee covers a great deal of information about the Dobe Ju/?hoansi, I found that the most important issues lie within their subsistence, kinship, and sexuality. The Dobe Ju/?hoansi are a hunting and gathering group of people, which is thought to be how early man lived. Therefore, it is easy to see why Lee acknowledges the importance of studying the Ju/?hoansi while they are still relatively isolated. Here we are able to view a culture that retains our early ancestral pattern. As recently as 1964, 85% of their calories were the result of hunting and gathering (156). That number has since decreased due to the increased Westernization. The most interesting feature of the Ju/?hoansi foraging is the relatively little amount of work needed to feed a village. As Lee observed on a trip to a mongongo tree, that within a two-hour period, a woman gathered 30-50 lbs. of nuts enabling a person to eat for ten days (40). The kinship of the Dobe Ju/?hoansi is very important in creating order to interpersonal relationships, inheritance, and marriage (foreword, v). Lee suceeds where others have failed in that he is able to take a difficult and complex topic (social organization of kin) and create an easier way to understand it. Instead of diving right into the organization, Lee provides a diagram showing what and where the terms are as seen on pages 66 through 69. The most interesting part, in my opinion, was the limited number of personal names. There are only 35 men's names and 32 woman's names in use in 1964 (71). In fact 75% of all the men had one or another of the eleven most popular names, while 73% of woman had one of the twelve most popular names (72). The reasoning behind this was due to the Ju/?hoansi belief that a child must be named for somebody. A first-born son is named after his father's father, and the daughter named after her father's mother.
