Marjorie Shostak

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Marjorie Shostak (born May 11, 1945 in New York City , † October 6, 1996 ) was an American ethnologist . She is mainly known through her writings and research on the Kung San in the Kalahari desert in south-west Africa.

Marjorie Shostak grew up in Brooklyn New York. At the college there she graduated in literature and met her future husband Melvin Konner . Both went to Africa in 1969 and 1971 and lived in a group of! Kung San. Marjorie Shostak described the role of women in this society in her book: Nisa: The Life and Words of a Kung Woman , first published by Harvard University Press in 1981 With this book, which is one of the classics of post-colonial ethnography today, Shostak broke new ground in narrative terms: it alternates between the scientific and ethnographic representation of the field researcher and the subjective perspective of Nisa. The author lets Nisa "speak for herself", she makes her voice heard. This aesthetic and epistemic process reflects an ethnographic approach that the filmmaker John Marshall pursues in his documentary "N! Ai, the Story of a! Kung Woman", albeit in an audio-visual medium.

Marjorie Shostak mainly worked in historical and systematic cultural studies, defining culture as the "totality of the forms of life typical of an ethnic group ". In 1993 she returned to the Kalahari after cancer treatment to write a continuation of Nisa's life story. But she died at the age of 51 and did not live to see her second book Return to Nisa .

Works

Her books were published in German under the titles:

  • I followed the drums of the Kalahari. Wunderlich, Reinbek near Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-8052-0712-3 .
  • Nisa tells. The life of a nomad woman in Africa. Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-499-23050-X .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Shostak, Marjorie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American ethnologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 11, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH October 6, 1996