Eating Christmas In The Kalahari, By Richard Lee

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In the ethnography, “Eating Christmas in the Kalahari,” Richard Lee goes to the Kalahari Desert to research the !Kung and study their hunting and gathering subsistence economy while avoiding to provide food, share, or interfere in food gatherings. One of the anthropological methods that Robert Lee utilizes is Fieldwork and participant observation; he immerses himself in the community and lived there with his wife for 3 years. Another method he uses is informant/interview, where he asks the people questions that he believed where relevant to his topic. Lastly, he uses fieldnotes and headnotes, where he transcribes what he observed or realized, whether mentally or physically. Lee also reveals valuable key insights about the !Kung. First off, he knows that they celebrate Christmas because of the, “Tswana-Herero custom of slaughtering an ox for his Bushmen neighbors as an annual goodwill gesture” (PG.31). He also learns quickly that they love to eat meat/fat and that if there is a lack of food, there could be possible fights and tension. However, he also learns that a good Christmas feast would bring together groups that did not get along in the past. Since Lee did not share his food with the !Kung, he was known to be stingy, …show more content…
ch is why he wanted to buy a huge ox for their feast, but multiple people told him that his ox was a “bag of bones” and that it would not feed everyone, so he became frantic and was afraid of what was to come for the feast, he later
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