ABSTRACT
Anthropological work on the life of the hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari has captured the attention of a number of disciplines concerned to understand the human condition. This chapter shows how newly focused ethnography of southern African foragers can contribute to explorations into the anthropology of social experience and to developing fields of interdisciplinary research. Johannes Fabian concluded that neither time nor space is adequately incorporated into anthropological knowledge as a constitutive dimension of social experience and practice. The chapter also shows how a shift of focus can improve our understanding of the social experience of confrontation with the economy of communal and commercial cattle-holders. It explores the potential of this approach for anthropological contributions to interdisciplinary research on the cognitive dimensions of community construction. In the case of southern African forager ethnography an investigation into social experience has led the anthropologists to issues of ethnic identity and of the definition and handling of attributes that distinguish insiders from outsiders.
