WHEN BUSHMEN ARE KNOWN AS BASARWA - GENDER, ETHNICITY, AND DIFFERENTIATION IN RURAL BOTSWANA

Recent scholarship on the Bushmen (San) and other hunter-gatherers cal ls for an understanding of the way specific historical circumstances g ive rise to a variety of modes of livelihood and strategies of surviva l of groups. However, little attention has been paid to the analysis o f cultural and political dimensions of this process. This article is c oncerned with a group of ''Basarwa'' (a Setswana equivalent to ''Bushm en'') who have been permanent residents in a Tswana village in eastern Botswana since the turn of the century, and with the historical proce ss that maintained those Basarwa in a position of marginality vis-a-vi s their Tswana neighbors. I argue that to fully understand the continu ed marginality of the Basarwa in changing historical circumstances, on e has to analyze the dynamic relations between the cultural definition of Sarwa identity and its material and social grounding in household reproduction.