Megan Biesele, Ph.D.
Megan Biesele has spent more than ten years of her life, during the last 36 years, living and working with communities of Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa children. She first went to live with the Bushmen as an anthropologist and folklorist, and has returned again and again as advocate, development worker, translator, educator, archivist, historian---and, she says, a better human being than she could ever have become without the Bushmen's friendship and teaching. Megan received some of her life's most powerful lessons in socialization and human relatedness from her close association with Bushman women, men, and young adults. Her life has become centered around the promotion of Bushman welfare and the dissemination to a wide public, in the service of world peace, of Bushman social wisdom and healing knowledge
Megan's experience makes her the perfect complement to Brad Keeney in the Bushman N/om Kxaosi Ethnographic Project he is directing. Her fluency in Ju/'hoansi, one of the major Bushman languages, and her understanding of Bushman expressive culture, are born of years of activist involvement in the current Bushman cultural and political renaissance. Without the visionary Nyae Nyae Village Schools Project Megan started or her sensitive, decades-long mentoring of the grassroots community organization that has become the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, the Ju/'hoan people would have neither access to their land nor the resources and contacts they have used to build an effective voice and presence within post-apartheid Namibia.
When not in the Kalahari Desert, Megan Biesele has lived most of her life in Austin, Texas. She has occasionally taught anthropology as a self-employed academic at The University of Texas and at Texas A&M University (College Station). She has also taught at Rice University (Houston) and at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Earlier, while finishing her Ph.D. in social anthropology at Harvard, she founded a pioneering US anthropological advocacy organization, the Kalahari Peoples Fund (KPF) in 1973 and still serves as its Director. KPF (www.kalaharipeoples.org) provides responsible information on the indigenous peoples of the Kalahari, and raises funds for their community-generated projects.
For periods during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Megan worked with Ju/'hoan communities in Botswana and Namibia as an advocate and documentarian, and served as director of a nongovernmental organization, the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia, during the years spanning Namibia's transition to independence (1987-92). She is an elected member of the Committee for Human Rights (CfHR) of the AmericanAnthropological Association. She was the recipient in 2000 of the Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology from the Royal Anthropological Institute, London.
Since 1998 she has co-founded and served as president of the Shumla School, a non-profit organization in Comstock, TX, near Del Rio that is dedicated to research and public education in the study of indigenous expressive forms such as rock art and folklore. Her research interests include religion, belief systems, and verbal and visual art of hunting-gathering societies; cognitive systems and environmental resource use; and contemporary political, economic, and human rights of indigenous peoples. Her most recent trip to Africa, completed in August, 2006, centered on the production of authoritative vernacular texts of Ju/'hoan healing narratives and folklore, destined for both local educational curriculum materials and for wide publication in translation.
Her extensive list of publications includes Shaken Roots: Bushmen of Namibia Today (Johannesburg: Environmental Development Agency, 1990), "Women Like Meat": The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/'hoan (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), and Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World: Conflict, Resistance, and Self-Determination (co-editors, Peter P. Schweitzer and Robert K. Hitchcock. NewYork: Berghahn Books, 2000). She currently has three new books in preparation under contract: one of Ju/'hoan folktales for local literacy projects in Botswana and Namibia, one of Ju/'hoan healing and other texts in Ju/'hoansi and English set in the context of the current Bushman cultural renaissance, and one a social history of Nyae Nyae's grassroots democratic movement since 1990, the year of Namibia Independence.
Meet team member Beesa Boo.
