“You cannot live with someone who does not share” is the uncompromising social principle of the San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, for whom “sharing” extends far beyond the distribution of food. It permeates bodily space, ritual life, material goods, actions, ideas, and social relationships. Sharing is not charity, nor is it a moral performance – it is the fundamental condition for living together. One shares in order to survive together.

Remarkably, this social system has no written laws, no formal authorities, no institutionalized power. It does not rely on fear, coercion, or the threat of sorcery. What sustains order is a disciplined attentiveness and a conscious stripping away of desire and attachment. To see clearly. To want little. To remain open to others.

What might hyper-consumerist, industrialized societies learn from such a way of life?

Drawing on years of immersive fieldwork beginning in 1988, an anthropologist who lived among the San offers a vivid ethnographic portrait of their world – particularly the lives of women who sustain, negotiate, and embody this ethic of sharing. Through intimate observation and deep participation, this book reveals a social philosophy forged in one of the world’s harshest environments – yet one that speaks powerfully to the crises of modern abundance.
In the vast austerity of the desert, we encounter not scarcity, but a radically different vision of wealth: that of mutual dependence, restraint, and shared existence.

About Editors and Authors

Kaoru Imamura is Professor in the Faculty of Contemporary Social Studies at Nagoya Gakuin University, Japan. She received a PhD from Kyoto University (1992) in Ecological Anthropological Studies.
Her research focuses on the natural resource use and lifestyles of people in arid regions, such as San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, the Tuareg camel nomads of the Sahara Desert, and the Kazakh pastoralists of the Central Asian steppes.

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