Where The Roads All End. Photography and Anthropology in the Kalahari by Ilisa Barbash (review)

In 1951 Laurence and Lorna Marshall and their two teenaged children, Elizabeth and John, embarked on what would become the first of eight field trips to the Kalahari Desert of South-West Africa (now Namibia). These trips spanned a period of slightly more than a decade. The primary purpose of these trips was to comprehensively study the people then commonly referred to as the Bushmen but more appropriately known by self-identifiers, such as Ju/’hoansi ! kung. Viewed against the broad canvas of the history of anthropological research, there are several characteristics that define these excursions and their scientific results as exceptional and unique.

This was a family endeavor, conceptualized by a retired father who hoped that their experiences would bring them all closer together. He himself was a co-founder of Raytheon Industries who retired as president from the company in 1950 after twenty-eight years. His wife, Lorna, was a former English instructor at Mount Holyoke College. However, with her husband’s encouragement, she took some anthropology courses at Harvard. Elizabeth and John were as yet professionally undifferentiated. However, these trips to the Kalahari and surrounding areas were to be of enormous influence in forging their future careers. Elizabeth became a renowned anthropologist and best-selling author, and John a distinguished and acclaimed documentary filmmaker.

Although sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University, the field trips were primarily financed by Laurence Marshall. This type of sponsorship arrangement was fairly common in those years and before. For example, the Royal Geographical Society sponsored Arthur Donaldson Smith’s trip to Lake Rudolf in East Africa in 1895; however, he personally bore all of the trip’s expenses. Later, in 1924, the American Museum of Natural History sponsored pioneer wildlife photographers and filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson’s four-year expedition to northern Kenya. However, museum trustee and banker Daniel E. Pomeroy formed a publicly traded corporation, the Martin Johnson African Expedition Corporation, whose stock sales funded this trip.

These field trips were then routinely described as expeditions, a term which, in the constructs of current presentism, is associated with the colonial era and colonial values. However, in the context of those times, this term defined major journeys for specific scientific purposes to regions lacking in a spectrum of infrastructure supports necessary for successful field research. Although dated today, the term was very valid in that era.

In order to be successful in their research, the Marshalls entered the Kalahari with four trucks and a vast array of supplies and equipment, as well as a staff of twenty-five, including themselves. They structured their studies in the framework of socio-cultural anthropology with a strong reliance on participant observation. They also decided to place a heavy reliance on film because it facilitated later study of direct documentation. As is evident from the forty thousand photographs they produced during eight field trips, photography was also essential to their work.

Ilisa Barbash, who is the Curator of Visual Anthropology at Harvard’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, has used a trove of films, photographs, field notes, diaries, journals, correspondence, personal interviews, and publications produced by the Marshalls to create a volume that splendidly chronicles the eight expeditions and their results. However, it achieves far more than this. The author is highly successful in situating the pioneering work of the Marshalls in the broader context of the history of anthropological research techniques. She also emphasizes their use of cinematography and photography that set a new standard for successful field studies.

Through their films, books, and numerous articles in scientific and popular publications, the Marshalls were able to successfully challenge what had long been a pejorative popular misunderstanding of these people. In Chapter Two, “Bushman Mythology and Bushman Anthropology,” Barbash presents in detail the manner in which the Bushmen had been presented in...