The Gods Must Be Crazy, 1980

The Gods Must Be Crazy was a movie released in 1980. It told the story of Xixo, a Bushman of the Kalahari Desert (played by Namibian bush farmer G!kau) whose tribe has no contact or knowledge of the world beyond. One day a passing airplane drops a glass Coke bottle and initially this strange artifact seems to be a boon from the gods, with many uses being discovered for it. But the tribe soon finds itself suffering from increased strife, since there is only one bottle to share among all the people wanting to use it, and it is decided that the bottle must be thrown off of the edge of the world. Xixo is nominated for the task, and as he travels in his quest he encounters members of western civilization for the first time.

The Kalahari Desert is a large, arid to semi-arid sandy area in southern Africa. Kalahari is derived from the Tswana word "Kgalagadi", meaning "the great thirst". It has vast areas covered by red-brown sands and has no permanent surface water. In winter, the Kalahari has a dry, cold climate with frosts at night. The average low winter temperature can dip below 0 °C.

The area is the ancestral land of the Bushmen peoples. There are many distinct tribes, and they have no collective name for themselves. The names San and Basarwa are sometimes used, but the people themselves dislike these names and prefer the name "Bushmen". They are thought to have been the first human inhabitants of Southern Africa; there is evidence that they have been living there continuously as nomadic hunter-gatherers for at least twenty thousand years.  The San were the original inhabitants of South Africa. They appeared in Africa about 30 000 years ago, and were largely exterminated by the Dutch settlers. Only a few scattered bands remain.

The Bushmens’ languages are under the Khoisan phylum, the smallest of the African Languages. They are notable for the use of click consonants as phonemes, including the !Xu~ language, which has in excess of 50 click consonants and over 140 separate phonemes.

In 2002 the Botswanan government forced all the Bushmen from their lands within the borders of that country and "resettled" them in fixed encampments. The government has given several different justifications for their action: that it was for purposes of nature conservation; that it was too expensive to continue to supply the Bushmen with water (the water table had been lowered by farming and other development); that it was "to enable them to share in the wealth of the country"; that it was for their own good to become settled and "civilized".

Optional Assignment: Define and give a specific example from the film for five of the following ten cultural vocabulary terms.  Do not use the same example twice and use full sentences (worth a maximum of 5 extra credit points).

Acculturation

Commodificaion

Cultural appropriation

Ethnicity

Globalization

Global-local continuum

Local culture

Popular culture

Race

Reterritorialization