The three communities under study might at first be seen as unrelated profiles other than belonging in a southern part of the respective country as an indigenous populace, thus tentatively referring to the emerging half of the ‘North-South’ dichotomy. The present account is aimed at comparing and contrasting the three traditional setups toward a set of crucial implications that might carry over to more generalized contexts. It will be shown how the institutional, as opposed to market-driven incentives as well as impacts, have resulted in very different developmental scenarios despite common mechanisms and a uniform sustainability agenda that might potentially apply. The coverage will demonstrate how the standalone issues, e.g. of market or institutional dominance versus their preponderantly negative or positive effect, are closely intertwined and can hardly be treated independently.
San Bushmen of Kalahari
San or Saan could be seen as referring to the hunter-gathering profile, with Bushmen being a generic cognate that is more European than authentic in nature. In a sense, both names might be seen as inferior alternates, as neither one was a matter of self-reference from day one. On the other hand, San would seem less of a misnomer, when referring to a broad ethnic and cultural aggregate by the socioeconomic status or path.
It should be safe, as a first iteration, to view this San society of Kalahari desert as one living in harmony and building on strong informal ‘social networks’ that have nothing to do with digital technology or indirect media per se. Social interaction, as well as the capital, may have been so intense as to imply cohesion and preference for cooperative rather than competitive developmental equilibria. Although this community might incur heavy losses in terms of the opportunity forgone by failure to make full use of free and complete markets, still the leisure spared may have been placed a far greater value on, with an eye on self-actualization and stimulating social exposure.
Needless to say, this is where the core clash lies in, as the Western counterparts may have espoused second thoughts as to which ways the host environments should best attempt, with inherent segregation or divide driving the bulk of convergence mechanisms (Watson, 2013). Among other things, market economy and possibly democracy would soon be ushered in—predictably at odds with the local preferences, institutional legacy, and consent rather than weak majority-based social choice. In fact, it is by overlooking strong preferences and enforcing weak coalitions (that are inherently unstable, defecting, or corrupt) that the Botswana government was at one point engaged in seeing the San community displaced and relocated into reservations on a dubious claim of its long attempted switch into settled farming and mainstream infrastructural planning.
In fact, the very nature of property rights enforcement, as well as bargaining over these issues, has long been obscure or ill-defined by the very design of colonial and neo-colonial lawmaking and enforcement. Whereas, according to the English or US common law, the incumbent host or defendant would have every title to it’s sustained, historically practiced customs and modes of living, that need not hold in overseas jurisdictions—much less in ones having little to no bargaining power as immunity against manipulative abuse.
It is no wonder that far from all