Around the start of the 1900s, Ju/’hoansi families in the Kalahari relied on wide social ties to manage drought, patchy water, and unpredictable food. Hxaro (also written xaro) linked people through ongoing, delayed gift exchanges of nonfood items, building relationships that could be called on for help and temporary residence when times were hard.
By about 1900, some Ju/’hoansi in the Dobe region were already connected to neighboring cattle economies through arrangements such as mafisa (loan cattle), where they helped care for others’ livestock. These contacts did not replace hxaro, but they added new routes to obtain goods and new pressures on land and labor that later intensified.
In the early 1950s, Lorna Marshall and her family conducted fieldwork among Ju/’hoansi communities in the Nyae Nyae area (then South West Africa, now Namibia). Their work created a major record of daily life, including sharing norms and exchange practices, at a time when many Ju/’hoansi still depended heavily on hunting and gathering.
In 1957, the ethnographic film The Hunters was released using footage shot in 1952–53 in Nyae Nyae. While the film focused on hunting, it also introduced wider audiences to Ju/’hoansi social life and the expectation that resources and benefits are shared beyond a single household—context that helps explain why long-term exchange relationships like hxaro mattered.
Starting in 1963, anthropologist Richard B. Lee carried out fieldwork in the Dobe area, observing Ju/’hoansi life as outside institutions and markets began to have stronger effects. His work helped clarify how gift exchange, visiting, and sharing fit into the wider economic system—not as random generosity, but as organized support in an uncertain environment.
In April 1966, the Man the Hunter symposium brought together leading researchers of hunter-gatherer societies. The meeting helped set the agenda for how scholars described foraging economies, including attention to sharing and exchange systems that reduce risk—an intellectual backdrop for later, more detailed analysis of hxaro.
After Botswana gained independence in September 1966, government presence expanded over time through services such as schools, clinics, and development programs. These changes increased settlement, new material goods, and new rules around land and wildlife—conditions that gradually altered how often and how far people could travel to maintain hxaro relationships.
By the 1970s, Polly Wiessner’s work closely described hxaro as a system of delayed, balanced reciprocity that helps people manage local shortages. The key point was that the gifts were less important than the relationship: hxaro partners offered access to help, hospitality, and safer options when weather or conflict made staying home difficult.
In 1974, detailed measurements showed hxaro’s scale: adults averaged about 15–16 hxaro partners, often spread across long distances (up to about 200 km). In this period, many people spent months away visiting partners, and a large share of personal possessions had been received through hxaro—evidence that the network functioned like social “insurance” during uncertain times.
In 1976, South African authorities established Bushmanland (a bantustan) in what was then South West Africa (now Namibia). This apartheid-era “homeland” policy reshaped land access and governance, adding new administrative controls that made long-distance visiting and flexible residence—central to hxaro—harder to sustain in the same way.
Through the late 1970s, increasing settlement, wage work, and government involvement introduced more cash and store goods into everyday life in places like Nyae Nyae. Researchers describe this as a gradual change: hxaro continued, but the balance between long-term gift partnerships and new market or state sources of support began to shift.
By about 1980, the conditions that had long supported hxaro—high mobility, flexible residence, and wide access across territories—were increasingly constrained by borders, settlement, and outside administration. Hxaro remained an important social institution, but its role as the main way to spread risk and access resources was being challenged by a growing mix of cash income, services, and changing land control.
Hxaro reciprocal gift networks among the Ju/'hoansi (San) of the Kalahari, c. 1900–1980