Where the Roads All End

Ilisa Barbash, Paul Theroux

"Where the Roads All End" tells the remarkable story of an American family's eight anthropological expeditions to the remote Kalahari Desert in South-West Africa (Namibia) during the 1950s. Raytheon co-founder Laurence Marshall, his wife Lorna, and children John and Elizabeth recorded the lives of some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers, the so-called Bushmen, in what is now recognized as one of the most important ventures in the anthropology of Africa. Largely self-taught as ethnographers, the family supplemented their research with motion picture film and still photography to create an unparalleled archive that documents the Ju/'hoansi and the /Gwi just as they were being settled by the government onto a "Bushman Preserve." The Marshalls' films and publications popularized a strong counternarrative to existing negative stereotypes of the "Bushman" and revitalized academic...