Since all anthropologists who have lived with the San are strongly committed to some notion of their rights and autonomy, naturally they were infuriated to be castigated as the dupes or tools of neo-colonialism. Rebuttals were soon forthcoming, and the controversy still rages. His linguistic, archeological, historical and ethnographic researches all converged on the same or on congruent conclusions. Academics are the timid type in the best of circumstances. By temperament they prefer to be the big fish in a pond however small.
Specialization is the source and the limit of the academic s authority.
The expert in one subfield, such as ethnography, cannot help but lose self-confidence something he probably never had very much of when his certitudes are impeached by researches in three other subfields. Wilmsen, by purporting to possess expertise in so many areas, intimidates the experts in all of them at first, anyway. But scholars have started checking up on Wilmsen, just as anarchists have started checking up on Bookchin, and with similar consequences. San are strikingly unlike the observations of all his dozen-odd predecessors in the field. Previous anthropologists had already reported how abruptly the San foraging life-way was succumbing to pressures ranging from protracted drought to entanglement in counterinsurgency in Southwest Africa to the sedentarizing, nationalizing policies of newly and nominally independent Botswana.