A Kalahari Family is a five-part, six-hour series documenting 50 years in the lives of the Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa, from 1951 to 2000. These once independent hunter-gatherers experience dispossession, confinement to a homeland, and the chaos of war. Then as hope for Namibian independence and the end of apartheid grows, Ju/'hoansi fight to establish farming communities and reclaim their traditional lands. The series challenges stereotypes of "Primitive Bushmen" with images of the development projects Ju/'hoansi are carrying out themselves.

In comparison to !Kung San: Traditional Life, this video shows some of the dramatic changes in life-style that Ju/'hoansi had experienced by 1986. No longer able to rely on hunting and gathering for subsistence, Ju/'hoansi collect mealie meal welfare, spend money earned from army jobs on alcohol and consumer goods, and live in a crowded area with increased fighting and illness. With a move back to traditional lands and development of cattle herding and subsistence agriculture, there is hope that Ju/'hoansi can be successful in a mixed economy.

Tchai is the word used by the !Kung to describe getting together to dance and sing; n/um can be translated as medicine, or supernatural potency. The !Kung gather for "medicine dances" often, usually at night, and sometimes such dances last until dawn. Women sit on the ground, clapping and singing and occasionally dancing a round or two, while men circle around them, singing and stamping rhythms with their feet. The songs are wordless but named: "rain," "sun," "honey," "giraffe," and other "strong things." The strength of the songs is their n/um, or medicine, thought to be a gift from the great god. N/um is also in the fire, and even more so in the "owners of medicine," or curers. Most !Kung men practice as curers at some point in their lives, and in this film we see several men in various stages of trance. A light trance gradually deepens, as the medicine grows "hot," and eventually some men will shriek and run about, falling on hot coals, entering the state the !Kung call "half-death."
The film opens with a brief introduction to the role of n/um tchai in healing and in warding off evil, followed by scenes from one all-night dance. The dance begins with a social gathering and becomes increasingly intense as the night wears on, finally concluding at dawn.

This film follows the hunting of a giraffe by four members of the Ju/'hoansi (a !Kung Bushmen tribe) over a 13-day period in the Kalahari desert. The film consists of footage shot in 1952-53 on a Smithsonian-Harvard Peabody expedition.