Lorna Marshall

Who was Lorna Marshall?

Lorna Marshall, born Lorna Jean McLean, was an anthropologist who in the 1950s, 60s and 70s lived among and wrote about the previously unstudied !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert.

Marshall was born in Morenci, Arizona territory. She married Laurence Kennedy Marshall in 1926; they had a daughter Elizabeth Marshall Thomas and a son John Kennedy Marshall. Marshall received a BA in English Literature from UC Berkeley in 1921 and an MA from Radcliffe College in 1928, and before 1926 worked as an English instructor at Mount Holyoke. Later she took anthropology courses at Harvard University and had a second career as an ethnographer. Her husband was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1889, studied at Tufts University, and co-founded the Raytheon Company in 1922 where he worked until 1950.

In 1951, the Marshall family went to South-West Africa to conduct an ethnographic study of the !Kung of Nyae Nyae. The family became deeply engaged in this work and returned to Africa on several expeditions throughout the 1950's and 1960's, each lasting from a few months to a year and a half. As Elizabeth Marshall Thomas explains in her book, The Old Way, Laurence Marshall attempted to recruit an anthropologist to join their expeditions, but no one was interested. It then fell to Lorna Marshall to conduct ethnographic interviews and compile fieldnotes, despite the fact that she had no formal anthropological training.