This reference to body casting arises unexpectedly in Dorothea's field notebook amid exchanges about extracting poison from worms for use in hunting, and a discussion about the role of ‘old’ and ‘young’ women ‘doktors’ [sic] in healing. It was December 1920, and Dorothea was at the start of a five-month-long, government-initiated research sojourn in which the aim was to document the ‘bushman types’ of the territory that Dorothea mistakenly referred to as the South West Protectorate (SWP), more commonly known as South West Africa (now Namibia). It was also the beginning of what was arguably the most active decade in Dorothea's career, in terms of both fieldwork and publications. This chapter deals with Dorothea's research trips to South West Africa (November 1920 to March 1921, and again from November 1921 to March 1922), Angola (1925) and Tanganyika (1930), and describes the day-to-day practice and texture of her work in the field, locating these in relation to Dorothea's intellectual progression and the development of her research process and methodology. It suggests too what these ideas and practices have brought to understandings of the term ‘bushman’ in popular and academic contexts in southern Africa and the world.

In South West Africa, first at the Windhoek prison and later at Sandfontein, Dorothea was working alongside ‘two gentlemen’ from the South African Museum whom she did not identify. Collectively, their task was to undertake ‘anthropological research among the Bushmen of the Protectorate’. The men, one of whom was identified in later correspondence as James Drury, were assigned ‘the physical research work, such as taking casts, measurements, etc., and I, though unconnected with the Museum, was asked to undertake the philological research’, she wrote later in her monograph The Naron.