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"Cosmology, San."
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Rocks of Potency: Engravings and Cupules from the Dovedale Ward, Southern Tuli Block, Botswana with Comment
In this contribution the recent discovery of rock engravings and cupules on the farms Riverslee and Basinghall, in the Dovedale Ward of the southern Tuli Block, Botswana, is reported. These access-controlled sites are interpreted as important ritual locales for both hunter-gatherers and African farmers who utilized the physical and spiritual resources of this area in the past. The distinctive features of the Riverslee site include fully pecked engravings of four human footprints, a preponderance of feline tracks, numerous other animal spoor (tracks), oval-shaped grooves and a boulder with 35 cupules, all executed on sandstone boulders and pavements surrounding a small pan near the Limpopo River. The Basinghall cluster contains six cupules and three oval-shaped grooves. The Riverslee site is compared to other engraving sites of Botswana, including Matsieng and Lowe, two well-known creation sites.
Journal Article
Myth and Meaning: San-Bushman Folklore in Global Context
Review(s) of: Myth and Meaning: San-Bushman Folklore in global context, by Lewis-Williams, J.D. 2015, Cape Town: UCT Press. 250 pp. ISBN 978-1-775-82205-9 (softcover), Price ZAR323.00.
Book Review
\... THE EYES ARE NO LONGER WILD. YOU HAVE TAKEN THE KUDU INTO YOUR MIND\: THE SUPEREROGATORY ASPECT OF SAN HUNTING
Drawing on historical /Xam and recent Kalahari San (Bushmen) sources, the paper examines an aspect of San hunting that is underreported in the ethnography on these hunter-gatherers (as opposed to other such peoples elsewhere in the world, specifically in the context of the New Animism paradigm): its relational and mystical – i.e. myth-, spirit- and ritual-informed – aspect. I show how myth and ritual express the animistic theme of human-animal identity blurring that is at the core of San cosmology, in different, mutually reinforcing ways, so that it becomes both an integrated, salient feature of San worldview – something of a philosophical postulate – and integral to and constitutive of experience. The latter includes the practice of hunting, the focus of this paper. Also examined are the reasons why in San studies the supererogatory aspect can be, and has been, overlooked by anthropologists and archaeologists.
Journal Article
Rock Art and Hunter–Gatherer Landscapes: Iconography, Cosmology and Topography in Southern Africa
Landscape studies of hunter–gatherer rock art often suffer from logical flaws. Some of these failings stem from the founding question that researchers ask: “Why do some places have images while others do not?” This question is misleading and not particularly helpful in some—but not all—contexts where there is no direct ethnographic evidence to provide an answer. Instead, we suggest that a better question from which to begin is: “How are rock art images related to landscape?”. To answer this question, we examine the relationship between iconography, cosmology and topography in two areas of southern African San rock painting. We argue that cosmology guided iconography and that the imagery, in turn, manipulated topography into landscape for the San. In this view, we do not need to rely on cognitive templates that invest topography a priori with significance that then determines the choice of locale for art. Instead, landscape for the San was socially and symbolically constructed through the placement of imagery.
Journal Article
Elusive Identities: Karoo |Xam Descendants and the Square Kilometre Array
In 2007, in order to facilitate the building and operations of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the Astronomy Geographic Advantage Act proclaimed a large 'astronomy reserve' in the central Upper Karoo, a roughly rhombic space covering some 120,000 square kilometres. As it happens, this geographic reserve coincides almost exactly with a region described by |Xam prisoners of the mid 19th century as |Xam-ka! au, their homeland. We show how archival records indicate that |Xam descendants are still living in the space now reserved for astronomy and how the claims of the Kalahari communities represented in the South African San Council of having once lived in the area lack substance. We compare the |Xam and the SKA notions of landscape, describe the historic evolution from the one to the other and suggest that benefit for local communities can only be in the form of bottom-up discussions about the planning of future developments and the distribution of tangible benefits.
Journal Article
'The hunting-field and its doings': subjectivities of territory of the |Xam Bushmen of the northern Cape1
This paper focuses on the nineteenth-century |Xam of the northern Cape to examine the relationship of people to the environment beyond techno-economic parameters. As a lived-in, engaged-with Umwelt, the landscape becomes socially and culturally inscribed and patterned, thereby subjectivizing its features. Two ways in which this epistemological and ontological process plays itself out in the case at hand are considered-in terms of human/other-than-human relationality, and in terms of mythological imprints on the landscape. Also considered are certain epistemological implications of these anthropocenic processes for San cosmology, specifically its core feature of ontological ambiguity and mutability.
Journal Article
'The hunting-field and its doings': subjectivities of territory of the |Xam Bushmen of the northern Cape
This paper focuses on the nineteenth-century |Xam of the northern Cape to examine the relationship of people to the environment beyond techno-economic parameters. As a lived-in, engaged-with Umwelt, the landscape becomes socially and culturally inscribed and patterned, thereby subjectivizing its features. Two ways in which this epistemological and ontological process plays itself out in the case at hand are considered--in terms of human/other-than-human relationality, and in terms of mythological imprints on the landscape. Also considered are certain epistemological implications of these anthropocenic processes for San cosmology, specifically its core feature of ontological ambiguity and mutability. KEY WORDS: relational ontology, San mythology, cosmology and rock art, taskscape, religion and ecology, onto-epistemology
Journal Article