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"San (African people) Folklore."
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Bushman Letters
The Bleek and Lloyd Collection consists of the notebooks in which William Bleek and Lucy Lloyd transcribed and translated the narratives, cultural information and personal histories told to them in the 1870s by a number of /Xam informants. It represents a rare and rich record of an indigenous language and culture that no longer exists and has long exerted a fascination for anthropologists and poets alike. Yet how does one begin reading texts that are at once so compromised and so unique? This important book examines not only the /Xam archive, but also the critical tradition that has grown around it and the hermeneutic principles that inform that tradition. Michael Wessels critiques these principles and offers alternative modes of reading. He shows the problems with the approaches employed by previous critics and, in the course of his own detailed and poetic readings of a number of narratives, suggests what their interpretations have left out. Bushman Letters addresses a curiously neglected area in the burgeoning literature on the Bleek and Lloyd Collection: the texts themselves. In doing so, the book makes a substantial contribution to the study of oral narratives in general and to the theoretical discourse that informs such studies.
eBook
Naming the Land
This book encompasses a history of identity-building amongst Khwe San people, and of contestations for authority over land and natural resources in Namibia’s West Caprivi. The politics of authority in this contested borderland area were significantly shaped by state and NGO interventions into local institutions and land use between the late 1930s and 2006. Julie J. Taylor pays close attention to the role of NGOs in these processes. She shows that, in their relationship with West Caprivi’s residents, NGOs unintentionally contributed towards the hardening and politicising of ethnic difference, including through the implementation of land mapping projects. At the same time, in their relationship with the state, NGOs often worked to ‘depoliticise’ struggles over authority, thus inadvertently reinforcing the state’s authority in the area.
eBook
N//àe (\Talking\): The Oral and Rhetorical Base of San Culture
Like many other small-scale hunter-gatherers, the San (or Bushmen) of southern Africa have a vibrant oral culture and a society that is structurally loose. After first showing the multiple ways in which orality is manifest within the various institutional domains of San culture, the article examines the connection between orality and structural looseness. It is argued that, in playing itself out in San sociality, orality both underscores the looseness and ambiguity of San society and ideology and mitigates these characteristics. It does so by acting as a social and expressive mechanism of culture that engages people and resolves issues and conflicts, creates diversion and enjoyment, and shapes people's understanding of the world.
Journal Article
An Application of Dogon Epistemology
An application of Dogon epistemology proposes an analysis of African knowledge—classical, indigenous, and diasporan—in view of broader ontological realities that include the synergy of metaphysical perception and cultural production. It analyzes several texts in light of four Dogon categories of knowledge and Karenga's framework for the creation of knowledge in Africana studies: San Spirituality: Roots, Expression, and Social Consequences, by J. David Lewis-Williams and David G. Pearce; Legends, Sorcerers, and Enchanted Lizards: The Door Locks of the Bamana of Mali, by Pascal James Imperato; and HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programmes, edited by Musa W. Dube. The result is a framework for discussing the dynamics of the synergy of metaphysical perception and cultural production.
Journal Article
Contemporary Bushman Art, Identity Politics and the Primitivism Discourse
In recent years artists from two San communities in Botswana and Namibia have been producing paintings and prints which have become sought after by Western collectors, as instances of African \"primitive art.\" The art is produced in a context of intense identity politics, which in recent years have awakened the San politically and placed this hitherto passive ethnic minority on a course of political action. The art is especially relevant to the issues of identity and self-representation, and holds the potential for exposing and displacing the colonialist, and still cherished, icon of the timeless hunter-gatherer of the far-away veld. The paper will show how this potential is thwarted by the Western perspective on the art, which, blind to its decolonizing images, sees it as reinforcing, rather than challenging, primordialist stereotypes. /// Ces dernières années, des artistes de communautés San au Botswana et en Namibie ont produit des tableaux et des graphismes qui sont recherchés par les collectionneurs, comme produits de \"l'art primitif\" africain. Cet art est produit dans un contexte d'intenses activités politiques identitaires qui ont récement réveillé politiquement les San et ont placé cette minorité ethnique jusque-là passive sur une trajectoire d'action politique. L'art est particulièrement pertinent à la question de l'identité et de la présentation de soi et il recèle le potentiel d'exposer et de remplacer l'image colonialiste, et toujours chérie, de chasseurs-cueilleurs intemporels du veld lointain. L'article montre comment ce potentiel est ignoré par la vision occidentale de l'art qui, aveugle à ses images de décolonisation, le voit comme témoignage des stéréotypes primordialistes plutôt que le contraire.
Journal Article
Bushmen in a Victorian World: The remarkable story of the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of Bushman Folklore
There can be few scholars - of Khoisan studies, rock art or Southern African history - who have not heard of the collection of Bushman (or San) folklore that was recorded by the linguist Wilhelm Bleek, together with his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, in Cape Town in the 1870s.
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