Papers by Mathias Guenther
Literatura Ludowa, Dec 1, 2022
The nature of human-animal hybrid beings (or therianthropes) is examined in an Animistic (traditi... more The nature of human-animal hybrid beings (or therianthropes) is examined in an Animistic (traditional San Bushman) and a Cartesian (Early Modern Western) cosmology. In each ontological ambiguity is imagined and conceptualized in different terms. One of them is through monstrosity, which, in the Western schema, is equated with human-animal hybridity. This equivalence threatens the boundaries and categories that buttress western cosmology, through a being-the human-animal hybrid-deemed a conceptual and epistemological abomination. It elicits a category crisis that is as much cerebral as it is visceral as the were-beings it conceives are feared and demonized. No such valences attach to therianthropes in the cosmology described in this paper. It is an "entangled" cosmology shot through with ambiguity and fluidity in which human-animal hybridity is neither abominable nor feared. Instead, as a pervasive and salient theme of San world view and lifeways, especially its expressive and ritual spheres, along with hunting, ontological mutability becomes an integral component of people's thoughts and lives and thereby normalized and naturalized. Beings partaking of this state are deemed another species of being with whom humans engage as other-than-humans, on shared social terms. Monsters are beings who negate or transgress the moral foundation of the social order. San monstrosity, conceptually and phenomenologically, becomes thereby a matter of deviation from social (moral) pre/proscriptions rather than from classificatory (ontological) ones. This basic conceptual difference notwithstanding, we also find a fundamental commonality: the inversion, through monsters and monstrosity, of each cosmology's underlying epistemic matrices, of structure and ambiguity, respectively.
Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume II, 2019
African Studies Review, 2002
Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume II, 2019
Current Anthropology, 1991
Current Anthropology, 1995
L'A. repond a un ouvrage de Wilmsen qui s'etait penche sur les facteurs economiques du Ka... more L'A. repond a un ouvrage de Wilmsen qui s'etait penche sur les facteurs economiques du Kalahari en essayant de combiner ethnologie et archeologie pour aboutir a un espace theorique permettant d'ouvrir un nouveau discours anthropologique sur les Bushmen
Current Anthropology, 1991
Current Anthropology, 1992
History in Africa, 1993
The !Kung San or Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana are one of the most thoroughly documented huntin... more The !Kung San or Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana are one of the most thoroughly documented hunting and gathering societies in the annals of African anthropology. In recent years two radically different views of the !Kung San have emerged in the anthropological literature. One sees the !Kung as hunters and gatherers living under changed circumstances and maintaining an old but adaptable way of life: the characteristic features associated with the hunter-gatherer subsistence or foraging mode of production.The other sees these same !Kung as products of a very different history, a history of long association with Bantu-speaking overlords, followed by intense involvement with merchant capital. In this view it was the !Kungs' experience of domination and incorporation, not the dynamics of autonomous foraging that shaped their economy and social life. Their well-documented egalitarian politics and gender relations are thus a product not of their own history, but of their history of sha...
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume I, 2019
Transformation plays itself out in many forms and ways within San cosmology and its manifestation... more Transformation plays itself out in many forms and ways within San cosmology and its manifestation in the context of San mythology, much of which sets in what some San people refer to as the First Order of Existence (or Creation). This inchoate world’s most ontologically volatile and slippery denizen was the trickster, in particular the !Kung’s /Xue who, at the moments of agitation, was wont to undergo transformation upon transformation, at staccato pace, mutating his being the way a vexed and confused chameleon changes colour. Two other transformation-prone beings of the First Order are the rain divinity !Khwa and the lion, both of them prominent figures in San myth and lore. The latter especially is grist on the San story mill, all the more so as real-life lion encounters add to the store of lion lore on a continuing basis, adding narrative substance and phenomenological significance to this central being within the San bestiary.
Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research, 2014
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain the discrepancy between ethnohistorical account... more Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain the discrepancy between ethnohistorical accounts on north-western Kalahari San of the nineteenth to early twentieth century and recent ethnographic accounts, the former depicting the San as intensely warlike, the latter as basically peaceable. Design/methodology/approach – Review of historical, ethnohistorical and ethnographic source material (reports, journal articles, monographs). Findings – The warlike ways of the nineteenth-century Kalahari San were reactions to settler intrusion, domination and encapsulation. This was met with resistance, a process that led to the rapid politicization and militarization, socially and ideationally, of San groups in the orbit of the intruders (especially the “tribal zone” they created). It culminated in internecine warfare, specifically raiding and feuding, amongst San bands and tribal groupings. Research limitations/implications – While the nineteenth-century Kalahari San were indeed warlike and ...
Current Anthropology, 1992
studied inattention to Jane Austen's ideological and literary context suggests that this is n... more studied inattention to Jane Austen's ideological and literary context suggests that this is not a question which particularly worries them, but even an uncontextualised reading of the six main novels is enough to show that their interpretation overlooks what is her most powerful claim to our attention: her immensely strong, intelligent, and penetrating exercise of moral judgment. It is true that no single character's view is fully "authoritative," that is, presented as completely correct, but some characters are much nearer to having correct views than others, and all six novels are directly or indirectly narratives of moral progress and enlightenment. The goalthe attainment of a true perspective, right judgment, self-knowledge, correct assessment of status, obligations, and affections-may never be fully attained, but its existence is surely never in doubt. This is not in spite of the mobilisation of the play of perspectives that is convincingly revealed in this study but through it and by means of it. The authoritative articulation of a point of view resides not in the mouth of any one character but in each novel as a totality. It is striking that Emma, the novel in which the counterpoint of differing perspectives and voices is most superbly evoked, is also the one that teaches us most movingly and unarguably that it is our duty to abjure falsity and folly and attain self-knowledge and self-control. The moral vocabulary of all the novels-opposing sense, intelligence, judgment, taste, tact, good manners, and "elegance of mind" to unregulated feeling, prejudice, vulgarity, selfishness, and coarseness-itself offers us an authoritative, unitary view of human experience, a view that is "strong-minded and intellectually coherent" and "conservative in a sense no longer current" (Butler I975:296, 298). The reader does arrive at a stable idea of which characters have which qualities and in what proportions. It is undoubtedly a complex and qualified view, presented in an extremely tactful and ironical manner, but I find it hard to believe that anyone can read Jane Austen and not sense its strength. Her work is "dialogic" not because it is internally undecided, not because it does not adjudicate between its constituent voices, but because it engages, as Butler has shown, with other works taking up contrary moral and political positions. Handler and Segal's language echoes, without wholly endorsing, that of recent proposals for a "post-modern" ethnography-involving a process of "cooperative story making that ... would result in a polyphonic text, none of whose participants would have the final word in the form of a framing story or encompassing synthesis" (Tyler I986: I26). If this is the goal towards which Handler and Segal's advocacy gravitates, their own chosen model puts a definitive brake on the tendency. Jane Austen's novels could hardly be farther from open, democratically produced texts designed to allow the interplay of voices on equal terms. The voices in her novels are not only never equal in the reader's estimation but also always very carefully framed and synthesised in a way that does give the "final word" to one, highly complex point of view. If her work is to be taken as a model for ethnography, it must be as a model of the tactful and sensitive use of authorial control. It could suggest ways of taking into account the intersecting voices and perspectives of others in order to construct complex accounts of our own understanding of what they have told us. That rather more modest aim is perhaps as much as we should aspire to.
African Study …, 1989
This paper examines the past and prescnt socioeconomic situation of the Basam'a (Bushmen. San) of... more This paper examines the past and prescnt socioeconomic situation of the Basam'a (Bushmen. San) of the Republic of Botswana. Changes in adaptive strategies are outlined. and it is shown that Basam'a groups have chosen a number of alternative lifestyles. In some cases, Basarwa have become clients of other groups: other people have been dispossessed and are now squatters on what used to be their land; and still others have continued foraging. Case studies of 5 communities are presented which range from the hunting and gathering! Kung of the Dobe region to the settled agropastoral Chwa of the Nata River area who arc engaged in self-help activities. Changes which will have implications for the future of the Basarwa are discussed, including the land reform program in the tribal grazing areas, the remote area development efforts of the Botswana Government. and the militarization of !Kung and other Basarn'a in Namibia. It is concluded that the future of the Basarn'a will depend upon how political, economic, and environmental issues are resolved. and whether or not the Basarwa are included in decision-making regarding development action.
Despite resurrecting its central concept from one of the discipline's Founding Fathers, the so-ca... more Despite resurrecting its central concept from one of the discipline's Founding Fathers, the so-called 'New Animism' is very much a current branch of symbolic anthropology. With its focus on the rituals and beliefs and modes of thought specifically of simple hunters, hunter-gatherers, hunter-herders and hunter-horticulturalists, it is concerned with how humans conceive of their being in relation to non-human beings, in particular animals. Studies of the relational ontologies of such peoples in Amazonia, sub-arctic America, Siberia and south Asia have revealed a number of commonalities, chief of them human-non-human ontological instability and continuity, and deriving from it, the attribution of personhood to non-humans. This article is concerned with the first aspect, ontological flux, which pervades San (especially /Xam) cosmology, manifested in myth, ritual and hunting, through such ontological and experiential processes as hybridity, transformation, mimesis and sympathy, as well as trance-induced transcendence. The schema of relational ontology of the San is compared to that of small-scale hunting peoples of Siberia and Amazonia and South India and sub-arctic North America. The cosmologies of these people have been examined in terms of the 'classic' relational ontology paradigms of Philippe Descola, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro and Tim Ingold of the 1990s, in either a structuralist or a phenomenological cast. The San pattern, pervaded with ontological instability and ontologically ambiguous mythic and spirit beings, differs from the Amazonian and Siberian schemas, which do not give sufficient ontological space to preternatural and mythological beings and states. '(S)animism' is closer to the ontologies of the other two peoples (exemplified by the Nayaka and Ojibwa) wherein spirit beings and mythological characters, respectively, impact closely on the people's relational ontologies. In introducing an animistic schema from a hunter-gatherer group and continent hitherto not considered in the comparative analysis of such ontologies the paper underscores the diversity of such patterns among small-scale societies.
This paper examines the past and prescnt socioeconomic situation of the Basam'a (Bushmen. San) of... more This paper examines the past and prescnt socioeconomic situation of the Basam'a (Bushmen. San) of the Republic of Botswana. Changes in adaptive strategies are outlined. and it is shown that Basam'a groups have chosen a number of alternative lifestyles. In some cases, Basarwa have become clients of other groups: other people have been dispossessed and are now squatters on what used to be their land; and still others have continued foraging. Case studies of 5 communities are presented which range from the hunting and gathering! Kung of the Dobe region to the settled agropastoral Chwa of the Nata River area who arc engaged in self-help activities. Changes which will have implications for the future of the Basarwa are discussed, including the land reform program in the tribal grazing areas, the remote area development efforts of the Botswana Government. and the militarization of !Kung and other Basarn'a in Namibia. It is concluded that the future of the Basarn'a will depend upon how political, economic, and environmental issues are resolved. and whether or not the Basarwa are included in decision-making regarding development action.
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Papers by Mathias Guenther