Bushman

Wilhelm H. I. Bleek first came to Natal in 1854 with Bishop J. W. Colenso's party to assist with translation of the English bible into Zulu.  A young Prussian linguist, he was the founder of southern African linguistics.  Bleek's doctoral dissertation at the University Bonn, submitted in 1851 as De Nominum Generibus Linguarum Africae Australis, Copticae, Semiticarum Aliarumque Sexualium was written in Latin, and based on a few texts that he had been able to obtain from missionaries in the Cape and from European libraries. This dissertation dealt with the problem of how the more abstract grammatical 'gender' classes of the African languages might be related to ‘sexual’ gender categories (masculine and feminine) in European languages.  Although broadly comparative, it also attempted to provide the first grammars of Nama and Xhosa.  Bleek’s earliest work was the first philosophical and comparative approach to African languages in relation to cultural categories: what we would today call a socio-linguistics.  Indeed, his work on gender as both a grammatical and cultural category anticipated by at least a century similar work by linguists and feminists.  This work formed the basis for his later Grammar of South African Languages published in 1863, a work which formed the basis for all subsequent grammars of Bantu languages and still forms the basis on which all of these languages are described and taught today.  By coining the term ‘Bantu’ as the universal label for a large family related languages and cultures, he paved the way for ideas of pan-African identities and histories, comparative studies in ethnology and linguistics, and helped to make later ethnographic studies possible

South African commercial and production pottery is a
highly neglected field of research. In this article I focus on
reproductions of San rock paintings on domestic crockery
produced by Grahamstown Pottery’s Drostdy Ware
in the 1950s. At first glance, Drostdy’s Bushman wares
appear to resemble clichéd copies of Helen Tongue’s
(1909) reproductions. It is argued that Drostdy’s Bushman
wares offer a partial reflection into the complex,
evolving and frequently contradictory public sentiment
of the 1950s regarding the provenance of San rock art;
its raison d’etre; its public profile in the media, literature,
popular fiction, scientific literature, the arts, festivals
and exhibitions. This article contends that Drostdy’s
Bushman wares both espoused and contested contemporary
realities. The interstitial agency of Drostdy’s
Bushman wares was asserted via the triangulation of
textual markings on their bases; iconography and design;
and compounded by their relative quantitative “weight”.
These wares challenge the political neutrality or complicity
of much contemporary South African art and craft
production.

The hunter-gatherer rock-arts of northern Australia and southern Africa have much in common. Both places have an abundance of engraved and painted rock-art that occurs at topographically comparable locales. Though northern Australian and southern African hunter-gatherers had no contact with each other, their world-understandings have tended to find expression in similar ways and often involve rock-art imagery. In the case of northern Australia and southern Africa, rock-art points the way, often literally, to multiple landscapes that co-exist but that do not seem to have been equally accessible to all hunter-gatherers. In particular, the notion of inner worlds of extra-ordinary experience simultaneously and immanently existing with the outer world of ordinary existence is pervasive. Rock-art sites represent places where these worlds connected. As important as the rock-art imagery in this respect is the rock itself, which is by no means a neutral support for imagery, but was and is an active, living and sometimes dangerous entity. By using ethnography, rock-art imagery and a consideration of rock and place, we explore the nature of landscape perception and usage among northern Australian and southern African hunter-gatherers and see if these perceptions and practices have an ancient origin or not.

The visual primacy of rock-art imagery can sometimes blind researchers to equally important but less obvious, non-visual aspects of rock-art. Recent work from southern Africa indicates that certain San rock-engravings were hammered, rubbed, cut and flaked in order to produce sound; to touch certain numinous images and rocks; and to possess pieces of potent places. By combining rock-art’s non-visual with the concepts of questing and desire we may understand how body, landscape and mindscape combined in an aesthetic and sensory articulation.

Evidence from Thaba Sione, a town and rock engraving site in the Bophutatswana District of the North West Province, South Africa, indicates that both the site and its imagery were and are involved in the spiritual and political lives of foragers and farmers. Thaba Sione constituted a hierophany where elements of forager and farmer belief and practice, particularly rain-making, appear to have been modified as a result of contiguity initiated with the movement of Bantu-speaking farmers into the area from at least 1 500 years ago. Today, local Tswana-speakers believe Thaba Sione to be a place of the ancestors and the town Chief and Zionist Christian Church members use the site and its imagery to posit and perpetuate a definite political identity.

Flywhisks are a common motif in southern African rock art, both in paintings and engravings. This brief article gathers most of the data on flywhisks in the Bleek-Lloyd Collection of /xam San (Bushman) ethnography and suggests connections between certain /xam narratives featuring segis (elephant shrews) and a panel featuring sengis and human figures with flywhisks in Springbokoog's main site.

There are different ways of perpetuating the image of !kung San people. Our tooth groove presentation has once more caught up Bushmen in a modern world that tries to speak for them by association with the beginning of the Human lineage, in the present case Homo habilis. Andrew Brown Smith, Emeritus Professor from the University of Cape Town, who has reviewed “Les Bushmen dans l’Histoire” for H-SAfrica (2006), recalled that “there is a new way of thinking in the West that gives primacy to the Bushmen having an equal place within history, and in the present”. We have described a special tool use by the !kung San people as a very ancient human tooth cleaning practice recognized at a date as far away as 1.84 million years in Homo habilis, L 894-1, from the Shungura formation at Omo, Ethiopia.

Louis Anthing (1829-1902) is almost unknown to contemporary South African historiography, yet the published and manuscript documents derived from the investigation he conducted in Bushmanland in 1862 about the reports of massacres of Bushmen by white and coloured farmers make of the extermination of the |xam possibly the first officially documented genocide. The archival reports also suggest that the genocidal campaign against the |xam was planned before hand by the perpetrators. This paper also tries to piece together the few facts known so far about Anthing’s life, and proposes that the massacre sites mentioned in his reports should be protected as “sites of conscience”, thus using the landscape as a memorial and as a means to educate present and future generations about the horror of genocide.

Rhebok are most commonly painted in naturalistic attitudes. Rhebok are indistinguishable from reedbuck and other small antelope'. Beyond such hackneyed associations that seem always to crop up when grey rhebok (Pelea capreolus) are mentioned, they are seldom tackled in the literature of southern African rock art. At first, it may perhaps be a surprise that this antelope, given so little attention, is the second most frequently painted in the southeastern mountains -the Malotis and Drakensberg -which is the most densely painted region of southern Africa. On closer examination, however, it may be clearer as to why the rhebok has been given a wide berth: because there is insufficient ethnography to get to grips with it. This paper attempts to show that there are several handles by which one can grasp how and why the rhebok was as important to the artists of the southeastern mountains as the numerical emphasis they gave it suggests. FIG. 4. Vinnicombe's copy of the Melikane therianthropes, the horns had faded since the Orpen's 1873 expedition; in January 2005, this panel was very difficult to see.

The arrival of printing in South Africa occasioned a great many social changes: it facilitated governance, participated in the production and propagation of anthropological and scientific ‘knowledge’ about the place and its peoples, required the development of orthographies for African languages, and served the spread of western education and of Christianity—with all of its attendant complex and ambiguous consequences. Print, Text & Book Cultures in South Africa explores the power of print and the politics of the book in South Africa from a range of disciplinary perspectives—historical, bibliographic, literary critical, sociological, and cultural studies. The essays collected here, by leading international scholars, address a range of topics as varied as: the role of print cultures in contests over the nature of the colonial public sphere in the nineteenth century; orthography; iimbongi, orature and the canon; book-collecting and libraries; print and transnationalism; Indian Ocean cosmopolitanisms; books in war; how the fates of South African texts, locally and globally, have been affected by their material instantiations; photocomics and other ephemera; censorship, during and after apartheid; books about art and books as art; local academic publishing; and the challenge of ‘book history’ for literary and cultural criticism in contemporary South Africa.

This volume is the most comprehensive and representative introduction to the study of print and of the book in South Africa, showcasing the best of current research (while problematising the nature of ‘the book’, and exploring the difficult conditions for print in the country). It takes the measure of the impact of book-historical and related fields of study on South African scholarship, while pointing the way towards avenues for future research.

Authors (in order of appearance): Leon de Kock, Isabel Hofmeyr, Meg Samuelson, John Gouws, Lucy Graham, Rita Barnard, Andrew van der Vlies, Jarad Zimbler, Patrick Flanery, Lize Kriel, Archie Dick, Hedley Twidle, Jeff Opland, Deborah Seddon, Lily Saint, Peter McDonald, Margriet van der Waal, Natasha Distiller, Sarah Nuttall, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Beth Le Roux.

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Print, Text and Book Cultures in South Africa is a field-defining contribution to the country’s literary scholarship. Andrew van der Vlies’s introductory essay maps the conceptual terrain in a systematic and engaging way, illustrating its relevance to South Africa’s literary and cultural history. The essays that follow demonstrate the archival richness and liveliness of the field, while opening doors to future research. Beyond South Africa, the book will be exemplary in showing how book histories develop under postcolonial conditions.
-- David Attwell, author of J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (1993) and Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (2005), and co-editor of The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012)

South African literary criticism has been rejuvenated by an emphasis on the materiality of book production and circulation, and the historical embedding of those institutions and practices that turned texts into ‘works’ considered worthy of our attention. This elegantly framed collection of readable, provocative essays examines the relations between the production and consumption of books to present a rich social history of South African print cultures. It is indispensible reading for anyone seeking to come to terms with the processes and practices, both national and transnational, that have fashioned this country’s literature and the ways in which it is read and understood.
-- Michael Titlestad, University of the Witwatersrand

This is an extraordinarily rewarding book. Its essays by key scholars and book-trade practitioners attend to the rich complexity of the varied trajectories and meanings of South African print culture. The introduction by Andrew van der Vlies offers a tour de force statement of the complex interplay between South African social, political, and economic realities and book history methodologies; each piece that follows charts a compelling course through the shifting contexts for South African print, whether to bring those contexts to bear on literary interpretation, or to highlight the interdependence of print and history.
-- Sarah Brouillette, author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007)

Wide-ranging and sophisticated, this collection of essays does not simply add more case studies to the book-historical canon but contributes new models to the debate.
-- Leah Price, Harvard University

Thought provoking, wide ranging in its subject material, and dynamically edited, this collection marks a turning point in the study of book cultures in South Africa. These essays, exemplars of recently published work in the field, draw attention to the rich, interdisciplinary seams of material uncovered by key exponents of South African print culture history. The work as a whole demonstrates how one can engage with the confluence of text, people, history, culture, and print technology in South African contexts. It will prove one of the first ports of call for anyone wishing to undertake further journeys in this subject area in the future.
-- David Finkelstein, co-editor of The Book History Reader (2001) and The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland (vol. 4, 2007), and co-author of An Introduction to Book History (2005)

Chris Knight & Camilla Power’s ‘Female Cosmetic Coalitions Model’ of the menstrual origins of human symbolic culture is explored through the lens of embodied, religious experiential and visionary experiential perspectives. Some ‘problems’ of visionary experience are listed, before symbolic cognitive and embodied archaeological perspectives are utilised to resolve – in part – these problems. Examples of ritual drama engendering altered states of consciousness are given from Bronze Age Cretan, contemporary Southern African Bushman and Haitian Vodoun contexts to highlight an important experiential implication of the mimetic and dramatic aspects of the FCC: that of the potentially unexpected outcome of visionary experiences, which may have rapidly become an important primary proto-cultural purpose for the menstrual dance displays. Some speculations on possible archaeological evidence for this implication are also suggested.

In this paper, we present the faunal results of five Later Stone Age sites in the Bushmanland region of South Africa,
drawing on analyticalwork conducted by the late E. A. (Liz) Voigt.The sites date from the end of the last millennium BC
to recent times, the period during which evidence for herding practices among stone-tool users first occurs in the
southern African archaeological record.Based on existing literature, three of the five sites, Melkboom 1, Biesje Poort 2
and Bokvasmaak 3, were expected to yield remains of domestic animals, while faunal components indicative of
foraging were predicted for Jagt Pan 7 and Vlermuisgat. Instead, domestic animal remains were identified at
Bokvasmaak 3 and Vlermuisgat.Closer examination suggests that stock-keepersmay have occupied Bokvasmaak 3,
as it is an open-air site that yielded sheep, cattle and even dog remains.Overall, the faunal results indicate groups of
people that hunted and gathered a variety of animal species, drawing on a range of procurement techniques and an
intimate knowledge of the natural landscape.

Rock-art is a powerful and theoretically informed artefact that allows non-rock-art producing people an understanding of the worldview of the rock-artists. But the flow of information in such rock-art researches – ‘us’ observing ‘them’ via `their’ artefacts is often asymmetrical and can be disempowering to the rock-art-producing individuals and communities past and present. Fortunately, rock-art is also able to balance and even reverse this asymmetry. For example, there are certain ‘contact’ period rock engravings and rock paintings in southern Africa that were produced at and after the time of the colonisation of southern Africa by non-Bushmen beginning about 2 000 years ago. Some of the power relations between indigenes and colonists are made explicit in the form of rock paintings and rock engravings. Specifically, much of this rock-art shows how the Bushmen imagined and imaged the colonists.

This article argues that the field of Bushman studies, although facing many crises of definition and focus, could be meaningful beyond the borders of its problematic past. To this end, a recent literary-philosophical pedagogical study which draws on Bushman studies, specifically research on Bleek and Lloyd's |xam archive, is critiqued, illustrating the pitfalls of an uncritical absorption of the field into broader discourses. This critique is balanced by a reading of the oral testimony of ||kabbo, one of the |xam whose voices line the archive, as offering a view of what scholarship in Bushman studies could look like-scholarship that is ordinary, complex, and attuned. This scholarship is finally compared to and contrasted with my theorisation of colonialesque knowledge-knowledge that is not colonial proper, but that still hinders truly transformative research. It is argued that if Bushman studies, and African studies more generally, could adopt ordinary, complex and attuned scholarship-in contrast to colonialesque approaches-it would be impactful and meaningful beyond its own current confines.

Species-specific rock paintings of freshwater mormyrid fish in central and eastern Zimbabwe and the south-eastern mountains of South Africa are interpreted in terms of San shamanism. Elements of mormyrid appearance and physiology appear to have been foregrounded in order to more precisely nuance San perceptions of supernatural potency and extra-corporeal travel. Many of the south-eastern mountain ichthyoid paintings have not been widely accepted as representations of mormyrids because they do not correspond with the natural distribution of mormyrid fish. This discrepancy may be indicative of extensive forager social networks in eastern southern Africa during the late Holocene.

Using words to capture and convey our beliefs and experiences may seem precise and comprehensive, but such omniscience is illusory (Mitchell 1994). It may, however, be possible to fragment the totalising influence of words and concepts like ‘cosmology’ – knowledge of the world – by using historically specific texts, images, sounds and sensoria to promote epistemological diversity. This approach works well within a ‘culture’. I can, for example, distinguish between Southern Baptist and Greek Orthodox as two heterodox forms of Christianity. But what about other people, in other places, at other times? The people on whose behalf we interlocute - in this case the San or ‘Bushmen’ of southern Africa (Sidebar 1) - have histories marked by imperialism, colonialism, missionisation and Apartheid (Figure 1; Emeagwali 1997). How then do we know when our information about these people draws on their remembrances of original traditions or when it embodies recent histories of violence? Despite ethnography’s ethical problems (Clifford & Marcus 1986), we can use multiple strands of evidence to produce working knowledge that tacks between absolutism and hyper-relativism (Benhabib & Fraser 2004).

The well-being of indigenous societies is highly dependent on ecosystem services from their surrounding environment supported by their traditional knowledge. However, the recent changes in their surrounding environment and the erosion of traditional knowledge is starting to impact their well-being. This poster illustrates the present-day relationship between human well-being, ecosystem services and traditional knowledge based on a recent fieldwork carried out among the Khwe San indigenous group in the Bwabwata National Park (Namibia) by showcasing the Photovoice participatory photography method. Photovoice is a multi-stage process by which participants identify, capture and reflect on specific topics within their own community. The 24 Khwe participants captured a total of 854 photos reflecting on their well-being and environment. The method of analysis for these photos is provided by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment framework.

This article investigates the problematic position of Bushman heritage. Acknowledging the importance of this heritage in itself, but further as unmissable against the backdrop of calls for the decolonisation of knowledge in South Africa, a discourse of indigenous rights appears as the most just and suitable tool for analysis and critical reflection. Indigenous rights, however, proves to be quite problematic unto itself. This article offers a critique of the framework of indigenous rights, and offers an alternative theorisation through the lens of citizenship. Through critiquing the dominant discourses of rights and ownership which seem to underpin the majority of current debates. citizenship moves the paradigm from the centre of simplicity to the depths of complexity-emphasising the fallacy of ownership, the essentialism of rights and the importance of a shared knowledge and heritage. Citizenship, in contrast with rights and indigeneity, opens to a third space-a space of both conceptual and practical decolonisation.

The faunal sample from iNkolimahashi Shelter is large with an unusually high proportion of identifiable
fragments. This is due to the large number of microfaunal remains, probably the result of burrowing rodents
and owls nesting in the shelter. The rest of the sample, accumulated by humans, shows that small to mediumsize
bovids were hunted predominantly. The species composition is similar to that of other Later Stone Age
sites in the Thukela Basin. A single sheep bone, grindstones and pottery suggest occupation of the shelter by
agriculturists during the second half of the second millennium AD.

In this paper, we present the faunal results of five Later Stone Age sites in the Bushmanland region of South Africa, drawing on analytical work conducted by the late E. A. (Liz) Voigt. The sites date from the end of the last millennium BC to recent times, the period during which evidence for herding practices among stone-tool users first occurs in the southern African archaeological record. Based on existing literature, three of the five sites, Melkboom 1, Biesje Poort 2 and Bokvasmaak 3, were expected to yield remains of domestic animals, while faunal components indicative of foraging were predicted for Jagt Pan 7 and Vlermuisgat. Instead, domestic animal remains were identified at Bokvasmaak 3 and Vlermuisgat. Closer examination suggests that stock-keepers may have occupied Bokvasmaak 3, as it is an open-air site that yielded sheep, cattle and even dog remains. Overall, the faunal results indicate groups of people that hunted and gathered a variety of animal species, drawing on a range of procurement techniques and an intimate knowledge of the natural landscape.

Time isn't holding us, time doesn't hold you back … Letting the days go by, letting the days go by… once in a lifetime, lyrics by , TALKING HEADS, Remain in the Light 2003 "Lascaux, I want to go to the caves of the Dordogne," replied my wife, Janice Teece PhD, on where she wished to celebrate her acceptance in the SF Jung institute"s analyst training program. Little did we know how magnificent the cuisine was in the Perigord [the Dordogne region]! The food was a revelation. It has, unfortunately, made all other "foodie" outings pale by comparison to my gustatory memory of Perigordian farm fresh cuisine with truffles, foie-gras, cassoulet, canard, and walnut oil. (See the film and book about Daniele Mazet-Delpeuch, the first woman chef to the French Presidents. [1])

The ethnographic monograph has its roots in two traditions. While its format and rhetoric are strongly influenced by the natural science monograph, its content derives largely from genres of travelogue and missionary letters and bulletins. In the period 1850-1900, ethnographic writing was addressed to two audiences, but by the turn of the century it had been 'captured' by theoretical social scientists and became the appropriate and legitimate domain of the new academic discipline of anthropology. Academic anthropology could not claim small-scale societies, but could claim the ethnographic description of small-scale societies, as its professional domain.

A few kilometers to the west of the rockshelters is the famous archaeological site Bumbusi Ruins, an Iron Age settlement with stone walling and housing platforms, and another site called Bumbusi Cave, a largely Late Stone Age rockshelter that was test-ex-cavated in 1947 by ...