Bushmen

Interpretation of symbols and glyphs found on 1st Dynasty BCE to 18th Century CE artifacts, are a means of tracing the transformational journeys of Bes, the Egypto-Nubian deity. The wanderings, which began in Nubia and Upper Egypt, continued north up the Nile into teeming markets and inns of port cities connected to the sea routes of the Mediterranean and Aegean and by land migrations west to Benin.
Beliefs based upon ancient Pygmy philosophy and tenets were incorporated into Bes as a divine representative. These views were spread by means of reciprocal gift systems, trade, migration and wars. The growing need for an accessible protector, healer and divine intermediary, spanning the distance from the Levant to the western Mediterranean was met by Bes, binding diverse communities into a common front against the external forces of disease and death.
As successive wanderings took place mostly in times of transition and upheaval, cultural contact between dissimilar populations malleably transformed images, names and myths associated with Bes  and Pygmy ancestors. These complex results are comprehensively examined in this paper to help us successfully transition into a new era.

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 jXam 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.

Erratum: la référence à Aarne et Thompson 1981 doit naturellement être remplacée par: Thompson, Stith. 1955–1958. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folk-Tales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediæval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books and Local Legends I–VI. 2nd rev. edn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

In diesem Artikel arbeiten wir durch einen interkulturellen Vergleich Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede von TRE ("Tension, Stress and Trauma Releasing Exercises") und San-Heiltänzen heraus.

In this paper we explore commonalities and differences between TRE ("Tension, Stress and Trauma Releasing Exercises") and San healing dances through cross-cultural comparison.

https://www.psychosozial-verlag.de/8164

تشير الدلائل الي ان مجموعات البوشمن  قد عاشت في جنوبي افريقيا منذ حوالي 22 الف عام مما يجعلهم من اقدم المجموعات العرقية ان لم تكن الاقدم علي الاطلاق في افريقيا ، ويختلف شعب البوشمن عن الزنوج ببشرتهم البنية المصفرة و قامتهم القصيرة و جباههم البارزة وعيونهم الضيقة.

This update of 4.6.22, is an interpretation of symbols and glyphs found on 1st Dynasty BCE to 18th Century CE artifacts, are a means of tracing the transformational journeys of Bes, the Egypto-Nubian deity. The wanderings, which began in Nubia and Upper Egypt, continued north up the Nile into teeming markets and inns of port cities connected to the sea routes of the Mediterranean and Aegean.

This thesis situates the current ‡Khomani claims to land in their historical context. Examining the nexus between land, economic choices, power, and identity, I analyze the construction of the "Bushman myth "in South Africa as it relates to the ‡Khomani San of the Northern Cape. The myth refers to stereotypical depictions of “Bushmen” based on invented traditions. These traditions are depicted as atavistic manifestations of a historically immutable Bushman ethnicity. Stressing their timelessness and isolation, the Bushman myth thus disregards the San’s internal dialectics and fluid social worlds as well as their historical and local relationships to non-San; nevertheless it has come to define the life of the so-called Bain’s Bushmen and their descendants during the last 80 years. By tracing the development, application, and appropriation of the Bushman myth and its power to define traditions, I hope to contribute towards a much-needed discussion in the present about multiple identities and ‡Khomani ethnicity.



Motivated by a desire to understand the difficulties the ‡Khomani community is facing today, I set out to trace the development of San identity and its relationship to land and the political economy through the past 150 years. My thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Northern Cape in South Africa from Cape Town to Upington and on the ‡Khomani land in January and summer 2008. I conducted 42 unstructured and semi-structured interviews with community members and others ranging from lawyers, government officials, to NGO consultants, and engaged in participant observation. The archival work is based on government records, newspaper articles, correspondence, and ethnographic studies collected in six South African archives.

BA thesis, summa cum laude in history

This PhD thesis highlights how marginalised Bushmen people are in the middle of a struggle between traditional and modern forces. Tourism, as an important element of conservation strategies, is a phenomenon built on both, and therefore reveals those struggles and shows how the marginalised status of Bushmen is interwoven with relations of power and myths. Seen from the dwelling perspective as the main theoretical starting point, many tourism environments in four case studies are described, three in Namibia and one in South Africa. All too often Bushmen are considered natural ecologists in need of protection, while in reality they are participants of modernisation with their own agency.

The Later Stone Age (LSA) is still commonly thought of as a period analogous to the prehistory of San groups in southern
Africa (Deacon & Deacon 1999). Analogies are a fundamental
component of archaeological research and theory. For example, try explaining how a 300 000-year-old blade was made or used without the aid of an analogy. Analogies help us to understand the rich behavioural component of the archaeological record and they help us to decide which variables are important for documenting changes in human material culture. However, the concepts archaeologists use to describe the broader structure of the archaeological record, such as ‘Stone Ages’ and ’Industries’, are not analogous to any known cultural institutions. V. Gordon Childe noted this half a century ago when he remarked that ’boundaries of the several fields of
culture do not necessarily coincide’ (1951:58). In this article I argue, as many have before me (e.g. Humphreys 2005), that the LSA is an analytical tool to help organise archaeological data, but that it does not easily equate with any living cultural or linguistic grouping. The LSA has many broad and sometimes
disparate meanings and contains a different kind of diversity than that seen in ethnographic hunting and gathering societies. I illustrate some of the key differences between populations living during the earliest parts of the LSA and those San hunter-gatherer groups to which they are most often compared, the
Ju/’hoansi of the north-western Kalahari. I conclude that hunting and gathering takes many different forms in southern Africa and around the world of which the desert-dwelling Ju/’hoansi represent only one variant. In closing, I argue that despite
the immense importance of ethnographic analogies in archaeology, the over-emphasis on the LSA as a representation of San prehistory reduces LSA studies and continues to jeopardise the place of these modern communities in contemporary southern Africa.

In 1929 D. F. Bleek wrote that |xam people she encountered in the Upper Karoo two decades before were unable to tell her a single story, and that their folklore `was dead’ and so was, by extension, their culture and sense of community, thus encouraging the notion that the |xam people had become extinct. Archival research and fieldwork in the area by the author in 2011-2014 shows that no such extinction took place and that a rich oral tradition, with strong connections with that documented by Bleek and Lloyd in the 19th century, is still very much alive in the area.

The transition to farming is often written in the language of progress. The search has been for the oldest sedentary farming settlements, the processes of plant and animals domestication and the profound societal alterations that accompanied the choice to change lifeway. Perhaps because most of us come from long-standing farmer ancestry, we tend to assume that farming is a superior and more secure way of life. Is there any data to support this? Evidence from southern Africa since the 1970s has shown that the Kalahari hunter-gatherers living in what is a comparatively harsh environment have/had a relatively easier life, with considerably more leisure time and a longer life expectancy than those living in early farmer groups (Lee and DeVore, 1976). Many hunter-gatherers in East Asia will have had even more comfortable and leisure filled lives than those of the Kalahari Bushmen. It is therefore important to ask the question as to why East Asian hunter-gatherers took up farming and whether all hunter-gatherer groups made this choice swiftly and willingly. I use evidence from studies into hunter-gatherer interactions with farmers in sub-saharan Africa to consider this question. It was originally hoped that groups such as the Bushmen of southern Africa, the Pygmies of central Africa and the Hadza/Sandawe of East Africa could give us glimpses into a universal hunter-gatherer past. Revisionist studies since the 1970s have sought to undermine this hope and have emphasised that early research recorded the end product of at least two millennia of interaction, influence and change from being amongst pastoralists and farmers. Archaeology has made significant contributions to this debate, providing evidence for the nature and extent of interaction, continuity and change. Today we are therefore well-positioned to consider the specifics of how hunter-gatherer groups responded to the coming of livestock keepers and farmers in different parts of Africa. This paper will review African interaction models so as to consider their implications for East Asia. I do not provide a general model for interaction, indeed I would be ideologically opposed to any attempt at this kind of universalism, but I seek to provide a convincing glimpse of the kinds of real-world complexity and contextuality in the choices made by East Asian hunter-gatherers in their responses to the presence and influence of farmers.

Namibian Bushmen, such as the Hai//om and the Ju/’hoansi, are increasingly involved in the growing, white-dominated tourism industry. In this, white Namibians tend to position Bushmen and themselves as people of nature and conservationists. Elsewhere, whites from southern Africa have avoided contact with blacks by identifying more with nature than with people. This has been an important element in their “politics of belonging” to the land. From this perspective, Bushmen occupy a special position because they are considered “part of nature” while they are also members of contemporary society. Although this view is paradoxical at first sight, I argue that essentialising Bushmen as people of nature and modernising (developing) them “into society” are compatible ideas that can strengthen white Namibians’ belonging to nature and society. Against the background of the global indigenous movement and local history, crucial elements in this process of belonging are the tourists’ quest for authenticity and southern African paternalism.

ohamed Adhikari’s book The Anatomy of a South African Genocide is a synthesis of the research on the extermination of the San peoples of South Africa and aims to establish that
such extermination must be considered genocide. Unfortunately, the book is based exclusively on published sources, and especially with regard to the nineteenth century, fails to consider archival and other sources that throw much light on the fate of the San, most notably the corpus of documents on the mission that the resident magistrate and civil commissioner of Namaqualand, Louis Anthing, undertook in 1862 to investigate reports of
massacres of San bands in Bushmanland. Adhikari’s book also suffers from the fact that he refers to “the San”, while it is methodologically more correct to distinguish clearly between the different San populations and to address the history of specific groups in specific areas of southern Africa. Another major weakness is his placement of almost exclusive blame for the extermination of the San on “Dutch-speaking pastoralists”, downplaying sources that point to the heavy involvement of Baster, Griqua and Khoi groups in the destruction of the hunter-gatherer bands. The case study of Louis Anthing’s mission to Bushmanland, which proves that there was indeed genocide in Bushmanland in the second half of the nineteenth century, is presented in detail to show that an engagement with archival sources is essential to grasp the tragedy of the San in all its complexity.

The aim of this article is to propose some principles and practices for truth-seeking during research into violent conflict. To achieve this aim, an argument is deployed by analysing the theoretical concepts “truth”, “myth” and “oral culture” as sources of knowledge. This conceptual analysis precedes a discussion on community-based participatory research (CBPR) as a research methodology to access the knowledge of lived experiences embedded in the oral culture of the San community of Platfontein, near Kimberley, South Africa. It was found that CBPR contains good practices to use in research to judge the probable truth about disputes. The CBPR process is ideal for determining the accuracy of data in the context of a specific culture, considering the norms, spiritual influences and personal considerations of knowledge-holders that accompany a unique cosmology. A variety and equity of worldviews and perspectives of what happened during violent conflict successfully challenges hegemonic ...

Southern African rock art is painted on exposed but sheltered rock faces and features involved
collocations of images in generally ambiguous relation to one another. Therianthropes — mixtures
of parts of humans and animals — condense in one image a relationship between animals and
human persons. This analysis takes inspiration from the anthropology of iconography and value
creation in Melanesian and Australian indigenous cultures rather than from Siberian “shamanism.”
It argues that specialised artisans created value by marking nodal points in the landscape that
helped to focus and to locate human-animal relations. Ethnographic sources for the interpretation
of some images is not restricted to vanished “Bushmen” cultures but is present in contemporary
“traditional” healing practices. Southern African cultures have used and understood the
relationships between humans, non-humans and the landscape in region-wide healing and ritual
practice. This paper abandons anachronistic “ethnic” boundaries of essentialised “Bushman” or
“hunter-gatherer” cultures, together with the notion that this art is the primitive manifestation
of altered consciousness. In sum, rock art images express concepts concerning the practical and
ethical relations that necessarily exist between human health (well-being), social life, “nature”
(animals, plants, earth) and the landscape in which human life and nature are set.
A arte rupestre da África Austral é pintada na superfície de rochas expostas, mas protegidas,
e apresenta arranjos elaborados de imagens em relações geralmente ambíguas entre si. Os
teriantropos — misturas de partes de humanos e de animais — condensam em uma única imagem
uma relação entre animais e pessoas humanas. Essa análise busca inspiração na antropologia
da iconografia e da criação de valor em culturas indígenas melanésias e australianas, e não
no “xamanismo” siberiano. Argumenta que artesãos especializados criaram valor ao marcar
pontos nodais na paisagem que ajudaram a focalizar e a localizar as relações humano-animal.
As fontes etnográficas para a interpretação de algumas imagens não se restringem a culturas
“bosquímanas” desaparecidas, mas estão presentes em contemporâneas práticas “tradicionais”
de cura. As culturas da África Austral têm usado e compreendido as relações entre humanos,
não-humanos e a paisagem em práticas rituais e de cura de alcance regional. Este artigo
abandona as fronteiras “étnicas” anacrônicas de culturas essencializadas de “bosquímanos” ou
“caçadores-coletores,” juntamente com a noção de que essa arte é a manifestação primitiva de
estados de consciência alterados. Em suma, as imagens na arte rupestre expressam conceitos que
dizem respeito a relações práticas e éticas que necessariamente existem entre a saúde humana
(o bem-estar), a vida social, a “natureza” (animais, plantas, terra) e a paisagem em que a vida
humana e a natureza estão situadas.

Following Ingold’s dwelling perspective, the world comes into being because an organism/person is continuously interacting with his/her environment through bodily activity. Ingold contrasts dwelling with building; in the latter, people construct the world cognitively before they can live in it. In this paper, we add the concept of ‘lodging’ to refer to a situation in which people live in an environment that contains increasing dominating powers. Under the influence of conservation and the implementation of a Community Based Natural Resource Management
(CBNRM) programme, with a strong focus on tourism, the environment of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen of the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia has changed dramatically. In this paper, we use various examples to show how the environment has become more dominant, often in very subtle ways. We argue that the Ju/’hoansi do not dwell as they used to, but lodge instead in an environment that is increasingly influenced by CBNRM and tourism activities. Some of the Ju/’hoansi’s agency has become limited to acquiescing; they passively adapt to and cope with the changes in their environment, while others have shown a more active adaptation strategy.

As former mobile foraging peoples, the indigenous Hai//om San of Namibia lost most of their land-including Etosha National Park and Mangetti West-to other groups and the state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After independence (1990), the government redistributed some of this land to various expropriated groups. In the following overview , we delve into this complex history to argue that the recent decision by the Hai//om (2015) to file a collective action lawsuit against the government of Namibia over Etosha and Mangetti West must be seen in a context of ongoing, often subtle, processes of land dispossession simultaneously taking place as a result of marginalisation and structural disempowerment.

The aim of this article is to propose some principles and practices for truth-seeking during research into violent conflict. To achieve this aim, an argument is deployed by analysing the theoretical concepts “truth”, “myth” and “oral culture” as sources of knowledge. This conceptual analysis precedes a discussion on community-based participatory research (CBPR) as a research methodology to access the knowledge of
lived experiences embedded in the oral culture of the San community of Platfontein, near Kimberley, South Africa. It was found that CBPR contains good practices to use in
research to judge the probable truth about disputes. The CBPR process is ideal for determining the accuracy of data in the context of a specific culture, considering the norms, spiritual influences and personal considerations of knowledge-holders that accompany a unique cosmology. A variety and equity of worldviews and perspectives of
what happened during violent conflict successfully challenges hegemonic power relationships, paradigms and narratives, ultimately leading to informed judgements of
what is probably true about a conflict. CBPR with the San of Platfontein revealed principles that can be used as guidelines for researching disputes where oral culture is involved.

In this article, we analyse the land claim of the South Kalahari Bushmen (≠Khomani) to reflect critically on the South African land restitution process in relation to their contemporary marginalised socio-economic situation. South Kalahari Bushmen were gradually displaced between the 1930s and 1970s and, after apartheid, they were reinstated as landowners in 1999. This does not mean, however, that the historical injustice of land dispossession is now solved. We argue that this can be explained by theoretically comparing a genealogical and a relational approach (based on so-called ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’ world views/ontologies, respectively) on land as different ways of looking at the claim. The genealogical model often used by advocates (non-governmental organisations [NGOs], governments, some anthropologists and donors) of ‘indigenous’ peoples’ rights generally overlooks a crucial element that becomes apparent when looking at the claim from a relational perspective, namely that the meaning of the regained land has changed; it is not the same as the environment that was taken away. Moreover, the people from whom the land was taken are not the same as those to whom it is returned. We conclude that the dominant focus on giving land ‘back’ to previously dispossessed peoples in South Africa needs to account for the ways in which different world views influence the nature of land claims and consequent developments on the land afterwards; this relates to ideal-types of world views that in practice always blend into more concrete, worldly politics, which, in this case, happens especially around ideas of ‘indigeneity’.

The Cascade Wildlife Monitoring Project uses trained volunteers to monitor the location and movement of wildlife, through snow tracking surveys, in the vicinity of proposed wildlife crossing structures along Interstate-90 in the Washington Cascades between Snoqualmie Pass and Easton. The first field season was successful in meeting multiple objectives: collecting an initial data set on existing wildlife along the interstate; training and utilizing approximately 50 volunteers to carry out a rigorous data collection protocol; and creating a structure for ongoing citizen monitoring of wildlife over time before and after highway construction activities. Nearly all expected common mammal species predicted in the study area were detected, while no rare, threatened, or endangered species were noted. Recommendations for next season include: expanding tracking surveys to non-snow seasons, making minor adjustments to field protocols, adding of a control transect, and minor adjustments to volunteer coordination and training.

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.

This is an obituary of Professor Michael Wessels (1958-2018), author of Bushman Letters (2010) and other important studies of historical Bushman (San) oral literature. His work is excepcional in that, among other things, he used the tools of literary criticism no analyze narratives that belong to an oral tradition. Bushman Letters focuses on the /xam narratives in the Bleek-Lloyd Collection, held at the University of Cape Town

This paper reports the analysis of the faunal remains recovered from re-excavation of Holocene Later Stone Age deposits at Moshebi's Shelter, Lesotho. The assemblage includes a range of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and molluscs, but no domestic livestock. Some of the most common taxa, notably mole rats and vlei rats, are likely to be natural intrusions, but most of the others were probably hunted by the site's hunter-gatherer occupants, with an emphasis on small-and medium-sized antelope and rock hyrax. Overall, the animals present reflect an open grassland environment with wooded microhabitats available in nearby valleys. Of the species identified, zebra was not observed in highland Lesotho in the nineteenth century, but is known there earlier in the Holocene. Bushpig, on the other hand, either suggests an enhanced presence of woodland or thicket vegetation relative to today, or contacts with communities living downslope of the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg Escarpment in KwaZulu-Natal.

The Namibian Khwe Bushmen live in the Bwabwata National Park, where they are highly affected by the park’s history and conservation activities. Following Ingold’s dwelling perspective the world comes into being because a person is continuously interacting with his/her environment. This contrasted with building, in which (wo)man constructs the world cognitively before (s)he can live in it. We apply a third notion, lodging, to refer to a situation in which people live in an essentially foreign environment. In this, many changes in the environment of the Khwe are triggered beyond their control, instead of through their interaction with their environment.

Although Bleek and Lloyd archival material of ǀxam (Bushman) folklore, oral history, and customs has been studied from a number of different disciplinary dispositions, a thorough linguistic analysis and description of |xam has not yet been done. What has, however, emerged in research into the archive since the 1990’s, has been a challenge to the perception of the archive as internally coherent and bound purely to the ǀxam language – Afrikaans, the intermediary language of communication between Bleek, Lloyd and the ǀxam, at least initially, has proven to have played a much larger role in the transcription and translation process than previously thought. This article reviews the existing literature of studies concerned with Afrikaans’ relation with the archive and argues for composing a corpus of all the extant Afrikaans linguistic data which can be gleaned from it – and, importantly, to use this data to create a sketch of the variety of Afrikaans known as Orange River (also Gariep or North Western) Afrikaans as it was spoken in the 19th Century Cape frontier. Through this, the understudied variety of Orange River Afrikaans could be described with greater accuracy, and the possible influences of ǀxam, and Khoesan languages more generally, on the development of Afrikaans could be better understood.

New evidence demonstrates a difference between forager lithics at rockshelters and open air assemblages on the Greater Mapungubwe Landscape, northern South Africa. This paper examines the relationship between these two contexts. A field survey was conducted with the goal of identifying LSA surface scatters. Twenty-six assemblages were collected and analysed. A comparison between these assemblages and those from five excavated and dated rockshelters showed discontinuities in the forager cultural record of the region. It was found that two assemblage types exist on the landscape: CCS and quartz dominated assemblages. A number of possibilities that may have resulted in the different assemblage types, notably quartz assemblages, are postulated, which include access to raw material, special purpose sites, the formal use of space, the relationship with agropastoralists or the difference between forager and Khoekhoe herder camps. The lack of chronological control does not allow for a full explanation as the difference may equally be a combination of these possibilities. It is suggested here using this data that by not considering the entire landscape we miss an important aspect of the total forager record. Adopting a landscape approach and excavating a series of sites in a variety of contexts – rockshelters, open air site, rain-control sites and farmer appropriated shelters – is proposed as a means forward.

The aim of this article is to propose some principles and practices for truth-seeking during research into violent conflict. To achieve this aim, an argument is deployed by analysing the theoretical concepts “truth”, “myth” and “oral culture” as sources of knowledge. This conceptual analysis precedes a discussion on community-based participatory research (CBPR) as a research methodology to access the knowledge of lived experiences embedded in the oral culture of the San community of Platfontein, near Kimberley, South Africa. It was found that CBPR contains good practices to use in research to judge the probable truth about disputes. The CBPR process is ideal for determining the accuracy of data in the context of a specific culture, considering the norms, spiritual influences and personal considerations of knowledge-holders that accompany a unique cosmology. A variety and equity of worldviews and perspectives of what happened during violent conflict successfully challenges hegemonic ...

For several years, livestock farmers from different parts of Namibia have settled in the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy – an area mostly inhabited by San (Bushmen) – and have illegally erected fences to keep livestock. As a result of this encroachment, communal land in N≠a Jaqna has become de facto privatised. In response, the local San present themselves as the ‘indigenous’ inhabitants, even though many of them do not originate from the area. They have mobilised the Conservancy as their legal entity – including in a court case – despite Namibia’s lack of a legal framework for the recognition and enforcement of global indigenous rights. We analyse their strategic usage of ‘traditional community’, which is a legal term in Namibia, in this land politics. To this aim, we use the four core pillars (characteristics) of the global concept of ‘indigeneity’, namely genealogical ancestry, cultural difference (in this case ‘San-ness’), non-dominance and self-ascription, with specific emphasis on the first two. Whereas genealogical ancestry appears to be a ‘weak’ argument for the San at first glance, cultural difference (supported by non-dominance and self-ascription) has proven crucial to winning the court case. We show that the use of ‘traditional community’ enables these four pillars to play an important role in defining who has access to the land and its resources. As such, we argue, traditional community and indigeneity (even though the latter is not formally acknowledged) provide the San of the N≠a Jaqna Conservancy with ‘immaterial indigenous modernities’: modern values or ideas in society that can be used strategically by local, marginalised groups to reach political goals.

In the global neoliberal ecological discourse, trophy hunting proponents
often articulate the economic benefits it creates for local communities,
especially through jobs and meat. Trophy hunting revenues are also crucial to support the overall operational costs of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM). The aim of this paper is to show that this rather simplified dominant discourse, based only on “benefits”, sells short the local realities of the Khwe and Ju/’hoansi Bushmen (San) in the Bwabwata National Park and the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, Namibia, respectively. Building on Gibson, I use the concept of “social affordances” as an addition to economic benefits. This leads me to argue for an expansion of the debate beyond the limits of economic benefits to the human domain, to better understand the multiple experiences, perceptions, power relations and meanings (for good and ill) of local actors on trophy hunting and its main players.

Despite the loss of speakers of |xam, one of the 28 Khoisan languages once spoken across Southern Africa, a part of the heritage of these speakers can be found in predominantly two archives: that of Wilhelm H. I. Bleek and Lucy Lloyd (1911) and Gideon R. von Wielligh (1919-1921). The archives form the heart of Bushman* Studies, and has long since received attention in, amongst others, anthropology, literature, and linguistics. This study presents an investigation into the ethical views of the |xam, an investigation which, with the single exception of the studies of Antjie Krog (2004-), has not been undertaken in a philosophical tradition. Through a comparative study of texts across archival boundaries, I engage critically with the ethical views of the |xam, specifically the phenomenological nature of these views. To this end, I use the hermeneutical approach in African philosophy, an approach which focuses on identifying and analysing concepts in texts. The approach to ‘reading’ |xam texts remains, however, a burning issue, and the limit to which disciplinary boundaries are appropriate, is debatable (Wessels 2010). Consequently, and as a result of the relative density of the available texts, insights from anthropology, literature, linguistics and rock art are incorporated within the comparative study. I secondly bring the ethical views which are identified through the comparative analysis into conversation with the dominant ethical framework in African philosophy, namely Ubuntu. Where Ubuntu as been ‘read’ through various lenses (Van Niekerk 2013), a phenomenological approach is absent. Further, where Ubuntu, African ethics broadly, is generally regarded as humanist, a salient ecological consciousness is present in the |xam views. A comparison between Ubuntu and the |xam views therefore deepens the discourse around African ethics in general, and further provides insights into the unique nature of the ethical views of the |xam in particular. Through this I attempt to add value both to Bushman Studies and African philosophy, whilst highlighting an important voice unique to Africa which could be added to the burning discussion around ecological decay in the time of the Anthropocene.