Bushmen

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.

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.

The Namibian government promotes community-based tourism (CBT) as market-based development. At Treesleeper Eco-camp, a CBT-project among marginalised Hai//om and !Xun Bushmen (San), we investigate how Bushmen's historically developed paternalist relations shape contemporary local institutional processes. Institutional design principles, seen as prerequisites for stable and robust institutions (norms, rules and regulations), and thus successful CBT, are used to analyse local changes of the project in relation to a government grant. Ironically, after the grant, Treesleeper generated less income and the consequent 'upgrade' intensified conflicts. This study shows that community control, ownership and participation are key factors for successful CBT-projects, but currently the state has obstructed these, just as various other 'superior' actors have also done (throughout history) in relation to 'inferior' Bushmen. We argue that paternalist ideologies perpetuate today in the Bushmen's relation with the state, leading to weaker institutions locally through dispossession of their sovereignty.

In this article, I reflect on my longitudinal relation with the indigenous Hai//om Bushmen of the resettlement farm Tsintsabis, in Namibia, exploring my position of power as a development fieldworker. I have been connected to the Hai//om since 1999, doing research and living and working with them while continuously moving between being an ‘outsider’ and an ‘insider’. As an MA student, a development worker/boss (baas) and a PhD researcher, my knowledge of these indigenous people changed over the years. My longest stay on the farm was not as a researcher/anthropologist but as a development fieldworker, engaging with the people in manifold relationships. I argue that there is much epistemological value in an ‘open retrospective analytic autoethnographic experience’. The article explores three under-analysed but crucial and related elements of autoethnography, namely unawareness, memory and power. Even when the awareness of ‘doing research’ is absent, knowledge is acquired. This can be used analytically at a later stage. However, this inevitably implies a major role for the researcher’s memories, thereby perpetuating his/her position of power in the representation and interpretation of events and experiences.

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.

In 1929, South African archeologists J. Goodwin and C. van Riet Lowe established the Later Stone Age (LSA) to differentiate
southern African Holocene “cultures” such as “Wilton” from those of the late Pleistocene Middle Stone Age (MSA). The material culture of the LSA was then, and to some extent still is characterized by ground and flaked stone “microlithic” tools and other artifacts thought to be synonymous with the ethnographically documented Bushmen. In the following decades,
archeologists subsumed other sub-Saharan African industries, such as “Somaliland Wilton,” within the LSA, even though those industries had little if anything to do with the Bushmen and were not necessarily of Holocene age.

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.

This study presents a historical review of the different types
of southern African hunter-gatherer arrows employing a
piece of bone situated at or near the tip of the arrow, which
I call the apical bone component. The results of an extensive
use-trace study of bone points and fragments thereof
from twelve archaeological sites spanning the last 18,000
years show that it is possible to identify arrow types based
on associated use-trace features. Five possible arrow types
are identified from the archaeological sample, all dating to
within the last 4000–6000 years. Using use-trace studies
it is possible to identify now-missing components of the
arrows, such as metal, mastic or stone inserts. Contrary to
recent claims, I do not find evidence for bone-tipped arrows
evolving along a continuum. Rather, some arrow types may
have a much greater antiquity than previously thought.

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

So-called ‘indigenous’ people, such as the Bushmen of Namibia, are often seen as ‘traditional conservationists’. Based on their indigenous knowledge of nature, they are frequently imagined and positioned as primordial people who belong to nature and therefore protect it better than anyone else. This kind of representation also creates the impression that they are still in need of development, as if they are ‘not yet modern’. Today, such images flourish in what I call ‘cultural ecotourism’ and its marketing strategies. Such cultural ecotourism also generates an expansion of neoliberal capitalism to the world of indigenous people, which creates two contradictions. First, through ecotourism, ‘authentic’ indigenous people earn money and adapt to an ‘inauthentic’ modern life in a capitalist world. To do so, it is necessary that they remember or reinvent their ‘traditions’ and thereby continue to act as ‘authentic’ people of nature. Second, ecotourism is supposed to ‘develop’ indigenous people, but the values of this ‘development’ are based on neoliberal capitalism; the system that creates many environmental problems today. Therefore, ‘developing’ people based on capitalist values might add to global environmental pressure. At first glance, these contradictions might create the impression that indigenous people are victims of a more dominant political economy, due to their limited economic possibilities. Yet, in cultural ecotourism, they can also take up a more active part in modernisation, creating ‘indigenous modernities’ in which indigenous people bend aspects of modernisation to their own benefit and to strengthen their indigenous image.

The archaeological significance of Canteen Kopje has been known for nearly a century, being mentioned by figures such as C. Van Riet Lowe, J.D. Clark and the Abbé Breuil, yet it has not been systematically studied. Since the first excavations at the site by Beaumont, at least three lithic cultures have been identified: a Victoria West Acheulean industry in the lowest calcretized gravels and Middle and Later Stone Age assemblages in the upper Hutton Sands deposit. This paper reports on the first study of the material excavated by renewed work at the site by a Wits University team in 2007-2008, which involves the Later Stone Age assemblage of Canteen Kopje. Based on a typological study it was concluded that this industry belongs to the Wilton complex, dating to between 7 500 BP to 2 000 BP. The high density of tools, along with ostrich eggshell beads, bone, charcoal and ochre, suggests a substantial occupation, unlike many Northern Cape sites.

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’.

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 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.

This article focuses on a project called Treesleeper Camp as a case study about Bushmen, wildlife parks and tourism. Treesleeper is a community based tourism project in Tsintsabis, a resettlement farm in northern Namibia. The largest group here is the Hai//om Bushmen, who have strong historical ties with Namibia’s main tourist attraction, Etosha National Park. Treesleeper illustrates the changing culture of the Hai//om, since tradition and modernisation are strong forces within the project and the community. The ‘Bushman Myth’ lives on in tourism, also in more ‘responsible’ projects such as Treesleeper. In fact, the Bushman Myth can be seen as an important part of the broader ‘African Myth’ which is prevalent amongst tourists and constructed within tourism’s environmental bubble. Just as other Bushmen groups in Southern Africa, the Hai//om have lost their land due to immigration of Bantu tribes and colonialism. In Southern Africa wildlife parks have been created for conservation purposes, nowadays serving Southern African nature tourism. The Hai//om used to live in and around the Etosha National Park, but are currently the only tribe in Namibia without land of their own. Therefore their relation with and the position of wildlife has changed dramatically. This is illustrated by comparing the Hei//omn relationship with wildlife and that of the tourists. Tourists can hunt game on hunting farms as part of their ‘African Myth’, while Bushmen are restricted in their hunting for survival purposes. Apart from that, tourists can visit game parks such as Etosha to see the animals. Traditional hunting techniques and performances now have a different function at Treesleeper. These have become sources of generating income for Treesleeper Camp. At the same time, the village tour of Treesleeper Camp is an example of an attraction where tourists can get closer to ‘real Africa’. What is shown in the article is how Treesleeper Camp and the Hei//omn Bushmen make use of their possibilities within the growing industry of tourism in Namibia, using the proximity of Etosha and its’ tourists for generating income. For this they use their possibilities, traditional as well as modern, within the tourists’ ‘African Myth’.

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.

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.

"An eye witness account of coastal people along the northern Namibian coast was recently found in the State Archives, Windhoek (Elers 1907). In view of current interest in coastal settlement and subsistence, it was thought worthwhile to reproduce relevant parts of the document. It shows that small groups of people were living on the coast searching for beached whales."

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.

In southern Africa, the indigenous Bushmen (San) have for long been positioned as an inferior group. First, in pre-colonial paternalist relationships that included slavery and several types of serfdom. Next, they had an inferior position under colonial paternalism (‘baasskap’) originating at white settler farms and last, they experience inferiority again in relation to the contemporary, mostly black, elites, including state officials. This paper addresses this historical pattern: through ethnographic results and examples from the literature it relates this process to contemporary post-colonial paternalist relations of various groups of Bushmen, particularly in tourism and development programmes. I argue that, despite dominant discourses about bottom-up approaches by the tourism industry, NGOs and the state, tourism and development also provide for a continuation of paternalist relations, in which articulations of inferiority come from ‘above’ and ‘below’, thereby often perpetuating Bushmen’s inferiority. Moreover, I suggest that this perpetuation is not confined to tourism and development only; an important discourse that underscores inferiority to a degree is the hegemonic global articulation of ‘indigeneity’, which subtly emphasises indigenous peoples’ inferiority.

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.

This chapter is a methodological and epistemological exploration, in which I reflect on my longitudinal relation with the indigenous Hai//om Bushmen of the resettlement farm Tsintsabis, Namibia. Using autoethnography, I investigate my changing positions of power in my relation to these people before, during and after collaborating with them in initiating Treesleeper Camp, a community-based tourism project. My connection to the Hai//om started in 1999 when I was an MA student, doing research, living and working with them while continuously moving between being an ‘outsider’ and an ‘insider’. Later, as a development worker/boss (baas), and later again as a PhD researcher, my knowledge of these indigenous people changed. Importantly, my longest stay on the farm was not as a researcher/anthropologist but as a development fieldworker during the initial years of the Treesleeper Camp community-based tourism project, engaging with the people in manifold relationships. Based on my various power positions and on the knowledge that I have built up over the years, I argue that there is much epistemological value in an ‘open retrospective analytic autoethnographic experience’. The chapter explores three under-analysed but crucial and related elements of autoethnography, namely unawareness, memory and power. Even when the awareness of ‘doing research’ is absent, knowledge is acquired. This can be used analytically at a later stage. However, this inevitably implies a major role for the researcher’s memories, thereby perpetuating his/her position of power in the representation and interpretation of (tourism) events and experiences.

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.

The emergence of the Neolithic introduced one of the most fundamental turning points in the history of humankind. People left this imaginary Eden of symbiosis with animal species to start their new role of stewards and destroyers of the nature. In this way humans completed their departure from nature into the world of their own culture and civilization. With a sedentary life and a newly acquired knowledge of the production and reproduction of their food sources, people set off to the path to their overpopulation and ruling over the entire planet and after more than 12,000 years to continue beyond its gravity. However, not everything was positive on this departure from the paradise, and soon people also tasted the bitter taste of the forbidden fruit that the first farmers seized. Along with the change of diet a general deterioration in the health of the Neolithic population occurred and we can even talk about the first diseases of civilization.
The course includes a current discussion on the conditions, methods and evidence of the emergence of cereal agriculture in the Western Asia. In addition to archaeological evidence of changes in the subsistence strategy, changes in the symbolic systems, cosmology and religion of the first agricultural civilizations, as well as demographic and social aspects of neolithisation, will be taken into account. The process of domestication will be investigated in various climatic-ecological contexts with emphasis on explanation of local variability in diversification of agricultural strategies. The topic also includes the spread of the Neolithic way of life outside the Neolithic epicentre, i.e. to the northwest of Asia Minor, the Balkans and North Africa. Subsequent cultural development and population cultural variability of newly domesticated areas will also be discussed. Finally, we compare the development in Western Asia and Europe to the domestication processes in other parts of the world.

Published over half a century ago, this paper documents the unequal relationships between Bantu-speaking farmers and Bushmen foragers in the Kalahari Desert. George Silberbauer was at the time Bushman Survey officer of the Bechualanad Protectorate. Adam Kuper was a doctoral student, doing fieldwork among the Kgalagari.

The San (Bushmen, Basarwa) of the Kalahari Desert and adjacent regions in Southern Africa have been studied intensively by anthropologists for over a century. For the past 40 years human rights and development work has been carried out in cooperation with San communities in the Republic of Botswana. Using a comparative perspective, we examine the economic wellbeing and livelihood strategies of San living in varying circumstances ranging from freehold farms in the western Kalahari (Ghanzi) to a protected area (the Central Kalahari Game Reserve) in the central part of the country, and a communal area with mixed ranch and cattle post production systems in the eastern Kalahari region of Botswana. Conclusions are drawn about the importance of using a socioeconomic approach as a way to measure Indigenous wellbeing and as a means of improving public policy involving Indigenous peoples.

This article explores the unique perspectives and uses of a traditional Upper Karoo Bushman tale retold in a cultural setting by a traditional teller. The role of the folklorist is dedicated to preserving and studying Bushman oral tradition (past and present) and the use of story for a violence prevention project by a contemporary nontraditional storyteller .

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

Paper given at the conference 'Landscape, Wilderness and the Wild', Newcastle University, 26-29 March 2015, http://www.ncl.ac.uk/apl/news/events/thewild/

Abstract: Modern biodiversity conservation in southern Africa is replete with reference to the value(s) of ‘the wild’. ‘Last wildernesses’ become conservation areas, ‘wilderness schools’ encourage human experiences of a transcendent ‘wild nature’, and ‘game’ farming and trophy hunting are framed as economically necessary for the sustenance of ‘wildlife’. The category of ‘wild’ is extended to ‘wild people’ or ‘Bushmen’, whose othered identities are sustained through Living Museums where tourists can consume in the present apparent past practices. Drawing on recent ethnographic encounters with created wild landscapes, wild life and wild people in Namibia, conveyed through a montage of still and video images, this paper seeks to problematise categories of both ‘wild’ and ‘game’ in conservation discourse and practice. Inspired by recent ‘anthropology of nature’ work by Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro among others, ‘wild’ and ‘game’ are theorised as intrinsically problematic terms and categories for the sustenance of socionatural abundance. This is due to their associations with a ‘humanist naturalist’ (cf. Descola) ontology of separateness between cultured heroic humans and their antithesis of a constructed wild natural realm that can become the object of productive management and instrumentalisation. This humanist naturalism of the wild is contrasted here with an ontology of what I will call ‘animist socialism’, documented ethnographically as characterising the worldviews of many indigenous peoples globally. In this, plants, animals and other subjects are assumed to be animated by souls, language and culture in ways that bestow personhood and the possibility of social relationships between what are thus kindred others. Understanding the structuring and ethical implications of the different ontologies of humanist naturalism and animist socialism is considered critical for conceiving and composing socionatural abundance based on cohabitation with other species as ‘soul mates’, rather than through barriers between humans and ‘wild game’. 

Key words: wild, game, wilderness, biodiversity conservation, Bushmen, humanist naturalism, animist socialism, socionatural abundance

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.

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.