Abstract
The book’s aim—of describing and seeking to understand how San perceive the human–animal relationship—derives from Lorna Marshal’s musings over 50 years ago about a Ju/’hoan giraffe healing dance she observed in the Kalahari, specifically about what seemed to be being—transforming effects on the dancer but which she had trouble grasping, in terms the then available terms of anthropological analysis and understanding. The book’s central terms and concepts for this task—connective cosmology and ontological mutability, mimesis and metamorphosis, anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism—are explained, as is this book’s focus on interdisciplinarity, which has defined and broadened the field of Khoisan studies over the past few decades. Brief outlines of the substance and approach of the two volumes and of the chapters of the present volume are presented.
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07 December 2019
This book was inadvertently published with few errors which has been corrected now.
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
They were featured as such in the Met’s 2017 production of Dvořák’s fairy tale opera “Rusalka”, staged by Mary Zimmermann. As playwright and producer a few years earlier of an adaptation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (2002), Zimmermann has a professional interest in the mytho-magical and mytho-poeic phenomenon of transformation which is beguilingly evident in her work on Rusalka.
- 3.
The terms are Pascal Boyer’s (2001) and refer to what according to him constitutes the evolutionary and cognitive basis for religious thought.
- 4.
I suggest some reasons for this elsewhere, prime of them theoretical and analytical blind-sightedness of many San researchers by a perspective deriving from a cultural-materialist paradigm (2017: 1–2). The Danish anthropologist Thea Skaanes, on the basis of recent field work among the Hadza of Tanzania, found a similar bias among researchers of this iconic African hunter-gatherer people, and, resulting from it, a lack of recognition of, and research on, their “religious, ritual and cosmological complexity” (2017: 12).
- 5.
Such as David Lewis-Williams, Janette Deacon, John Parkington, Pieter Jolly, Andy Smith, Sam Challis, Mark McGranaghan, Sven Ouzman, Anne Solomon, Jeremy Hollmann, Aaron Mazel, Francis Thackeray, John Kinahan, Thomas Dowson, Siyaka Mguni, Edward and Cathelijne Eastwood, Geoff Blundell, Frans Prins, Andrew Skinner, David Witleson, Larissa Swan, Alicia Mullen.
- 6.
They are, inter alia, folklorists (Megan Biesele, Sigrid Schmidt, José Manuel De Prada-Samper, Ansie Hoff), linguists (Roger Hewitt), literary critics (Duncan Brown, Helize van Vuuren, Robert Thornton, Hermann Wittenberg, Michael Wessels, Elana Bregin), historians (John Wright, Nigel Penn, Andrew Bank, Mohamed Adhikari), communication and cultural studies researchers (Keyan Tomaselli, Mary Lange), rock art specialists (Patricia Vinnicombe, Neil Rusch), art critics (Miklós Szalay, Nyasha Mboti, Jessica Stephenson, Leila Baracchini) and artists (Walter Battiss, Pippa Skotnes, Mikko Ijäs), poets (Eugène Marais, Antje Krog, Stephen Watson, Alan James) and novelists (Gideon von Wielligh, Peter J. Schoeman, Elias Canetti, Laurens van der Post, Willemien Le Roux, David Donald). Having just recently read the last-mentioned author’s recent novel Blood’s Mist (Donald 2009) and enjoyed it, I expand on the same as it exemplifies the intellectual rewards of interdisciplinarity: The story, squarely set within /Xam mythology and rock art, as well as colonial history, brings a fiction writer’s eloquence and poignancy—along with a enlivening dose of literary licence—to descriptions of a number of ethnographic or ethnohistorical features carefully researched and referenced and annotated by the novelist. These factual features all add to the interest and relevance to this work of fiction. Its relevance to this book specifically are the novel’s sections on a girl’s inner experiences, of transition and transformation at her menarcheal rite and a shaman’s or hunter’s experiences of Altered States and of tappings’ sympathy and presentiments, respectively. An especially interesting ethnohistorical example for anthropologists is the description by the novelist—who is also a University of Cape Town emeritus psychology professor—of the social chemistry of invidiousness-fuelled incipient tension over inequality and autocratic leadership of multi-band aggregations formed by dispossessed, scattered San people.
- 7.
See also his Bushman Letters: Interpreting /Xam Narratives (2010), a hermeneutical, literary monograph on the /Xam archive, in which Wessels engages explicitly with the sociologist/linguist Roger Hewitt (pp. 121–50; see also Wessels 2009) and the anthropologist Mathias Guenther (pp. 151–74; see also Wessels 2008).
- 8.
Twenty years earlier, a conference on the same theme—the /Xam Archive—was convened in Cape Town by the South African archaeologists Janette Deacon, John Parkington, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson, on a somewhat smaller scale (Deacon and Dowson 1996). A similar multi-disciplinary /Xam-focused event was Pippa Skotnes’s influential and controversial (e.g. Butler 2000, Lyons 2018) Miscast exhibition in Cape Town in 1996 (Skotnes 1996). For a critical assessment of the theoretical impact of multi-disciplinarity on Khoisan research, see Solomon (2014). Two multi-disciplinary conferences on San (specifically /Xam) rock art and identity and Khoisan politics of representation were held in 1994 and 1996, respectively, in Johannesburg (Guenther 1995) and Cape Town (Bank 1998) and the South African Cultural Studies journal Critical Arts edited by Keyan Tomaselli has published two multi-disciplinary special issues on San, one on their “recuperation” (by popular media) in post-apartheid South Africa (vol. 9, no 2, 1995), the other 20 years later, on San (self)representation (vol. 28, nos 3 and 4, 2015).
- 9.
The digitalized archive is an open-access resource. A CD of the collection is appended to Skotnes’s edited volume Claims to the Country (2007).
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Guenther, M. (2020). Introduction: “… some subjective identification … which I failed to understand more deeply”. In: Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume I. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21182-0_1
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