Abstract
This chapter deals with the at-times hovering closeness of myth and spirit beings and presences in the natural and social world of the San that brings some of the myth and spirit world’s ontological inchoateness and inconstancy to this world. The San forager’s being-in-the-world place and space is the natural environment, in particular the hunting ground, the arena within which animals are encountered most directly, eye-to-eye and cheek-by-jowl. This in itself keeps humans constantly aware of ontological ambiguity ad mutability, their sameness-as and otherness-from animals whose identity they may assume mentally and bodily at certain moments in the hunt. That awareness is intensified by the presence, in the same landscape, and, at times on hunting ground, in the form of a lion- or jackal-shaman or a trickster-eland, of the ontologically fluid beings or states from the mythical and preternatural domains. This presence potentially transforms their being-state, from virtual, imagined or “thought-out” myth and spirit beings to actual ones, seen, encountered or even “become”—at times “danced out”—by people.
“Things which old people thus said, they taught us children about them, of the hunting-field’s doings, of the things which we should be careful about.”
Diä!kwain (V-8.: 46171)
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06 December 2019
This book was inadvertently published with few errors which has been corrected now.
Notes
- 1.
I am grateful to José de Prada-Samper for directing me to this source.
- 2.
These narratives, after trance and the shaman’s return from the spirit world are different from the “dialogue”-style narrative the shaman utters as goes into trance, which is more disjointed, consisting of phrases, sentence fragments and expletives, rather than coherent narrative (Wiessner and Larsen 1979; see also Guenther 2006a: 248–51).
- 3.
Both of these mytho-mystical aspects of the cultural landscape of the Damara are documented in a short film (“Landscape Final”) by Chris Low, Andy Botelle and Silvia Diez filmed in Sorris Sorris in western Namibia in March 2016. It is available through the website of the “Future Pasts” research project carried out among Namibian Khoisan people from Bath Spa University and University of Edinburgh (http://www.futurepasts.net)
- 4.
See Chap. 5, Vol. I.
- 5.
Märchen , the German word for “fairy tale” (which has assumed generic status in folklore studies), is a diminutive of Mär (also Märe) an archaic German word glossed in Cassell’s German-English English-German Dictionary (London: Casell Ltd., 1978: 407) as “news”, “rumour”, “report”, “story”, “tidings” (as in Bach’s Christmas carol “Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her, ich bring euch gute, neue Mär”—“From Heaven above I have come, I bring you good, new tidings”).
- 6.
Yet, on the other hand, that loss of culture and land, for—and because—all of its devastating existential stress, may also have culturally revitalizing effects that curbed some of the disenchantment people were experiencing. One of them is to evoke in the people affected by existential stress and crisis conditions collective nostalgia, about a romanticized past and life, and a hunting ground invested with mythical and mystical doings. Such is the nature of “memory culture” and its impact on stories and storytelling is that it gives rise to eulogizing narratives about an idealized, essentialized and mytho-poeticized past, recently vanquished and vanished. Memory culture left its mark also on the narratives Bleek and Lloyd received from some of their storytellers. Two examples that come to mind, readily because of their iconic stature in /Xam orature, are //Kabbo’s “Intended Return Home” musings (cited above) and Diä!kwain’s—wistful “Song of the Broken String”—the string that connected the /Xam to their spirit world (Lewis-Williams 2015a: 183–200). Like a number of other South African historians and commentators, Mohamed Adhikari deems Diä!kwain’s song “a monument to a departed way of life: a southern African genocide” (2010: 94–96).
- 7.
The German folklorist and Khoisan folklore specialist Sigrid Schmidt’s has recently presented an exhaustive study of linkages between /Xam and Khoe Khoe folktales (2013), a number of which are of European origin.
- 8.
- 9.
See Chap. 7, Vol. I.
- 10.
Both of these aspects of contemporary San orature were recently tapped by community development researchers, in the interest of fostering a positive image and identity of San among themselves and vis à vis outsiders as well as provide for both partiers an information source about the people’s traditional band territories and ecological knowledge (Le Roux and White 2004; Lange and Dyll-Myklebust 2015; Lange et al. 2013, 2014; Hannis and Sullivan 2018; LaRocco 2018). Some of this material, especially traditional myth and lore, history and indigenous knowledge has been used for school primers and books (Biesele 2009; Schmidt and van Vuuren 2014, Kuru D’Kar Trust n.d.).
- 11.
Another factor, in Botswana, that contributed to this secularization of the San trance dance was its appropriation and cultural refashioning—and, in the process, bowdlerization—by the San’s Bantu-speaking neighbors, in the context of the popular, national and touristic form of entertainment, “traditional dance” competitions (Hermans 1998; Lee 2003: 201–5).
- 12.
See also Thompson (2016), whose recent cross-cultural overview of the anthropological literature on the concept of “sense of place” among hunter-gatherers draws extensively on Silberbauer’s article.
- 13.
From Saugestad’s edited version of Hardbattle’s text (1998: 289–92).
- 14.
As presumably it was to San in the past: !xoe, the term the /Xam applied to their home territory, meant “the place to which one belongs” (de Prada-Samper 2017: 119).
- 15.
For instance, Botswana San today, in their protracted struggle with the Botswana government for land and occupancy rights to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, may, for strategic reasons, include Bakgalagadi within their newly minted, politically motivated ethnonym “Peoples of the CKGR” (Sapignioli 2018: 250).
- 16.
Ethnic identity, along with official recognition—as the “First Peoples of the Kalahari” (FPK) of the country’s indigenous people—shared first place, with land rights, to “our own place”, in San people’s aspirations when I carried out my field research on the Kuru artists in the mid-1990s (see also Saugestad 1998). Both of these issues were also themes in the imagery of some of the artists (Guenther 2006b). Here I note parenthetically that the prioritization of indigeneity and ethnic identity by San and San activists was very much out of step with how some anthropologists viewed this matter at the time (Kuper 2003; Barnard 2006; Sylvain 2014, 2015). The former, the San, were wont to consider the latter’s’ debates about essentialism, identity and indigeneity as both irrelevant and counterproductive to their aspirations (Guenther 2006c). This became clear to me at a conference I attended in the mid-1990s and to which San delegates had been invited. A paper, and its ensuing discussion, about it, on the illusionary and delusional nature of the concept of “indigenous”, was listened to with a mixture of consternation, impatience and annoyance, which one Khoisan delegate expressed vociferously in the discussion.
- 17.
Such as Khoe-descended, Colored “Kalahari People” north of the Orange River around Upington and Kakamas and the Afrikaans- and Nama-speaking ≠Khomani of the Northern Cape, in and around the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, for whom “cultural identity, indigenous ontology and spirituality are inextricably linked with land”. This is the theme of a recent article by Mary Lange and Lauren Dyll-Myklebust (2015: 4; see also Lange et al. 2013).
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Guenther, M. (2020). The Enchantment and Disenchantment of the World of the San. In: Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume II. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21186-8_5
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