Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San

Roger Hewitt

Description

Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San analyses texts drawn from the Bleek and Lloyd Archive – arguably one of the most important collections for the understanding of South African cultural heritage and in particular the traditions of the /Xam, South Africa’s ‘first people’. Initially appearing in a now rare 1986 edition and here re-issued for the first time, the doctoral thesis on which the book is based became the catalyst for much scholarly research. The book offers an analysis of the entire corpus of /Xam narratives found in the Bleek and Lloyd collection, focusing particularly on the cycle of narratives concerning the trickster /Kaggen (Mantis). These are examined on three levels from the ‘deep structures’ with resonances in other areas of /Xam culture and supernatural belief, through the recurring patterns of narrative composition apparent across the cycle and finally touching on the observable differences in the performances by the various /Xam collaborators.
Hewitt’s text remains the only comprehensive and detailed study of /Xam narrative, and it has become itself the object of study by researchers and PhD candidates in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada and elsewhere. This new edition at last makes Hewitt’s important work more widely available. It will be a welcome addition to the recently burgeoning literature on the place of the /Xam hunter-gatherers in the complex history of South African culture and society.

Sujets

• Social Science
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• África
• General officer
• History of Africa
• Anthropology
• General
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: WITS University Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776141265
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Khoisan Heritage Series
Series Editor: David Lewis-Williams
Other titles in the Khoisan Heritage Series, published by Wits University Press
Contested Images: Diversity in Southern African Rock Art Research
Edited by Thomas A Dowson and David Lewis-Williams
Customs and Beliefs of the |Xam Bushmen
Edited by Jeremy C. Hollman
Rock Engravings of Southern Africa
by Thomas A Dowson
Voices from the Past: |Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Lloyd Collection
Edited by Janette Deacon and Thomas A Dowson
Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju|’Hoan
by Megan Biesele

Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
2001
South Africa
http://witspress.wits.ac.za
© Roger Hewitt 1986
First published 1986 by Helmut Buske Verlag, Hamburg, Germany.
This second edition published 2008 by Wits University Press.
ISBN 978-1-86814-470-9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express permission, in writing, of both the author and the publishers.
Cover photograph by Anthony van Tonder, The Media Bank, africanpictures.net Cover design by Hybridesign
Layout and design by Acumen Publishing Solutions, Johannesburg.
Printed and bound by Creda Communications
For Georgia
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Ethnographic background
2 Introduction to the narratives: their context, performance and scope
3 Legends and the stories of !Khwa
4 Sidereal narratives: the story of the Dawn’s Heart and his wife the Lynx
5 Animal narratives
6 |Kaggen in belief and ritual
7 The |Kaggen narratives (1): characters and content
8 The |Kaggen narratives (2): sequence and structure
9 |Kaggen in belief, ritual and narrative: a synthesis
10 Two |Kaggen narratives: compositional variations
11 The verbal surface: a note on the narrators
Appendix A Girls’ puberty observances of the | Xam
Appendix B The shamans of the | Xam
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
M y first thanks are, undoubtedly, to Pippa Skotnes, who managed to blow a trumpet in my ear from what seemed a very long way away to wake me up and let me know about the developments in the Bleek and Lloyd Archive in recent times and to invite me to Cape Town. She gave me such positive encouragement to re-publish this book, and pointed me in exactly the right direction. She is a very special person to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude.
I would also like to take this opportunity to make an acknowledgement that would have been in the first edition, had its birth not been such a casual and chaotic affair. David Lewis Williams was a fellow at Cambridge working on his earliest ideas concerning the San rock paintings he had been so meticulously recording and analysing when we somehow came into contact at the start of my doctoral research. We had many fascinating conversations and debates in London over the published Bleek and Lloyd materials at a time when it was hard to find a soul who even knew of their existence. He also gave very ungrudgingly of his time to translate from the Afrikaans for me a number of the von Wielligh texts of |Xam narratives, the whole four volumes of which I had somehow assembled myself a photocopy version but could not read. I would like to thank him, somewhat belatedly, for his generosity and company at that time.
Others who were the effective dramatis personae of that period and with whom I had really fruitful dialogue were Megan Biesele, Sigrid Schmidt and Alan Barnard who started his doctoral research at the London School of Oriental and African Studies in exactly the year I started there. I still have some of the letters he sent me, somewhat sandy, from the Kalahari, while he was doing his fieldwork. Each of these scholars was all in different ways important to me in the development of my own thinking.
Finally, of course, I would like to acknowledge again the work of the staff at the University of Cape Town Library, who tolerated and then responded so well to my unexpected and at the time obscure request that they search to see if the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks were with them. Little were they to know at the time that that was just the beginning and that over 30 years later their office would be caught up in a tsunami of Bleek and Lloyd digitalisation.
In the production of this book, I have been fortunate to have the services of Fiona Potter as proofreader, Margie Ramsay as indexer, Karen Lilje of Hybridesign as cover designer and Acumen Publishing Solutions as book designers.
Introduction
T his new edition of Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San comes some 20 years after its initial printing and 30 after the text, with few differences, was presented as a doctoral thesis to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Since then there has been a great deal of excellent scholarship that has explored the Bleek and Lloyd collection of |Xam texts, housed mainly in the library of the University of Cape Town (UCT), or has added substantially to what we know of the historical context of that collection and its content. At the time of my thesis, however, not only was the location or, indeed, the continued existence of Lucy Lloyd’s |Xam transcriptions – the largest part of the collection – unknown, but the content of Bleek’s own notebooks also remained unexplored and the notebooks themselves barely catalogued. Thus it was with something of a gamble that I embarked on a thesis designed to be based alone on those as yet ‘undiscovered’ notebooks. Luckily for me my optimistic digging was rewarded 1 and the work that produced this book was able to commence. Naturally the existence of the notebooks did not remain a secret for long, and much useful scholarly work, largely by South African researchers, started to flow.
Much has changed in the intervening years. Even between the presentation of the thesis in 1976 and 1986, when editors from Helmut Buske publishers in Hamburg approached me to ask if they might publish the work, there had grown a greater sensitivity around nomenclature applied to peoples customarily studied by anthropologists. For many years the term ‘Bushmen’ had been used to describe the hunter-gatherers whose click language was closely related to that of the Khoi herders with whom they also shared much of the Cape. Both Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd referred to theirs as a collection of ‘Bushman folklore’. By the late 1970s, however, the Khoi word ‘San’ became widely adopted to describe the various language groups evident amongst the hunter-gatherers, as well as the people themselves. While anthropologists familiarised the reading public with the specific names of some of these – principally the !Kung, made internationally famous by the Marshall expeditions to the Kalahari desert in the 1950s – the term ‘San’ became preferred by many in seeming not to have the derogatory connotations that ‘Bushmen’ might be thought to possess. It was not long, however, before it was pointed out that ‘San’ itself was often a derogatory term applied to the hunter-gatherers and was often used simply to mean ‘thief’. The best nomenclature was clearly not to be found in these terms for the general category, but those used by each specific group to refer to itself. For this reason, as most of the texts collected by Bleek and Lloyd were from one large group of hunter-gatherers, the |Xam, it was possible to use that term in accounts of that people and their language. However, for anyone except for a very small circle of academics, the name ‘|Xam’ meant nothing. Hence the general terms were often attached, giving ‘the |Xam Bushmen’ or ‘|Xam San’ and it has not been until very recently that ‘|Xam’ has acquired greater popular currency – certainly within South Africa if not elsewhere – so that it can now be used without explanation. Too late, alas, for the title of this book, which, being republished more or less as it stood, has for the sake of transparency to carry its original title. Similarly, the text throughout uses both ‘San’ and ‘|Xam’ in different contexts, reflecting the initial academic need to identify the people within the widest anthropological frame and at the same time be specific. The need to do so continues to be shared with most authors today, and we find the words ‘Bushmen’ and ‘San’ in common use alongside ‘|Xam’ in even the most recent texts.
It would be very time-consuming and possibly pointless in the end also to allow the text of this book now to benefit from all the scholarship that has followed – tempting though that might be. This is particularly so because the work is fundamentally an analysis of narratives in relation to their specific ethnographic context insofar as that context is reconstructible from the ethnographic record in many of the texts collected by Bleek and Lloyd and from writings by early travellers, missionaries, local officials and so on. There is a strong argumentative thread – heavily structuralist – to this book, and its virtues – if virtues it has – will not lie in the comprehensiveness of its scholarship, but in the persuasiveness of its analysis and the logic of its arguments. Furthermore, that scholarship that has emerged since it was written speaks for itself.
Hardly in mitigation of the slow genocidal process by which the |Xam had ceased to exist, but in a miraculous parenthesis to its final stages, the written record of |Xam culture, belief and oral tradition was constructed by the co-operative efforts of several |Xam people – five men and one woman – and the two Europeans, Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek. The constructed texts were subsequently explored, written about and partially published by Lucy Lloyd herself, then Dorothea Bleek, but by few others (see below). Between 1936 and 1973 they more or less disappeared from