Anthropology and the Bushman

Front matter

Atan Barnard

Alan Barnard

@BERG

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Preface 1 Introduction From Early Encounters to Early Anthropology Victorian Visions of the Bushman Beckoning of the Kalahari Amateurs and Cultural Ecologists An Original Affluent Society?

The Return of Myth and Symbol

Representations and Self-representations 11 Reflections and Conclusions References

Preface

‘The Bushman’ is an image that remains in anthropological consciousness, although transformed through history, especially in recent decades. This book is a social and intellectual history of that image as handed down to anthropology from earlier anthropologists and archaeologists, social theorists and travellers, and Bushmen and Khoekhoe themselves. It is also an exploration of the diversity of that image, for its appearance changes in space as well as time. ‘The Bushman’ in contemporary South Africa can be quite different from ‘the Bushman’ as understood in Japanese or American writings.

One disclaimer: although it has quite a lot of references and covers a long period, this is not intended to be ‘the great big book of Bushman studies’. That would take many volumes, each (going backwards in time) probably of interest to fewer and fewer readers. My hope instead is to provide something more readable. My focus is on anthropologists and anthropology, but what is said here should, I hope, be of interest to a much wider public. It may be of interest especially to development practitioners, to scholars in related disciplines such as archaeology and history, and to those of Khoisan descent who simply want to know more about anthropology’s involvement in their heritage.

Unless clearly essential for my sense, I shall dispense with quotation marks on words like ‘Bushman’ throughout. The word is certainly not without its problems. Indeed the same can be said for the currently more politically correct term ‘San’, which historically and in the Khoekhoe dialects in which it is found has carried connotations of poverty, low status, thievery and scavenging, as well as purposeful food-gathering (that being perhaps its most literal translation). ‘Khoisan’ today is a word that includes both the ‘San’ hunter-gatherers and the ‘Khoikhoi’ or “Khoekhoe’ herder-hunter-gatherers. Most of this book concerns the former and those anthropologists who have worked with them, although throughout much of the history of these studies, especially in early times, the place of the ‘herders’ has been integral to the definition of the ‘hunters’. In general, Khoisan names are given in the preferred form of the individuals themselves or, where appropriate, in a simplified Khoisan form rather than a European one — for example, /Han#kass’o rather than Klein Jantje (the various click symbols are explained in Chapter 1). I should add that there are many Japanese anthropologists among today’s Bushman experts, and their names are given in Western form, with given name first and family name last.

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The book is based on three things: (a) my immersion in Khoisan studies for nearly thirty-five years (with ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and the odd bit of archaeological and archival work), (b) specific library and Internet research devoted to the book, and (c) conversations with colleagues both recent and through the years. A great many people have helped to define my interest and refine my arguments. I have benefited especially from discussions of the history of anthropological thought with scholars in Khoisan studies and hunter-gatherer studies, as well as from more formal interviews with some of them. It would be invidious to name some of those here and not others, so I will simply acknowledge the suggestions of the publisher’s anonymous reader. He or she pointed out a number of omissions in the first draft, and although this is not ‘the great big book of Bushman studies’ it is now a slightly bigger and, I hope, rather more balanced account.

I am also grateful to my close colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, and to the members of Khoisan groups and people of Khoisan descent who have guided me in my own studies, and, as always, to my wife and best critic Joy. I acknowledge too the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, the James A. Swan Fund, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the National Science Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation and the University of Edinburgh, for grants to support for my Khoisan research and my research on the history of Khoisan studies.

This book is dedicated to southern Africa’s foraging peoples, for the many insights they have given anthropology, and in the hope for a future for them with land, liberty and individual self-determination.

Alan Barnard