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To see ourselves as we need to see us: Ethnography'sprimative turn in the early cold war yearsEdwin N. Wilmsen a b , Alan Barnard a , Megan Biesele c , Akira Takada d & Owen B.Sichone ea Centre of African Studies , University of Edinburghb Department of Anthropology , University of Texasc University of Texasd Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (ASAFAS) , Kyoto Universitye Department of Anthropology and Archaeology , University of PretoriaPublished online: 26 Jul 2012.

To cite this article: Edwin N. Wilmsen , Alan Barnard , Megan Biesele , Akira Takada & Owen B. Sichone (2009) To seeourselves as we need to see us: Ethnography's primative turn in the early cold war years, Critical African Studies, 1:1,20-95

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

TO SEE OURSELVES AS WE NEED TO SEE US:

ETHNOGRAPHY'S PRIMITIVE TURN IN THE EARLY COLD WAR YEARS

Edwin N. Wilmsen

Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh

& Department of Anthropology, University of Texas.

anaw630@uts.cc.utexas.edu

Abstract Against a backdrop of calls for a more layered understanding of the dominant societal concerns which

influence anthropologists' thinking, and thus the need to address the philosophies and assumptions that for so

long misrepresented those characterized as ‘primitive’ along with others marked out as culturally or

biologically inferior, I reflect on the existential crisis that engulfed Euroamerica in the early Cold War years.

This was a threat anthropology was well placed to relieve; it did so in part by framing a natural ‘primitive

man’ in opposition to ‘civilized’ humanity to restore the ‘family of man’ to psychic security. An image of

‘Bushmen’ etched by ethnographers rapidly emerged as a centerpiece of anthropological practice. I show

how that image is indistinguishable from the fictional version popularized by Laurens van der Post and that

both forms of it derive ultimately from the work of Jung. I argue that the image feeds readily into racialist

discourse; thus, the time to render it obsolete has long passed.

[primitiveness, Bushmen, modernity, race, academic-public discourse]

Earlier versions of this essay were read as a Horizons of Knowledge lecture at Indiana University (1996), a Taft

Lecture in Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati (2000), and as part of a faculty lecture series in the Department of Anthropology, University of California-Berkeley (1996). As well, between 1994 and 2001 versions were presented in seminars at the following universities: Amsterdam, California-Irvine, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Leiden, London, Manchester, Munich, Witwatersrand, and Western Cape. The suggestions of the participants in these venues contributed substantially to the development of the themes of the paper, as did readings of various drafts by Ana Alonso, Upendra Baxi, Franz von Bender-Beckmann, Diana Blank, Renee Dankerlin, James Denbow, Carol Greenhouse, Anne Griffiths, Hartwig Isernhagen, David Killick, Kent Lightfoot, Thomas McClendon, Sally Engle Merry, Duncan Miller, Pauline Peters, Owen Sichone, Keyan Tomaselli, Melanie Wiber, Carl Wilmsen, and Henry Wright. I am indebted to all for their attention and encouragement. Much of the work upon which this essay is based was made possible by a Simon Senior Fellowship at the University of Manchester, and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

This San group has been used as a kind of narrow and opaque window to the

Pleistocene. (John Yellen 1984:56)

Yet Westerners exploited the Xam [San]1 from the start - first in the brutal mode

of racism by marking them as the base of the evolutionary ladder, later in the

kinder (but also mythological) romanticism that regarded hunter-gatherers in

general, and the San peoples of southern Africa in particular, as living

representatives of our original and admirable ways. All these perspectives are

wrong and self-serving. (Stephen Jay Gould 1991:iii)

But you cannot compromise my humanity in order that you explore your own

ambiguity. I cannot accept that. My humanity is not to be debated, nor is it to be

used simply to illustrate European problems. (Chinua Achebe 2003:6)

An invitation to participate in a symposium on literary complicity in the construction of otherness

held in Basel in 1987 started my active engagement with the themes of this paper (Wilmsen 1987),

but my thinking with regard to them began several years earlier as an outgrowth of conversations

with Carmel Schrire about her struggles to publish her seminal paper (Schrire 1980) in which she

dissected the deep-seated essentialism underpinning anthropological thinking about ‘Bushmen’.2

Her paper was rejected by the American Anthropologist, raising questions, in my mind at least,

about ethnographic complicity in the construction of otherness.3 My questions were soon answered

by Ranger (1983: 261-262) who exposed 'the ambiguous legacy that is “traditional” African culture;

the whole body of reified "tradition" invented by [among others] anthropologists' (see also Vail

1989; Wilmsen 1983, 1989: xii-xv, 1-32). Two subsequent invitations concentrated my thinking:

the first to write on the political context of John Marshall's San (‘Bushman’) films for a

retrospective of his work at the Kommunale Kino Freiburg in 1991 (Wilmsen 1991), the second to

participate in a debate over proposals to 'recuperate the San' in Laurens van der Post's 'First People'

1. San-speaking people who lived in the region of the Cape (today roughly Cape Town and environs); some Xam men provided most of the material for Bleek and Lloyd's (1911) Specimens of Bushmen folklore. The title of the exhibition, in the catalogue of which Gould's epigraph appears, was taken from that book; hence, Gould's reference to Xam here and then all San peoples.2. My use of the term ‘Bushman’ follows that of Voss (1982:25): ‘By the term “Bushman” I intend to refer to the mythical rather than the historical figure, to a literary/ideological stereotype, often the projection of sectional interests, designed to justify a partisan interpretation of history and society’.3. The fact that Schrire found the only outlet for her first foray into this topic (Perper and Schrire 1977) in a book on chemical senses says much about anthropological resistance to challenges to its central tropes at the time.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. image as bridge to heal the wounds between black and white South Africans across the chasm left

by apartheid (Masilela 1987; Tomaselli 1992, 1995; Wilmsen 1995a, 1995b, 1996). I discovered

that the films of Marshall, especially The hunters, and of van der Post, The Lost World of Kalahari

plus the trilogy of books that followed (The lost world of the Kalahari, The heart of the hunter, and

A mantis carol), which I had rather neglected until then, constitute important ethnographic

documents. Not reliable documents of the objectified peoples made subjects in them, but faithful

documents of the authors situated in the discourse of a distorted modernity in the 1950s-60s. They

distil notions of alterity, essentialism, and the primitive in crystalline form and thus permit us to

draw inferences about the species of colonial ideology pervasive at the time, particularly as it

permeated anthropological practice (Wilmsen 1999b, 2002b).

Other anthropologists have voiced converging concerns. Eric Wolf (1999:121) expressed the

thoughts of many when he stressed that anthropology needs 'a more layered understanding of the

forces – both external and internal – that formed it … the world views and dominant societal

concerns, which influence anthropologists' thinking and to which they may respond.' Two years

earlier, Laura Nader (1997a) had investigated the impact of the Cold War on anthropology with an

emphasis not only on its topical range (the study of race, power relations, etc.) but also on external

factors such as funding sources and formulating forces such as political ideology. Nader (1996:1)

had already expressed a premise upon which her study and this essay are built:

Science [for my purpose here, read anthropology] is often characterized as

detached from and above ordinary daily life, although science defines daily life in

innumerable ways … in backyards, in museums, on reservations, among the lay

public … from them different viewpoints emerge.

That is, the relationship between academia and the public is a two-way street, and the interpretation

of anthropological data is neither neutral nor immune from societal influences. By now it is

commonplace that 'representations of knowledge give a life to that knowledge [and] this life shapes

the object of the knowledge' (Fitzpatrick 1984:20). But for my purpose, it is necessary to stress,

again with Fitzpatrick (1984:24), that

anthropology was taken beyond these bounds and presented as definitive, whole

accounts of African societies … focused on the over-structured small community,

[which] made the presence of colonial power an irrelevance. The centrality of that

power in the very constitution of the object of study was thus obscured.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

In recognition of the centrality of these observations for a socially cognizant anthropology,

two recent presidents of the AAA have called for a reorientation of the discipline's priorities.

Annette Weiner (1995:19) asserted that our task today is to address the philosophies and practices

along with the prejudices and assumptions about 'power and authority that for so long

misrepresented not only those characterized as 'primitive,' but major segments of populations, such

as women and others marked out as culturally or racially inferior.' She challenged us to rewrite

social science and to expose what is most pernicious in its theory and practice. Yolanda Moses

(Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997) was more direct and urged the reestablishment of ‘race’ in

anthropological discourse, as earlier had Gregory and Sanjek (1994). Faye Harrison (1999:609-

610), among others, sees anthropologists in growing numbers already regaining concern for this

'problem of the 20th century' (Dubois 1989 [1903]) that accompanies us into the 21st. Leith Mullings

(2005:679, 684-685), however, notes that 'anthropology still remains largely on the periphery of

studies of racism [and] … we must begin to critically scrutinize our own discipline' so as to focus

our theoretical perspectives and methodologies sharply on this pernicious problem. To meet these

challenges, requires, as Harrison insists, an unraveling 'so that we can discern and detect 'race' when

it is positioned at the deep level of shifting subtextual meanings.' The association, from 2004, of the

AAA with 14 American organizations in the Understanding Race and Human Variation project

highlights the continuing saliency of the challenge. As Nader (1997b:7) remarks, 'the end of the

Cold War is not the end of scientific racism.'

This essay addresses these issues; in it, I probe the premises upon which both the popular

and academic image of ‘Bushmen’ are predicated. In doing so, I call attention to the importance of

socially constructed cognitive objects in anthropology, and draw on Ana Alonso's (1988:36)

observation that once established in scholarly and popular lexicons these objects are transmuted into

'indexical signs which perpetually point to their status as realities constituted independently of the

process of re-presentation itself'. Furthermore, 'one of the certainties in anthropology of the last

twenty-five years has been that social facts are constructed out of fragile human observations and

that truth is always contested and contestable' (Schumaker 2002:50). For my present purpose,

Barbara Buntman (2002:81) states the matter precisely: a Bushman image has become part of our

society's - professional and public - network of signs, its mythologized forms gaining credibility by

repetition in a variety of media locales. She suggests that in order to support the production of

indigenous images of ' “self”, it might be necessary to move away from romantic notions and to

demystify the mystified.' To make this move, it is necessary to understand how the mythologized

Bushman object was constructed. I intend here to contribute to such an understanding.

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A primitive foil against modernity

I begin by reflecting on a perennial crisis in Euroamerican ontology. The crisis is one of personal

and collective identity, of continuity with the past and continuation with the future. Although

always with us, it arose with renewed urgency in the first decades - 1946-1968 - of Cold War

confrontation when the very foundations of continued civil existence were drawn into the arena of

ideological struggle. This near-quarter century - marked at its beginning by the Berlin blockade and

Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, at its midpoint by the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow

followed soon by the du[a/e]l betrayals of Suez and Budapest when the Cold War froze hard, and at

its end by the Prague Spring, the Paris révolution manqué, the solipsistic Berkeley Free-speech

Movement, and the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago - seems to me to be a moment of

particularly deep trauma in Euroamerican social psychology. W.H. Auden (1946:8, 57) called it the

Age of anxiety, in which '… The prudent atom/ Simply insists upon its safety now,/ Security at all

costs … [and people] sought that state of prehistoric happiness which, by human beings, can only

be imagined in terms of a landscape bearing a symbolic resemblance to the human body.'

In 1955, Edward Steichen gave this human body its face in his photographic exhibition The

Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The title was drawn from Carl

Sandberg who had long used it in his writings, particularly his poem, The People, Yes: 'the little

Family of Man hugging the little ball of Earth' (Sandberg 1936:3). Eric Sandeen (1995:40-41,

passim) has shown how Steichen sought to embody in 502 thematic black-and-white photographs

the universal qualities of life of this little family. He sought, too, to emphasize the fragility of these

qualities, indeed, of that very life, in the destructiveness of war magnified by possibilities of atomic

annihilation. The last, 503rd, image of the exhibition was a huge (6x8ft.) colour transparency of the

first hydrogen bomb explosion; it was preceded by a quote from Bertrand Russell: 'The best

authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with hydrogen bombs is likely to put an end to the

human race' (quoted in Sandeen 1995:48).4 Steichen clearly stated his ambition for the exhibition

while it was being assembled: 'It is essential to keep in mind the universal elements and aspects of

human relations and the experiences common to all mankind' (pre-exhibition news release, quoted

in Sandeen 1995:41) in order to buoy the individual above the hazards of life in a nuclear world.

No spatial, temporal, or developmental hierarchy was suggested by the exhibition, although some

critics read this into it (e.g., Barthes 1957; see also, Sandeen 1995:54-55, 155-156). The simplistic

stress on universality, however, was to be subjected to considerable aesthetic, anthropological, and 4. This was the only colour photograph in the exhibition and the only one not included in the book that followed.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. ideological critique by a later generation (e.g. Sontag 1977), whose only experience of the

exhibition was through the book that resulted from it, which is not arranged in the manner of the

exhibition. Most crucially, the depiction of nuclear destruction was replaced by a backlit shot of two

small children walking hand-in-hand down an Eden-like woodland path, captioned: 'A world to be

born under your footsteps' (MoMA 1955:192), thus erasing the original message. Nevertheless, we

must bear in mind that the Family of Man images were selected to resonate with the experiences of

ordinary viewers in their time. Steichen stressed the urgency of his purpose: 'We can understand the

danger of the atomic bomb, but the danger of our misunderstanding the meaning of life is much

more serious' (Nelson 1958:40). His aim was to elevate that meaning in the eyes of viewers through

the revelatory power of photographs, which generalized the human condition to subvert ever present

elements of bigotry all over the world. The photographs were not chosen primarily for aesthetic

qualities imbued by artists, but as purportedly unselfconscious snapshots of life as lived in many

parts of the world. As such, ethnographic naiveté was irrelevant, perhaps even an asset. Henry

Steele Commager (1950:411) described the initially intended audience precisely:

the American of the mid-twentieth century was by no means so sure that his were

the best of all times, and after he entered the atomic age he could not rid himself

of the fear that his world might end not with a whimper but a bang.

And the audience responded – not only in New York but also in Cleveland, Dallas, Omaha, Los

Angeles, Toronto as well as other American and Canadian cities where the exhibition drew in very

large crowds. Not everyone was happy about this. Conservative intellectuals, such as Jacques

Barzun (1959:40) thought the exhibition 'surrendered to the exotic and primitive … and pandered to

mass public opinion'. But it was not only ‘the masses’ who responded. The Noble Peace Laureate

and Canada's former Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, titled his 1968 BBC Reith Lectures Peace in

the Family of Man (Pearson 1968) and stressed the exhibitions themes repeatedly in the six talks.

From 1956 to 1962, versions of the exhibition toured 38 other countries, under the aegis of

the United States Information Agency, where the public response was just as great. Critical

response also recognized Steichen's purpose: a Dutch reviewer said 'if you can ever speak about the

universal, then this is it … the exhibit must be seen from a humanitarian viewpoint'; the Hamburger

Sonntagsblatt thought the exhibition brought 'delight to the eye and appeal to the conscious and

heart of the people' (both quoted in Sandeen 1995:121-122). For Soviet Bloc countries, however,

the context of representation was subtly but significantly changed from the original message of

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. universality in the family of man to the particularity of the family – as affluent consumer - where it

had been realized, the United States of America.

The crisis, thus, was most forcefully couched in terms of a threat to cultural life as Western

Europe and, particularly, America knew it, a threat perceived to be posed by modernity with its

science and technology and its more perplexing questioning of cultural meaning. The threat made

tangible in an atmosphere of immanent nuclear annihilation and lingering ecological dissolution

reinforced by a modernist communist menace.5 Humankind appeared mortally vulnerable, with few

avenues of escape.6 The warning was issued daily by newspapers and articulated by philosophers

and social critics, the titles of whose surprisingly popular books underscore the pessimism: Rollo

May's The meaning of anxiety (1950) and Man's search for himself (1953); Hannah Arendt's The

burden of our time (1951) followed by her dire assessment of The human condition (1958); Jean-

Paul Sartre's Being and nothingness (1956); Frank Kermode's A sense of an ending (1961); Herbert

Marcuse's One-dimensional man (1964), to name only a few of many (see Cotkin 2003 for an

extensive evaluative list). Rachel Carson's Silent spring, received with foreboding acclaim in 1962,

was a portent of the coming wasteland of chemical and nuclear winter. David Riesman, in The

lonely crowd (1953:157), echoed a fear voiced by the novelist cum philosopher Laurens van der

Post, in turn echoing Jung, that 'there may be no clear core of self' remaining in modern man.

But one need not have confined one's reading to philosophers and social critics to feel the

existential fear. One could read novels and poetry. In the early 1950s, Samuel Beckett ([1959]1979)

brought the second book of his Molloy trilogy Malone dies to this end: 'I mean/ never there he will

never/ never anything/ there/ any more' (p. 264). The trilogy is brought to a terminus rather than a

close with the last words of The unnamable: 'where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the

silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on' (p. 382). This impossibility of the

impossible folds back into the beginning of the first book Molloy, … 'I don't know how I got there

… Here's my beginning' (p. 9), inexorably leading back to where I am I don't know folding again

into the beginning. Gary Snyder (1969:91) put it bluntly: 'The conditions of the Cold War have

turned all modern societies – Communist included – into vicious distorters of man's true potential.' 5. Communist takeover rather than annihilation was the greater source of anxiety for many; the physicist Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, spoke for those of this view by urging, successfully, the building of an even greater nuclear arsenal.6. It is true that atomic angst receded somewhat after the mid-50s, but it soon re-emerged in more desperate form when both the USA and USSR developed intercontinental missiles with which they could mutually annihilate themselves in minutes; perhaps more frightening were the increasingly rigid rhetorical platforms from which the missiles might be launched. Other factors contributing to the trauma were the growing awareness of the full horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, of the Allies’ fire-bombing of German cities, of the US atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; as well, processes of decolonization worldwide and of desegregation in the US were bringing to the fore the brutality of social systems heretofore taken for granted. Euroamericans needed reassuring that these atrocities did not define true human nature.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

And one could look at paintings. Erika Doss (1991:350-365) 7 elucidates how Jackson

Pollock's 'drip paintings embodied the tensions of postwar America'. Pollock (O'Conner 1967:79)

himself describes how the dualistic conditions of the time – the potential for almost infinite public

communication, hence communal commonality, countered by the potential for destruction coupled

with private alienation – formed his need to express 'this age of the airplane, the atom bomb, the

radio' in a universalist language accessible to individuals striving for personal autonomy. O'Conner

refers to Pollock's paintings as aggressive essentialism, 'the psychological equivalent of political

radicalization: that is, when a person is so afflicted by injustice that life is meaningless until equity

is restored. Restoring equity, for Pollock then, was to get to the bottom of things.' To do which he

turned to Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and mythic themes of Native Americans,

especially Navaho sand paintings, to what Snyder (1969:115) called 'the Great Subculture which

runs underground all through history … without break from Paleo-Siberian Shamanism and

Magdalenian cave-painting; through megaliths and Mysteries … right down to Golden Gate Park.'8

Hannah Arendt (1958:2) portrayed the human condition in tenuous terms:

For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward

making life also ‘artificial’, toward cutting the last tie through which even man

belongs among the children of nature. In the secularization of the modern age there

is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is

no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth.

As an example of the ability to destroy organic human life, Arendt (1951:191-192) singled out the

massacre of ‘Hottentots’ (she seems to have had ‘Bushmen’ in mind) in South Africa, whom she

thought

certainly appeared rather like the … accidentally surviving specimens of the first

forms of human life … ‘natural’ human beings who lacked the specifically human

character, the specifically human reality.

Herbert Marcuse (1964:252) turned to decidedly non-natural one-dimensional man:

7. I am grateful to my grandson, Dylan Wilmsen, for introducing me to Doss.8. In San Francisco, where the ‘Gathering of the Tribes Be-In’ was held in 1967.

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Society would be rational and free to the extent to which it is organized, sustained,

and reproduced by an essentially new historical Subject. At the present stage of

development of the advanced industrial societies, the material as well as the cultural

system denies this exigency. The power and efficiency of this system … militate

against the emergence of a new Subject.

Although I don't know if Richard Lee and Irven DeVore (1968:ix, 3) drew directly on these works

in 1968, their overture to Man the hunter – echoing, as it did almost verbatim, the authors just

quoted - was in tune with the expressed ethos of the time:

Many of us were led to live and work among the hunters because of a feeling that

the human condition was likely to be more clearly drawn here … To date, the

hunting way of life has been the most successful and persistent adaptation man has

ever achieved. Nor does this exclude the present precarious existence under the

threat of nuclear annihilation and population explosion. It is still an open question

whether man will be able to survive the exceedingly complex and unstable

ecological conditions he has created for himself.9

And John Marshall (1991:83; Wilmsen 1999:219) has said of his family's engagement with

‘Bushmen’, 'I thought it was important when we learned that the Zhu of NyaeNyae, who supported

themselves with the economy that cradled human evolution on the plains of Africa, did not make

war.'

Helga Nowotny (1977:260-261), in an essay titled ‘Scientific purity and nuclear danger’,

sets the crisis on the level of the person. She notes that the destruction of nature has accelerated ever

since capitalism brought about the large scale industrialization of Europe and America, but well into

the 20th century the visibility of the damage was contained spatially in industrial centers and

concentrated socially in the experience of those who lived in them; thus, 'risk technologies were

localized.' With the advent of nuclear power this relationship has changed; 'risk has become

universalized … [and] the possibility for the individual to accept the risk or reject it remains

extremely limited'. Universalized risk begs for individualized relief. The hit song Atomic talking

blues (Partlow 1950) set the tone on the turntable: 'the people of the world must pick out a thesis: /

Peace in the world, or the world in pieces'. The hands of the ‘Doomsday Clock’ on the cover of the 9. Lee (1992:43) now accepts this view to be wrong, and moves from an optimistic to a pessimistic assessment: ‘The human condition is about poverty, injustice, exploitation, war, suffering’.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. September 1953 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal intended to make current

science intelligible to laypeople, were set at two minutes to midnight, the nearest it has thus far

come to the hour of nuclear annihilation.

This existential threat, real enough, was one that anthropology was especially well placed to

relieve, as witnessed by the phenomenal growth of the discipline during this time. Again, Snyder

(1969:115-116), with a degree in anthropology from Berkeley, articulated this most clearly:

We came, therefore, … to suspect that civilization was overvalued. Before

anyone says 'This is ridiculous …,' let him read some cultural anthropology. Take

a look at the lives of South African Bushman, Micronesian navigators, the Indians

of California; the researches of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Margaret Mead (1968:40) used similar language in advocating an expanded role for anthropology:

'Upon the growing accuracy with which we are able to judge our limitations and potentialities …

will depend the survival of our civilization, which we now have the means to destroy.' To overcome

the threat, a priori human possibilities had to be re-excavated, the primitive in man brought forth

again, natural society reasserted. Donna Haraway (1988:207) has proposed that,

in that context, Early Man in Africa and UNESCO universal man became Man the

Hunter, the guarantor of a future for nuclear man … Man the Hunter embodied a

socially positioned code for deciphering what it meant to be human … in the

Western sense of unmarked, universal, species being.

Wendy James (1996:86, original emphasis) portrays the sort of dramatis personae required:

What makes a particular piece of anthropology [or a particular anthropological

character] appealing to the ‘consumer’ market in this kind of way is a concern,

explicit or implicit, with some aspect of explaining or contextualizing ourselves

… Other peoples, remote in time or place or both, are given a walk-on part in the

story about one's own relation to the world, one's own origins, one's own history,

one's own future. The drama itself is directed, in this sense, by the audience.

It was this story, about ‘our’ own future, that captivated the American-European audience in

the early Cold War years. As Stanley Diamond (1974:208) put it in his tellingly titled book, In

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. search of the primitive, the utopia of the past had to be found upon which to forge the future.

Diamond (1974:160, 282) drew directly on Jung for his figure of the primitive. Although Jung

([1933] 1953:144) dissociated himself from Lévy-Bruhl's distinction between a ‘ “prelogical” state

of mind and our own conscious outlook', he nevertheless framed a natural ‘primitive man’ in radical

opposition to civilized humanity. For Jung (1972:6-7) this

primitive man impresses us so strongly [because] his knowledge of nature is

essentially the language and outer dress of an unconscious psychic process …

[and] that psyche contains all the images that have ever given rise to myths. [In

contradistinction,] our unconscious is an acting and suffering subject with an

inner drama which primitive man rediscovers.

Jung (Jaffé 1961:253-274) held that modern humanity had been debased and disfigured by loss of

this 'deep, warm, primitive' core of the self. This notion was picked up by van der Post (1961:134):

There was a great lost world to be rediscovered and rebuilt, not in the Kalahari but

in the wasteland of our spirit where we had driven the first things of life, as we

had driven the little Bushman into the desert of southern Africa. There was indeed

a cruelly denied and neglected first child of life, a Bushman, in each of us.

As it was by Diamond (1974:173): 'what primitives possess - an existential humanity - we have

largely lost … we cannot abandon the primitive; we can only outgrow it by letting it grow within

us'. For Diamond (1974:118, 130, original emphasis) this 'primitive implies a certain level of

history, and a certain mode of cultural being … all primitive peoples are marginal to the mainstream

of modern history, primarily because of such “accidents” of habitat as removal from the developing

centers of civilization.'

Thus, Diamond, like van der Post, naturalized ‘primitive peoples’ by embedding them in

‘nature’ in opposition to (and critique of) civilization (cf. Wade 1993:26). Van der Post (1955:19)

used the terms 'primitive and civilized man … because I know no others to denote the general

difference of being which undeniably exits between indigenous and European man in Africa.'

Surely a certain level of history implies an incomplete history, and a general difference of being

suggests an incomplete being. Although now Lee (1993:2) 'would be more cautious on what [living

hunter-gatherers] can and cannot teach us about our species' distant past', he implicitly endorsed this

Jung-van der Post-Diamond primitive when, in 1963, he began his engagement with 'those fabled

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. people – the !Kung San [Bushmen]' (Lee 1984:ix, 1, 1993:1), whom he (1979:1) thought 'are among

the few remaining representatives of a way of life that was, until 10,000 years ago, a human

universal.'10 The popular image of ‘Bushmen’ - now engraved on ethnographic and literary stone -

had emerged as a centerpiece of anthropological practice. It was what Micaela di Leonardo

(1998:160, 204) calls 'a therapeutic engagement with the primitive … [that] spoke to existential

nuclear age anxieties with a soothing model of cooperative, egalitarian … human nature.'

On the threshold of a Subject

It had not always been so. Lorna Marshall (1976:2) records that when her family was planning its

1952-53 expedition 'Bushmen were so far from the mainstream of American anthropologists'

studies … that no one known to the Harvard anthropology department, either at Harvard or

elsewhere, wanted to take time out to spend a year with them'. At the same time, van der Post

(1958:66) too was frustrated in his attempts to draw academic interest to ‘Bushmen’. Nevertheless,

the American and European publics' enthusiastic embrace of a rhetoric of primitivity is not

surprising. For in both their and anthropology's imagination in the mid-1950s, reinforced by the

then current atmosphere of the Family of Man and after a full decade of exposure to the real

possibility of nuclear nightmare, a metaphorically powerful image arose in revival of attention to

humankind's presumptive primordial roots as a guide to the renewal of its lost humanity. Along

with extinct and extant primates – the search for and study of which as the remote ancestors and

cousins of the family of man suddenly received, with broad popular approval, substantial public

funding – ‘Bushmen’ quickly became a main subject of this attention: 'Let poetry and Bushman lead

the way in a great hop forward' (Snyder 1969:129). They were not, it is true, a new subject (a

nominal topic of discussion), but they had acquired a new role as putative primordial human subject

– the determinate object of history – in a twisting of Althusser's (1969) sense.11

Desmond Clark (1960), an archaeologist, had already proposed in 1960 that the

ethnographic neglect of Bushmen should be corrected, and in 1962 Sherwood Washburn (1963:523)

put such beings forward as having the best claim archaeologically to the status of ‘primary race’.

The archaeological record, of course, bares no evidence of any such status; nonetheless, where

previously they had been merely character actors – variously villainous or virtuous in the hands of

different authors and times (Guenther 1980; Ross 1995; van Wyk Smith 1992) – now ‘Bushmen’ 10. Lee (1998:47, 57), citing Diamond, subsequently explicitly re-endorsed this view.11. In one of the earliest treatments of the Noble Savage theme, Tacitus (1970) found a model of primordially pure morality in the 'primitive' Germanic tribes and urged a return to those wholesome mores to save Rome from its decadent decline.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. were proposed for star status as exemplars of Euroamerica's image of what its evolutionary alter-

ego ought to be and could become again (Isernhagen 1982; Isaac 1985; Haraway 1988). Jung

([1933] 1953) sought that alter-ego in Modern man in search of a soul; it is not coincidence that this

book, collected from papers written in the 1930s under the gathering Nazi cloud, was republished in

the United States in 1953 when the mushrooming nuclear cloud posed an even more final threat. In

the posthumous Memories, dreams, reflections (Jaffé 1961:252), Jung counseled the need for

renewed imagery: primitive 'life is cosmologically meaningful … but see our poverty …

Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we

were once at home.' The image he, the public, and anthropology sought is one of fixed alterity,

reproduced for its value in confirming an essential stability in the state of human being.

Susan Sontag ([1966] 1970:185) imbued this search with a sense of resignation:

Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness. The

felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of

historical change has led every sensitive mind to the recording of some kind of

nausea, of intellectual vertigo … Modern thought is pledged to a kind of applied

Hegelianism: seeking its Self in the Other. Europe seeks itself in the exotic …

among preliterate peoples … The ‘other’ is experienced as a harsh purification of

‘self’.

Although there were several candidates for the role of purifier, attention quickly focused on

southern African ‘Bushmen’, either alone or in conjunction with Lost City of the Kalahari

searches. 12 In the decade of the 1950s, more than a dozen expeditions from almost as many

countries were mounted to find and study this vital embodiment of supposed primal human being.

Of these, two were most important. In 1951, the Marshall family began its decade-long series of

expeditions to film the 'Bushmen … who supported themselves with the economy that cradled

human evolution on the plains of Africa' (J. Marshall 1993:23; Wilmsen 1991, 1999b, 2003b). In

1955, as a result of his strategic reconnaissances for the British Colonial Office begun in 1950, van

12. The ‘Lost City of the Kalahari’ was first sprung on the reading world in 1886 by an American circus impresario calling himself G.A. Farini. Search for it became entwined with renewed interest in Bushmen after World War II to such a degree that one is inclined to imagine such people as its only inhabitants. Phillip Tobias (1967:iii) records that the multidisciplinary Kalahari Research Committee of Witwatersrand University was established in 1956 to study the Bushmen because of his participation in L'Expedition Panhard-Capricorne of which ‘search for the Lost City was one of the avowed aims’. The genesis of the Marshall Bushman studies was an invitation to join F.D. du Toit Van Zyl in 1950 on his second of three expeditions to rediscover Farini's phantom city. This stimulated their interest in the Kalahari (L. Marshall 1976:3; Wilmsen 1991, 1999).

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. der Post (1958:63) 'took up the spoor where it vanished in the sand … of the oldest man of all [the

Bushman], older than any ruin of stone' in his lost Kalahari world. 13 I (1995b, 2002b) have

presented evidence that knowledge of the Marshalls' filming of ‘Bushmen’ coupled with his seeing

Walt Disney's The Living Desert impelled van der Post on his odyssey. As so often happens,

however, the media in the form of Life magazine got there first; in 1947 its own writer-

photographer team set the atavistic tone – albeit in journalistic terms – for all that was to follow

anthropologically into the 1950s and through the 1960s (Burke and Farbman 1947:91-97).14

Following the Marshalls in 1963, the Harvard Kalahari Project led by Lee and DeVore -

whose 'research goals required a population as isolated and traditionally oriented as possible' (Lee

1965:2) - commenced its 'race against time … through the deep sand' (Lee 1984:ix, 1, 1993:1)

toward people whom they thought were on the 'threshold of the Neolithic' but on the verge of

losing, through outside influences, the sought after 'basic human adaptation stripped of the

accretions and complications brought about by all the 'advances' of the last few thousand years' (Lee

1974:169, 1979:2). 15 They, thus, anticipated Diamond's (1974:129) injunction to 'pursue the few

remaining peripheral peoples … the more remote local groups … always attempting to distinguish,

of course, between primitive and peasant traits’. But in attempting to distinguish primitive from

peasant traits, they lost sight of the fact that these traits were forged in the 'history of European

colonial encounters that have focused on certain features and given them such powerful and deeply

rooted meanings' (Wade 1993:26). Nevertheless, John Yellen (1984:54), who joined the Harvard

13. In addition to those of the Marshalls and van der Post, these were led by John Clement (South African) - 1951 (Clement 1967); François Balsan (French) - 1951 (Balsan 1952); Ernst Westphal (South African/British) – 1953 (Westphal 1956); Kenneth Oakley (British) - 1953; William and Irene Morden for the American Museum of Natural History – 1954 (AMNH 1954); Alan Paton (South African) – 1956 (Paton 2005); Jens Bjerre (Danish) - 1957 (Bjerre 1960); Oswin Köhler (German) - 1957-1993 (Köhler 1989-1997). They were followed immediately by Clive Cowley (1968) with the Witwatersrand University Kalahari Project (South African) - 1960 and many years thereafter (Tobias 1975), the Harvard University Kalahari Project (American) - 1963 and continuously until 1972 (Lee 1965; Lee and DeVore 1976), the Wild Kingdom TV producers (American) – 1964 (Perkins and Perkins 1965), and the Kyoto University Primatological and Anthropological Expedition (Japan) - 1968 and sporadically thereafter (Tanaka 1980). I began my work in 1973. 14. I found a copy of this among the Marshall papers in the Peabody Museum, Harvard archives; it may, thus, have been an unacknowledged factor in orienting the Marshalls to the ‘Bushmen’. Five of Nat Farbman's photographs of ‘Bushmen’ were included in the Family of Man exhibition; however, these pictures, shed of the atavism of their original accompanying texts, were displayed simply as of one set of people among many.15. Lee (1979:10) occludes his debt to the Marshalls by saying he was in 1963 ‘intrigued by reports’ of Bushman on the Botswana/ South-West Africa border, an area well known from Lorna’s publications of the 1950s and John’s film. Here, he perpetuates that occlusion: the ‘fabled people’ were ‘unknown to the outside world until recently. And I was going to find them’. He thoroughly preempted Lorna Marshall's work, begun in 1951, using techniques of ridicule and exclusion, giving her not participatory but only ‘invited audience – no expenses’ status at the Man the Hunter conference in 1966, thus effectively silencing her voice (Wilmsen 1999:255). He also used elision: ‘Baines's and Chapman's [1860s] descriptions of the “Makowkow” provide the earliest English-language accounts of the !Kung San. Curiously, there are no modern studies of these people’ (Lee 1979:38, emphasis added). This is geographical distancing to shore up paradigm distancing (Wilmsen 1999:232-241); in their proposal to NSF, Lee and DeVore (BLA 1963a:5) had written that Lorna’s ‘excellent ethnographic reports’ were the foundation for their own work, and in an addendum to that proposal (BANC 1963b) stated that they had consulted John.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. project in 1967, approvingly marked the locus of the trans-Neolithic through a 'narrow and opaque

window on the Pleistocene'. To Lee (1993:176), in company with van der Post and Jung, this was

'the value of the world of the "primitive" '. As Alan Barnard (1989:104) has remarked, van der

Post's 'notions of “the primitive” … of "the Bushmen" as an archetype for humanity – a symbol of

natural purity in all mankind … lie submerged in any number of anthropological accounts as well'.16

A subtle but crucial transformation had taken place in the Family of Man imaginary: in the original

presentation ‘Bushmen’ were simply an element in the display of what all humanity shared, now

they were depicted as the sole retainers of what the rest of humanity despaired.17 Hierarchy had

been reasserted.

What the Marshalls and Harvard anthropologists (in company with their fellow seekers)

believed they had found was a small isolated remnant of the Stone Age (Zhu people in the

Botswana-Namibia border region)18 living as all human ancestors had lived 10,000 years ago,

depending for their existence solely on wild animals and plants which they hunted and collected.

However, in order to create this object of their search they had to do what Diamond and Lee

advocated - that is, strip away the complications of the fact that all the people so objectified were

actually employed as laborers by Bantu cattle owners and farmers, or were partly/largely dependent

on relatives who were so employed, or owned herds of their own. Most of these people did indeed

forage, some intensively, but as a supplement to domestic resources or a secondary support system

when employment opportunities were low (Wilmsen 1989: 225-257, 281-303); archaeological

evidence has since revealed that this has been variably the case for 2000 years (Denbow 1984;

Denbow and Wilmsen 1985 & No Date). Also stripped away was the legacy of 19th century

European trade, which Zhu recall 'with a great deal of affection as a time of intense social

interaction and economic prosperity' (Solway and Lee 1990: 116); this trade came to a halt when

the first World War closed the border between German Süd-West-Afrika (Namibia) and British

Bechuanaland (Botswana) (Wilmsen 1985). After the war the border remained effectively closed

while South Africa consolidated its League of Nations mandate over SWA, and 'there was a deep

trade recession in the area during the 1930s-1950s, associated with world economic depression and

16. Elsewhere Barnard (1996:239), setting his discussion in the Kalahari debate, specifies that in that debate ‘The traditionalists [Lee, Yellen, and those who share their view] unwittingly echo van der Post in their search for a purer humanity in Bushmen’.17. It was, however, largely confined to the ‘Bushman’ imaginary. Those engaged with others in the hunter-gatherer pantheon – Australian Aborigines, Eskimos, et alli – seldom subscribed to this exceptionalist thesis.18. I use 'Zhu’ rather than the now more common 'Ju' for several reasons: 1. 'Ju' in English would normally be pronounced as in 'juice' which is phonetically incorrect; the correct sound is like 'shoe' spelled with z ('zhoe') rather than s - or as Susman (1999:1) has to warn his readers "Ju (pronounced Zhoo)"; 2. All but one author I quote uses 'Zhu', introducing another orthography would confuse most readers; 3. Snyman (1999:103) notes that the use of 'z' retains ‘the phonetic symmetry of the alveolar and the alveo-prepalatal fricatives and affricatives’ which other orthographies do not.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. the second World War. It was at the end of these depressed decades with their atypical economic

conditions that modern ethnographies of disengaged Zhu foragers were written' (Wilmsen

2003a:96).

Thus, ethnographers, film-makers, journalists, and novelists invented a primitive (in both

senses of first and fundamental) past world as a foil to the seemingly apocalyptic present

confronting Euroamericans, individually and collectively, in the 1950s-60s. In van der Post's Lost

World, as also in John Marshall's Hunters, these personal and collective crises are fused and

resolved in the revelation of ‘Bushmen’ as the Jungian archetype of authentic humanity. 'Hidden in

the film, as hidden in a fairy tale, is an archetypical structure, a mandala of the species' specific

form of human consciousness' (Thompson 1971:75), imbued with 'universalized meaning … the

particular view of human nature that favors the mythic over the historic' (Nichols 1981:261, 274).

Public embrace of this resolution was immediate and ardent. The BBC Radio ‘Woman's

Hour’ reviewer called The Lost World of the Kalahari 'the most important book I have read lately'

(Dole 1958), and the TV films on which the book is based were rerun again and again. The Chicago

American TV reviewer said of The hunters, a 30 minute segment of which was shown on the CBS

TV public affairs program ‘Adventure’ in May 1956, that it was 'as hard scientifically as, and vastly

more useful' than technical miracles in the development of space rockets shown at the same time on

the rival NBC program Wide Wide World (Kern 1956). Anthropologists too 'expressed an interest

in the future of this interesting group of people' when preliminary versions of The hunters were

shown at the 1955 and 1956 AAA meetings in Boston and Philadelphia (Brew 1956; PMA 1956).

Odyssey to an Other

That usefulness lay in the construction of a new public persona. As Mudimbe (1991:xv) has

remarked concerning Lévi-Strauss' Tristes tropiques (another in the 1950s oeuvre), van der Post's

books, Marshall's films, and Lee's ethnography must be read simultaneously as an anthropologist's

saga and a spiritual odyssey. Like Tristes, the ‘Bushman’ works 'do not make sense without the

postulations of a confession … and parallel deductions from the paradigm "I am an other"' (1991:xv,

xvi). Like Lévi-Strauss, the Kalahari authors were inspired by the profundities of a natural space,

although as landscape for van der Post and barrier for Marshall and Lee, rather than geology which

stirred Lévi-Strauss. While Lévi-Strauss and van der Post were also inspired by psychoanalysis,

which in the 1950s was opening fresh routes of exploration into the workings of the human mind,

Lee was inspired by ecology, which then was opening new paths into the surroundings of the

human body. So whereas Lévi-Strauss and van der Post probed into the mythic consciousness of the

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. past, Lee probed into the emic behavior of the present to uncover the master-meaning of humanity's

unconscious true reality.

Although each configured his myth in the imagery of ‘natural being’, Lévi-Strauss and Lee

turned to their versions of scientific probes of humanity to support their myths. Van der Post

(1986:66), however, erected an individualized collective unconscious drawn from Jung, who he said

'made the journey which Dante undertook as a poet' in search of reunion with origins, in order to

achieve a reintegration of the human spirit accomplished by Dante for his time, which is the project

of Jung and of T.S. Eliot for modern time. The ‘Bushman’ imagery of his books and films has been

absorbed by countless millions all over the world. The expression of spiritual loss found in them -

irrespective of foundation in fact or fantasy – resonated with the general cultural fear in late

twentieth century Euroamerica. That, coupled with the compensation of mystical love, is what

appeals to those who share his faith. It should be transparent that the opaque window of 1950s-60s

Bushmen ethnographers, although glazed with a different motivation, refracted the essentialist

rhetoric embedded in this popular discourse; a point made long ago by Schrire (1980) and me

(1983). A quick look at a fragment of van der Post's contribution to this discourse will tell us much

about the anthropological interest that followed.

His Bushman trilogy 'works its way towards the resolution of Khoisan and Christian ideals'

(Parsons 1992:10) in the certainty 'of promise that the garden in the beginning, no matter how far

lost behind us now, could be recovered through love' as van der Post wrote in A mantis carol

(1975:167-168). The promised garden is found in Eliot's Four Quartets. First in Burnt Norton (Eliot

1952:117):

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden….

… Into our first world.

Then in Little Gidding (Eliot 1952:145):

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, remembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

where, in East Coaker (Eliot 1952:129):

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

The garden for van der Post is Eliot's place of transcendent innocence, of childlike purity removed

from lustful adult experience (cf. Hargrove 1979:33). For both men, it is where the conflict between

good and evil in the soul is resolved, the place of redemption where the aspiration toward God is

fulfilled. It is an interior landscape of a higher degree of psychological realism than corporeal

geography (cf. Hargrove 1979:27) reached only through a life of yearning: 'one's whole life is a

search, is a matter of reunion as Dante sought it, with God, a reunion with one's origin. I always feel

that origin and destination are one' (van der Post 1986:146). This is the 'deepest pattern in the

human spirit' (van der Post 1976:187).

Natural being for van der Post lies in a mythic, dream realm not in a material reality. Thus

he was drawn particularly to Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, especially it would seem

because Jung found confirmation of the theory among a group of ‘mysterious’ Africans, the Elgonyi

of Mt. Elgon on the Kenya-Uganda border, with whom he had spent a short time in 1925-26. The

two men shared what must be seen as racialist assumptions, especially Lévy-Bruhl's assertions

about the irrationality of ‘primitive mentality’ and the notion that African culture was essentially

prehistoric (Jung [1933] 1953). Fearful as it is, the mythic challenge of 'the Dark Continent and its

aboriginal peoples … provoked what was forgotten in [modern European] primitive selves' and thus

held the secret for their psychic renewal (van der Post 1976:51-53). All this meshed perfectly with

van der Post's (1986:26) incubating mythology of a ‘Stone Age idiom’ in which 'the Bushman was a

walking pilot scheme of how the European man could find his way back to values he had lost and

he needed for his own renewal'. This ‘Bushman’ would open eyes clouded by modernity so that

they could see again 'how fatally divided against themselves the processes of civilization have been,

and how horrific the consequences in the human spirit'.

As if in fugue, Lévi-Strauss ([1955] 1992:383) voiced a parallel utopia:

in which man would finally be freed from the obligation to progress, … and

society, placed outside and above history, would once again be able to assume that

regular and quasi-crystalline structure which, the best preserved primitive societies

teach us, is not contradictory to humanity … [but] corresponds to a permanent

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

possibility of man, over which social anthropology would have a mission to stand

watch, especially in man's darkest hour.

And in contrapoint Lee (1979:461) offers his lessons of the !Kung:

A truly communal life is often dismissed as a utopian ideal, to be endorsed in

theory but unattainable in practice. But the evidence for foraging peoples tells us

otherwise. A sharing way of life is not only possible but has actually existed in

many parts of the world and over long periods of time.

Lee (1992:43) retains this viewpoint: 'When anthropologists look at hunter-gatherers they are

seeking … a vision of human life and human possibilities without the pomp and glory, but also

without the misery and inequity of state and class society.' Thus his ‘Bushman’ like van der Post's is

a walking pilot scheme that could open eyes clouded by the processes of civilization with their

horrific consequences in the human spirit. It is, perhaps, a noble vision, but one blinded by its own

light; 'nostalgia for lost origins can be detrimental to the exploration of social realities' (Spivak

1988:291). Lee, as also Marshall (1993:34), remains unable to understand that the people he studied

are in just that kind of society (cf. Wilmsen and Vossen 1990) and were when he did his fieldwork

in Botswana (Wilmsen 1989:64-157).

Time out of mind/mind out of time

The rest of what I shall say sets off from a question posed by Valentine Mudimbe (1991:xi): 'How

does one think about and comment upon alterity without essentializing its features?' The answer I

propose presupposes a distancing from the essentialist position that still too often dominates

ethnographic practice. My focus is on authoriality, the conditions in which specific authorship

condenses - and, more pointedly, the atmosphere in which anthropology distills - knowledge claims.

‘In dealing with a people as exotic as the !Kung, we have to be careful to avoid the twin

pitfalls of racism and romanticism' - so wrote Lee in 1984 (p. 2), reprinted in 1993 (p. 3),

retrospectively of his 1963-68 ethnographic work. It is hard to imagine a more self-negating

sentence. In it, the essential rhetorical mark of romanticism - the condition of being exotic - as also

of racism - one of the conditions of being radically exoticized - is stamped onto a people about

whom we are cautioned to be neither romantic nor racist. Why would any anthropological author be

moved to make such a remark near the end of the twentieth century? Why, especially, would an

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. author who is rightly respected for strong anti-racist sympathies - and in whose writings no trace of

overt racism can be found - make such a remark about his own work? We must examine this

further. In 1979, Lee (1979:xvii) wrote that he, Washburn, and DeVore 'faced some formidable

difficulties … how were we to avoid the implicit racism and biological reductionism of earlier

anthropological work on this subject … of looking at a contemporary hunting and gathering society

from an evolutionary perspective?' Given Washburn's justly admired efforts to erase ‘race’ as a

perceived component of human diversity, it is not unreasonable to assume that the matter was

indeed raised. But it was certainly not resolved. For in his thesis Lee (1965:11) wrote:

Bushmen may be defined racially, linguistically or culturally. None of these

criteria used alone will give a satisfactory definition. If the presence of ‘Bush’

physical type is used as criterion of Bushman status, then some members of

Hottentot tribes would be incorrectly included, and members of the hybridized

Bushman people of Ngamiland would be excluded.

And in the proposal to NSF which funded his fieldwork, he and DeVore (BANC 1963a:5) had

written: 'the African Bushmen and the Australian Aborigines represent living hunting peoples

whose racial and cultural antecedents can be traced back archaeologically to late Pleistocene times’.

But of course the antecedents of us all can be so traced. It is not, however, surprising that

they wrote in these terms, for as they were doing so Washburn delivered his ringing condemnation

of racism in his 1962 AAA Presidential Address. In it he (1963:523) made these surely

contradictory assertions: 'The fact is that the Bushmen … are a race which belongs exactly where

they are … If one were to name a major race, or a primary race, the Bushmen have a better claim in

terms of the archaeological record than the Europeans'. These remarks appear incomprehensible in

view of Washburn's aim to undercut Carlton Coon's (1962) then recently published scheme of five

geographical ‘races’ of which ‘Capoids’ – Bushmen – were one.19 But, manifestly, Lee followed

Washburn in casting ‘Bushmen’ in a Coonian mold, thereby authorizing their status as key

ethnographically appropriate subjects (cf. Keita and Kittles 1997:539; Shanklin 1998).

Further, in the NFS proposal, DeVore and Lee (BANC 1963a:1-2) wrote in ethological

terms:20 'The aim of this study is to … make possible extensive, first-hand knowledge of the

19. In his address, Washburn appears to tacitly accept the concept of geographical races. The term ‘primary race’ seems to be a reference to Fritsch’s notion of ‘Elemente’ – that is, primordial racial elements; the so-called stem races were ‘primary’. Unlike, Washburn, however, Fritsch considered Bushmen to be ‘secondary’ racial elements – that is, geographical autochthons (Wilmsen 1997:31-37). 20. I have not, however, found evidence that in this they were influenced by the work of any ethologist.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. behavior and ecology of Bushmen and baboons [with which to] compare and contrast the ecology

and social organization of nonhuman primates and human hunters.' This was an extension of

Washburn's (UCB-AL 1959:23) project of 'developing a new theory of human evolution' which

married fossil and primate studies, and now ethnography, into a unified model of human behavioral

adaptation. Although based on scientific principles, Washburn's was a thoroughly humanistic model

intended to undercut racial divisions and demonstrate the unity of humankind. It belongs to one of

anthropology's finest hours, contributing to a comparatively non-violent dismantling of racial

segregation in the US.

But, as Lévi-Strauss (1968:349-350) pointed out at the very beginning of the ethnographic

extension, ambiguities crept in:

The first level of ambiguity comes from the fact that one of the purposes of this

[Man the hunter] conference is to bring about a kind of rehabilitation of hunting

and gathering societies: we cannot consider them as belonging to a semi-animal

condition of mankind. Yet at the same time, I noticed a strong temptation to call

upon recent studies of primates to explain [aspects of forager culture]. The

appearance of DeVore's magnificent studies makes the consideration of such

problems all the more tantalizing. However, we should not forget that … they

disclose facts which are so fundamental that if they hold true for primates, they

also hold for the whole of mankind. I do not think they can have a special bearing

on a certain type of society.

Contradicting his triste trope of a decade earlier, he continued: 'Certainly we should not try to use

these recent hunter-gatherers to reconstruct events and conditions in the prehistory of mankind'. ]

He was joined by David Schneider (1968:341-342) who said:

It is not yet at all clear that hunting is such a distinctive and clearly definable way

of life … I fail to see any distinctive set of relationships making up a constellation

of … man-animal relations that are specially centered around hunting peoples …

So the idea that we must, unfortunately, look at some peoples as ‘enclave

minorities’ seems to recall the myth of the natural man.

In other words, as genuine and urgent as Euroamerica's peculiar search for primitive psychic

security may be, the onus for its attainment cannot be thrust onto the universalized physical bodies

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. of African others. Neither Achebe's (see quote at the beginning of this paper) nor ‘Bushman's’ nor

any other humanity can be compromised in order that Euroamericans may explore their own

ambiguity.

Nonetheless, although baboon comparison was dropped, DeVore and Lee (W-GA 1966)

wrote in a grant proposal submitted to NSF and NIMH (funded by the latter) that the ‘Bushman’

they had studied in 1963-64 had a 'way of life that, until 10,000 years ago, was the universal mode

of human existence'. Lee (1979:1) reiterated this proclamation and continues to assert it (inter alia,

1993:3). Lee was, of course, not alone. Nor the first: already in 1960, Claude Meillassoux (1960:38)

proclaimed that '"primitive man" was not quite a man since he was not a "homo oeconomicus".'

Marshall Sahlins (1972:23, 87, 1965:225) agreed; he found that

the time Bushmen do not work in subsistence they pass in leisure or leisurely

activity. One detects again that characteristic Paleolithic rhythm … dictated by the

nature of primitive culture … [in which] the norm of domestic livelihood tends to

be inert.

For Sahlins (1965:158) ‘Bushmen’ who do not fit this mold, whose culture may not be primitive

and domestic livelihood may be active, are 'displaced and decultured persons'.21 Reification of a

‘primitive’ had set in.

I do not mean to censure Lee, Washburn, Sahlins, or anyone else for articulating what was

commonly accepted in the 1960s, 'the majority of us who were studying foragers at the time were

swept into this stream' (Wilmsen 1983:11). I cannot except myself; I too was in 'pursuit of the pure

Paleolithic, not noticeably unlike the quest of a host of others, when I went to the Kalahari in 1973

(Wilmsen 1989:xvi). My motives then were almost identical to Lee's. It is also the case that a great

many anthropologists accepted the essentializing myth, terminology and all, without hesitation or

modification well into the 1980s: for example Binford (1983:149) captioned a figure in his book

like this: 'Young bushman male using a bowdrill in a camp located at Gautsha Pan'. This use of

‘male’ rather than ‘man’ is on a par with talking about animals, indirect indexicality encoding

gender while withholding humanity. Would we talk about a young Texas male riding his horse or

polishing his pickup? 22 Barnard (1989:110, original emphasis) stresses the 'very fact that writers

find it necessary to warn their readers not to romanticize testifies to the power of the van der Postian

myth'. 21. I (1989:33-63) examine this poverty of misappropriated theory at length in Land filled with flies.22. I thank James Denbow for this illustration.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. Anthropologists should have recognized the degrading terminology: hybridized Bushmen of

Ngamiland and decultured persons are the semantic homologues of van der Post's 'mongrel versions

[of ‘Bushmen’] … met on the fringes of civilization' (BBC 1951:7). We should have recognized it,

but we did not. Shamefully, some still have not. Frank Marlowe (2002:275) can write today: 'In

many ways, contemporary foragers come close to being living fossils, and this is why they are so

special and interesting'. This is close to being Social Darwinism, and it was just that which brought

about the collapse of 19th century evolutionary anthropology – thanks in large measure to advances

in Euroamerican moral philosophy to which anthropologists themselves contributed significantly.

The international scope of this anthropological failure of purpose is captured in a Danish novel

(Hφeg 1993:203-204): 23

At the university they had a lot of funny ethnographic clichés … [like] …

studying the interesting Polar Eskimos … [to] learn something about human

progression from the Neanderthal stage to the people of the Stone Age. It's written

with a certain amount of affection. But it's a study in unconscious prejudices. Any

people that allows itself to be graded on a scale designed by European science

will appear to be a culture of higher primates.

Yet in Marlowe's view those of us who have learned from Washburn that revival of this mode of

thought is demeaning - with attendant disastrous material and social consequences for those

demeaned and debased moral consequences for us all - do so because we have a defective

philosophy of humanity.

Anthropology was not alone in its failure. Saul Dubow (1995:108, 119) has pointed out that

from the 1960s African historiography, despite its avowed aims, also carried 'the imprint of the very

race paradigm it was trying to escape … many of the underlying evolutionist and diffusionist

assumptions of an earlier era remained intact'. Thus to single out individuals would be unfair and

unhelpful. But a problem with words is that, although many people may have a certain construction

of them in mind, for this construction to take on a public life someone must speak it, hence the

speaker becomes a subject. And as Johannes Fabian (1996:190) insists:

The critique to which our constructions must be submitted does not question that

they are constructs. Who is still prepared to maintain that we do nothing but

23. I thank Duncan Miller for introducing me to Hφeg's novel.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

accurately represent data and then analyze them? We must, however, be willing to

discuss how we arrive at our constructs and what or whom we claim them to

represent.

I want only to draw attention to the dramatic contrast in the positioning of the author, Lee, with

respect to changing public discourses of alterity. I think the ‘we’ who have to be careful to avoid the

twin pitfalls may be identified not as a collective we (author and readers exploring a text

disjunctively), certainly not an editorial we (author expounding a text with authority), but an

authorial we in which Lee finds himself overwhelmed by conditions of authorship vastly

transformed from those in which he had his initial success, and in an atmosphere in which

anthropological knowledge claims are almost unrecognizable from those of thirty years ago.

Deborah Poole (2005:160) notes that it is only recently that we have recognized the degree to which

ethnographic modes of description have 'led to the reification, racialization, and temporal distancing

of the people whom anthropologists study'. Lee (1993:173-174) animadverts as much in his lament

that 'the very idea that anthropologists as recently as the 1950s or 1960s could have spent their time

with people who dressed in skin clothing and hunted and gathered for a living is actually a source of

embarrassment for many of our colleagues', while for him it is still 'a source of astonished delight

that the Ju/'hoansi … could have resisted the steamroller of modernity for so long.'24

But it is not the fact of having spent time among people who dress differently and make a

living from the limited means at their disposal, that is a source of disquiet. It is, instead, the

persistence in representation of such peoples as equivalent to

Our ancestors [who] evolved as foragers, and all basic human institutions … were

formed during the two to four million-year period when we lived by hunting and

gathering. Thus the study of surviving foragers … had much to teach us … These

peoples … have a core of features in common, and this core … represents the

basic human adaptation (Lee 1984:2-3, 1993:3-4).

This is perilously close to an indirect indexicality, which brings about racialization of its subject

through an inadvertent racialist discourse (Hill 1998:683). I emphasize, however, that for Lee as for

the other ‘Bushman’ authors, this is an unpremeditated, unintended consequence of the essentialist

discourse they employ. With Keita and Kittles (1997:534, original emphasis) I want to stress that 24. Compare this with Max Gluckman who insisted that the benefits of modernity should be available to all Africans as well as Europeans (Hammond-Tooke 1997:55).

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. 'racial thinking is not necessarily synonymous with racist thinking'. I (2002:187) use ‘racialist’ to

refer to essentialist philosophical notions that any difference among persons, whether of appearance

(such as skin colour) or substance (such as genetic makeup) or circumstance (such as mode of

living), indicates a different natural state of humanity; ‘racism’ then refers to ideological practice

based on these assumptions (cf. Mullings 2005:684; Silverstein 2005:364). The paradox that

racialist notions can be held by persons who abhor specific practices of racism is manifest in van

der Post's early opposition to racist policies in South Africa and his often expressed strong

denunciation of apartheid (Jones 2001). 25 The Marshalls did their bit to subvert American

segregation (Wilmsen 1999b:249) and Lee's activities on behalf of Native Americans are well

known (at least to members of his professional generation). But all forcefully defend their shared

notion that what they perceive to be a distinctive ‘Bushman’ and/or forager circumstance indicates a

different natural state of humanity.

More perilous is the earlier, 1963, direct representation of Bushmen as 'living hunting

peoples whose racial and cultural antecedents can be traced back archaeologically to Pleistocene

times' (Lee and DeVore, see above BANC 1963a:5). It is the atavism of that representation

emanated through an opaque window to the Pleistocene that is the source of embarrassment. A

measure of the embarrassment is provided by Michael Bywater (1999:29) who, in his London

Observer column ‘Millennial bestiary: things we could have done without in the last 1,000 years’

ranks anthropology sixth in a list of fifty, and caricatures Bushman studies thus, 'no point in reading

earnest studies of the !x*Ng’ (read !Kung).26 The admonition to avoid pitfalls with its ambiguous

object, then, appears to be an effort by Lee to occlude his continued embrace of essentialism with

regard to a selected set of Khoisan-speakers. An occlusion common in and congenial to that

tradition of ethnography as a particularizing practice but at odds with an anthropological praxis

concerned with contradictions in human sociality. The dropping of the androcentric man-the-hunter

model for an androgynous gatherer-hunter does not alter the matter: 'this 'gentler, kinder'

evolutionary past also offers racist and ethnocentric pitfalls' (Wiber 1997:144).

Equally fundamentally, for van der Post the 'true Bushman's conscious mind corresponded

in some sort to our dreaming selves' (1975:10) and its relation to animals 'could almost be called

25. This was backed up by deeds; he also contributed significantly to the opposition Liberal Party, even knowing that he was under surveillance by the South African Secret Police for doing so.26. And a recent episode of Star Trek Voyager lampooned anthropologists who swarmed in to study ‘scientifically valuable primeval ancestors’, a group of ‘primitives’ dressed as Bushmen on a distant planet, isolated from civilization by a natural electronic shield (read ‘vast distances of the Kalahari’) when that shield was neutralized by explorers thus opening the planet to corrupting influence - followed, of course, by moral dilemma about destroying that ‘natural’ way of life. ‘Bushmen’ mythology projected to future century mythology! I think the true lesson of the !Kung today is this, if anthropology is to regain legitimacy outside its narrow academic confines we must demythologize the peoples we portray.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. mystical' (1958:15). This could be taken as no more than a lyrical, textual figure were it not for the

context of immutable atavism in which it occurs. This abstract expression of the idea, moreover, is

made concrete in other places. For instance the Bushman in one of his novels thinks about relations

among birds, bees, plants, food, and procreation - and finally as van der Post must have it, the

meaning of life – 'not as rational concepts or organized dogma, but as feelings derived from the

most vivid of instincts of which a human being is capable' (1974:218-219). The Bushman speaks 'in

the round-about manner of a language, which may lack logic and reason but more than compensates

for them in feeling' (1972:50). Yellen's (1990a:115) conclusion that 'from a San perspective a cow

counts as just another large mammal, and a goat as just another medium-sized one … both are

viewed as foraging resources' to be stalked and eaten at first encounter rather than husbanded

because 'the !Kung had retained their foraging mentality' (1990b:102B) is fully congenial with van

der Post's ideas about ‘Bushman’ instinctual irrationality. This cow-goat = meat equation could

indicate rationality if it were attributed to San having learned from the circumstance of their lives

that this was a wise strategy in the face of probable dispossession by stronger neighbors, but

attribution to a ‘retained mentality’ posits a naturalist's catalogue of human types (see Brown

below). That mentality is derived by van der Post directly - by Yellen, no doubt, unwittingly – from

Jung ([1933]1953:64-65), for whose primitive man 'psychic happenings naturally give rise to

relations between men and men, or between men and animals or things, that to us are inconceivable

… because of the undifferentiated state of his mind'; furthermore, 'his consciousness … is still

childish, having just emerged from the primal waters' (Jung 1972:22).27

These unbridgeable alteric divisions are drawn from Jung's classification of four functions -

two rational: feeling/thinking, two non-rational: intuition/sensation - which each human being is

said to possess; in any individual, one function of each pair is dominant. To van der Post (1976:193)

this represents the formidable achievement of providing humankind with a common code of

psychological types. But by amalgamating these functions with Jung's other classification of

archetypes, van der Post makes a subtle yet crucial transferal of Jung's psychology of individual

being to his own notions of affective states of group being. From the above passages it is clear that

he assigns the feeling function to be in command of ‘Bushman’ consciousness, with the intuition

function in support, in contrast to a thinking-sensation pair which he says is the specialty of

27. Richard Wagner, in the third part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, extricated himself from this spurious reasoning: he realised that the first two acts of the opera in which an idealistic Siegfried is portrayed as a child of nature, who - like a later ‘Bushman’ - communicated better with innocent animals in the primeval forest than with members of the rapacious capitalist society in which he lived, seemed to turn the story into just another polemic about nostalgia for the past and the return of the human race to its ‘true’ origins. A more mature dimension of the hero developed in part three brought Siegfried's moral void to an end solely through human agency without the intervention of mythic beings that cluttered the earlier scenes.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. European's in modern time (see 1976:190-194). All this is translated into an allegation that

‘Bushmen’ are children of nature rather than adults with dominion over nature. It is also the

affective attribution made in the ethnographic Bushman canon. Neither Lee nor Yellen nor any

other of the Harvard group cite Jung and they may not have been familiar with his writings. They

also do not cite van der Post, but note that Diamond (1974:133) quotes him approvingly:

Laurens van der Post spoke to this point [primitive egalitarianism] as follows: ‘An

old hunter in Africa, the simplest and wisest man I ever knew, once said to me,

“The difference between the white man and the black man in Africa is that the

white man "has" and the black man "is" ” ’.28

I also have no reason to believe that Sahlins was influenced by Jung or van der Post, but, as

Fabian (1983:137-138) has shown, he introduced a similar

ontological difference: As symbolic and practical reason are two irreducible

modes of thought and action, so are being primitive and being civilized two

irreducible modes of existence. Consciously or not, Sahlins and other symbolic

anthropologists promote fundamental oppositions which have left traces in almost

every ideological camp in our discipline … Primitive societies, we are told, are

guided by, and must be understood in terms of, ‘cultural (symbolic) reason’. If

this were taken to its radical conclusion one would have to assert that sense and

meaning are to be found in primitive societies only, whereas Western civilization

is but the result of economic mechanisms and pragmatic adjustments.

The close convergence of the imagery of the primitive (feeling-intuition/sense-meaning) in

opposition to the civilized (thinking-sensation/mechanisms-adjustments) in the works of all these

writers testifies to the pervasive strength of the ethos I am considering.

28. This is from The Dark eye in Africa (van der Post 1955:19), the book based on lectures of the same name given to the Psychological Club of Zurich in March, 1954; in this, van der Post denounces apartheid in uncompromising terms, but he also outlines his paternalistic alternative by which to bring, eventually, the ‘black man’ up to ‘white man’ standards (Jones 2002:251-262).

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

Never anything

Megan Biesele (J. Marshall 2002, 4:00:47:37) revives the child of nature trope to provide an

ideological framework for the creation of segregated conditions of pseudo-primitivity in a

NyaeNyae wildlife reserve, that would force resident Zhu people – who had achieved a degree of

farming success before the reserve was established - into roles of puppet subsistence foragers,

whose strings would be pulled by the whims of culture tourists eager to see lots of wild animals

pursued by ‘Bushmen’:

Let me first make clear a basic distinction between hunting-gathering motivation

structures and agricultural motivation structures. Typical hunting-gathering

economic activity is something which is not planned … it is not highly organized

… there is little social hierarchy. Agriculture on the other hand involves a great

deal of pre-planning, a great deal of organization, a great deal of delayed

gratification. So there needs to be a completely different understanding of

cooperation, of collaboration. (Megan Biesele in J. Marshall 2002, 4:00:47:37)

This is the language of essentialist antithesis, of racialist discourse (Wilmsen 2002a:172-174, 2004).

It is blood relation to van der Post's view of Bushman thought 'not as rational concepts or organized

dogma, but as feelings derived from the most vivid of instincts of which a human being is capable.'

Biesele's misguided judgment is fully congenial with van der Post's ideas about ‘Bushman’

instinctual irrationality and fits precisely Lévy-Bruhl's notions about prelogical mentality.

Michael Brown (1986:255-257), in assessing the viability of racism as expressed in another

film with a prominent ‘Bushman’ character, The gods must be crazy, lists 'three key elements of the

racialist discourse: (1) a naturalist's catalogue of human types; (2) an unforgiving, ahistorical

perspective on the human experience; (3) an evolutionary view of the relationship between those

who have adapted to nature and those who have adapted nature to themselves'.29 These are precisely

the elements in the Bushman corpus from beginning to end. Moreover, the validity of van der Post's

mythic allegory, as that of Bushman ethnographers, depends on the evaluative identification of

human objects by type, which Brown defines as racialist. The evaluation is merely asserted and left

29. On its surface this is a silly pastiche lampooning Whites, Blacks, and Bushmen alike, but it encodes an indirect indexicality which accomplishes racialization through a covert discourse. Again, I am sure this is unintentional on the part of the film-makers, but that is exactly Brown’s point.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. unproblematized - and is tempered by the figure of redeeming love (for van der Post) or

communitas (for Lee and Marshall) - but its encodement of human types and experience is

undeniable. Jung's abstractions may be evaluatively neutral when applied to individual psyches.

But when appropriated as group phenomena there can be little doubt of their affinity to racialist

ideology - regardless of intention or love.

There can also be little doubt that any conceptual isolation of peoples in a time outside of

which they actually exist or in a mental state different from that of their contemporaries - that is to

say that posits their objective condition as natural rather than historical (cf. Fabian 1987:45) - feeds

racialist ideologies. 'On its own, the assumption of cultural boundedness and essentialism may seem

harmless enough, but it also serves as ingredient to a dangerous variety of claims to cultural

authenticity and the uniqueness of particular cultural visions' (Roseberry 1992:849). In the

‘Bushman’ case this is so because the discourse reifies its subjects not only beyond race but,

paradoxically given its intentions, beyond humanity; they can be pan-human only if imaged as pre-

human. As Roseberry continues, 'the distance between such claims and ideologies of ethnic

cleansing is not great'.30

Although Eliot - unlike van der Post - felt that Lévy-Bruhl drew the distinction between

primitive and civilized mental processes too sharply, he was as strongly attracted as van der Post to

Lévy-Bruhl's theory of a prelogical state of mind which posited ‘the savage’ as involved in a

mystical law of participation connecting him to his environment in a manner entirely alien to logical

thought (cf. Crawford 1987:92-94). It is just this mystical law of participation with which Yellen

connects San mentality to its environment, and this marks them at Gould's base of the evolutionary

ladder. That marking had been made before and has its impetus in the Lamarckian doctrine of the

inheritance of acquired characteristics.

A brief look at two earlier applications of this doctrine to putatively hunting society will

reveal an affinity of these recent views of ‘Bushman’ mentality to racialist ideologies of the past

and present. The first is Herbert Spencer's (1897:422) attempt to locate modern human psychology

in evolutionary terms:

Hereditary transmission applies to psychical peculiarities as well as to physical

peculiarities … It needs only to contrast national characters to see that mental 30. When I (Wilmsen 1993:720) first made this observation, Lee and his associate Guenther (1995:304) took umbrage, choosing to read it as equating them with advocates of ethnic cleansing. Nothing could be farther from my intention; I continued the quote from Roseberry, ‘and we need to subject the historical and cultural presuppositions of each to critical scrutiny’. Then added my own remark that ‘[t]he issues transcend questions of authority, fashion, and parochial concerns and enter deeply into public and academic discourses’. I hope these motives are unambiguously clear in this paper.

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peculiarities caused by habit become hereditary. We know that there are nomadic,

maritime, hunting, commercial, races … hence it is inferable that these varieties of

disposition, which have evident relations to modes of life, have been gradually

produced in the course of generations.

Spencer's evaluation of ‘savage’ mentality was negative but John Dewey (1902:219-220) –

substituting ‘occupations’ for ‘modes of life’ - employed exactly the same reasoning to argue for a

more positive view of that mentality:

If we search in any social group for the special functions to which mind is thus

relative, occupations at once suggest themselves. Occupations determine the

fundamental modes of activity, and hence control the formation and use of habits

… So fundamental and pervasive is the group of occupational activities that it

affords the scheme or pattern of the structural organization of mental traits … into a

functioning whole.

Stocking (1962, 1968) notes that for Dewey this functioning whole in the Paleolithic savage

stage of society was a 'hunting psychosis or mental type' for which he offered examples from

Aborigine ethnography. Stocking (1968:241, 250) further elucidates clearly how both Spencer and

Dewey explained the evolution and racial diversity of higher mental faculties in similar terms of

Lamarckian inheritance from a hunting base of acquired characteristics. Already in 1915 Alfred

Kroeber (1915:285-286) had said that the idea of 'heredity by acquirement is equally a biological

and historical monstrosity' and insisted that there were no 'standard cultural types or stages'. Boas

(1928:18; see also Williams 1996:35) was appalled at how much literature was 'based on the

assumption that each race had its own mental character determining its cultural or social behavior'.

Of the revived essentialist ideas of the 1950s-1960s, specifically those of Lévi-Strauss but

applicable as well to Sahlins, Yellen and Lee, along with van der Post, Jack Goody (1977:1, 20)

objected that it was 'almost as if human minds differed in their structure like machines of an earlier

and later design', and asked 'Do natives think? Or do they just have constraining structures?'

It was the ascholarly bias of much anthropology in the latter part of the twentieth century,

coupled with an imperious naïveté that lingered in Euroamerican thought about peoples beyond its

borders in the early decades of that time - a naïveté which many anthropologists did not escape -

that created the atmosphere in which Sahlins along with Lee, Yellen, and their fellow members of

the Harvard Kalahari Bushman Project could overlook Stocking's (1962) warnings about

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. Lamarckian errors. These warnings were published before Lee, in 1963, first sought his ultimate

goal of using ‘Bushmen’ 'to illuminate human evolution' (Lee 1979:2), and were collected – along

with further warnings about essentialist yearnings - in readily accessible paperback form (Stocking

1968) in the very year, 1968, in which Lee's expanded expedition embarked for its version of

‘Bushman’.

Oppressive consequences are left in the trail of academic naïveté. In 1978, during hearings on

amendments to the Botswana constitution's land tenure stipulations, the Attorney General's

chambers found that 'Masarwa [Bushmen] have always been true nomads … [and] can have no

rights of any kind except rights to hunting' (Hitchcock 1978:242; Wilmsen 1989a:336). Hitchcock

(1980:24), then Rural Sociologist in the Botswana Ministry of Agricultural, was challenged when

he urged ‘Bushman’ land rights, based on their traditional institutions of tenure, upon the

Commissioner of Lands in 1978: 'Richard Lee says that the Bushmen have no territories. Why then,

are you trying to tell me that they do'.31 Hitchcock (Hitchcock and Brandenberg 1991) has since

elaborated on the policy implications of academic stereotypes of the Khoisan. Lee would not want

his work to be so subverted. But his presentation lends itself to such abuse: his analysis of !Kung

spatial organization is directed to establishing the fundamental difference from all other sorts of

society in relation to land exhibited by foragers, and he finds them to be ‘nonterritorial’ (1972:125)

with 'a first approximation of the 'half-life' of a group's tenure at a waterhole … estimated at 30 to

50 years' (p. 129). In 1979 (pp. 60-61) the approximation became established fact and Lee had come

to 'believe the !Kung consciously strive to maintain a boundaryless universe' (p. 335, original

emphasis). In such a universe, the perfunctory finding that '!Kung do own the land they occupy' (p.

337) is unconvincing, and, in any case, two sentences buried in a 400 page book do not correct a

strongly argued and widely credenced contrary perception. The Attorney General's chambers have

since changed their view, substantially on the basis of my vigorous demonstration of Khoisan

tenurial institutions exactly parallel to those of Botswana's Bantu-speaking agropastoralists. But

Lee's contrary, and really no longer supportable, view remains unamended in the public arena of the

country and thus available as support for dispossessive sentiments and policies.

The perception is in urgent need of cleansing from our minds (cf. Wilmsen 1996a). In 1996,

Festus Mogae, then Vice-President of Botswana, was quoted in the British newspaper The

Guardian (Daley 1996) as saying about removals of ‘Bushmen’ from the Central Kalahari Game

Reserve (CKGR): 'How can you have a Stone Age creature continuing to exist in the age of 31. In Land filled with flies, the work that sparked the Kalahari debate, I (1989:336), paraphrasing Hitchcock, wrote: ‘anthropologists had established that “Bushmen had no territories” ’. In doing so, I wished to stress the role of anthropological pronouncements in a serious political matter, and to avoid endorsing a politician’s use of a particular ethnographer for his own purposes.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. computers? If the Bushmen want to survive, they must change or otherwise, like the dodo, they will

perish'. This stricture was not applied to the Bantu-speaking Kgalagadi segment of the removed

community, only to ethnogracized ‘Bushmen’; a clear instance of racial compartmentalization

abetted – unintentionally, but none the less tellingly – by ethnographic authority, as well as by

media authority. John Simpson (2005:37), world affairs editor of the BBC, wrote that rather than

Stone Age creatures, 'the superbly interesting and admirable Bushmen are one of the glories of

Africa'. Simpson's purpose was to counter the notion of living human primitives, but his

unconscious essentialism runs as deep as (and is here clearly derived from) the ethnographic image;

he (2002) identifies the reason ‘Bushmen’ are interesting: they are 'human treasures of a culture

lasting 10 millennia or more'. What other African glories/treasures come to mind? Elephants?

Gorillas? Landscapes? Diamonds? Gold? Not it seems other peoples; certainly not Bakgalagadi,

who have shared the same land and its vicissitudes with ‘Bushmen’ for centuries, and now share the

same fate of removal from that land. It should by now be beyond question that poised, celebratory

atavism expressed by ethnographic or media authority normalizes xenophobic notions of

ontological difference, because it makes these notions seem familiar, more subtle but still

compatible with strident idioms of racial or religious bigotry. Even Solid Crew gangsta rapper,

Ashley Walters, came to realize this; he recounts how a meeting with a schoolboy traumatized by

taunts of ‘nigger’ made him realize that in his performances he 'was giving racism more longevity

by helping to make the N-word seem like a cool, hip word' (Hill 2005) – an epiphany everyone

should seek.

The Stone Age attitude was affirmed by the Director of the Department of Wildlife and

Natural Resources: 'There is no future for the Basarwa [Bushmen]. They must join the modern

world now'. Government initially offered removed households two heifers, gradually rising to five.

As for ‘Bushmen’ in this program, the official view was that they were to prove they would not eat

the cows – that is, that their inherent ‘hunter instinct’, dragged through to this side of the window on

the Pleistocene, could be domesticated – before being entrusted with more (Wilmsen 2002b). As

Ramsay (2002) points out however, 'the colonial creation of the CKGR has fuelled ongoing neo-

colonial and local conflict' that can take on ugly ethnic cum racial dimensions in contestations over

land and scarce resources. We must keep this in mind when judging statements made in the heat of

these contestations. We must also remember that the ‘Stone Age creature’ was born into the Atomic

Age family of man, with substantial assistance from anthropologists. In pre-colonial times Khoisan-

speakers occupied all socio-economic levels – in some places subservient, in others dominant – of

southern African society (Wilmsen 1989:64-157 collects the evidence). Seventeenth century

Europeans coined the term ‘Bushmen’ shortly after they came into the subcontinent, and proceeded

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. to generate the circumstances in which peoples so labeled could exist; but this term was a socio-

economic marker, not one that marked a natural state of general difference of being. It was not until

the 1950s-60s that ethnographers placed this being on the threshold of the Neolithic, thus generating

the circumstances in which peoples so labeled can be thought of as stone age creatures.

The angry words spoken by a Namibian Zhu man in reply to the question 'What is it that

makes a Bushman a Bushman?' capture, more eloquently than any written by those of us who have

only witnessed the present state of his humiliation, the demeaning condition in which he finds

himself, a condition ethnographic depictions have endorsed: 'I do not know what makes a Bushman

a Bushman … It is them who say we are just Bushmen, that we are just things from the bush'

(Suzman 2000:1, original emphasis). Obviously, anthropologists cannot be held responsible for the

misappropriation of their work by others, but we should expect them to protest vigorously when

they find it done. But is it really misappropriation, or simply transpositioning of the inherent sense

of the ethnographic representation? It would be well for us all to reflect critically on this question.

For as Spivak (1988:278, original emphasis) compellingly demonstrates, conflating rhetoric-as-

persuasion (representation of a dislocated subject) and rhetoric-as-trope (re-presentation of that

subject as metaphor), 'especially in order to say that beyond both is where oppressed subjects speak,

act, and know for themselves, leads to an essentialist, utopian politics.' This is the arena for

'asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subject-ivity' (Spivak

1988:281).

Toward a new threshold

Eliot likewise associated the artist with the primitive, whose experience was deeper than

civilization. From here it is but a short step to linking the artist-poet hero with the anthropologist-

archaeologist, as Sontag (1970:185) has done, in the search for 'the stratifications of history that

cover savagery' (Eliot 1919:1036; Crawford 1987:93). The further link to van der Post, Marshall,

Lee, Yellen, and Sahlins requires no step at all. For both the Christian poet and the Christian

philosopher as well as for the secular filmmaker and ethno-archaeographers, the elemental garden

populated only by pristine purity is the sole earthly cradle for meaning in life. 'We anthropologists

have more in common with van der Post than meets the eye' (Barnard 1989:112).32

32. A fact that may be reflected in an obituary of van der Post in the Anthropology Newsletter (February 1997, p.24) in which he was identified as ‘author, explorer, anthropologist, linguist, and philosopher’. No other obituary I have seen gave him anthropologist, a calling he despised, or linguist status.

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Van der Post shared with Eliot a profound mental exile from a lost paradise, expressed in

metaphors of modern disorder. In Strange Jerusalem, the coda to A mantis carol, he (1975:168)

discovers again in his transmogrification of the true story of a ‘Bushman’ exiled as a side-show

freak in circus America, 'a manifestation of the power of love in the wasteland which is a modern

city'. For Lee a different kind of exile from paradise, a ‘Bushman’ place of communal adequacy

could offer refuge from alienation for individuals flattened by what he thinks of as the ‘steamroller’

of modern society. Both projects are, of course, sincere attempts to grapple with the interpellation of

persons in what appears to some to be a disastrously over-determined social formation. But

ironically, rather than subvert the elaborate signifying system of advanced capitalism - as both van

der Post and Lee would do, or subvert capitalism itself as Lee, but not van der Post, avers he would

do - both elevate the circulation of the signs they employ, in which the subject is constantly figured

and refigured, to the level of key clichés in the legitimation of advancing capitalist penetration into

a continuously recreated ‘underdeveloped’ - this market economy euphemism for ‘primitive’ -

world. 'The exploitative relations that are hidden behind ethnicizied customary rights are at the heart

of this system' (Sichone 2001:374).

Certain pervasive assumptions underpin ethnographic tradition and inform its practice even

today. Among these is the ethnographically etched ‘Bushman’ image of fixed alterity, reproduced

for its value in confirming an essential stability in the state of human being. Framed in, as, and of

the evolutionist and structuralist origins of the whole new vision of primitivism that rose to

prominence in anthropology during the early Cold War years, it remains imprinted on post-

modernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and the variety of current post-phases of these

post-Cold War discursive turns. Likewise, a basic premise of the earlier assumptions remains: that

the ethnogracized world and our knowledge of it are isomorphic, and that such knowledge

replicates, mirrors, and reflects that world while at the same time refracting it to whatever purpose

we may wish. To assimilate Roy Bhaskar's (1991:vii) ‘underlabouring’ in the fields of human

sciences struggling to come into being: 'it is a picture of ourselves or our insignia in any picture …

invariably containing our mirror image or mark.'

But anthropological post-narcissism will be effaced only in the exercise of our capacity to

draw non-Euromorphic pictures of human being - to dismantle those constructions of otherness that

we nowadays preserve by denial. 33 This is not a trivial matter. Balibar (1991:15-28) argues

persuasively that at this postcolonial juncture, racism infiltrates discursive practices which

themselves deny the existence of race, and of racial or cultural hierarchies. Racism itself assumes

33. I am indebted to Carol Greenhouse for this observation.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. subtle and elusive forms reconfigured without ‘race’ as a classificatory device for demarcating

difference (Harrison 1998:610). Owen White (2000:517) does not absolve

anthropology which, in seeking out the ‘true essence’ of the cultures it

encountered, tended to inscribe cultural differences in stone … which, in isolating

differences between communities, could easily play into the hands of racists.

The triumph of anti-racism (to the limited extent it has occurred), in which many

anthropologists played a sterling role, has not been so complete that readers of ethnographies are

not free to locate odious racialist meanings even where anthropological authors deny them.

Anthropologists must confront this painful fact rather than 'continue to teach dichotomous thinking

– traditional/modern; civilized/primitive – and hierarchical arrangements … ranked according to

“developmental level”’ (Shanklin 1998: 674). Too many, however, continue to teach dichotomous

thinking. Barnard, who earlier observed that anthropologists have much in common with van der

Post, reveals how far this is true: he (2002, 2007a) now joins Lee in consigning San to a Neolithic

threshold by proposing that they 'are comparable in many ways to north-west European Mesolithic

populations'. He goes further: 'The surrounding agropastoralist populations are similarly comparable

to the European Neolithic peoples' (2007a: 5). As readers will by now expect, the former have a

foraging mode of thought that inhibits much forethought, the latter an accumulation mode of

thought that induces forethought (2007a: 7). In the Mesolithic mode of thought, social equality is

‘natural’, in the Neolithic and later ‘unnatural’ (2007a: 12, Fig. 5); apparently Barnard has not read

the French or American constitutions nor the Enlightenment ‘mode of thought’ which engendered

them. This is just Lévy-Bruhl, Spencer, Dewey, Biesele and van der Post all over again. Baxi

(2002:84) identifies exactly the proper response:

Human rights logic and rhetoric, fashioned by historic struggles, simply and

starkly assert that such imposition of primordial identities is morally wrong and

legally prohibited … It is the mission of human rights logics and paralogics to

dislodge primordial identities that legitimate orders of imposed suffering.

Yet even when the primordial myth is questioned it retains its power to misshape ethnographic

images and to influence policy based on these distortions.

The myth retains this power in large part because it is endorsed not only by the words but

also the actions of ‘experts’ like Biesele, who are pursuing their own agendas. Biesele's (Biesele

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. and Hitchcock 1999: 146-148) self-justification for collaborating in the making of Hunters of the

Kalahari (1995) for the Discovery Channel, 'a film trading on the image of San as "primitive"'

(Tomaselli 2002: 206), rings hollow; no amount of tinkering with faulty translations will eclipse

this 'costume drama of hunting-gathering' (J. Marshall 2002, 5:01:10:42) caught by low-angle

camera shots of near-naked buttocks slithering across hot sand in mock pursuit of non-existent

quarry. These images will be imprinted in the imaginations of viewers, who will have hardly heard

the voice-over words; and those imprintings will re-validate preconceptions generated by

‘Bushman’ ethnography. Biesele could have refused to collaborate in any way; and if NyaeNyae

Zhu did indeed plead with her to cooperate as she avers, use her influence to persuade them that the

film sullied their best interests.

But image remains important. Another film, The great dance (Foster and Foster 2000), is

John Marshall's (1957) first film The hunters replayed in drag and illustrates the inter-reliance,

persisting for near half-a-century, of ethnographic and cinematic themes which run through all the

‘Bushman’ works I have discussed. It opens with a reference to van der Post's (1972) boys-own

adventure romance, A story like the wind, but differs from other Bushman hunter films by showing

people in the tattered western clothing they now normally wear. This costuming is meant to affirm

the film's concern with ‘Bushmen’ ‘today’; nevertheless this film avoids the true nature of current

San economic life and also 'positions the Bushmen as Other, as they are depicted as linked to the

animal kingdom, rather than having their humanity emphasized' (Dodd 2002: 233).34 The film was

sponsored by WIMSA (Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa), a group with

which Biesele remains in close association. The film was sponsored and later endorsed in order to

shore up the image Biesele had crafted of NyaeNyae Zhu in a modern world but retaining the

‘motivation structure’ of natural wildlife managers; it was 'strategic essentializing of [a] culturally

defined group' (Cowan, Dembour, and Wilson 2001:11). The aim was to lend credence to a 'bid to

have [NyaeNyae] land managed as a [wildlife] conservancy under emerging Namibian laws'

(Biesele and Hitchcock 1999:143); ‘Bushmen’ were to be part of the wild life. For readers who

wish to see for themselves, the consequences are evident in Marshall's five-part film. They are also

articulated by Neil Powell (1998: 135-138):

outside interests [the conservancy] see it necessary to stabilize a [Zhu] culture …

to revive, strengthen, and develop forms of existence that are assumed to have

shaped human-nature relationships prior to the point when the system began to

34. The original has masculine singular pronouns; I have changed these to gender neutral plurals.

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‘degrade’ … In a social sense, the institution-building that is associated with the

effort is serving to erode a once resilient local economy … by closing their system

from the potential of forming [the kinds of] reciprocal relationships … Zhu once

had with Hereros … what has historically been welcomed as acts of reciprocation,

today are being articulated ‘by the Zhu’ as acts infringing on their resource

tenure.35

In placing scare-quotes around 'by the Zhu' Powell signals that the production of an indigenous

NyaeNyae Zhu ‘self’ is now orchestrated by extraneous interests. Clearly, Baxi's (2002:81) insight

is relevant here:

The evolution of the right to self-determination of peoples signifies no more than

the power of hegemonic or dominant states to determine the ‘self’, which has then

the right to self-determination. In sum, that right is only a right to an access to a

‘self’ already predetermined by the play of hegemonic global powers.

Individuals become what Mouffe (1992:237) describes as 'the articulation of an ensemble of subject

positions, constructed within specific discourses and always precariously sutured at the intersection

of subject positions'. NyaeNyae Zhu, indeed all peoples ethnographically ossified as ‘Bushmen’,

find themselves constructed in hegemonic discourses as avatar/Bushman/hunter-gatherer/sometimes

exemplar/sometimes scoundrel, while struggling to stitch together a different ensemble of subject

positions that would at least let them, still subalterns, attempt to be heard.

Harsher realities

My project in this essay, though focused on but one of a plethora of constructs in ethnographic

practice, has a broader aspiration. Fabian (1983:155), citing Duvignaud (1973), reminds us that 'the

“savage [hunter-gatherer, ‘Bushman’] and the proletarian” are in equivalent positions vis-à-vis

domination'. Essentialist/racialist representations of ‘primitive’ peoples, of our original ancestors, of

living human fossils, of ‘Bushmen’ serve to confine peoples so stigmatized to subordinate positions

and defeat attempts to alleviate conditions of poverty in which most of them live. This substitution

35. Powell was project manager for a natural resource management project at NyaeNyae in 1993-94; like me, he initially expected to find ‘Bushmen’ as imagined in evolutionary terms by Biesele, Lee, et alli. Like me, reality changed his mind (Powell 1998:8, 114).

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. of tradition for history 'victimizes by representation those whose continued subordination the telling

of the traditional narrative exists to secure' (Barker 1993:104). It is particularly important to

recognize this at a time when a philosophy of primordial ethnicity is being reasserted in many parts

of the world as a form of neo-racism and used to justify new or continued suppression of

dispossessed and/or disadvantaged ethnic or religious groups (Wilmsen 1996:10). Paul Silverstein

(2005:365), citing Trouillot (1991), reaffirms this by noting that the racial categorization of

immigrants now emerging in Europe amounts to the construction of a new ‘savage slot’

underwritten by the same racializing rhetoric I have examined here.

Agencies with professed humanitarian motives, such as Survival International (SI), by

rooting their concern - and persuading their clients - to preserve ‘Bushman’ culture in false

essentialist premises, a process Mullings (2004:4) calls 'racialization from below,' subvert efforts to

address issues of San inequality and poverty in realistic political terms.36 These agencies too often

adopt self-defeating programs, which do little other than compromise the position of the people they

wish to help (cf. Saugestad 2001). 37

To some the recent Botswana High Court judgment partially in favor of San rights to remain

in the CKGR validates SI's agenda. It was, however, a pyrrhic victory. The applicants, only 189 of

some 800 CKGR San, did win their claim to possession – not ownership – of certain parts of CKGR

land, and the right to return there without restriction and also to receive special licenses for hunting

in the reserve. On closer inspection however, the harsher realities assert themselves: 1. some 600

San who were not party to the litigation were excluded from the judgment; 2. hunting could only be

done with bow-and-arrows, spears, and snares as 'they have always done' (in the ironic words of the

applicants dictated by Survival International); this could not yield an adequate food supply under

present conditions. The most difficult ruling, thus, was that government was within its rights to

withdraw ‘basic and essential services’ – boreholes and pumps for water, supplementary food

(almost always needed, but especially during frequent droughts), schools, clinics, law enforcement -

from the CKGR and is not obliged to restore the provision of such services now. Having predicated

their case on a retention of ‘pure’ foraging traditions, the applicants, now part-time returnees to the

CKGR, argue that they cannot live without their livestock and the basic and essential services

formerly provided by government. They are correct. Nobody has lived independently in that part of

36. An earlier WIMSA (2005) press release highlighted the imperious stance of SI and its negative impact; it ended with an ‘appeal to SI to immediately cease their campaign on our behalf until such time as they are prepared to co-ordinate with our representative organizations’.37 . A prominent Khoisanist has said about the infighting common among people associated with ‘Bushman development’: ‘They all want to be the Bushman Führer’.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. the CKGR since present climatic conditions were established some centuries ago; this land was

used only in favorable seasons as hunting and plant collecting grounds.

This has landed the CKGR San in a serious predicament: they cannot viably exercise the

land use-rights they have won in court. Note also that 'this judgment does not finally resolve the

dispute between the parties but merely refers them back to the negotiating table’. It seems the

damage all parties to the dispute have suffered is not yet over. That damage extends to a second and

ultimately more grave consequence of this entire affair. The main San association, First People of

the Kalahari, under the leadership of Roy Sesana manipulated by the CKGR-focused militance of

Survival International, has become obsessed with the CKGR to the detriment of issues concerning

the greater and more widespread population of San in Botswana, who number some tens of

thousands. This has allowed the drive for minority rights in Botswana to be so narrowed that

international concern is fixated on one small place and one small community at the expense of so

many impoverished, powerless others – only a fraction of whom are San - living in different parts of

the country.

Peter Brosius (1997:60-66) considers the rhetoric of a parallel campaign in the ethnographic

context of Penan people in threatened Malaysian rainforests. He dissects the strategy by which their

knowledge of the forest is 'transformed into an obscurantist, essentialising discourse which elides

the substantive features of that knowledge … in an effort to make a people narratable and create

value' in them as ‘forest people’.38 Brosius observes that this Euroamerican meta-narrative has

pernicious effects: it imposes arbitrary meanings on a people, and paradoxically makes generic

precisely the diversity it wishes to advance. There is an ethical element in this, the true qualities of a

people's culture and social life are lost, their existential being becomes defined by others, and they

become dependent on foreign protectors as never before. Neil Parsons (1988:75) long ago

recognized that

the challenge of writing Kalahari history is to break the conventional stereotyping

of Khoisan people … by questioning the conventional view of their helplessness

in the face of oppressors – which is also used to justify their dependency on

outside guardians to advance their interests.

Rural Batswana of whatever identity, many of whom share the same degree of poverty with their

San-speaking neighbors (Hudson 1976; Kerven 1982; Wilmsen 1989:289-299), see this attention as

38. I thank my son, Carl Wilmsen, for drawing my attention to Brosius.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. privileging a favored few who are thus perceived to infringe on their own access to resources and

land. To paraphrase Powell, relationships within the overall polity, which were once resilient and

reciprocal, are thereby eroded. In response, governments - such as that of Botswana where most

attention to ‘Bushmen’ is directed – adopt a defensive, at times self-justifying, stance that deflects

human energy and material resources from productive policies aimed at alleviating poverty.

Lyrical textual figures of our surrogate dreaming selves and reifications of bizarre costume

dramas may provide seemingly harmless entertainment or inoffensive ersatz anthropology. All the

while, however, at the level of consciousness on which individuals compartmentalize their

knowledge of the world, 'at that level [where] people are most vulnerable to the pitfalls of a usually

well-hidden discrepancy between professed beliefs and inner reactions' (Blommaert and

Verschueren 1996:106), these representations are 'weaving the ethnographic curtain between us and

them’ (Wilmsen 1999a, 132). They offer thereby logical links to scientific racism and thus reinforce

alienating categorizations of human diversity. Such representations legitimate partitive ideologies

wherever found and however based, which in turn may be invoked as authority for racial

discrimination, religious intolerance, ethnic cleansing, and sectarian war. In Images of savages,

Gustav Jahoda (1999) must still ask why such repellent ideas are so intractable. I cannot help but

add: Why are they not recognized as repellent? It is distressing that such ideas remain acceptable in

public discourse today. It is disgraceful that anthropologists continue to contribute to their

legitimacy.

Coda

Lévi-Strauss ([1955] 1992:383), never one to shrink from his own contradictions, drew to a close

Tristes tropiques - one of the most essentialist works imaginable - with this reflection:

[the anthropologist] is faced with a problem: the value he attaches to foreign

societies - and which appears to be higher in proportion as the society is more

foreign - has no independent foundation; it is a function of his disdain for, and

occasionally hostility towards, the customs prevailing in his native setting.

Thirty years thereafter Adam Kuper (1988:243-244) ended The Invention of Primitive Society like

this:

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If we liberate ourselves we may also be able to free others. Anthropology

developed the theory of primitive society, but we may make amends if we render it

obsolete at last, in all its protean forms.

A year later I closed Land filled with flies (1989:324-325) with these words:

The first step to this realization leads away from a fascination with a fixed forager

image, a fascination that sets the present of peoples so labeled out of focus and

circumscribes any vision of their future. It is a step that I have hoped to help

anthropologists, administrators, and the public to take.

I would wish to reemphasize these conclusions now.

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COMMENTARIES

Alan Barnard

Social Anthropology & Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh.

a.barnard@ed.ac.uk

I agree with much that Wilmsen says. Indeed, I expressed very similar views not only in ‘The lost

world of Laurens van der Post?’ (Barnard 1989), but also throughout Anthropology and the

Bushman (Barnard 2007b: 53-81, 97-111, 129-47). However, I disagree with his implicit and

simplistic categories of anthropologist as either bad (those who succumbed to the primitivist

Zeitgeist) or good (those who remained immune to it). I also disagree with his simplification of the

issues. The traditionalists do not reject historical understanding in favour of primitivism or building

an us/them dichotomy just for the sake of it. They reject Wilmsen’s interpretation of archaeological

evidence and documentary sources on the impact of culture contact on San peoples. If they have

strayed too far towards generalizing ethnography, Wilmsen strays too in his occasional

misrepresentation of their intentions and seemingly deliberate misreading of their ill-chosen

phrases.

The foraging mode of thought

I shall return to those general issues at the end of this commentary, but let me explain first my own

position in light of Wilmsen’s specific criticisms of my notion of the foraging, hunter-gather or

Mesolithic mode of thought. My choice of label has always depended on the audience and the

imagery connoted, which differs greatly in the various countries in which I have discussed it:

England, Wales, Norway, Japan, and Argentina. It also differs with ethnographic, archaeological,

and development studies audiences. The opposite of a foraging mode of thought is an accumulation

mode of thought. The former is characterized, for example, by a preference towards immediate

consumption which is associated with sharing, and the latter by accumulation associated with

saving for one’s dependents. These are idealized models. Real societies, and certainly real

individuals, at best only approximate these representations, and these ideological transitions tend to

lag behind changes in means of subsistence. My original full formulation of the models was for an

audience consisting mainly of development practitioners and social scientists interested in

development, including many from Botswana. What I set out to explain was not the nature of San

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. society, but sets of structural inversions apparent in relative oppositions between what I loosely

called ‘accumulation’ thinking (that of development experts) and ‘foraging’ thinking (that of many

hunter-gatherers and mixed hunter-gatherer-herder-labourers). Similar, but by no means identical,

ideas are apparent in the distinction James Woodburn (e.g. 1980) makes between immediate and

delayed-return economies.

Wilmsen suggests that my notion of the foraging, hunter-gatherer or Mesolithic mode of

thought is related to that of Lévy-Bruhl. On the contrary, the idea has nothing directly to do with

Lévy-Bruhl, who in his writings expressed two quite different views of the relation between

primitive and civilized thought. In most of his books Lévy-Bruhl (e.g. 1926 [1910]) held that

‘primitive peoples’ (and he sometimes uses inverted commas on this term himself) think logically

most of the time and are just as capable as anyone else of solving practical problems by thinking

through them. However, in his view, their failure to distinguish true representations from mystical

or symbolic ones leads to an inability to think logically in the abstract. Equally, in his view,

‘primitive thought’ reflected collective rather than individual thinking, and differs in this regard

from ideal ‘civilized thought’, and in particular the thought systems of literate peoples, which to

Lévy-Bruhl tend allow for more individual variation. Here he was simply following the spirit of his

time and place, and in particular the ideas of Durkheim and Mauss (e.g. 1963 [1903]) on ‘collective

representations’ – a phrase Lévy-Bruhl used often in his writings. Lévy-Bruhl’s second theory of

‘primitive thought’ is that expressed in his posthumously-published notebooks. There he explicitly

rejected his 1910 statement and substituted a more subtle understanding. In a notebook entry dated

29 August 1938 he remarks: ‘There is a mystical mentality which is more marked and more easily

observable among “primitive peoples” than in our own societies, but it is present in every human

mind’ (Lévy-Bruhl 1975 [1949]: 101).

That said, I would nevertheless admit to a certain parallel in the progression of my ideas of

the foraging mode of thought and Lévy-Bruhl’s on the primitive mentality. In the Notebooks Lévy-

Bruhl comments:

If I glance over all I have written on the subject of participation between 1910

and 1938, the development of my ideas seems clear to me. I started by

positing a primitive mentality different from ours, if not in its structure at

least in its function, and I found myself in difficulties in explaining the

relationships with the other mentality, not only among us but also among

‘primitive peoples’. In short, I had only juxtaposed them, without being able

to account for either their coexistence or their relations. A position which I

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have never been able to defend well, and in the long run an untenable one. By

limiting myself to discussing mental customs, I took refuge in withdrawal.

But the thesis thus extenuated and weakened is no more defensible. One will

then ask whence these customs arise, and how, in themselves, they constitute

a ‘mentality’ which, in an inexplicable fashion, co-exists with the logical

exercise of our mental activity. (Lévy-Bruhl 1975 [1949]: 100)

While I do not see ‘mentality’ and ‘mode of thought’ as at all the same thing, and certainly

do not equate the ‘primitive’ and the ‘foraging’, I can see where others might have problems with

my terminology. Thomas Widlok (pers. comm.) once suggested I might better have described

‘mode of thought’ as ‘ideology’, and in recent work I have tended to favour that latter term, or to

make plainer the fact that it is ideology (not mentality or mode of thought) which is at issue. I have

also frequently used instead the phrase ‘foraging ethos’ (in contrast to ‘accumulation ethos’). The

reason I used ‘mode of thought’ in the first place was to hint at yet another opposition, namely the

notion of ‘mode of production’. I first pointed this out in 1993, towards the end of the Marxist era,

when I said that we should turn away from production, towards thought, as the driving force of

human culture (Barnard 1993:34). Mode of production is not so much ‘means of production plus

relations of production’, as in classic Marxist understandings, but the ideological, social and

material, in that order, in interplay with each other. I still stand broadly by that view, although these

words may still not be quite right to express the meaning.

Wilmsen cites favourably my paper on van der Post (Barnard 1989), but accuses me of

switching sides in my work on modes of thought. This is not quite accurate. I never said that I was

immune from van der Postianism. On the contrary, I admitted that the entire subdiscipline of

Bushman or San studies is guilty of it. That includes me (see also Barnard 1996). I argued for a

collective reflexivity, and I suggested that we might better understand the relation between the

people we work with, the imagery we create, and ourselves, if we aim for this. My van der Post

paper was, like Wilmsen’s one here, primarily about the exploration of imagery in ethnography. My

later work on the foraging mode of thought was quite different. In that I sought to understand

relations between two ideologies – the articulation of modes of thought, one might say. This is

undoubtedly clearest in my first full paper on the subject (Barnard 1998), and the rest might best be

thought of as an extension of that model to other issues, including the Mesolithic-Neolithic

transition.

In the paper most criticized I state explicitly that there I am concerned ‘not with direct

ethnographic analogy, but rather with relational analogy’ (Barnard 2007a: 5). Further,

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A relational analogy involves comparable archaeological periods, and it

involves equivalent sets of structural relations. Comparable here means

literally compare-able; it does not mean identical. (Barnard 2007a: 5)

Wilmsen cites a figure of mine (Barnard 2007a:12, Fig. 5) as implying that in the Mesolithic mode

of thought social equality is natural, and in the Neolithic and later, unnatural. This is not true.

Admittedly, the chart if read by itself might seem to imply that, but the text of that article makes

crystal clear that I am talking about how Mesolithic and Neolithic peoples construct the meaning of

egalitarianism, not whether such a construction truly is either ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’. Wilmsen’s

comments on my reading of Enlightenment and Enlightenment-derived texts are, of course, also

misplaced. In my Mesolithic paper I was not talking about Rousseauian ‘natural inequalities’, but

about the social hierarchies Rousseau (1984[1755]: 68) called ‘artificial inequalities’. Like

Rousseau, I argued that there was a clear transition between an egalitarian, hunter-gatherer way of

thinking and an in-egalitarian, post-hunter-gatherer one, with elements of hunter-gatherer thought

persisting through the transition. Wilmsen therefore misrepresents my Kalahari comparisons and

speculations on the (late) Northwest European Neolithic. Nor does his paper explain any of the

subsistence-related ideological transitions I referred to (Barnard 2007a, 16-17): knowledge of the

environment to knowledge of herding and cultivating skills; search for food to search for grazing

(for herders) or spatial stability (for cultivators); chance of finding meat to guaranteed supply of

meat; sharing meat to trading meat; lots of free time to longer working hours; few possessions to the

chance to acquire more; fewer worries about water to more worries; taking each day as it comes to

planning for the future; a relatively stable supply of food to greater fluctuation; and production

primarily for one’s own use to production for trade. Far from being anti-Enlightenment, oppositions

similar to mine on subsistence, ideology, egalitarianism, and so on, were common in a good deal of

18th century texts on the nature of society and of economic systems, both in France and in Scotland

(see Barnard 2004).

Where does this leave Wilmsen’s argument?

Many of Wilmsen’s points are well made. However, his mocking misrepresentation of the views of

others does no service to his extremely interesting and, to a degree, valid arguments. Wilmsen’s

statement (true or false) that ‘the image [of the Bushman] feeds readily into racialist discourse’ does

not in itself require it to be rendered obsolete. There are other, more effective, ways to combat

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. racism than changing one’s ethnography to suit others’ misguided perceptions. No one in San

studies denies the power structures which have been present at the fringe of San societies for

centuries. No one denies the complex relations among ethnic groups. No one denies that van der

Post, Marshall, Lee, Biesele or I construct images through our writing. I hope that Wilmsen does

not deny that he does the same. It is in the nature of ethnography to do so. To abandon ethnography

for a de-ethnicized historiography will not solve practical problems for San or anyone else. Nor will

it purify anthropology. It will just turn it into something else.

What is required is a recognition of the problem, and a collective reflexivity from all of us

on behalf of the discipline. Lévy-Bruhl had the humility to re-evaluate his own writings in that way.

I argued in ‘Laurens van der Post and the Kalahari debate’ (Barnard 1996: 243-47) that revisionist

discourse, as well as traditionalist, is all about the construction of images. It is just that these are

different images from those of the late 20th-century, traditionalist mainstream. Whereas

traditionalists emphasize San egalitarianism, revisionists such as Wilmsen’s emphasize unequal

relations between San and others. If fault is to be found in traditionalist discourse of the 1960s and

1970s, it is more with the leaving out of Herero, Tswana or Afrikaner presence (as if they occupy a

different ecological niche), or simply with the now dated language of ‘primitive’, ‘Pleistocene’,

‘simple’, or ‘natural’ in reference to Bushmen or San. Yet both these problems were solved at least

two and a half decades ago, as the various editions of The Dobe !Kung (e.g. Lee 1984: 119-45)

make clear. Wilmsen is right to draw attention once again to such issues, but he is wrong to think

that any of us, including Wilmsen himself, can fully escape from at least a degree of easily misread

essentialism. Like it or not, essentialism remains the basis of any ethnographic generalization.

Megan Biesele

University of Texas & Kalahari People’s Fund.

meganbie@gmail.com

The intention of Wilmsen’s article is to demonstrate that the San have been ‘exploited’ by

anthropologists in order to serve an agenda stemming from the angst of the Cold War. He holds that

this agenda was to assuage guilt and provide hope to a western psyche stunned by the destructive

power of the atom bomb. He further argues that in pursuing this agenda, anthropologists have

advanced romantic and patronizing stereotypes, to the detriment of indigenous peoples. Here I seek

to outline some flaws in his argument, including those that have to do with his characterizations of

my work, and to supply other relevant information of which Wilmsen may be unaware. The flaws

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. of the article are camouflaged in various ways, most directly by Wilmsen’s simplistic

dichotomizing between writers he agrees with and those he doesn’t. Thus he sets up a polarization

that undermines his argument, because such ad hominem distortions effectively cancel the

possibility for productive debate. Wilmsen also disarms, in advance, any proposed critical

commentary on his writing in return. By making unsubstantiated comments on others’ work and

conjoining those comments with emotionally charged descriptive words as a way of setting up a

defensive posture, he successfully avoids a ‘clean’ initial statement by any respondent who wishes

to offer a depersonalized theoretical/ethical probe into his claims.

Following his recitation of the supposed antecedents to the self-serving Cold War ‘Family of

Man’ imagery, Wilmsen abruptly inserts a section with the puzzling subtitle ‘never anything’. Its

first sentence tries to say it all, where I am concerned: ‘Megan Biesele…revives the child of nature

trope to provide an ideological framework for the creation of segregated conditions of pseudo-

primitivity in a Nyae Nyae wildlife reserve that would force resident Zhu people—who had

achieved a degree of farming success before the reserve was established—into roles of puppet

subsistence foragers whose strings would be pulled by the whims of culture tourists eager to see lots

of wild animals pursued by “Bushmen” ’ (p. 28). First, the ‘degree of farming success’ Wilmsen

naturalizes here is a problematic issue on which volumes could be—and are being—written.

Second, the whole statement is astonishing in its tendentiousness, downright falsity, and crude

neglect of both context and published records.

Next, although Wilmsen is aware of what is possibly the single most galvanizing issue in

writing about indigenous politics/the politics of indigeneity today - the need to question the view

that people like the San are helpless in the face of oppressors - this issue makes little appearance

here except in a quote (p. 40) from Parsons (Parsons 1988: 75, ‘the challenge of writing Kalahari

history is to break the conventional stereotyping of Khoisan people…’). Cliched as it is now to say

it, the voice of San people is missing from this article. What do San think of the anthropological

perspective that is being criticized here? Surely the San - and not as a faceless collective, but as

individuals - should be consulted about the supposed essentialisation of their history.

Today San people can be consulted readily by anthropologists—it doesn’t even require

fieldwork. Here are a few resources: San groups meeting under the auspices of TUCSIN (The

University Centre for Studies in Namibia) and WIMSA (the Working Group of Indigenous

Minorities in Southern Africa) made a 2003 film about their weeks-long discussions of this topic,

‘P.R. Course for San Students’; the newsletters and other publications of a myriad of San

organizations and organizations assisting San have debated the issue for at least two decades; and

the website www.kalaharipeoples.net was formed in 2008 partly to fill the need for an outlet for

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. such indigenous critique by San. By not referring to the massive body of critique that has been

going on orally (invisibly?) among San and is now becoming visible through local activism and the

use of new media technologies by individual San, their people’s groups, and the NGOs that they

enlist to aid them, Wilmsen does worse than ‘mythologize’ the San - he merely dismisses them.

In his commentary on my work, this dismissal ends up causing a significant contradiction in

Wilmsen’s argument. He refers to me as an ‘expert’ in quotes, but then says that I could have used

my ‘influence’ with the Nyae Nyae Ju|’hoan San to ‘persuade them’ that Discovery’s Hunters of the

Kalahari film was not in their best interest. This seems like a classic colonial statement, making the

assumption that an anthropologist could/should naturally ‘influence’ San people (the Other).

Wilmsen presents a perspective in which San people could not only be influenced, but also that they

needed to be told what was best for them. I am not alone in experiencing San people as far from

being this helpless, at least cognitively and communicatively speaking. In practical terms, however,

both they and I were indeed somewhat helpless in the face of documentary filmmakers, most of

whom arrived without permission in Nyae Nyae, prior to the Conservancy’s implementation of

media contracts. John Marshall himself always counseled that ‘you have to work with these people

(filmmakers) because they’ll come in and make footage anyway, and you may be able to help them

do at least a slightly better job’ (Marshall, pers. comm.). The contract form has been used since the

late 1990s by the Ju/’hoan people’s organization, to control exactly the kind of filmmaking

companies that Discovery employs. (Ironically, it was Axel Thoma and the organization he

founded, the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) - which comes

in for heavy criticism from Wilmsen - who initiated and are still helping San groups to successfully

use the media contract process.) Although it can often be trenchant and revealing, film with

‘ethnographic’ subjects also has the power to subvert the communications and realities of

indigenous peoples and anthropologists alike. Wilmsen’s critique of my participation in John

Marshall’s films and the ill-fated Discovery film is out of touch with both my and the Ju|’hoansi’s

pro-active efforts to contain and turn that power to their own advantage.

Ethnographic Film and the Kalahari Non-Debate

Wilmsen’s treatment of John Marshall’s A Kalahari Family should be more clearly problematized

and historicized, and the film’s intended audience noted. The filmed ‘interview’ upon which

Wilmsen seizes in my own case was, like some others in John’s film, a deliberate reconstruction.

John asked me to do it for the camera to explain to donors and the South West African

Administration why the husbandry mentoring work and cattle subsidies offered to Nyae Nyae

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. Ju|’hoansi by his Foundation were necessary to establish viable herds in Eastern Bushmanland. The

idea he wanted to get across was that the people’s life experiences, until then limited mostly to

foraging and to working as cattle serfs for others, had not given them some knowledge they now

needed, nor prepared them for some of the disciplines and periodicities of agriculture. Instead, their

experiences had built up in them vast environmental information and other, resilient, no-less-logical

habits of mind, which stood them in good stead in the shifting economic circumstances in which

they found themselves. Woodburn (1980), Barnard (2007a), and others have cogently written on

these flexible habits of mind, supported by long-honed oral ideologies, and neither they nor I have

ever suggested that they were to be seen as cognitively limiting within the lifetimes of individuals.

Instead, our insistence has been that these mental habits were enabling and flexible ones, ones that

allowed people like the San to go back and forth from foraging to agriculture as environmental and

social conditions allowed. If any limitation was implied, it was the limitation of having so often

worked (if at all) as an economic underclass in southern African agricultural systems with very little

experience of the planning processes and longterm rewards involved.

At the time of the interview John Marshall and I were collaborating to promote the idea of a

‘mixed economy’ in Nyae Nyae, a tripos based on agriculture, wage labour, and continued foraging.

In my own case I was doing this because that was what Ju/’hoansi, through their people’s

organization with which I worked closely, had asked me to do. Later what they wanted to do, in

addition, was to use their extensive knowledge of the Nyae Nyae environment to establish control

over their natural resources and their land by forming a Conservancy, which became possible after

Namibian Independence. John was absent from Namibia at that time and was dismayed to find on

his return that Ju/’hoansi were now working closely with the new SWAPO government. They had

come to believe, with justification, that they could solidify their resource control through

Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), a respected international approach to

community environmental empowerment and land tenure. Having lost the South West African

administration as the apostasized adversary figure in his film, John ‘finally found its ending’ by

making its ultimate scapegoat Axel Thoma. This scapegoating included those of us who with

Thoma had tried, during John’s lengthy absence, to keep his Foundation afloat and to make sure the

Ju/’hoansi had access to knowledge of changing political realities in Namibia.

A Kalahari Family thus fits well with Paul Henley’s recent characterization of ‘ethnographic

documentary’ as ‘a motivated story’ (Flores 2009, 94). I would be wary of taking uncontextualized

quotes from one person in a film made by another, however motivated, as representative of that

person’s entire career. The film quote (p. 28) attributed to me is far from adequately grounded or

explained, nor is any reference made to my substantial work in other media (writing, language

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. transcription, activism). The quote will certainly not be read with much comprehension by those

unfamiliar with the well-established caricaturing of the so-called Kalahari Debate. It is extremely

hard to understand how Wilmsen moves from the statement quoted in the Marshall film to the

charge that this is the language of essentialism or racism. Wilmsen’s argument with me - which

should be a platform for just debate - would be better stated through a logic that any educated reader

could grasp. And it is not there.

The kicker is that Wilmsen uses little more than those few reconstructed seconds of John’s

film to link me with those he casts as ‘pre-logical mentality’ apologists of the past. In fact it takes

less than a paragraph for him to span the centuries, Barnard joining Lee ‘in consigning San to a

Neolithic threshold…just Levy-Bruhl - Spencer - Dewey - Biesele - van der Post all over again’ (p.

35). From there, despite our various reflexive acknowledgments of our struggles to write good

ethnography and/or undertake committed scholarship, we’re all racists in a heartbeat. Wilmsen’s

neglect of the lifetimes of work of those he thus castigates is stunning in its intellectual dishonesty. I

am at a loss to know why he does not avail himself of any of the rest of the relevant published

material. My own record speaks for itself, as do those of Thoma and Hitchcock, whose enormous

contributions to the legal and political welfare of San peoples receive but faint mention here.

Readers wanting more nuanced investigation into the complex and heroic story of the Ju|’hoan

people’s organization that became, after Namibian Independence, the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, will

find it in the forthcoming book Political Achievements of the Ju/’hoan San: Namibian

Independence Viewed from Nyae Nyae (Biesele and Hitchcock (2009). Because the history we

present is richly nuanced, it corrects many of Wilmsen’s inaccuracies. It includes extensive

verbatim quoted material from Ju|’hoan people commenting on the film and the Foundation from

their own point of view. A number of Ju|’hoansi raised important questions about the way John

Marshall chose to represent the supposedly climactic meeting in which Axel Thoma was ‘chased

away’ from his Foundation post by a meeting of the people’s representatives. I presented some of

that quoted material some time ago (Biesele 2004) and have been amazed that not one writer since

(that I am aware of) has commented on it. Instead critics like Wilmsen have chosen to rely on sound

bites John Marshall selected after his titanic battle with Thoma, seemingly unaware of how

selectively and unchronologically some of them were used.

Wilmsen needs more information about the situation of the Ju/’hoansi over the last few

decades to understand the way it is presented in A Kalahari Family. The fifth and final part of that

film ‘Death by Myth’ focuses on a moment in 1994 that was deeply rethought by members of the

Ju/’hoan community after it was filmed. Yet because it was fixed in film, people felt that any

discussion about it was in some ways closed to them - that although they had opinions they could

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. have no input. This quote is from an older Ju|’hoan leader (interviewed on condition of anonymity)

in 1995:

‘When we had the meeting where (Axel was) “chased away,” I told the young

men that it was not our way to “chase away”… people so quickly without

discussing it. I said that instead it was important to talk with them, tell them our

concerns about their work. I told them we should wait with Axel, because earlier

we had worked well together. But the young people refused. They said that they

were following white people's ways now, and that white people's custom is not to

stop in the middle of chasing someone away. White people's custom is to do it all

at once.’

Another Ju|’hoan witness to the meeting, also anonymous, said between five and seven

young men, two of them teachers from Botswana who were not involved in the representative

organization’s management, were in the crowd at the meeting, shouting ‘Get these useless

cooperative leaders fired!’. They were interrupted by John Marshall, who said ‘No, no, I don’t mean

the cooperative leaders; I was talking about Axel…’. Then the young men turned around, shouting

‘The white faces have to go!’. Two young men shouted ‘We do it in the white man’s way and do

not stop halfway!’.

Why do these apparent provocateurs not appear in the film? I believe John was by that time

bent on finalizing his ‘unfinishable’ film in support of replacing natural resource control with full-

scale agriculture in Nyae Nyae. Unfortunately for his purposes, he tried to do that by demonizing

Thoma, one of the people most closely associated with the Ju/’hoansi’s eventual establishment of

land tenure in Namibia in the form of their Conservancy. I find it disappointing that Wilmsen has

accepted, without question, this dramatic film manipulation, with its problematic attacks on several

important historical players.

One of the problems with postmodern critique is that it sometimes eschews fieldwork in

favor of intellectual argument for its own sake. But some postmodern critics have reassessed their

assumptions after visiting Nyae Nyae. Keyan Tomaselli, who was at first taken in by John

Marshall’s increasing insistence, during the early 1990s, on promoting agriculture at the expense of

foraging and/or wildlife conservation, emailed me in 1996: ‘What convinced me [otherwise] was

my visit to Nyae Nyae in July, when I began to realize that cattle farming on the scale envisaged by

John would be an environmental disaster, and that the Ju|’hoansi themselves were not really that

interested in cattle farming’. Tomaselli went on to say ‘It does not take a geographer – a discipline

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. in which I qualified and worked – to realize that the Kalahari offers few options’. He then said ‘I

suspect that John is hugely embarrassed by the dependency of the Ju|’hoansi on tourists,

anthropologists, filmmakers etc, and that his suggestion of farming was a way of breaking this

relation. But it would also break what economy does exist. The Foundation were also of the opinion

that mixed cattle husbandry in a game conservancy was the best option’ (Tomaselli 2006, pers.

comm.). In the Coda to his article Wilmsen reemphasizes the conclusions to his Land Filled with

Flies (1989:324-325) by calling for a break from the fascination with a fixed forager image. ‘It is a

step that I have hoped to help anthropologists, administrators, and the public to take’ he writes

(cited on p. 41). What he is talking about, essentially, is promoting learning. But learning cannot

take place in the atmosphere of blame that Wilmsen so clearly espouses. If he is looking for a way

to encourage colleagues to unlearn wrongheaded perspectives and learn more humane ones, it

would be worthwhile to respect their long term practical efforts. That way, rather than an urge to

retaliation, an atmosphere of tolerance and humour - and a space for honest debate - could open up

around the lessons.

Akira Takada

Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies (ASAFAS), Kyoto University.

takada@jambo.africa.kyoto-u.ac.jp & akiratakad@gmail.com

In this article, Edwin Wilmsen aims to ‘probe the premises upon which both the popular and

academic image of “Bushmen” are predicated’ (p. 4). According to the author, under the threat of

nuclear annihilation in the early Cold War years, Euro-America was engulfed by an existential

crisis. Humankind appeared vulnerable, and perceiving that the threat was posed by ‘modernity’,

with its science and technology, people turned to ‘the bottom of things’ to restore equity. The

overture to ‘Man the hunter’ initiated by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore was in tune with the ethos

of that time. To overcome the threats of the age, they re-excavated a priori human possibilities,

brought forth the primitive in humans and reasserted natural society. Wilmsen claims that an image

of ‘Bushmen’ etched by these ethnographers rapidly emerged as a centerpiece of anthropological

practice, although the image seems to have derived considerable inspiration from earlier notions of

‘the primitive’ as an ‘archetype of humanity’, that were nurtured by Jung and later van der Post.

In the latter part of the article, Wilmsen seeks to to disclose the authoriality in which Lee

and other members of the Harvard Kalahari research group distilled the features of the !Kung. He

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. suggests that the !Kung were imposed onto an image of fixed alterity, which both reflected and was

drawn from Euro-American Selves under the existential crisis. Lee and his colleagues are

condemned as ‘racialist’ (though I could not agree with this assertion, for the reasons given below),

which Wilmsen defines as ‘essentialist philosophical notions that any difference among persons,

whether of appearance (such as skin colour) or substance (such as genetic makeup) or circumstance

(such as mode of living), indicates a different natural state of humanity’ (p. 25). Although the

Wilmsen notes that Lee and his colleagues have abhorred ‘racism’, which refers to ideological

practice based on racialistic assumptions, he also cautions that their discourses might produce

unintended consequences among the readers of their ethnographies.

I hold this article highly with regard to the following two points. Firstly, the author is on the

right track with the perspective that the enthusiasm for studies of foraging peoples, once one of the

most prosperous domains of research in anthropology, was inseparable from the socio-cultural

circumstances surrounding research in the early Cold War years. In reality, most of these works are

offspring of that age, explicitly or implicitly. We can better understand the cultural meanings of

such works through analysing those circumstances, even as we step back from the enthusiasm of

that time. As James (1996) implied, once ethnographic research is planned, the ethnographer is

required to maintain a sort of dramatis personae toward the supervisor, funding agency, informants,

readers and others; in brief, towards the work’s prospective audiences. The life cycle of successful

ethnography is characterised by constructing convincing appeals to such a variety of audiences, all

of whom wish to contextualise peoples in the field relative to their own value systems. On this

point, the image of ‘Man the hunter’ would have, in part, appealled to the Euro-American audiences

of 1960–1970. This popularised image of these peoples was thus a collaborative construction

among all the participants in the research activities, in this wider sense. However, in the interests of

deeper empirical understanding, one must attempt to further examine the existential formation of

‘the Age of Anxiety’ and its relevance to the enthusiasm for the study of foraging peoples at that

time. These examinations would lead to questions that are not answered in Wilmsen’s article. For

example, can we truly locate the threat of nuclear annihilation at the core of this anxiety? What

were its other components? Did the configuration of those components remain the same throughout

the Cold War years? And was turning to the primitive in humans the only envisaged solution for

overcoming the anxiety?

Secondly, Wilmsen’s work enriches knowledge resources that can empower the

development and political movements of San peoples in Southern Africa. The affirmative actions of

San people have become increasingly notable in recent years, and San have become profoundly

conscious of their past, present and future. To date the author's works have facilitated the ‘Kalahari

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. Debate’, in which many researchers have examined closely the history of San people, of the

interactions between them (particularly the !Kung [Ju|'hoan]) and their neighbours in the region, and

of the nature and meaning of such contacts. As a result, with the exception of groups of the !Kung

(the extent of whose contacts across cultural boundaries remains in question 39 ), it has been

established that San peoples had long maintained politico-economic relationships with neighbouring

peoples. Moreover, triggered by the Kalahari Debate, active moves have emerged to appreciate the

socio-historical complexity of the clusters of people who have been given the appellation of

‘Bushmen’ or ‘San’, and to do so in a way that transcends the frameworks of both the traditionalists

and the revisionists. The time is ripe for today's San people to review how their current politico-

economical position has been constructed in relation to the legacy of anthropological studies. At

minimum, they stand to benefit from an accumulation of detailed knowledge about the socio-

historical path of these clusters of people, as that knowledge can clarify and strengthen their marked

cultural flexibility and creativity.

This is not to say that I entirely approve of the argument in this article. Rather, I suggest that

the author should take into consideration the points given below, as bases for the elaboration of his

argument. Firstly, some quotations in this article do not correctly reflect the context of the original

literature. For example, the author quotes (p.21) the following words from Lee to demonstrate that

Lee was unable to erase ‘race’ as a perceived component of human diversity:

‘Bushmen may be defined racially, linguistically or culturally. None of these

criteria used alone will give a satisfactory definition. If the presence of “Bush”

physical type is used as criterion of Bushman status, then some members of

Hottentot tribes would be incorrectly included, and members of the hybridized

Bushman people of Ngamiland would be excluded’. (Lee 1965: 11)

Considering the fact that this was written more than 40 years ago, it seems likely that the statement

was intended to indicate the formidable difficulties of defining the ‘Bushmen’ on the basis of

physical features, and to introduce complexity in order to problematise such simplistic definitions of

‘Bushmen’. Wilmsen attributes racialist assumptions to Lee and his colleagues based on the quoted

passage. However, this attribution is at least partly derived from a misunderstanding or

misrepresentation of the context of the passage. 39 I do not reiterate the issues that caused controversy in the Kalahari debate here. Note, however, that the researchers have not reached an agreement about the semantic scope of the concept of ‘Bushman’ or ‘San’. Close examination of the historical facts should continue to identify the parameters that distinguish the research subjects.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

Next, it is not clear from the article how the author perceives the relationship between San

society and its members. The target scholars of his dispute, such as Jung, van der Post and Lee, are

not monolithic, either in terms of their premises about the relationship between society and

individual mentalities or in the focus of their analyses. Reflecting Jungian images of

psychoanalysis, van der Post spoke at length about the self and the existential reality of ‘Bushmen’,

but he made few observations about their social organisation. In contrast, Lee and his colleagues

scrutinised the environment, subsistence strategies, social organisation and social activities of the

!Kung, but avoided appealing to psychologism as a tool for understanding their society. Wilmsen

also admits that he can not attest to the influence of Jung on the works of ecological anthropologists

represented by Sahlins and the Harvard Kalahari research group (p. 27). In addition, he explicitly

distinguished between van der Post's (accompanied with Levi-Strauss') and Lee's perspectives:

‘While Levi-Strauss and van der Post were also inspired by psychoanalysis, which

in the 1950s was opening fresh routes of exploration into the workings of the

human mind, Lee was inspired by ecology, which then was opening new paths into

the surroundings of the human body. So, whereas Levi-Strauss and van der Post

probed into the mythic consciousness of the past, Lee probed into the emic behavior

of the present to uncover the master-meaning of humanity's unconscious true

reality’. (p. 16-17)

The above distinction is worth examining. Diversity rather than uniformity characterises premises

about the relationship between self and society among these scholars, and this provides an

interesting study theme in itself. It seems overly lopsided to condense the works of these divergent

researchers into nothing more than racialist assumptions about the imagery of a ‘natural being’. In a

similar way, Brown's definition of racialist as ‘the evaluative identification of human objects by

type’ oversimplified the issue and sidestepped the discussion about human sociality.

Thirdly, as James (1996) suggested, the participatory status in discourses varies

considerably from situation to situation. The same person may act as the author of ethnography, an

applicant to a funding agency, a spokesperson for tourists or at a press conference and so on. This is

not to say that she or he cannot help but equivocate, saying just what an audience wishes to hear;

rather, it is to say that discourse is constrained by (and at the same time makes use of) the

background knowledge that the speaker supposes the recipient(s) to have. In this sense, ‘the

premises upon which both the popular and academic image of “Bushmen” are predicated’ (p. 4)

were not possessed by a particular scholar but rather were a collaborative construction among the

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. participants in the discourses of the age. Therefore, when we analyze discourse, we should take into

consideration the participation framework within which the speaker puts that discourse into

practice. Discourse thus turns out not to be a revelation of the speaker’s disposition, such as his or

her racialist assumptions, but the result of socio-political decision making in a particular context.

Further empirical explorations framed in this manner will clarify the structure of cultural meanings,

contributing to the accomplishment of the author's aim in this article, without condemning the

forerunners as racialists. Moreover, such explorations lead us to grounded descriptions of the

complex socio-cultural network that enables the construction of meaning. The local people also

require this in order to understand themselves.

Fourthly, this article is virtually silent about the viewpoints of the peoples called ‘Bushmen’.

It is true that contemporary anthropology has been profoundly distressed at the difficulty of

understanding the ‘Other’ and of ensuring the authenticity of such understandings. This situation

has led us to a nihilistic view on the world, as expressed by the idea that ‘nothing is real’.

Furthermore, many anthropologists have now shifted their attention to the effects of hidden power,

as expressed in the assertion that ‘everything is politics’. They try to reveal how those we call

experts have suppressed or misrepresented the voices of laypersons. However, this is not a sure way

to achieve mutual understanding among the parties.

Quine (1960) proposed the notion that people cannot avoid ambiguity when they speak. That

is, when an informant in an unknown world points to, say, a rabbit while naming it, the

anthropologist-hearer has in principle no way of determining what the informant is talking about.

This argument has been easily confused with the endless controversy over the impossibility of

translation or interpretation of others’ language. However, we can point to a variety of

counterarguments to this notion. One productive counterargument is that Quine (1960)

underestimated the impact of context in actual interactions (Zukow-Goldring 1996). When we

achieve mutual understanding in the course of interactions, we make use of a variety of semiotic

resources other than the verbal sounds of the utterances. Through explicating the context in which

the particular utterance is made, we can demonstrate how participants in interaction make use of

these semiotic resources and overcome the difficulties set up by Quine’s (1960) notion. This

constitutes a key strategy in linguistic anthropology, in which everyday interaction is used as a

source of information to examine the making of social reality. In addition, interactions occur not

only among the exclusive members of a certain speech community, but also between those

members and outsiders. Along with this line, I have focused on the analysis of actual conversation

among the local San people and researchers (Takada 2006). This research empirically explicates the

interwoven relationships among the content of conversations, the actions displayed during the

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. interaction, and the participation framework in which conversations took place. In a similar way, it

has proven valuable to scrutinise the creation of social reality with regard to the politics of rights

and recognition among the San people, through examining the sequential organisation of

interactions. We thereby seek to understand the process of meaning construction to which all the

participants, including San people and researchers, contribute. This perspective facilitates the

analysis of the inter-subjective foundation of fieldwork, which has largely been excluded from

serious ethnographic texts (Clifford 1986:109) and can offer a basis for ‘adequate representation of

other voices or points of view across cultural boundaries’ (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 2).

Could the author demystify the mystified image of the ‘Bushmen’? I think that the attempt is

still under way. The author quotes Sontag ([1966] 1970, 185), saying that Europe seeks itself in the

exotic, that is, it seeks its ‘Self’ in the ‘Other’. This wisdom may also apply to the author, who

confessed that his motives were almost identical to Lee's when he first went to the Kalahari in 1973

(p. 22). Unless the author secures persuasive evidence by accumulating empirical information on

the above points, his attempt to ‘probe the premises upon which both the popular and academic

image of “Bushmen” are predicated’ (p. 4) may generate another creation myth of the ‘Bushman’.

This may curtail the anthropological processes entailed in reconstructing the history of negotiations

between the Euro-American world and peoples living in the Kalahari.

Owen B. Sichone

Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Pretoria

owen.sichone@up.ac.za

This essay argues that ‘An image of "Bushmen" etched by ethnographers rapidly emerged as a

centre piece of anthropological practice… that image is indistinguishable from the fictional version

popularized by Laurens van der Post and … both forms of it derive ultimately from the work of

Jung. (The) image feeds readily into racialist discourse; thus, the time to render it obsolete has long

passed’ (p.1). Indeed the obsolescence of racialist discourse cannot be denied and yet this image of

the ‘Bushmen’ as a Stone Age people refuses to fade away. Why?

The Jungian archetype of authentic humanity may have had a deep impact on European

thought and especially on anthropology but Jung was also created in a particular social context.

Wilmsen shows that the context in which this Bushman image was most vigorously constructed by

anthropological research, was during the era of dangerously distorted modernity of the 1950s-

1960s. This America-centred age of high mass consumption was a time when politicians claimed,

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. and many people believed, that life had never been so good. However, the spirit of mass

consumerism in the wealthy countries of the north, was spoilt by the recurrent nightmare of the

apocalyptic last days. This fear among was borne of the Cold War. The capacity for cosmocide, as

the NATO and Warsaw Pact armies faced off, grew steadily as the kilotons piled up and new

weapons were invented by armies of scientists and researchers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It

was in this context that Albert Einstein reputedly said, when asked what weapons he thought might

be used in the Third World War, 'In the Third I don't know, but in the Fourth – bows and arrows'.

As Wilmsen shows, another army of researchers not directly involved in war preparations included

cultural anthropologists. They had always been interested in people with bows and arrows – but

during the Cold War they appear to have developed a special interest in this kind of technology and

the people that used it. Did they believe that they could learn peace-building techniques from ‘the

harmless people’ so as to prevent WWIII? Or was it to provide survivors of the nuclear winter with

the skills and mentalities of the ‘Bushmen’?

This is the context, then, that the San as an ‘Other’, were conceptualised as a Stone Age

people and not Yuri Gagarin's or Neil Armstrong's contemporaries - as the archetype of the human

past and future, ward and guardian, ancestor and heir - all in one. If they were a Stone Age people

then the industrial revolution had passed them by, leaving them in the most natural, un-distorted

human form and psychology. But of course, as Wilmsen and others have already demonstrated, it

had not; though that history is generally ignored, it shows that all the inhabitants of Southern Africa

have been involved directly or indirectly in the major upheavals of the last few centuries – including

the Cold War.

Was or is Euroamerica’s need for an Other, mythologized or otherwise, so great that the

humanity of the people of the Kalahari must be sacrificed to compensate for overwhelming sense of

loss and resulting identity crisis? According to Wilmsen, there is ‘…a perennial crisis in

Euroamerican ontology. The crisis is one of personal and collective identity, of continuity with the

past and continuation with the future’ (p.5). The anxiety of the Euroamericans can be said to be

caused by the sense that they have lost some of their ‘humanity’ in the mad rush to make a

civilization, thus they search for the anti-anxiety in ‘the Bushmen’ who have lots of ‘humanity’ and

no civilisation. This was one message from The Family of Man photography exhibition curated by

Edward Steichen in 1955, first at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later presented

elsewhere in several versions, with the one aimed at Soviet bloc countries that focused on images of

affluent society. Although the ‘American way of life’ did triumph in the end, it should be recalled

that the Khrushchev-Nixon kitchen debate of 1959 was not just about rockets and satellites, but also

washing machines and vacuum cleaners, and arguments about whether it was quicker to squeeze a

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. lemon by hand in the old fashioned way or by switching to electric juicers. Today that debate is still

relevant; as we enter another age of anxiety over climate change, unprecedented demographic

changes and dwindling resources, the age of high mass consumption still looks like the last days,

even if the Cold War is over. It seems to me that the fear was not just of nuclear weapons. What

seems to be unthinkable is an end to the way of life we have come to accept as ‘modern’. Does

anybody really wish to give up their SUVs, and emulate the hunters of the Kalahari ?

And why pick on ‘Bushmen’? Why must they bear the burden of representing the way of

life of the Stone Age ancestors of modern European man? If for John Marshall the mythologized

Zhu of Nyaenyae were important because they were the people who did not make war, we could

say, well, neither did the neutral Swiss. Are the peace-loving Swiss not sufficiently ‘natural’? Have

they like other Euroamericans lost their ubuntu (to borrow a term from another, yet closely related,

debate about humanity)? There are many reasons why ethnographers require the Other to be without

history and to acquire (once captured by description and translation) a fixed alterity. Probably the

most important reason is to confirm the ‘essential stability in the state of being human’ that Jung

sought (p.13). So from fellow human beings ‘Bushmen’ became more natural - a positive spin on

‘less civilised’ and one which nevertheless amounts to ‘less human’ in a social-Darwinist way,

trapped in the Stone Age of our scientists’ imagination. As Wilmsen notes hierarchy had been

reasserted (p.15), but in many ways it never went away.

By reading the three key Stone Age mythmakers of the Cold War era (Laurens van der Post,

Levi-Strauss and Marshall) together, Wilmsen shows that the need for such myths was at its apex

during this period. But given the impact of this deeply entrenched discourse (which had its roots in

imperialism, and did not end with the Cold War), how, as Mudimbe (1991:xi) asks, can

anthropologists think about and comment upon alterity without essentializing its features (p. 19)?

Wilmsen suggests focusing on ‘the conditions in which specific authorship condenses – and more

pointedly, the atmosphere in which anthropology distils – knowledge claims’ (p. 19). In addition it

might help to switch the ethnographic gaze from ‘exotics’ and do some serious fieldwork at home,

because the way anthropologists write about the Other is so different from the way the social

sciences generally write about European society. Many anthropologists are just too comfortable

talking about other people in degrading, dehumanising, animal terminology, like mongrel, living

fossils or even just males and females, in the jargon of a biology that says not only that humans are

animals, but also that some are more animal than others. The spirit of social Darwinism cannot be

exorcised by anthropology alone, the roots of the ‘defective philosophy’ (p. 23) of humanity that

Wilmsen opposes are very deep.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. In many newly independent countries in Africa national universities established in the 1960s

did away with anthropology because they rejected the language of social darwinism, of imperialism,

and the Levy-Bruhl mentality, all culminating in the ‘reification, racialization, and temporal

distancing of the people whom anthropologists study (Deborah Poole 2005:160). Yes, African

universities threw out the baby with the bath water – it was that polluted and dangerous. Wilmsen

shows, for example, how in Botswana ‘Basarwa’ have, on the authority of ethnography, lost their

citizenship and become ‘Stone Age creatures’ who must either be hauled, against their will, into

modern Botswana, with its digital telecommunications technologies and shopping malls, or be

defended by Survival International because they are one of Africa’s treasures. Why are the Kalanga,

Tswana or Afrikaner neighbours not also Africa's treasures? Have they not also been known to

forage and to hunt?

Indeed the modernist discourse that demands that ‘Basarwa’ join the modern world or

perish, also makes similar demands on the rest of Botswana to become part of the global market or

risk becoming a pariah nation steeped in ‘primitive tradition’. Like the Stone Age, the mythologized

‘traditional society’ of Africa covers up all exploitative labour arrangements, land tenure systems

and even the simple fact that modern society has computers as well as dispossessed and underclass

citizens. Both the ‘Stone Age people'’ and ‘traditional society’ were actually born in the Nuclear

Age. Like the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda, they have been forced to be one thing only and that is

an ethnographic icon. Khoisan speakers, like their neighbours (and relatives), have kept cattle, ran

marathons and fought wars with machine guns and rockets. Like their neighbours (including

Rhodesians and Afrikaners) they have lived in the bush, so why are they not all called Bushmen? I

recall an incident when University of Cape Town students, on a field-trip to northern Namibia (to

study the Himba of Epupa dam fame), interviewed a San man who spoke, among other things,

about how he navigated by the stars when he was out hunting at night. When they pressed him for

more details about his ‘indigenous knowledge’ he disappointed them by revealing that it was basic

South African Defence Force (SADF) field craft which he had been taught as an infantryman in the

SADF’s proxy wars in Angola! Why do we want the San to be our ancestors and not our

contemporaries? Even if for the Lees, Marshalls and van der Posts, a sense of lacking a heritage or

the threat of having no future, may have propelled them to search for answers in the Kalahari, but

could they not find the answers by looking at themselves?

Human rights discourses and the rights of human beings would not be an issue were it not

for the fact that it is so easy for the humanity of the underdog to be denied. Not only are the poor

less wealthy they also become less human in the eyes of dominant groups, and what Stone Age

anthropology does, perhaps inadvertently, is try to justify the social inequality that results from

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. domination. Sometimes even human rights activists rely on their love of animals to make the case

for defending the rights of ‘cultural groups’, thus for the Masai or the Nyae-nyae Zhu to have their

land rights they must become part of the wildlife. For the real rights of people in Namibia,

Botswana or South Africa (which are enshrined in their constitutions) to be realised, they have to be

fought over politically (not always successfully), without the need for racialization from below. In

this sense, Khoisan speakers are true representatives of the African experience because the rest of

the continent too is helpless in the face of oppressors, be they foreign or home-grown, and this

experience is used to justify dependency on outside guardians to advance their interests. A recen

and much debated book on foreign aid to Africa has made a similar argument (Moyo 2009).

American aid to post-war Europe lasted for five years, why is there no exit strategy for aid to

Africa? Is the cradle of humanity doomed to infancy because of an infantile, European disorder - a

search for innocence even if it is in the mythologized Other? If this is the case then we can re-

phrase Adam Kuper and say if you are not free, you cannot free Others, and the first step to

liberation is to abandon this obsolete image of the mythologized Stone Age people.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

RESPONSE TO COMMENTARIES

Edwin Wilmsen

These comments taken together underscore the fractured state of anthropology as a discipline today.

Owen Sichone recognizes that diversity – cultural, ethnic, social, however perceived - is just the

current manifestation of processes that constantly realign the terms of human existence. The

imperative is to find ways to address diversity without codification or selective celebration, with the

ultimate aspiration not of eliminating diversity but of domesticating diverse perceptions of its

constitution. Megan Biesele is committed to codification and selective celebration and is seemingly

incapable of grasping the contradictions in her position. This inevitably leaves her with nothing

other than self-justification, as exhibited here. Alan Barnard takes on the role of honest broker and

finds himself trapped in a dilemma inherent in that vocation. He understands that what he calls the

traditionalist ‘Bushman’ paradigm is faulty, but attributes the main flaws to merely 'ill-chosen

phrases'. Far from ill-chosen, however, those phrases were deliberately deployed in an ill-conceived

programme designed to celebrate an iconic 'Bushman' alterity for all time. This does not appear to

trouble Barnard overly much, for he avers that 'like it or not, essentialism remains the basis of any

ethnographic generalization'. If that were true anthropology would have been a monstrous mistake.

Fortunately, there is an overpowering body of evidence documenting that it is not true; we must

keep that uppermost in mind when confronted with the assertions of those committed to codification

and selective celebration. Akira Takada fears, with more than a little justification, that essentializing

forces may yet prevail and offers some suggestions for further study that may help avoid such an

outcome. We must hope that the voices of the Sichones among us will be those most influential in

forging anthropology's future.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009.

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Woodburn, J. (1980) ‘Hunter-Gatherers Today and Reconstruction of the Past’ in Gellner, E. (ed)

Soviet And Western Anthropology. London: Duckworth.

Wolf, E. (1999) ‘Anthropology among the Powers’ in Social Anthropology 7:219-222.

Yellen, J. (1984) ‘The Integration Of Hunting into Prehistoric Hunting and Gathering Economies’

in Hall, M. & G. Avery (eds) Frontiers: Southern African Archaeology Today. pp. 53-64.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yellen, J. (1990a) ‘The Present and Future of Hunter-Gatherer Studies’ in Lamberg-Karlovsky, C.

(ed) Archaeological Thought in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yellen, J. (1990b) ‘The Transformation of the Kalahari !Kung’ in Scientific American 262:96-105.

Zukow-Goldring, P. (1996) ‘Sensitive Caregivers Foster the Comprehension of Speech: When

Gestures Speak Louder Than Words’ in Early Development and Parenting 5(4): 195-211.

FILMOGRAPHY

Discovery Channel(1995) Hunters Of The Kalahari; Vhs/Pal, Colour, 50 Minutes. New York:

Discovery Channel.

Foster, C. & D. (2000) The Great Dance – A Hunter's Story; Vhs/Pal And Ntsc, Colour, 75

Minutes; Producer, Earthrise Productions; Distributor, Off The Fence, Amsterdam.

Marshall, J. (1957) The Hunters; 16mm, Colour, 80 Minutes. Cambridge (Us): Harvard University.

Shooting Dates, 1952-53, 1958; Camera, John Marshall; Sound, Daniel Blitz; Editors, John

Marshall And Robert Gardner; Producer, Film Study Center, Peabody Museum.

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Critical African Studies, Issue 1, June 2009. Marshall, J. (2002). A Kalahari Family; Colour Vhs Series in Five Parts: 1. A Far Country (84

Mins.), 2. End Of The Road (54 Mins.), 3. The Real Water (54 Mins.), 4. Standing Tall (54

Mins.), 5. Death By Myth (84 Mins.). Watertown Ma (Usa): Documentary Educational

Resources. Shooting Dates, 1952-2000.

van der Post, L. (1956) The Lost World Of Kalahari; B/W TV Film Series in Six 30-Minute Parts:

1. The Vanished People (15th June), 2. First Encounter (22nd June), 3. The Spirits Of The

Slippery Hills (29th June), 4. Life In The Thirst Land (6th July), 5. The Great Eland (13th

July), 6. Rain Song (20th July). London: British Broadcasting Company. Shooting Dates,

September-November 1955; Camera For Kalahari Scenes in Parts 1 and 2, Enrico Pratt and

For Parts 3-6, Duncan Abraham; Sound Dubbed in Studio; Editor, Andrew Miller-Jones;

Producer, BBC TV.

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