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Anthropology and the Bushman Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 Am Page Ii Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 Am Page Iii Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page i Anthropology and the Bushman Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page ii Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page iii Anthropology and the Bushman Alan Barnard Oxford • New York Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page iv First published in 2007 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA © Alan Barnard 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg. Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Barnard, Alan (Alan J.) Anthropology and the bushman / Alan Barnard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-428-0 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1-84520-428-X (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-1-84520-429-7 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 1-84520-429-8 (pbk.) 1. San (African people)—Kalahari Desert—Social life and customs. 2. Ethnology—Kalahari Desert—Field work. 3. Anthropology in popular culture—Kalahari Desert. 4. Kalahari Desert—Social life and customs. I. Title. DT1058.S36B35 2007 305.896’1—dc22 2006101698 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 84520 428 0 (Cloth) ISBN 978 1 84520 429 7 (Paper) Typeset by Avocet Typeset, Chilton, Aylesbury, Bucks Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn www.bergpublishers.com Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page v Contents List of Figures and Tables vii Preface ix 1 Introduction 1 2 From Early Encounters to Early Anthropology 11 3 Victorian Visions of the Bushman 23 4 Beckoning of the Kalahari 39 5 Amateurs and Cultural Ecologists 53 6 An Original Affluent Society? 67 7 The Return of Myth and Symbol 83 8 Kalahari Revisionism and Portrayals of Contact 97 9 Advocacy, Development and Partnership 113 10 Representations and Self-representations 129 11 Reflections and Conclusions 143 References 149 Index 171 Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page vi Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page vii Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 Migration routes of the Khoe-speaking peoples 7 Tables 1.1 Click sounds in the two most common systems 9 Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page viii Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page ix Preface ‘The Bushman’ is an image that remains in anthropological consciousness, although transformed through history, especially in recent decades. This book is a social and intellectual history of that image as handed down to anthropology from earlier anthropologists and archaeologists, social theorists and travellers, and Bushmen and Khoekhoe themselves. It is also an exploration of the diversity of that image, for its appearance changes in space as well as time. ‘The Bushman’ in contemporary South Africa can be quite different from ‘the Bushman’ as under- stood in Japanese or American writings. One disclaimer: although it has quite a lot of references and covers a long period, this is not intended to be ‘the great big book of Bushman studies’. That would take many volumes, each (going backwards in time) probably of interest to fewer and fewer readers. My hope instead is to provide something more readable. My focus is on anthropologists and anthropology, but what is said here should, I hope, be of interest to a much wider public. It may be of interest especially to development practitioners, to scholars in related disciplines such as archaeology and history, and to those of Khoisan descent who simply want to know more about anthropology’s involvement in their heritage. Unless clearly essential for my sense, I shall dispense with quotation marks on words like ‘Bushman’ throughout. The word is certainly not without its problems. Indeed the same can be said for the currently more politically correct term ‘San’, which historically and in the Khoekhoe dialects in which it is found has carried con- notations of poverty, low status, thievery and scavenging, as well as purposeful food- gathering (that being perhaps its most literal translation). ‘Khoisan’ today is a word that includes both the ‘San’ hunter-gatherers and the ‘Khoikhoi’ or ‘Khoekhoe’ herder-hunter-gatherers. Most of this book concerns the former and those anthro- pologists who have worked with them, although throughout much of the history of these studies, especially in early times, the place of the ‘herders’ has been integral to the definition of the ‘hunters’. In general, Khoisan names are given in the preferred form of the individuals themselves or, where appropriate, in a simplified Khoisan form rather than a European one – for example, /Han≠kass’o rather than Klein Jantje (the various click symbols are explained in Chapter 1). I should add that there are many Japanese anthropologists among today’s Bushman experts, and their names are given in Western form, with given name first and family name last. Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page x x • Preface The book is based on three things: (a) my immersion in Khoisan studies for nearly thirty-five years (with ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, and the odd bit of archaeological and archival work), (b) specific library and Internet research devoted to the book, and (c) conversations with colleagues both recent and through the years. A great many people have helped to define my interest and refine my arguments. I have benefited especially from discussions of the history of anthropological thought with scholars in Khoisan studies and hunter-gatherer studies, as well as from more formal inter- views with some of them. It would be invidious to name some of those here and not others, so I will simply acknowledge the suggestions of the publisher’s anony- mous reader. He or she pointed out a number of omissions in the first draft, and although this is not ‘the great big book of Bushman studies’ it is now a slightly bigger and, I hope, rather more balanced account. I am also grateful to my close colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, and to the members of Khoisan groups and people of Khoisan descent who have guided me in my own studies, and, as always, to my wife and best critic Joy. I acknowl- edge too the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council, the James A. Swan Fund, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the National Science Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation and the University of Edinburgh, for grants to support for my Khoisan research and my research on the history of Khoisan studies. This book is dedicated to southern Africa’s foraging peoples, for the many insights they have given anthropology, and in the hope for a future for them with land, liberty and individual self-determination. Alan Barnard Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page 1 –1– Introduction ‘Studying the Bushman?’ When in the early 1970s I first did fieldwork in the Kalahari, that was a pretty standard question from non-Bushmen of all sorts. The idea of ‘studying the Bushman’ was very well known throughout southern Africa, and it seemed quite unproblematic in the sense that the exercise was so obviously important. Most black and white people I met in Botswana seemed to have a pretty clear notion of which red people (as many of Botswana’s former hunter-gatherers call themselves) were the ‘true Bushmen’, and therefore worthy of study, and which were not. Of course I always answered ‘yes’, but in a very real sense I was not studying Bushmen, much less ‘the Bushman’, at all. Anthropologists do not study people; we study either societies or cultures in the abstract or, more likely, aspects or ‘systems’ of society or culture (like economics, politics, kinship or religion). Our method of presentation may be either through the more traditional approach with generalized data or through the more recent style of individual narratives. Some anthropologists study a community’s biological make-up or their relation to the environment. These studies too are at least a step or two away from the literal ‘study of people’. It is fair to say that anthropologists work with people, in this case those known variously as ‘Bushmen’, ‘San’ or ‘Basarwa’, but exactly what anthropologists actually study is somewhat harder to define. It is also very difficult to pin down exactly why ‘the Bushman’ ever was, and remains, so plainly impor- tant to anthropology and to what outsiders think anthropology is all about. This book is not primarily a summary of ethnographic findings. I have already written a somewhat technical book on that topic (Barnard 1992). Rather, my concern here is more with anthropology in interplay with Bushman or San people and with the idea of ‘the San’ or ‘the Bushman’. We anthropologists constantly change our images of these people in diverse ways. These reflect our time, our national traditions and our shifting and often complex theoretical positions. I hope it will be enlightening to anthropologists, of course, but I hope too that it will help explain what anthropologists do and have done among the San. The book covers a number of different themes, two crucial ones being (a) the history of ethnographic representations of peoples known as ‘Bushmen’ or ‘San’, and (b) the influence of these representations on anthropological thought (theory, method and message to the world beyond anthropology). A related theme (c) is the nature of the models 1 Anthro & Bushman 4/3/07 9:18 am Page 2 2 • Anthropology and the Bushman anthropologists carry with them in the field and employ in their writings: scien- tific, humanistic, and so on.
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