Wilhelm Bleek was fascinated by African languages and set out to make sense of a complex and alien Bushman tongue. At first Lucy Lloyd worked as his assistant, but soon proved to be so gifted a linguist and empathetic a listener that she created a monumental record of Bushman culture. Their informants were a colorful cast. The teenager, /A!kunta, taught Bleek and Lloyd their first Bushman words and sentences. The wise old man and masterful storyteller, //Kabbo, opened their eyes to a richly imaginative world of myth and legend. The young man, Dia!kwain, explained traditional beliefs about sorcery, while his friend #Kasin spoke of Bushman medicines and poisons. The treasures of Bushman culture were most fully revealed in conversations with a middle-aged man known as /Han=kass'o, who told of dances, songs and the meaning of images on rocks. The human histories and relationships involved in this unique collaboration across cultures are explored in full for the first time in this remarkable narrative.

Consists of all the notebook pages, watercolours and drawings that comprise the bulk of the Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek /Xam and !Kun (Bushmen) archive, with photographs, documents, letters and notes, as well as contextualizing essays and an index for the included narratives and contributors.

Goes to the heart of contemporary arguments about the "primitive" and the "modern" minds, and draws new social, anthropological, and ethnographic conclusions about the nature of ancient societies. How did ancient peoples—those living before written records—think? Were their thinking patterns fundamentally different from ours today? Researchers over the years have certainly believed so. Along with the Aborigines of Australia, the indigenous San people of southern Africa—among the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth—became iconic representatives of all our distant ancestors and were viewed as either irrational fantasists or childlike, highly spiritual conservationists. Since the 1960s a new wave of research among the San and their world-famous rock art has overturned these misconceived ideas. Here, the great authority David Lewis-Williams and his colleague Sam Challis reveal how analysis of the rock paintings and engravings can be made to yield vital insights into San beliefs and ways of thought. This is possible because we possess comprehensive transcriptions, made in the nineteenth century, of interviews with San informants who were shown copies of the art and gave their interpretations of it. Using the analogy of the Rosetta Stone, the authors move back and forth between these San texts and the rock art, teasing out the subtle meanings behind both. The picture that emerges is very different from past analysis: this art is not a naive narrative of daily life but rather is imbued with power and religious depth.

A detailed and compelling volume that contributes significantly to current trends in post-apartheid scholarship.

Exploring a hitherto unexamined aspect of San cosmology, Mathias Guenther’s two volumes on human-animal relations in San cosmology link “new Animism” with Khoisan Studies, providing valuable insights for Khoisan Studies and San culture, but also for anthropological theory, relational ontology, folklorists, historians, literary critics and art historians. In Volume I, therianthropes and transformations, two manifestations of ontological mutability that are conceptually and phenomenologically linked, are contextualized in broader San myth. Guenther explores the pervasiveness of human-animal hybridity and transformation in San expressive culture (myth, stories and storytelling, ludic dancing and art, ancestral rock art and contemporary easel art), ritual (trance dance curing, female and male rites of passage) and hunting. Transformation is shown to be experienced by humans, particularly via rituals and dancing that evoke animal identity mergers, but also by hunters who may engage with their prey animals in terms of sympathy and inter-subjectivity, particularly through the use of “hunting medicines.”

South Africa's unique history has produced literatures in many languages, in both oral and written forms, reflecting the diversity in the cultural histories and experiences of its people. The Cambridge History offers a comprehensive, multi-authored history of South African literature in all eleven official languages (and more minor ones) of the country, produced by a team of over forty international experts, including contributors from all of the major regions and language groups of South Africa. It will provide a complete portrait of South Africa's literary production, organised as a chronological history from the oral traditions existing before colonial settlement, to the post-apartheid revision of the past. In a field marked by controversy, this volume is more fully representative than any existing account of South Africa's literary history. It will make a unique contribution to Commonwealth, international and postcolonial studies and serve as a definitive reference work for decades to come.

Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges presents a collection of original readings that address gendered dimensions of empire from a wide range of geographical and temporal settings. Draws on original research on gender and empire in relation to labour, commodities, fashion, politics, mobility, and visuality Includes coverage of gender issues from countries in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia between the eighteenth to twentieth centuries Highlights a range of transnational and transregional connections across the globe Features innovative gender analyses of the circulation of people, ideas, and cultural practices

?Where once there were twenty-nine San Bushman languages (and/or dialects) in Southern Africa...few now remain.The loss of these languages results in the loss of their stored oral culture and indigenous knowledge. All that remains are archaeological evidence and rock art, or archives recorded by individuals, such as Wilhelm Bleek, Lucy Lloyd and GR von Wielligh, who heard the encroaching language and cultural death knell before it was too late.?

European archives hold historical voice recordings that were produced by linguists, ethnologists and musicologists during colonial rule in African countries. While these recordings reverberate with the polyphonic echoes of colonial knowledge production, to date, acoustic collections have rarely been consulted as sources of colonial history. In this book Anette Hoffmann engages with a Southern African audio-visual collection, which is located in five different institutions across Vienna, Austria. Several recordings collected by the anthropologist Rudolf Pch in August 1908 have been retranslated for this book. These translations provide new insights into Pchs collecting expedition to the Kalahari. Pchs narrative of his heroic journey is called into question by the Naro speakers comments, which address colonial violence and criticise the research practices of the anthropologist. By attending to the spoken texts on the recordings and reconnecting them to photographs, ethnographic objects, archival documentation and Pchs travelogue, Hoffmann offers a different reading of this research trip into a war zone.triesries.