This is a selection of tales gathered in Afrikaans from present-day Karoo storytellers. They animate the harsh but beautiful landscape with lively characters like cunning Jackal, silly Hyena, dangerous Water Snake and the sinister Foot-Eyes. Such tales were first documented among |xam hunter-gatherers in the 1870s by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. Unexpectedly they have survived, affirming a strong and continuing tradition of oral storytelling in South Africa. They’re presented here with English translation.

Book

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. Building from the examinations of San myth and contemporary culture in Volume I, Volume II considers the experiential implications of a cosmology in which ontological mutability—ambiguity and inconstancy—hold sway. As he considers how people experience ontological mutability and deal with profound identity issues mentally and affectively, Guenther explores three primary areas: general receptiveness to ontological ambiguity; the impact of the experience of transformation (both virtual/vicarious and actual/direct); and the intersection of the mythic, spirit world with reality. Through a comparative consideration of animistic cosmology amongst the San, Bantu-speakers and the Inuit of Canada’s eastern Arctic, alongside a discussion of animistic currents in Western humanities and ethology, Guenther clearly paints the relative strengths and weaknesses of New Animism discourse, particularly in relation to San ontology and cosmology, but with overarching relevance

eBook

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.”

eBook

Of the Same Breath opens the door to a better understanding of why and how the animals and places of southern Africa have been given the names they have today. The vast reaches of the information provided in this book have been drawn together to create a veritable cornucopia of answers to the old question of how names originated. In this linguistically thought-provoking book, readers will be guided through the origins of animal names and toponyms, from the coastline of South Africa to the northern border of Namibia, and from the mighty elephant to the humble grasshopper. “The vast empty spaces of South Africa and Namibia are suffused with codes to the past. To the casual traveller, the -laagtes and -leegtes flash and roll past our windows, unexplained and undiscovered, but to the informed, these ancient names unfurl a history as old as man himself. This is Simon Schama’s “topography of cultural identity”, which started with the San, and continues to this day. Lucie Möller’s glorious exploration of these animal origins stands proud, with the work of Bleek, as reminder and tribute to voices now silent.” – Dave Pepler

Book

This article forms part of the Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on the subject of Khoisan Languages and Linguistics held on July 11–13, 2011 at Riezlern/Kleinwalsertal. This paper describes the ǂHoan linguistic forms used while hunting, and for talking about hunting. Spoken language is avoided during hunting, but a set of conventionalised gestures is used. Thus, both oral and manual lexical forms are presented here. In addition to providing new data on ǂHoan, the authors hope to show how the use of a Kalahari-specific lexical elicitation guide can be an important aid in short-term fieldwork. Due to constraints of space and time, this paper does not discuss vocabulary related to plants and the gathering of plant and animal foods; the distinction between hunting and gathering implied here is an artificial one.

Conference Proceedings

The present paper concentrates on placenames that are regarded as originating in European or African languages, but are in fact of Bushman or San origin. From their placenames a great deal can be deduced about the identity of the San, and the things that make their placenames unique, e.g. the click sounds and various other aspects of their language. Some San words that are used as components of placenames reflect their environment, describing natural features and the character of their surroundings, and referring to animals and plants so essential to their survival, to the cosmetic and aesthetic use of natural pigments, and perhaps even to their deity. Many of these things have been recorded by anthropologists, linguists, Khoisanologists and others. But from a study of the vast corpus of placenames, many new facts may emerge, and above all, the original San placenames may be reconstructed by reversing the processes of adaptation, and recognised as the original indigenous toponyms of South Africa. This paper forms Chapter 21 in the Book Indigenous and Minority Placenames.

Chapter

In When Animals Were People, Bert Woodhouse (H.C. Woodhouse) has combined the Bushmen folklore about animals and their pictorial records on the rocks with photographs of actual animals for comparison. In doing so, he has drawn upon his collection of some 30 000 slides accumulated over more than twenty-five years of pursuing a hobby which brings together his interest in mountain-walking, archaeology, anthropology, art and photography.

Book

Numerous place names in southern Africa reveal cultural and language contact between Bushmen (San), Khoikhoi, Bantu and European language speakers over many thousands of years. These toponyms reflect the diversity of languages that had an influence on words and common names used by local people speaking different languages. Many of these place names are complex and their origins and meanings can only be explained by tracing onymic (naming) formatives in components from cognate words appearing in other languages, often only by deciphering the phonological, orthographic and morphological adaptations that they underwent, or through translated names elucidating the meanings. The findings of this research provide insights into the inter-connected, multilingual context and show names as being verifiable evidence of onymic, lexemic and toponymic exchange. They indicate language elements that survived in names that are part of the toponymic heritage of the region.

Article

In this paper I draw on my findings and those of historical and recent Khoisan ethnography to attempt to explain how these southern African ‘Khoi’ and San peoples relate to wind and how the environmental phenomenon has informed their epistemology and ontology. I begin by fleshing out the knowledge and experience of wind among these past and recent hunter-gatherers and, pointing to continuity in wind relationships and the ideas that stem from them, I go on to demonstrate how wind weaves into Khoisan understandings of the body and illness. Despite extensive interest in Bushman healing, anthropologists have overwhelmingly concentrated on the ‘trance’ healing dance. My findings suggest this partiality has obscured the wider healing context in which the dance operates. Exploring the wider context, including massage, ‘medicinal cuts’, and witchcraft, reveals that the ‘potency’ conceived as central to the healing dance is, in certain contexts, equivalent to overlapping ideas of wind, arrows, and smell. Examination of the ethnography reveals that a number of the associations I make between wind and potency have been partially recognized in specific Khoisan contexts but, because comparative studies of Khoisan are difficult and unpopular, these similarities have gone largely unnoticed.

Article

The thesis explores the relationship of contemporary Namibian Khoisan healing practice and ideas, to a history of Khoisan healing from an indeterminable pre-colonial past to the present. My focus is one principally of ideas and understanding as opposed to practice, because of a perceived need to highlight, and to some extent attempt to redress, a very partial historical and contemporary literature on Khoisan healing.

Theses & Dissertations

The following plant names have been extracted from the Nama Dictionary, which is presently being compiled by W. Haacke and E. Eiseb at the University of Namibia. The project commenced in 1981 and has been completed approximately 80%. W. Giess has been so kind as to identify most of the botanical samples that have been collected, with the exception of a few that were identified by M.A.N. Muller of the State Herbarium. The compilers express their gratitude to these botanists for their authoritative assistance. The present list is confined to those names that could, up to this stage, be established with a reasonable degree of authority. Unless marked otherwise, only such Khoekhoe names have been included as were obtained by the compilers first hand from informants or from E. Eiseb himself. Other names are confined .to those identified beyond doubt by W Giess in his personal inventory (labelled ?, Giess), by H.-J. Wiss (labelled ?, B.M.), by PJ. Ie . Roux, or - in one case - by Leonard Schulze (d. References below). Such entries could, of course, not be marked for tone. English plant names follow mainly F. &J. von Breitenbach (1987) and P.J. le Roux (1971). In cases where a plant is decidedly better known by its Afrikaans name, rather than by its English name, the Afrikaans name has been included as well.

Article