This thesis analyses the social relationships of a group of northern Hai||om, who also call themselves Akhoe, in the Oshikoto region of Namibia. The Hai||om are a Khoisan-speaking group, labelled "Bushmen" or "San" by outsiders, who were dispossessed of their land during the colonial period. Today most Hai||om combine hunting, gathering, agriculture, handicrafts, wage labour, and cattle-keeping in a mixed economy. The Hai||om changing economy has elements of an immediate-retum strategy aimed at gaining access to the delayed-return economies of neighbouring groups, particularly Owambo-speaking agropastoralists, and farmers of European origin. Based on long-term participant observation with the Hai||om, this thesis shows the flexibility and versatility of Hai||om social organization and its institutions. Particular reference is made to the ways in which social categories are established on the basis of material transactions (sharing, gift-giving, bartering and commercial exchange), and are grounded in shared classifications of land and its resources. The thesis documents and analyses how Hai||om construct and maintain social relations, including relations with outsiders, in everyday social interaction. Patterns of Hai||om social practice involving these social relations emerge in language pragmatics, in the usage of space, and in ritual activities. The thesis also includes an analysis of representations of ethnic identity and economic difference in Hai||om folklore. The investigation shows that Hai||om social relationships and social values continue to shape the diversity and overall flexibility that characterize Hai||om life today. Although Hai||om have little power to influence the conditions imposed on them by national and international contexts, Hai||om social strategies across changing conditions can be explained on the basis of a set of instituted social practices centred around open accessibility and informal common ground.

In Ghoera, Afrika-verse vir kinders, poet Hennie Aucamp demonstrates an affiliation with and reflection of his surroundings, such as the tribal communities he experienced as a child. This group of African children’s poems, published by Protea Boekhuis in 2011, became the source of inspiration for composer Niel van der Watt’s song cycle Die wind dreun soos ‘n ghoera, ‘n Siklus Boesman-mites. This study investigates and identifies significant compositional traits that contributed to van der Watt’s song cycle. To explore and understand the nature of such influences, the second chapter considers the composer’s early childhood; religious world views; student life; social, environmental, and political ideas; personal tonal language; and western musical elements. To ascertain possible indigenous Bushmen musical elements in van der Watt’s song cycle, the third chapter traces the history of the Bushmen and their marginalization, followed by a brief survey of historical writings on Bushmen music, and an identification process utilizing musicologist Percival R. Kirby’s research on Bushmen music as a foundation. The fourth chapter explores the origins of the cycle and other significant compositional influences. This study suggests that Hennie Aucamp’s poetry and Niel van der Watt’s song cycle represent a reconciling vehicle for cross-cultural understanding generating awareness and greater appreciation of the life, myths, oral traditions, and the music of the Bushmen.

The Kalahari San or Bushmen are one of the most researched ethnic groups. As such, multiple images, produced by research, popular literature and films exist of them. Tsumkwe, the administrative centre of what used to be known as 'Bushmanland' during Apartheid, occupies a special place in the context of San image production as it is the site of most visual material produced about San, a popular destination for tourists who want to see San and a successful indigenous governed conservancy that attracts many NGOs and other projects aimed at San. The people living in Tsumkwe are the Ju|'hoansi, a group considered to be part of the 'San' category. This thesis considers ethnographic questions about the Ju|'hoansi and those who visit them, through a framework based on the theory of images. How do the Ju|'hoansi inhabit the multiple images of San-ness which non-San bring to Tsumkwe and how do they navigate the pressures of both San sociality and expectations from outsiders within and outside the structures of knowledge which shape our perception of these images? In addition to general participant observation in Tsumkwe and the surrounding Nyae Nyae conservancy, I make use of ethnographic data from filmmaking workshops I conducted with Ju|'hoan participants. These workshops created important primary data. Further, by inverting the hitherto passive relationship to film into an active one, the engagement with the medium and its production enabled usually invisible concepts and understanding of self and others to become articulated. Additionally, I conducted interviews with tourists, researchers and NGO workers. As Gordon discusses in The Bushman Myth, the label of San or Bushmen is an externally invented and constructed category. Over the course of the 20th century, a multitude of images of the San have emerged, ranging from 'underdeveloped primitives', to no 'noble savages' to 'disempowered minorities'. However outdated, once articulated, remnants of these images have remained and contribute to the body of preconceived ideas outsiders approach the San with. | Inhabiting Images: Ju|'hoansi, vi San, and Others In Tsumkwe, different images exist simultaneously. In interactions with outsiders, Ju|'hoansi informants confirmed and enacted sometimes opposing images, depending on the context, without considering one more 'true' than another. Some Ju|'hoansi were able to switch between different images particularly well. Despite of the Ju|'hoansi community in Tsumkwe being accepting of the various images of San-ness brought in by outsiders, Tsumkwe was overall governed by Ju|'hoan values and sociality which stopped any of the NGOs that tried to establish themselves and their world views in Tsumkwe from becoming too dominant. Egalitarian pressures, however, also affect not only outsiders seeking to establish themselves but also Ju|'hoansi. Additionally, many Ju|'hoansi, experience the multitude of images brought in as a pressure. This double pressure can be somewhat relieved through carefully negotiated play in which caricatures of identities are acted out playfully. Despite possible overlap between San images and Ju|'hoan sociality, it is useful to understand San images as being a reflection on those who construct them. For the Ju|'hoansi, these images are part of the world they inhabit creatively.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In this thesis, I examine the narratives of authenticity, the limits thereof, the potential interests served by these narratives, and the power relations involved in the promotion of an authentic San identity. I focus on four key areas to achieve this goal: the methodological issues involved in studying authenticity, the framing of the land claim lodged by the San against the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park in South Africa in 1995, the post-land claim settlement activities on the restituted farms, and the various issues around authenticity and traditional leadership. I will also highlight a variety of issues, ranging from livelihoods to governance, community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), identity and ethnicity, and common property debates. The study begins with a brief introduction to the richly textured and highly contested debates and analytical issues concerning the San. Among other things, this first part of the thesis deals with naming, the alleged disappearance of the San, and the eventual reemergence of this group in the post-apartheid landscape of southern Africa. This is followed by a brief description of some aspects of the natural environment of the southern Kalahari and how the San see themselves situated within this cultural–ecological complex. This exploration of the cultural–ecological landscape is not meant to mirror previous San studies of cultural ecology but rather to offer an account of a possible San ontology. The thesis gives an inventory firstly of the research methods applied by myself, and then probes the research encounter reflexively. The main descriptive chapters of the thesis begin with an examination of how the ≠Khomani San emerged onto the political landscape of post-1994 South Africa and how an ethnic entity was constituted through the land restitution process. The post-restitution activities of at least three subgroups of the ≠Khomani San Common Property Association (CPA) are then examined and shown to be a series of contestations and challenges of authenticity. In the final chapter, I take an experimental look at a particular institution that emerged as central to the debates about authenticity and the management of resources in the ≠Khomani San CPA

This thesis analyses the dynamics, complexities and numerous obstacles that serve to constrain rural development within the ‡Khomani Community of the Northern Cape Province, South Africa. Following the end of Apartheid, given the disparity in wealth evident among the country’s population, in 1994, the South African Government embarked on a process to address inequality. In regard to the rural poor, who constitute the majority of the country’s poor, the Government envisioned that a more equitable distribution of land would result in economic development and poverty alleviation for land reform beneficiaries. Consequently, a Land Reform Policy was introduced, which was used by the ‡Khomani Bushmen to reclaim ancestral land in South Africa’s rural Northern Cape in 1999. More than ten years on, however, the living conditions of the ‡Khomani have not improved, and the Community continues to live in poverty. Despite the award of land and financial input from government and development agencies, the ‡Khomani have no basic services and are unable to significantly diversify or increase livelihood strategies. Multiple factors including a lack of Community cohesion and capacity, limited opportunities due to remote rural location, and the inability of government and development actors to successfully apply effective interventions, serve to constrain development, and maintain ‡Khomani disempowerment. The thesis argues that governments, development institutions and actors must recognise the need for a multidimensional approach to development to alleviate poverty, while recognising the limits of external actors and the role of communities in this regard. Essentially, sustainable rural development will only ensue when communities are able to make effective decisions based on meaningful choices.

This thesis constructs an ethnography for the nineteenth century ǀXam Bushmen of the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, known primarily through a nineteenth century manuscript collection of oral narrative (the Bleek-Lloyd archive), which has, over the past twenty-five years, increasingly become the focus of scholarly attention, mined for insights about the cultural world of southern Bushman societies. It draws on the Bleek-Lloyd archive to produce a detailed ethnographic case study, focusing on the ideological and ontological concepts that underpinned the differentiation of ǀXam society. Firstly, the thesis situates the archive and ǀXam society within their particular environmental and historical contexts, providing valuable supplementary information that informs readings of the narratives. By producing a fully searchable transcription of the entirety of the archive, paying close attention to emic terminology, and examining the recurrence of thematic associations of this phraseology throughout the narratives, the analysis explores the constitution of ǀXam ‘personhood’ and examines the extent to which the ‘hunter-gatherer’ category forms a useful heuristic for understanding ǀXam society, with a particular focus on models of the ‘animic ontology’. The ǀXam deployed a series of positively and negatively evaluated traits in the creation of dimensions of authority, obligation, and social responsibility, embedded in particular social identities; central to these constructions and to the differentiation of these identities were the techniques and resources of ǀXam subsistence practices, salient in the production of admirable (socially-responsible hunters), reprehensible (antagonistic ‘beasts of prey’), and more ambiguous (ǃgi:tǝn ritual specialists) identities. Recognising this internal differentiation, the thesis outlines ǀXam ‘subsistence strategies’ and suggests they should be defined broadly to include their contacts and interactions with non-ǀXam groups, with domesticated animals, and with the novel material culture of the colonial period; these interactions were a consequence of their ‘hunter-gatherer’ strategies rather than a negation of them. Such strategies generated experiences that reinforced and reconstituted ǀXam ideological frameworks, incorporating the dynamics of the nineteenth century ‘frontier’ scenario and provided avenues for social change that ultimately led to the collapse of independent hunter-gatherer lifeways, and to the adoption of strategies that incorporated ǀXam individuals within rural and urban ‘Coloured’ populations of the Northern Cape; placing the ǀXam in a comparative colonial context, the thesis stresses the wider relevance of this particular ethnography for understanding hunter-gatherer engagements with food-producing, state-level societies.

<p>Namibia won its independence in 1990 after a long liberation struggle lead by the – since independence ruling party – SWAPO. There is an ongoing nation-building process in the multiethnic country ever since, with a vision about a unified nation. This study examines the relationship between the nation and one of its ethnic minority groups; the San. From a socio-economic perspective the San is the most disadvantaged ethnic group of contemporary Namibia. How do members of San experience national participation? How does the nation handle the ethnic diversity? This study illustrates that a national identity is promoted by the government and that the struggle for an unified nation is legitimized with the liberation struggle and its won independence. At the same time members of San seem to identify their living situation with ethnicity and are more concerned about the survival of their closest community than national participation. The discussion is based on qualitative interviews where experiences among San-members and one NGO-volunteer are analysed with inspiration of the method Grounded Theory, related to earlier research on the field and theories of nationalism and ethnicity.</p>

Namibia won its independence in 1990 after a long liberation struggle lead by the – since independence ruling party – SWAPO. There is an ongoing nation-building process in the multiethnic country ever since, with a vision about a unified nation. This study examines the relationship between the nation and one of its ethnic minority groups; the San. From a socio-economic perspective the San is the most disadvantaged ethnic group of contemporary Namibia. How do members of San experience national participation? How does the nation handle the ethnic diversity? This study illustrates that a national identity is promoted by the government and that the struggle for an unified nation is legitimized with the liberation struggle and its won independence. At the same time members of San seem to identify their living situation with ethnicity and are more concerned about the survival of their closest community than national participation. The discussion is based on qualitative interviews where experiences among San-members and one NGO-volunteer are analysed with inspiration of the method Grounded Theory, related to earlier research on the field and theories of nationalism and ethnicity.

No description available.

Ph.D. university of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities (Art History), 2012 / Pictorial copies play an essential role in the creation of rock art knowledge, forming a bridge between the art and theories of interpretation. My thesis traces a ‘pictoriography’, that is, a historiography of the practice of recording rock paintings in pictures. I begin with the earliest examples dotting the shifting edges of the Cape Colony from the mideighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. Thereafter, the focus shifts to the Maloti-Drakensberg, where two case studies bring this disciplinary history into more recent times. The first is the rainmaking group from Sehonghong Shelter (Lesotho). One of the first rock paintings to be published, it became one of the most iconic in southern Africa. I relate its various copies to one another and to wider views of Sehonghong, revealing how it has been decontextualized and reproduced in diagrammatic form. I develop a ‘digital restoration’, whereby copies circulating independently in the world are returned in digital images to their place of origin. I develop this process further in a site-wide study of eBusingatha Shelter (AmaZizi Traditional Authority Area, KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg). Once an impressive painted gallery, eBusingatha has been severely damaged by vandalism, removals and collapse, while documents tracking its demise accumulated elsewhere. I reunite scattered records, enabling copies to be contextualized and lost visual qualities of the originals to be restored. Throughout these pictorial genealogies, I explore the distance between the way the rock paintings are illustrated and the way they actually look. While recording strategies are diverse, one dominant convention has emerged in recent decades. Meticulous tracings converted into monochrome redrawings effect a translation of complex and ambiguous painted occurrences into clean forms ‘peeled’ from the rock and projected like shadows onto paper. The are more like text than picture. Colour for instance is considered an integral part of painting traditions worldwide, yet is expunged from the study of San rock paintings. A reintegration of such pictorial attributes into their study may encourage a return to the material world of the imagery and a contextualization of the semantics of its symbolic constituents.