I am always advising
my students, when they get lost in the entanglements of complex research
projects, to try to capture what they’re after in a couple of pages. What’s the primary research question? What’s the necessary primary and secondary
material? What’s the approach? What are the main lines of argument? To what basic conclusion?
Now that I’m
enmeshed in trying to write a paper that has grown too big and ragged for its
own good, and I need to lay out its essentials for myself again, I thought this
might be a good place to do it. Then
some kind-hearted and perceptive reader might be able to tell me where it’s
gone wrong – or that I’m simply crazy.
The subject combines
two things I’ve touched on in previous posts: Bushmen and animals. The brief of the paper is to explore links
between what is becoming known as Human-Animal Studies and ‘indigenous
knowledges’. Since I’ve been picking at
aspects of Bushman ecologies and modern poetry for a few years now, it seemed
natural to try to take this a bit further, and to work with a tightly-contained
‘case study’ to anchor the bigger question.
The broad question I
take to be this: What can ‘we moderns’ learn about human-animal relations from
an indigenous (or pre-colonial) culture?
The case-study question that follows is:
What can we learn about human-animal relations from modern
transcriptions of /Xam Bushman testimonies – such as Alan James’s poetic
versions of //Kabbo’s testimonies?
A bit of the necessary
background. In the 1870s the linguist
Wilhelm Bleek was able to record our largest collection of ‘Bushman’
testimonies (more precisely, /Xam from the Northern Cape): legends, tales,
songs, incantations, recollections, laments of a society already on the brink
of vanishing beneath the onslaught of European farmers and commandos. (The
whole Bleek-Lloyd Archive is accessible online.) This treasure-trove has proved irresistible
poetic material for a number of white poets – Jack Cope, Stephen Watson, Antjie
Krog – seeking belatedly to valorise this vanished people. Because no one can speak /Xam any more, these
poets have had to upgrade and edit Bleek’s laborious original translations into
modernised, readable versions. So I want to focus just on Alan James’s
versions of the animal stories of the most accomplished of Bleek’s informants,
//Kabbo, in his book The First Bushman’s
Path. I’m hoping that this case will
exemplify, in a slightly heightened form, a set of issues that bedevils all
efforts to answer this kind of question.
There are at least four inter-related problems.
The first problem is that we don’t even have a clear idea of who the ‘Bushmen’ (or San, or Khoisan) were or are; an historian colleague has suggested to me that the term is so imprecise it should be done away with completely. We know very little about the /Xam or their ‘original’ lifestyle, and it’s only with extreme caution that we can transfer impressions from other extant ‘Bushman’ groups. And we don’t know much about //Kabbo.
A second, closely
related problem is that we have only a sketchy notion of what pre-colonial
societies did and believed; we extrapolate backwards from present-day groups,
but how modified have they become
over the decades? Even in the 1870s
//Kabbo and the /Xam had already become deeply dislocated by, and implicated
in, the invasion of the ‘modern’. We
have never seen ‘indigenous knowledge’ other than through the modern eye, pure
or original or unmodified. ‘Indigenous
knowledge’ has become a text – even, perhaps, for many indigenous peoples.
What we know of /Xam
beliefs about animals is confined to Bleek’s texts. He and Lucy Lloyd
were inventing an orthography for /Xam as they went along, translating as best
they could, often twice, first from the Dutch that //Kabbo knew (how well?),
then into Bleek’s archaic English (how well?).
Then we have Alan James modifying those texts yet again into
self-conscious ‘poems’, which they were not originally. So the third problem is how far we can take
these multiple ‘layers’ as giving us access to anything like an ‘original’.
The fourth issue has
to do with our approach, our underlying motive for asking the question in the
first place. Isn’t this because ‘we’ academics
tend to think of ourselves as ‘Westerners’, meaning we belong (even when we
dissent) to a culture that’s essentially rational, scientific, foreign,
supremacist, capitalistic, globalising, and ecologically destructive? Hence, in looking shame-facedly about for a
gentler, rooted, organic alternative, we are predisposed to extract from
‘indigenous’ societies what we need in order to critique ourselves. If the Bushman did not exist, we would have
to invent him, the way Michel de Montaigne invented the noble ‘cannibal’, back
in 1580, with the same purpose. Indeed,
anthropologist Ed Wilmsen argues that we – and the whole problematic, imperial
enterprise of anthropology as a discipline – have invented ‘the Bushman’.
Maybe one can make
too much of these problems. Maybe, even
through the cryptic veils of rock art, even through the attenuated poems of
Alan James, we can be fairly sure about some
things. The/Xam hunted animals
selectively and lived frugally; they told complex stories about their hunts and
myths about human-animal origins; their shamans believed they could ‘channel’
animal powers and beings; their relations were in some degree egalitarian and
spiritual. They certainly did not wipe
animals out with firearms for sport, eliminate wildlife in favour of
domesticated stock, and slaughter that stock by the millions for food. We can admit all this without necessarily
romanticising the Bushman, as Laurens van der Post did. This is to emphasise and utilise the
‘Bushman’s difference from ourselves.
One thing is clear:
we cannot go back to pre-colonial Bushman life – even if we could understand
exactly what that was. Even what remains
of the Bushmen can’t really go back to ‘Bushman life’. We will never relate to animals in quite the
same way again. But maybe we can find
some cross-cultural similarities, some common ground in ‘the West’s own animal
mythologies, in a persistent strand of anti-rational Western philosophy running
from Berkeley to Merleau-Ponty. Or, most
attractively, a strong school of thought that is now revitalising concepts of
“animism”, not (only) looking to ancient myth, but trying to re-sacralise
human-animal relations within our modern world.
Much as Alan James is doing poetically with the Bleek-Lloyd material. And this is to emphasise the Bushman’s commonality with us.
Can one balance difference and commonality? Maybe,
through this animist lens, we can view James’s modern poems, not as
representative of some fixed historical /Xam moment, but as aesthetic objects
in themselves, with whatever ethical import they can be seen to carry. Like any work of literary art, the poem
carries the traces and burdens and richness of its verbal pasts, but in transmogrified
form – the way Shakespeare’s plays modified and recharged his sources in
Plutarch, or Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros
reconfigured Homer’s Odyssey for the
Caribbean milieu. All stories are
stories, as //Kabbo himself put it, that float in on the wind, and away again,
belonging to no one.
Hmm, that does feel a little clearer...
Oh, conclusions? Though
study of Bushmen-as-different might give us a lever with which to critique
modern eco-destructiveness, and though a recharged animism might bring Bushmen
closer to us in common humanity, what we might usefully learn about
human-animal relations is probably quite limited. An attitude of greater respect? Perhaps.
But are we going to believe in
Bushman myths and shamanistic shape-shifting?
Or go out and actually live a
hunter-gatherer life? Very, very
unlikely. We can be certain, I think,
that Bushman attitudes had nothing whatsoever to do with conservation, animal
rights, or extensive domestication – the three major modes into which modernity
has thrust our animal relations. For
most of us, and for most animals, the ‘Bushman way’ must remain an unreachable
fantasy, and a literary construct – but, like a lot of fantasy, it is good to
think with.
Anyway, here is an extract from Alan James’s poem, derived
from //Kabbo, entitled “The hyena fears the fire”. Make of it what you will.
hyenas eat meat
that is raw,
and they eat
ostrich eggs that are raw, that are cold,
they all eat things
that are raw
for they keep no
fire, they fear the fire, they run from fire,
for they remember
how the hyena mother once burned her feet
when she stood on
the coals of a fire at the Dawn Heart’s house:
Hi Dan, I would love to chat about this! But will not be in Grahamstown for a while. Email maybe? Yvw@me.com. I am translating a little book by a "modern" self styled Bushman from Upington. Interesting references to living with animals!
ReplyDeleteHi Dan.
ReplyDeleteReally interesting questions you pose here.
Have you read Roger Hewitt's book "Structure, Meaning and Ritual in the Narratives of the Southern San"? First published early 1980s but republished recently. Might be useful in thinking about Bleek and Lloyd...
Also, maybe some of the essays in Clifford and Marcus's classic "Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography", particularly the chapter by James Clifford "On Ethnographic Allegory" might be useful.
There is also a wealth of ethnographic material - lots from South America - on eco-cosmologies: which perhaps might be accused of romanticism...
Also interesting to read Sahlin's and Lee's work which argued that the Bushmen were "The Original Affluent Society" - an argument heavily overlaid with the Cold War politics of the time.
Andrew Hartnack
Hi Dan
ReplyDeleteInteresting experiment: intellectual, as opposed to financial, crowd sourcing ;)
You raise very pertinent questions and make insightful observations. You may well be right in suggesting that researchers are not so much discovering facts about the Bushmen as being involved in creative Bushman mythography or mythopoeia.
Just one point, you may be correct to write that "no one can speak /Xam any more," but at least a couple of researchers like David Lewis-Williams and Mark McGranaghan have read and re-read the entire 12 000 pages of the Bleek and Lloyd collection, and have comprehensively cross-referenced the entire collection. So, while I am not sure that they can speak /Xam, they can read Bleek's transcriptions.
Good luck with your chapter!