Image-Makers
The Social Context of a Hunter-Gatherer Ritual
Description:... "While this approach has implications for rock imagery worldwide by virtue of the principles it uncovers, I illustrate the social role of imagery in a hunter-gatherer context by means of the southern African San, more popularly though contentiously still known as 'Bushmen'. A major advantage of this exemplar is that researchers have recourse to a remarkable archive of nineteenth-century verbatim southern San ethnography in the original, though now extinct, Xam San language. In addition, there is the considerable amount of related material garnered from the better known twentieth- and twenty-first-century Kalahari San. It is therefore possible to go further in southern Africa than in some other parts of the world where relevant ethnography is minimal, absent or of dubious relevance and to elucidate the underlying social and cognitive framework of San imagery. Certainly, I do not say that researchers should argue by simple analogy from San to other rock arts. Each rock art is worthy of its own study; no one explanation can cover all rock arts. Rather, the San example opens up lines of enquiry that may be followed up in those different contexts. Researchers may find points of similarity and, at the same time, difference; it is principles, rather than specifics, that matter. In short, the southern African evidence points to the multi-stage process of San image-making being embedded in, and contributing to the maintenance of, definable social distinctions and networks"--
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